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About Me

Community Manager for Tomopop.com.

Random gaming facts about Haxan

Legitimately beat Mike Tyson and went through Another World Circuit undefeated.

Beat the original Contra without dying. Twice.

Can land the damn plane in Top Gun and can also refuel in midair.

Can't beat Ghost & Goblins without the level select code and has never lied about it.

Thinks Friday the 13th is a great game even if the physics, controls and weapons are garbage.

Mario Paint caused him to buy a Super Nintendo and largely leave his Sega Genesis behind. He has played it more than most video games and wore down the mouse pad so that the grid only shows around the corners.

Has beaten Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers on the SNES on the hardest difficulty without losing a single round. Multiple times.

Is still friends with the girl who worked at a local game store and sold him Street Fighter II nearly 17 years ago.

Beat Final Fantasy 2 in a weekend when he was a kid, yet can't get through a role-playing game these days if his life depended on it.

Has never beaten Final Fantasy VII.

Prefers pads to sticks.

Likes the N64 controller.

Prefers the Duke to the S-controller.

Doesn't think that Super Mario 64 is all that great.

Got an Xbox mostly for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. And thinks it's a damn good game. Really.

Swore he would never buy a Game Boy Advanced SP, but immediately broke down once the NES edition came out. (And regarding the NES Classics series, true in-store dialogue: "Dude, are you serious?! They seriously expect people to pay 20 dollars a piece for games they can just downlo...Ooh! Zelda!")

Really liked the first Halo. (Well, there goes my dtoid cred.)

Can rock out Dynamite Rave in Dance Dance Revolution like it's nobody's business.

Played the hell out of Animal Crossing: Wild World and hid that fact from nobody.

Stomped Brad Nicholson at Street Fighter IV, but had to resort to the cheapest of tactics in order to do so. ;)

Thinks you're really, really, really smart. And pretty.

Top ten favorite games (in no particular order):

•The Legend of Zelda (NES)
•Mike Tyson's Punch-Out (NES)
•The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)
•Phantom 2040 (SNES)
•Street Fighter II (any version)
•Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (PS2)
•Final Fantasy 3/6 (SNES)
•Ico (PS2)
•Sin and Punishment (N64)
•Picross (DS)



(NVGR)

I love drawing, though I realize that I'm not very good. I figured early on that drawing my own header art would help my blogs stand out. Thanks to Destructoid, and to the scanner that Carollelogram got me for my birthday last year, I feel like I've developed a unique style that's distinctly my own.

Outside of games I've got a DVD collection that is exploding out of a 5'x6' shelf (over 400 titles). So suffice it to say that I love movies. I'm a huge horror fan and I host an annual Dusk Till Dawn Horror Movie Marathon nearly every October. My top ten favorite films in order are as follows:

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cativo, 1966)
2. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
3. Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, 1954)
4. The City of Lost Children (La Citι des enfants perdus, 1995)
5. The Apartment (1960)
6. Strings (2004)
7. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
8. The Big Lebowski (1998)
9. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
10. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Music-wise, my top 3 bands are The Pixies, The Velvet Underground and Radiohead. I listen to damn near every genre of music (except modern country. I yearn for the days of Hank Williams, Sr. and Tammy Wynette). Hit random on my mp3 player and you'll get everything from darkwave to hip hop to 80's synthpop. I karaoke pretty regularly. I can't sing, but I surround myself with people who can. Still, you've not experienced all there is in life until you've seen me proper butcher True by Spandau Ballet.

Then, as for the literary interests, my love lies with pulp detective novels of the thirties and forties. Raymond Chandler is simply the greatest ever. And Dashiell Hammett is just fantastic. Lately, I've been reading through Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles at Carollelogram's recommendation. Two books in and I have to say they're astonishing.

If you do the Twitter thing, Haxan1 is my handle should you want to follow me.

Feel free to friend me to your console of choice should you ever want to play a game of Street Fighter. Just be sure to let me know that you're from Destructoid and you'll get the royal treatment.



