I’m probably going to take some more more heat for this, but I think it’s worth it. Before I continue with this piece, let me explain my methodology for choosing those pictures found in this post. Every once in a while you’ll see a message board thread inviting the community to share their gaming and/or home theater setups. Eager forum users time and time again step up and post their pictures while proudly stating, “this is my setup!” Well, if you’re going to put yourself out there, I’m going to be the jerk that saves your picture, shares it with an audience, and ridicules each and every one of your missteps. To be fair, however, I don’t make fun of people for having poor setups due to financial constraint; everybody is judged according to how well they did within their financial means. It’s all about execution, people! Also, you can click on the images to enlarge them (and believe me, but the final image you’ll want to).

Note: I’ll be adding to this as the need arrives. If you find worthy submissions, email them to me at jar155 [at] gmail dot com.

I’m guessing that there must be a good reason why everything in this person’s room is jammed into this single little shelf unit. I figure that the house was built upon an active volcano and that the floors are indeed made of hot magma. Why else wouldn’t you let your power bricks sit behind everything on the floor? Or maybe they just look great elbowing for space with dusty figurines, smashed game boxes, and whatever else might be on there. One solid bump, and that’s all coming down.

I had a conversation with this guy, and I said, “Hey buddy, why don’t you move some of that stuff into boxes or somewhere else where they won’t be so tightly crammed in?” He said, “Well, now, I can’t do that, can I? I already have the game shelf. It’s the game shelf. I put my game stuff on the game shelf.” In order to avoid a possible British comedy style conversation, I just nodded and left him be.

I’m not certified, and I’m certainly not qualified, but I have to write this guy up for a safety violation. We all can see what’s going to happen here. This guy will asleep in bed and his little brother will be using the bathroom in the next room. Little bro will let the lid drop too hard on the toilet seat and the resulting vibrations will send everything crashing down. Should he survive the initial avalanche, digging out won’t be easy. And how in the world is he getting games out of there to play? Some of those are stacked two deep and several levels high. I want to make friends with him just to ask if I can borrow one of those hard to reach games.

And finally, you don’t need to store your Rock Band drum sticks in the impale position, there’s a holder for them that lets you store them horizontally, also known as the “don’t die” placement.

Keep reading past the jump for more. You know you want to. You know you will.

Wow, this one is special. I figure this is how their buying checklist went when they were moving into what looks to either be a new home or a newly finished room. PS3? Check. HDTV? Check. Gaming-class PC? Check. Cable? Check. So, what’s left to get after we steal our neighbor’s deck furniture? Nothing, right? These guys at VERY LEAST could have put outlet covers on their electrical outlets. They still have the stickers on their windows, floodlights in the room, exposed wiring, and they’re more concerned about getting in a quick picture to show off. Nice priorities, boys. Oh, but that empty paint tray liner does make for a killer remote caddy. Sweet awes!

So…we ask for gaming setup pictures and this guy submits a picture of his Macbook. Macs are fine and all, but can they really be considered a gaming platform? Can any laptop be considered a gaming setup without a mouse?! No sir, it cannot. This entry is invalid. Props for good cord management though. I see that this guy has adopted Apple’s minimalist designs into his desk space usage philosphy as well.

Hey pal, this was a “show your gaming setup” thread, not a “show your gaming setup and 3 weeks of undisposed garbage” thread. The setup is fine, for the most part, but if you’re going to present this to thousands of people, at least scoot the Sunday ads and your empty Hi-C bottles out of the way. My readers don’t ask for much (well, they do, but it goes unheeded), but at least show them the decency it would take to kick that stuff off camera. Oh wait, it looks like Old Navy is having a sale! Neat!

Ropes were made for jumping, not lighting up your PC gaming rig. It’s true, I can figure eight, double dutch, blue bell, and even pull off a mean half twister if I’m particularly loose that day. I also like that the table legs are touching the couch. What, you couldn’t drill holes in the couch to insert the legs directly into it?

This is either extreme dedication or insanity. There’s no gray here. So the guy has enough scratch to put a Wii, 360, and a PS3 under his (nice) TV, but he doesn’t have enough to put in better shelves/storage above it? It’s like a perverted game of reverse Jenga going on up there. I get that sometimes we need to stack things, but is it a good idea to not line things up properly or to put thinner things on the bottom? How does one walk away from this and think that the way that they’re leaving things is not just acceptable, but also worth showing off online? It was considerate of the robbers to leave the shelves when they took the dresser though.

Home Depot Salesman: Speaker wire? Sure, I can cut some for you. How far are your speakers from your receiver?

Champ: About 3 feet.

Home Depot Salesman: Ok, good, so you probably need about 5 feet for each speaker.

Champ: Can we make it an even 50? That would be best.

What you see pictured here are the results of the above conversation.

It has to be nice to be able to sit down in your computer chair, give yourself a good, hard spin, and just be able to open your eyes up to a different computer to use each time. In fact, I’m about 99% sure this is how he decides where his hardcore gaming will take place each day.

I’m pretty sure it’s a crime in 43 states to have a PlayStation 3 hooked up to a 13″ Aiwa TV set through composite cables. Check Craigslist and you’ll see at least 50 TVs within driving range that you can use as  a replacement for less than the cost of that wicked rad and almost completely concealed wall scroll up there. Now, you will have a better TV, but you won’t have the scroll. Tough choice, I’m sure. Seriously though, I Just looked and there were several 27″ TVs to be had for under $25 (some free!). Do the right thing; stop the PS3 abuse.

