It’s that time again, dear readers! Meeeeerrry Christmas!

What’s that? It’s summer, you say? Haven’t you ever heard of the time-honored tradition of celebrating Christmas in July? It’s the perfect time for stores to gear up to sell you your Christmas necessities and for everyone to celebrate the holiday season while lounging in the sun sipping on some delicious iced tea.

It’s also the perfect time to take a look at some great releases we’re going to see around the real holiday season this year. Let’s take a look into Santa’s big red bag.

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One of the most horrible, frustrating and agonizing enemies of gamers these days isn’t a boss.

It isn’t pixelated, doesn’t have HP, has no corporeal form, and it is invincible. It strikes without warning, especially just at the moment you engage in combat, and the result of its onslaught is usually death.

It speaks to gamers in the harshest tongue, more hideous than that of Mordor. It says, “You have been disconnected.”

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Last week I told you why I loved graphics. Juicy polygons, full of shine, make me happy. But, I have to say, there is one other thing that makes me fall in love with a game.

Just to review, we covered the little details that make a game great - such as the GTA IV cellphone. We covered the plot, which in some cases can make a game instantly a classic, and in other cases can destroy it entirely. And we covered the graphics, the spit and polish of a game.

I’m going to finish up this series with what I think is personally the most important part of a video-game - assuming that I can play it halfway intuitively and it isn’t broken.

The most important part of making a video game great is the characters. Those would be Link. Sephiroth. Mario. Knuckles. Dante. Leon. Master Chief. Samus. Lara Croft. Sonic the Hedgehog. Solid Snake. Iconic, classic, and with that certain something that makes fangirls and boys everywhere go weak at the knees.

Quite what it is that makes gamers so attached to the characters they play I’m not quite sure. Maybe it’s because there’s a little piece of us in them. Maybe it’s because they are hot. Maybe it’s because they can defeat three thousand enemies single-handedly.
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Hello, I’m Mercedes, and I don’t finish video games.

That’s not to say I don’t play them. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them. But I can’t not put them down. There’s always that final push of the start button, the pause that lasts for days, weeks, and sometimes years. It’s a bad habit, to say the least, but I’m on the path to recovery.

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So I’m chugging through Gears of War, gunning down Locust left and right, lighting paths in the streets to avoid being eaten alive by the Kryll. I’m having a good old time and then suddenly I pause the game. It is then, sitting at the pause menu, that I am struck with a realization.

Some of my most favorite games have little or no sense of humor.

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I can enjoy a good single player game as much as the next gamer. In fact, being by myself can sometimes be cathartic. But only sometimes.

Having an added interactive personality or two to spice up the time you spend with your favorite pixels? Why, who could resist? Friends, and people in general, make gaming multidimensional. They point out things you may have missed, spend joyous hours entertaining you, share the journey of your characters from one point to another, and make you feel like not so much of a geeky gamer freak because hey – you’ve got friends who play too, so spending twenty hours a week or more on an activity atypical to most people in society isn’t quite so lonely an affair.

My personal favorite? Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions on Ventrilo during PvP combat.

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