Clerks and Casuals

[Garple]

Share your experiences talking about games with "regular" people. AKA those who don't keep up to date obsessively like we do, etc...

and especially exchanges you've had with game store clerks.

In Gamestop the other day, I asked the clerks, "have you guys played "Little King's Story" at all?"

One of them said, "Never heard of it."

The other one scowled and told him "It's only on Wii," as if that disqualified it from legitimacy or something.

I paid for my used copy of Burnout Paradise and left with a sadness in my heart.

I should have known better.

But I had the audacity to hope.

[Psych]

I was in a game store in Australia where I asked the clerk about finding a used copy of Panzer Dragoon Orta, and to put a preorder on Odin Sphere, he had never heard of either.

Although in his defense I later found out that Odin Sphere was never localized for Australia...

those poor bastards.

[Chris]

I paid for my used copy

Yeah well you've left me with a sadness in my heart

[MrHoatzin]

I paid for my used copy of Burnout Paradise and left with a sadness in my heart.

I should have known better.

But I had the audacity to hope.

Cold, smug disenchantment with a thin crust of affected mourning for the human condition...

Yeah well you've left me with a sadness in my heart

... and the requisite chaser of sanctimoniousness. So smooth. So refreshing.

¬¬¬¬¬¬etc.

Signed: Esteban "MC Kingsley" Kingzjester, feckless defender of clerk complacency and The Way Things Are.

[Azazello]

I recently visited a bunch of family, including my 15-year-old, Call of Duty-loving, Halo-playing cousin. He kept trying to wow me with facts about the Modern Warfare 2 collector's edition (zomg, night vision goggles) and the failed Halo movie. It was interesting to see what a general member of the Xbox-live playing public thought of these games, even if I did know all this stuff already.

[Chris]

Cold, smug disenchantment with a thin crust of affected mourning for the human condition...

... and the requisite chaser of sanctimoniousness. So smooth. So refreshing.

¬¬¬¬¬¬etc.

Signed: Esteban "MC Kingsley" Kingzjester, feckless defender of clerk complacency and The Way Things Are.

You've left me with a sadness in my heart

Signed: IGN.com

[ThunderPeel2001]

I met a rather cool dude on my travels who part-times as a clerk in the Cape Cod area... He knew more about games than anyone I'd ever met, and was very enthusiastic, too. So if you live around that area, check out the Game Stop and ask for Ryan

[brkl]

I spent a few nights with family in Hastings last week. My youngest cousin there had an Xbox and owned, I think, the past five FIFA titles. I never understood that. But shooting zombies in CoD: World at War sure was fun.

[elmuerte]

I never speak to game store clerks, mostly because most of the stores I shop at are online and therefor don't have clerks you can speak to. And in most other cases I try to avoid clerks, they usually can't help me anyway.

As for the "casuals"... games rarely ever come up as a subject. I can not really recall any conversations

[twmac]

Brighton and Montreal have been surprisingly kind to me.

The Clerks in, I think, GameStation in Brighton might all have been a bunch of Sony-loving, COD-playing youngsters but they were always nice about it and generally were able to talk about stuff that didn't involve those two things a lot. They didn't even laugh at me when I bought Frontlines: Fuel of war over Battlefield: Bad Company.

In Montreal I've had some terrible service (EBgames and Game buzz) but that was more to do with the company's policies than the people who worked there. I was thoroughly shocked when I bought my copy of Sonic: Unleashed at HMVand the clerk told me that the last good sonic game was Sonic CD and SEGA had never gotten it right once they moved to 3-D. I could have proposed to her on the spot for that.

Oh and Chris if you are decrying the purchase of second hand goods, I agree for the most part. Then again it is Burnout Paradise, if had been something else, a little more niche then I might have brought out some sanctimony.

[DanJW]

I asked around in the shops once for Kult: Heretic Kingdoms. No-one had heard of it.

Another time I went out looking for Okami on the PS2. Seeing as the Wii version was imminent I thought it would be a good chance for them to sell off remaining PS2 stock or even (gasp) pick up second-hand copies.

Most clerks had never heard of it. After checking their computers some of them discovered a fabled copy in storage, but after 5 minuteds out the back they couldn't find it.

