Added: 01/22/2006 |
Gamefaqs.com Soothing My AchesHello. My name is David, and I am a maddenaholic.
It all began so innocently. Once in a while I'd watch my friend play a game or two on his PC, much to the constantly heightening consternation of his wife. I made fun of his addiction. Sure, I saw the value in the game, saw that it might be amusing for a while, but I was blind to the danger of "Madden NFL Football." Little did I know the pitfall I was in for. When he received a new version of the game, he bestowed the older one upon me as a "gift."
Some gift. I was in for months of torment, as my beloved team did well in the preseason, did well in the exhibition games, repeatedly finish in the top two or three of my conference and then...lose on the path to the Super Bowl at the bloody hands of the Houston Oilers or Pittsburgh Steelers. My dreams began to become filled with tormented visions of powder-blue bedecked offensive lineman forming an impenetrable wall against hundreds of defenders I'd send at him. The playbook plays riffled through my mind before I feel asleep and as soon as I woke up. The addiction had set in hard, but the nice opiate feeling had been replaced by misery. And then I discovered gamefaqs.
Gamefaqs is the website any computer game (or Xbox or Sega or whatever system you're playing these days - I love my PC) geek has lusted after. Turned on by a friend's tip, I scoped out gamefaqs.com for tips to put my Budapest Stars over the top.
See, those nice people at Gamefaqs have done a service to set them amongst the silicon gods. The 'site is a free video game resource for players. For more than ten years now, the gamefaqs team has collected tips and codes and cheat codes and reviews and et cetera for players' perusal. To join gamefaqs is the simplest of procedures, with data entry like we've all seen before. The 'site itself is basically no-nonsense: not too many frills, just hard-nosed information. To join gamefaqs offers vast expansion of more more more information!
A search for Madden 2003 showed enough useful information to help the Budapest Stars. The strategy guide itself is available for download, but the FAQs section is what I needed like that craving you get when you must have something now or you won't be held responsible for...oh, sorry. I rethought my draft order when I read the first submission by a private party (nearly all information on gamefaqs is contributed and most is copyrighted by the author in question - hey, this is valuable stuff) on his suggestion of a quarterback/halfback/middle linebacker/tackle/tackle system. And in rookie scouting itself, wow. Some dude posted gobs of minutiae that really needs to be brought to the forefront of the Madden maniac. They even had the lyrics to the annoying theme music that keeps popping up during every gridiron battle.
So, anyway, I used this information to bag this excellent quarterback - Josh Knight out of Yale - who has led the mighty Budapest Stars to a 14-2 record. We're in the playoffs now and...what? This is a what? A meeting of Maddenaholics Anonymous? Huh. I thought it was a strategy group. No, I don't have a problem. I can quit any time, really, I just don't want to...now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a quarterfinal game against those f---ing Pittsburgh Steelers...
GameFAQs is a popular website that has provided video game resources free of charge to visitors since November 5, 1995. The site includes FAQs, walkthroughs, images, cheat codes, game saves, reviews, credits and release information for games.
It was started and is maintained by Jeff "CJayC" Veasey, and has one of the largest databases of video games available on the Internet. The site covers a wide range of systems, with many obscure consoles and titles. Registration with the site allows access to message boards (which has posted over 280 million messages in over 25 million topics by over 3.3 million users) and the ability to contribute game content. Since 2003, the site has been a wholly owned subsidiary of CNET Networks.
Any registered user may submit information to GameFAQs; almost all of GameFAQs' content was created by its users. Typically, the information is reviewed before being put up. Submitted guides may be rejected if they are of low quality, or if several other similar guides on the same game already exist.
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