I tried playing a Sims game once.  I found myself getting bored quickly, as I realized how much waiting was involved with playing it the "right way".  So I restarted my game, constructed a house with no doors, no bathrooms and no food.  I put a hillbilly family of about twenty-five in as inhabitants.  They milled about aimlessly, got into an occasional argument, and pissed on the floor.  Eventually they all died of disease or starvation.  I chuckled, turned the power off and didn't look at the game again.

* * * * * * * *

The first time I'd read Seanbaby's work, it was by accident.  I was a senior in college in my first half of the year (circa 2003), and I needed inspiration for my senior illustration thesis that was based on old-school video games.  I wound up picking up a copy of EGM off of the magazine rack at Stop & Shop to peruse the illustrations inside, but found that the real gem was printed on the last page.  Apparently it was some guy's job to rip apart all of the terrible games that hit the video game shelves. These usually consisted of Christian games or the lame attempts to tap into the girl market by making pointless Barbie and Disney Princess games.  BTW, just a hint to video game designers from a girl gamer:  Girls that are obsessed with their own appearance, or the only ones that would consider those games fun, are too busy throwing up their lunch and spending their boyfriends' money to play video games.  If you want to play more to the female gamers, just make a different version of a popular title.  For example, Duke Nukem for girls: Instead of rescuing strippers, you rescue abused animals.  If you're not going to bother with that, please stop making those stupid Hannah Montana games, and other garbage that insults the industry.

While reading this article about horrible video games, I had at least three genuine laugh out loud moments after reading a single page of text.  That's rare for me.  In what seemed to be one of those commercials for TBS where a clueless caller asks operator assistnence if something is really as funny as they think it is, I brought the article down to my friend, Amy.  She was a volunteer worker, and looked after mentally handicapped adults in her spare time, and her sister was a lesbian.  This meant she was constantly correcting me whenever I used the words "retarded" or "gay" to describe something I thought was stupid.  I examined her face as she read it, knowing that it was full of usage of both adjectives, and amazingly she had the same reaction I did.  She didn't complain about his liberal use of either word.  She just thanked me for showing it to her.  I guess it's impossble to be offended when a joke is funny enough.  Here's an example of one of his genius observations:

"I was interrupted every three seconds by messages that told me things like 'press <-- to go left,' and 'press the pause button to pause the game'.  If this game was going to treat me like I was retarded, I was going to act retarded.  This meant smearing the cartridge with peanut butter, and racing around the room until somebody hugged me."

Anyway, I was so impressed, I had to check out the author.  His name was Seanbaby, and a simple Google search told me that he had his own website.  It was a thing of beauty, chock full of brilliant material.  There was a ton more of that video game related material.  He out angry video gamed the Angry Video Game Nerd before there even was an Angry Video Game Nerd.  There was also other material, including his critique's on videos from the 80's, like Alyssa Milano's teen workout video and Mr. T rapping with kids, and hundreds of pictures of Seanbaby with his friends doing kegstands and muy thai-ing the shit out of an assortment of produce, often with a hilarious caption.  My favorite section of the site had to be the chronicles of his flame war with a socially-challenged man from East Lyme, CT, that Seanbaby made fun of in an article for writing to Nintnendo power at 32 years of age to share his high scores and tell "all the kids that looked up to him" not to do drugs.

The big problem with the site was the lack of updates.  I'd read every section of the site whenever I was snowed in at my studio, or just needed a break. There's been gaps between updates that have lasted years, so I stopped checking in so often.  Imagine my surprise and delight the other day when I'd decided to drop by the page and discovered that he had updated several times since I last checked, and though he didn't work for EGM any more, he is now writing for Cracked.  It's perfect.  It's where he belongs anyway.  He's also writing an advice column for bitmob.com.  Here's a taste:

"Dr. Sean

Why the f*** are women so re******? How do I get them away from the assholes that treat them like shit and get with a guy like me? Do have to start being douche just to get some attention??

Sincerely,Victor S.

I have some good news for you, Victor. You already are a douche, so if your Plan B is TRYING to be a douche, give it a shot.

Women are fine with nice guys. You're not one of them, but if you were, I'd tell you that the problem with "nice" is that it isn't really anything. A hot woman, which I assume is the kind you're talking about in your letter, gets hit on by every guy she has or ever will meet. Is she supposed to sleep with every clumsy pussy vagrant, like yourself, who thinks to be polite while he forces small talk until he thinks of a way to ask for sex? That woman wouldn't have time to take her AIDS medicine between trips to the delivery room.

Being wonderfully pleasant and agreeable isn't sexy to hot women. That's how waiters or doormen behave, and I've never seen a woman leave with one of those. But only an idiot would think the solution is to do the exact opposite and act like an asshole. If you meet a woman, act rude to her, and if she sleeps with you, expect an emotional breakdown several minutes later and 75 voicemails after you finally get the crazy bitch and her daddy issues out of your home. Lonely masturbation wins over that any day, even if someone catches you.

Try to ease off on the compliments and worship and work on being interesting enough that she could pick you out of a lineup later. If all you talk about is how attracted you are to her, you might as well take your wiener out and whimper.

You can visit your local Internet for books or videos on chick hounding, but most of these are specialized for picking up the type of girls who flash their tits for a T-shirt. And these girls have had so much of their time taken up with one-liners and game that they've never developed the ability to be entertaining. That means the post-coitus activities dry up pretty fast. To pick up regular, nonsluts, try to fix yourself so they want to hang out with you. Maybe by being a puppy, or the perfect shoe."

As a woman, I can tell you he's so right.

* * * * * * * *

Getting back to my original story about my experience playing Sims, Seanbaby wrote an article about his own time playing "The Sims 3".  Let's just say he made my "experiment" look absolutely thrown together and unorganized...which it was.  He promised Nazi scientist level experiments to be practiced on his virtual subjects, and he delivered, though my reaction was decidedly different from reading about his and actual Nazi tests.  He spent a lot more time planning creatively cruel setups than I did, and took copius and hilarious notes on the results.  It's the kind of thing your happy you didn't read with a full bladder.  I won't spoil it for you, so here's the link: 

http://www.cracked.com/blog/exploring-the-mysteries-of-the-mind-with-the-sims-3/

That being said, since you're in the blog section and have made it to the end of this and presumably enjoy finding a good read, I highly recommend checking out seanbaby.com, at the risk of making my own writing look piss poor and unfunny by comparison.