55 Things To Be Thankful For

Thanksgiving is a time to eat until you feel greasy then zone out with football and video games. That’s how the pilgrims did it after they fled Europe and the tyrannical rule of King Koopa. However, the holiday is also a time you spend with your family so you can be thankful you don’t have to do that the other 364 days of the year. So in honor of our Grecian ancestors we figured we’d come up with an exhaustive list of things we’re thankful for in 2010. Then we got tired and decided to stop at 55.

1. Downloadable games – because when you’re stuffed with turkey you don’t want to stand up and put a disc into your console.
2. Playing DS on the john. “Few things satisfy like a puzzle solved.”
3. Caffeine.
4. Explosive barrels – how else would we take down the hordes of FPS villains?
5. Online gaming – because now when we have to stay home with the family, we can still “go out” and play with our friends.
6. Co-op – because you have to let your nephew play eventually.
7. Dance Central – it’s the only way we’re going to be able to work off that Thanksgiving dinner this year.
8. The way Nuka Cola refreshes on a hot nuclear day.
9. Negligent virtual police – We’d never trap our neighbor in the basement in real life, but The Sims manages to bring out the serial killer in all of us.
10. Sonic – because it’s always nice to have someone to make fun of.
11. De-friending – seriously Todd Phillips, stop sending us Farmville invites on Facebook.
12. Generous checkpoints – we never want to say, “You mean I have to replay the last 15 minutes!” again.
13. Autosave – we never want to scream, “You mean I have to replay the last two hours!?” again.
14. The mute button – we never want to hear “---k you, you ---k ---king piece of ---t.” again.
15. Multiple lives.
16. How “just one more round” always turns into six in the morning.
17. The mobile-phone revolution. Suddenly we don’t mind playing phone games on the coach.
18. Unexpected weight loss thanks to motion gaming.
19. The flood of great indie titles.
20. The Jordan Challenge. More games need to tap into the rich history sports offer.
21. Arcade classic revamps. NBA Jam. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. Please tell us someone is fixing Pong.
22. Old games re-released to work on newer hardware.
23. Normal voice chat – we’re tired to talking to people who sound like they kidnapped our child and are demanding a ransom.
24. The “kick” option in random dungeon groups [WoW].
25. The “kick” option after your brother steals your Thanksgiving dessert.
26. Layered achievements – Beating a game is great, but beating a game, hearing that satisfying sound as four achievements for 200 points pop up onscreen is even better.
27. Having games to look forward to after the holiday season.
28. Patches – both fabric and video game, but not soul.
29. Stable Internet connections on snowy days.
30. Steam sales – because who wants to go to a mall on Black Friday? That scares us.
31. Nintendo platformers.
32. Quality voice-acting (usually not in Nintendo platformers)
33. New Game +
34. Minecraft – how many games let you build a floating mansion, a working computer, or a replica of the USS Enterprise during a monster invasion?
35. Being able to fire our boss…with a gun. Online multiplayer is good for something.
36. Telltale’s upcoming Jurassic Park game. We hope doc Brown is in it.
37. People that say anything other than “kekekeke” in Starcraft 2.
38. Double Fine’s shift to downloadable games.
39. Our TV. It never tells us we’re bad at watching TV, or judges us for playing video games.
40. Netflix instant queue – because sometimes we need an instant Jeff Bridges fix.
41. Wireless controllers – because wires suck.
42. Finally getting to live out our cowboy fantasies, without getting weird looks from the neighbors in our backyard. Thanks, Rockstar.
43. Books. Nah, just kidding. Who reads books?
44. Open-world sandbox games and destructible environments.
45. Games with user-created content – games used to just be a linear experience, but with titles like LittleBigPlanet, Minecraft, and ModNation Racers, we get to create like we’re still five.
46. HD collections. We need more of them.
47. RPG elements in first-person shooters.
48. RPG elements in platformers.
49. RPG elements in role-playing games. (What happened, Fable?)
50. Level editors. Our story about sentient bananas and their revenge on the monkey kingdom has to be created somehow.
51. Co-op campaigns where characters aren’t just clones of the main protagonist.
52. A backlog of awesome games – way better than an actual back log.
53. Minimaps and waypoints – we like to know where we’re going; some games just don’t get it.
54. DLC – because you’re never done with that game if you don’t want to be.
55. All of our faithful readers.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!