The most helpful was a girl. She had played Okami and enjoyed it and knew that the Wii version was coming. I instantly developed a crush on her as a result. Alas, her store also suffered from the phantom storage copy. In the end I ordered online.

Frankly, I feel no sympathy for bricks-and-mortar stores losing out to online services, because they almost never sell me the game I want anyway.

My cousin in Lancashire is now a teenager, confusing as I still think of him as being 10 years old. Anyway. He used to play Jedi Knight 2 and stuff on my PC when he was little, and now he has a 360 of his very own. At christmas we played some CoD4 deathmatch.

He still has that kid thing where they assume that because you are an adult you therefore know nothing about anything cool and insist on explaining the game to you in detail, as you would an idiot. Then he trounced me multiple times. However, once I had adjusted to the molasses pace of console FPS, my years of Counterstrike experience came to the fore and I turned the tide; his better reflexes versus my diversionary tactics, traps and mind-games. It was fun times.

[elmuerte]

Oh and Chris if you are decrying the purchase of second hand goods, I agree for the most part. Then again it is Burnout Paradise, if had been something else, a little more niche then I might have brought out some sanctimony.

I think the issue is buying second hand games from retailers like GameStop.

[brkl]

Tangent tangentially related to Dan's post:

How is it possible that the CoD games do not have bots (or AI players in multiplayer :/ ) and also do not support splitscreen play on an online server like Halo 3? I spent years players Half-Life mods and Quake 3 mods with perfectly fine bots you could use if you didn't have enough players.

It's such a huge step backwards, especially when the games would be so much fun with a few human players playing splitscreen against a ton of bots. Why even have the regular multiplayer option when the most players you can have in splitscreen is 4?

[Thyroid]

My seven year old cousin owns a PSP and his parents' choice of games. These are including, but not limited to, Ben 10: Protector of the Earth, Transformers 2 and Wall-E. (Trust me, you don't want to know what games grace his Wii.)

So now we're playing Launch of the Screaming Narwhal and he's absolutely loving it. He doesn't get a lot of it (well obviously) but he's been laughing in all the right places and just having a great time. His sketchbook is full of drawings of Guybrush, Elaine and LeChuck (he's a pretty good li'l artist).

On the other hand you have people like his 18 year old sister, who actually likes games but doesn't play them for fear she'll be frowned upon from members of the socially "cool" crowd. She loves Crash Bandicoot though, and plays it when she has a chance.

Clerks...Some dude laughed at me when I stated that Psychonauts was a better game than Halo. Another dude got annoyed at me when I walked into the store, saw Call of Duty 5, exclaimed surprise and then walked over and asked for Beyond Good and Evil; indicated that I live in the Stone Age.

But for me it's always been the "hardcore" gamers (computer science students) who break my heart, as they would, as a majority, much rather play Fallout 3 (again and again and again) than, say, The Path. Usually when I end up ranting about derivative knock-offs they give me a puzzled look followed by, "But, it's so,...so...casual," or, after one particularly impassioned rant in favour of Grim Fandango, "But you don't kill anyone." Then again I've had programmers tell me that Star Wars is better-written than The Big Lebowski, and that's just baffling.

(Edit: Forgot about these two. These two kids are awesome.)

[Garple]

Yeah well you've left me with a sadness in my heart

Suck it, Remo. Also, touche, sir.

[miffy495]

Hey now, I'm a clerk at HMV. I happen to be the games guy at my store. I'll have you know that some of us games clerks actually know our shit. Apparently our games section is the second most successful in Canada, and we're a comparatively small store to most. And these are good games that we're selling. Our overstock shelves of shit games are bulging, while we always seem to have just enough good games to go around. I don't let people leave the store with a shit game unless they insist on it, and I'm driving my manager crazy with how blunt I am when someone asks about one. Still, he can't do much about it when people are asking for me by name and our sales are doing so well. Policy be damned, you're not buying GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA on my watch unless you absolutely can't be convinced.

[Roderick]

Hooray! Next time in Canada I'm asking for you by name.

Don't care which store I'm in.

[twmac]

Kroms and Miffy have kind of touched on what I ran out of time to write about. I also worked in an HMV at one point and was actually much better at recommending films than I was music or games.