Blogs I writed:


Reviews
•Virtual Console Review- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
•Review- Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop

Front Page
•Other Worlds Than These: The citizens of the land of Termina
•Community spotlight: Haxan goes above and beyond for the community

Monthly Musings
•Instant Replay: Street Fighter II
•The Start of the Affair: Solomon's Key

Editorials and assorted articles
•Does the Wii have RROD-type issues of its own?
•Okay, Nintendo. I guess that we can be friends again.
•Niero, do you have any idea what in the lobster milkshake you have done?! (dtoid 3rd anniversary post)
•10 things you might not have known about Haxan (but really only 8)
•Why Destructoid is awesome: Nilcam is the greatest edition (I honestly can't give Nilcam enough props for this.)
•Christmas shopping: Non-gaming, priest dad-style
•Bad Dye Job: A Darius Pickman Story
•"Congraturation" RetroforceGO!
•Nintendon't what?! Now you tell me just what the %#@$ Nintendon't do!

Neat stuff I played a bit part in
•The Destructoid children's alphabet book

http://profiles.us.playstation.com/playstation/psn/visit/profiles/Haxan

Gamer Profile

3DS friend code:
Steam:
Battle:
PSN: Haxan
Mii: 8490 3559 2301 7665
Gamertag: haxan1

Following (28)

OG (Original Geek) since birth or did it creep up on you slowly? Haxan | 5:25 AM on 04.26.2008 6 comments

Am I genetically predisposed to liking Zelda and John Woo films? Over at vn1977's C-Blog, we kind of started a bit of a discussion in the comments regarding inherent Geekdom. Is it nature or is it nurture? Are you born a geek, and by that I mean: do you just dive head-first into the vortex of poplular entertainment and seek out as much of the various forms as you possibly can (not just the elements themselves, but the history, the interconnections, the people involved, etc.) the moment you burst from the womb (stopping first only for a moment to deal with such tediums as learning to walk and possibly speak)? Or is it something that can be developed into a person over a long period of time due to their exposure? I was going to touch on some examples in a comment, but realized that we'd hit upon something much larger, that deserved a blog of it's own. I'd like to hear what all of you have to say on this subject. I believe that geeks are born. For me, I hit the ground running. As an infant I was obsessed with Superman (I was a kid, what did I know? I got better and moved onto Batman). Soon I hit the point where TV became the new word for God. I absorbed everything I came in contact with, be it Voltron, the Transformers, Star Wars, the Beastmaster, MASK, He-Man or Jayce and the MFing Wheeled Warriors. (My mom put my brother and I on a Saturday morning bowling league, which didn't at all fly with me, because I was missing the cartoons. It didn't take me long to get out of that. Now my brother's rolled multiple 300 games, and I... have beaten Contra without losing a life). A small pause as I take a couple moments to go overboard on nostalgia. I did say a couple of moments. This of course (and more relevently to this site) moved on towards the world of video games. At that time for me, that was the 2600 (and I don't care what anybody says. Frogs and Flies is one of the greatest head-to-head competitvie games of all time). And then the NES, then Super Nintendo etc., etc. And outside of games, Ninja Turtles and Comic Books by middle school. Cult films and anime in high school. Few levels of geekery have escaped my gaze. For me I started out a geek in utero, and have remained so ever since. All my friends seem to be the same. So, I started racking my brain to think of an example of a person who had a normal, non-obsessive, geek-free childhood then ultimately grew into Geekhood. And I couldn't think of a single one. I've got many stories, like the following: About 6 years ago, I had a super-tight group of friends. We'd hit up our favorite coffee-house after work almost every night. Then head over to someone's house afterwards for a serious night of gaming or movies. Often this was system-link 8-player Halo. My friend Andrea would play with us often. She enjoyed herself, but she really wasn't a geek. She never bought a system (even a DS), and probably hasn't touched a game since that summer. It was just something she did. And when it was gone she didn't miss it. I'm positive that the die-hard gamers on this site aren't just gaming geeks. I don't think there's a pure form of geek. I bet you 99.9% of us here do multiple of the following: watch cult films, read comic books, are heavy into sci-fi, play pen and paper RPGs and/or card games, collect figures, watch anime, know way more than they should about Hip-Hop from other countries (my girlie is way into this last category). And I bet you've been doing so for as long as you can remember. It still doesn't seem inconceivable ("You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means") that a person could grow into a geek over time. But eff me if I can think of an example. So where do you fit in? Are you OG or did it just hit you suddenly one day? I'd really love to hear a counterpoint (and your stories) on this. As a quick shoutout, here's an AMAZING video from my girlfriend's favorite band. Attached photos: