The Top 7... steps to becoming a videogame snob

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Think you're hardcore? Not until you turn into an elitist jackass. We tell you how

Step 4 - You care at all about geeky tech speak

Here's one we're all guilty of - obsessing over trivial hardware details that don't amount to squat. We can't even begin to count the number of times we've sat in heated debate with a fellow gamer over "normal mapping," "HDR lighting,""framerate issues" or "poly count." And don't even get us started on "pixel shaders" versus "vertex shaders." The whole office will descend into chaos.

Does this junk really matter? When the graphics look as good as they do today, worrying about how jaggy the leaves are 17 miles in the distance seems like a creepy fanboy-ish waste of time. But dammit, sometimes you've just gotta point out how boxy some chick's ass is when you paid $600 for a realistic-looking chick ass.

This snobbish behavior can also manifest itself in criticisms of hardware media. We've seen our fair share of wordy lecture classes or back-and-forthbitchfests(read the comments).Precisely two people care about this stuff, people - the developer and the developer's mother, and she doesn't even know what the hell he's talking about.