I included this one not for the ridicule, but simply because it kind of blows me away. Yes, there are issues with what you and I are seeing, but the sheer craziness of it is almost inspiring. You’re seeing pretty much every gaming console from the Atari 2600 up to the current generation all hooked up to a single TV. Look at that highway of cords running to the back of that stand. I am seeing several switchers to accommodate the cause, so these are readily playable. There’s now way this guys plays all of those systems regularly, but man, at least he can. I do have to give props for Tempest 2000 sticking out of the Jaguar, too.

Oh who am I kidding? This is ridiculous! Yeah, neat, you have a ton of systems, but would it kill you to stick one of them in a shoebox? Also, close your NES cartridge door, it’s firing off my OCD triggers.

Past iterations of The Gaming Setup Hall of Shame (Parts 1-3 are much funnier, I think I’m running out of material here).

Part Three - Where the jerkfaced criticisms should have ended.

Part Two - Where the jerkfaced criticisms continued.

Part One – Where the jerkfaced criticisms got started.

Link: http://sovietrussia.org/f/src/tetoris.swf

Seriously now, this is just silly.

Note: Pressing space bar makes the block drop faster. You can also click on the “key” button on the top right to make it so space bar rotates the block and the down arrow makes it fall faster.

For comparison sakes…

James Bond: Quantum of Solace on the Wii

Just look at that water on the right side of the pic…LOOK AT IT! The muddied textures, the low poly counts, the haze, and the idiot guy on the left looking down the wrong side of the hall all add up for one poor looking screenshot.

Wallguy’s famous intro to the world with Perfect Dark Zero

Yes, his legs are different sizes, and yes, it looks like he’s part of the wall, but I’m sorry Wallguy, you’ve been outdone.

Half-Life on the Dreamcast…TEN YEARS AGO

And I don’t know why a white rectangle is showing up above the video. Just ignore it and don’t complain, ok?

Now, Denis got himself into this, but really I think we as a gaming community are being just a bit harsh on him. Yes, it’s providing some nice comedy for anybody willing to watch things unfold, but I think amid all the mudslinging that people should at least be giving Denis some props for being so candid and accessible to the general gamer. Denis, you blew it, but I really hope this doesn’t prevent you from interacting and communicating with the gaming audience. It looks like your game didn’t turn out as well as we (and you) would have liked, but I guarantee if you come back strong with a new project after Too Human that a lot of this can be swept under the rug.

Forget the analysts. Forget the NPD sales figures. Forget the CEO’s. I live with the ultimate expert on the video game industry—my 16-year-old son.

He not only plays video games, he watches every show about them on G4, he participates in chat rooms about them on the internet, he competes in a variety of games on a variety of platforms. He always tells me the latest trend three months before I read about it in the media.

But he’s never been a PlayStation fan. Sure, he had a PS1, but as soon as the Xbox came out, it was game over. He loved the Xbox graphics, and once he was old enough to play “Halo,” he loved the games. He graduated to the Xbox 360, Xbox Live, “Gears of War,” etc. He even hung in there during the overheating Xbox “red ring of death” phase. Other than a two-year detour/obsession playing “World of Warcraft” on his computer, he has always been an Xbox fanboy. Sony just didn’t have great games.

Last week he recorded all of G4’s E3 coverage so he could watch it after work (he’s got a summer job to save money to buy gas and videogames, in that order). He was very excited after Microsoft had its news conference. “You can stream Netflix movies onto the Xbox 360!” he exclaimed.

Then he watched the Sony press conference, and the world as we know it changed. After hearing about “Metal Gear Solid 4”, as well as other PlayStation exclusives in the pipeline and the awesomeness of Blu-ray, he promptly packed up his Xbox 360 and all his games and went down to Game Stop to trade them in. He bought a PS3 and “Metal Gear Solid 4.” I had to be there to approve the purchase of the M-rated game since he’s not yet 17, and I was surprised at how rapturous the Game Stop employees were about Sony. They then sold him a USED copy of “Metal Gear Solid 4.” “How can the game already be used?” my son asked. “Because some people get frustrated if they don’t have ‘cheats’,” he was told. But the cashier assured him that the game “was just as good as new.” My son asked, “How can that be?” “Because PlayStation players are ninjas!” was the response.

I’m happy to say my son didn’t accept this answer. Perhaps that’s because he’s now spending his own hard-earned money to purchase these games. He said, “Seriously, how does that work?” And the Game Stop fanboys explained that Sony now has a special coating on Blu-ray game discs which makes them virtually scratch-proof. We shall see.

One thing we do know. We may not be able to stream Netflix movies onto the console (yet) but now we can start ordering them on Blu-ray.

As we left the store, I said to him, “I never thought I’d see you with a PlayStation.” “Neither did I,” he replied.

Ok, so in the first line she claims that she lives with the “ultimate expert on the video game industry”, who happens to be her 16-yr. old son. That’s nice, but how does this so called expert not even know about Metal Gear Solid 4 before E3? After all, she says that he spends his time on message boards, watches “every show about them on G4″, and informs his mom of the latest trends months before the media picks up on them. So she states this, but we’re supposed to believe that E3 2008 was the first time he’d heard of the game? Strike 1!

She claims that he’s always been an Xbox fanboy and that “Sony just didn’t have great games” is the reason why her son picked the 360 over the PS3. Ok…so what did each company show at E3? Sequels! If Sony never had great games (and they most definitely have), why is he all of a sudden excited about their sequels, but not about the sequels on the 360? Fishy. Strike 2!

The conversation in Game Stop…I don’t I really need to point out the improbabilities there. Strike 3!

Seriously, what a load of garbage. I don’t care if this article had been about Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, the PC, or the Phantom; there’s absolutely no way this is anything but fiction. We might be geeks and nerds, but we’re not naive idiots.

Link to the original story: http://www.cnbc.com/id/25782540

Oh, and she looks a little old to have a 16 yr. old kid…I’d be worried about that kid.

(Note: Some colorful language in the second half)