The reason being is that my tastes in music were pretty niche so as soon as anyone asked me whether the new semisonic or Linkin Park album was any good I'd have to fight back the urge to go 'No, but have you tried Merzbow?'. The same happened with being 'Hardcore' in terms of games (read: not interested in a lot of mainstream stuff), people would ask me about whether the new GTA game was any good (I think it was San Andreas) and I'd have to grit my teeth. It wasn't that the game was shit it was that I didn't like it and had strong opinions on it.

The hardcore gamers of this world often go too far in the opposite direction in reaction to the casual gamers and as a result end up making things worse. I'm definitely no exception as people give me bewildered looks when I say that the only EA game I plan to buy is Brutal Legends and the last one I bought was Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath purely on the principle of being on the receiving end of their business policies and hating it. I usually get:

"Well that's too bad SSX tricky is sweet."*

*Someone said that to me 8 months ago, I can't even remember the last time an SSX game was released.

In short I've never really gotten my knickers in a twist about ignorant 'casuals' or Clerks but have instead rejoiced when I meet people who know what they are talking about and by that I mea people who share similar attitudes towards games.

Arrgh got to go to work.

[BooJaka]

I would just like to commend the mention of Merzbow in this thread.

Carry on

[RobTheReverend]

I'm doubt someone seriously considering the new Linkin Park hotness would hop onto the Merzbow wagon instead. That said, I find Merzbow delightful and one of the reasons why I posted about them in the music thread is in hopes of finding a cache of rabid anti-Linkin Parkers here in the thumbs forums.

[DanJW]

Tangent tangentially related to Dan's post:

How is it possible that the CoD games do not have bots (or AI players in multiplayer :/ ) and also do not support splitscreen play on an online server like Halo 3? I spent years players Half-Life mods and Quake 3 mods with perfectly fine bots you could use if you didn't have enough players.

It's such a huge step backwards, especially when the games would be so much fun with a few human players playing splitscreen against a ton of bots. Why even have the regular multiplayer option when the most players you can have in splitscreen is 4?

I have no idea Brkl. The only thing I can think of is that they want to drive people to play online, and splitscreen online would be prone to ghosting and other exploits. But it might just be an oversight or a developer time budget thing.

[jneeriem]

I find people tend to shy away from conversations where erection, tv and controller all come into play. Thus I usually play the part of "non-gamer" in my normal life.

- Edit: I would say that most people think the 13 yr-olds who play Halo 3 until their eyes bleed are the real "hardcore" gamers while people who appreciate games are generally considered obsessed, stupid, or Fat.

[Chris]

"Well that's too bad SSX tricky is sweet."

Well, it is

[Nevsky]

I suppose I have only one clerk-experience to share, and it has coloured my expectations with most game shop employees since.

To cheer myself up after a pretty horrible day visiting my university house (which was a building site, a week before moving in, due to the landlady being incompetent), I decided to pick up two games in the Gamestation 2 for £25: Metroid: Zero Mission, and Pikmin.

While at the till, I overheard one of the guys behind the counter loudly proclaiming the extreme idiocy of the Wii's classic controller. He said something along the lines of 'it's just fucking pointless, another waste of money, Nintendo are money-grabbing wankers etc'. I chimed in, stating it was much better for playing SNES Virtual Console games than the Gamecube controller, due to the face buttons being equally sized and spaced.

His response: 'why would anyone be stupid enough to buy SNES games on the Virtual Console?'. Somehow mustering up more confidence than I usually have in the face of extreme stubbornness, I replied saying that, to take an example, Super Metroid (which had just been released on the VC at the time) was £7 on Wii, whereas a boxed copy in that very shop was £30. That £7 would go straight to Nintendo, whereas buying the cartridge only enriches the store chain - not the game makers themselves. Also, I stressed that, to the majority of the Wii's audience, it isn't viable/desirable to seek out and buy a SNES on eBay, just to play the games - they're not collectors. What about those who should be allowed to experience such a cool game?

The guy just grimaced at me, like my point was irrelevant - even idiotic. Meanwhile, a girl, who had popped back up from under the counter, having found the Pikmin disc, said 'well, I have every SNES game on my DS anyway'.

I can't remember how it went from there, but in my memory that last statement rings a dull, reverberating note, and I probably just left the shop, stuttering and muttering to myself.

[syntheticgerbil]

How did she cram all that graham onto one DS cartridge?