Interview: 10 Games That Bun B Can't Get Enough Of

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I’m not a big online gamer, but just Halo as a game, it’s just incredible to watch them go from the first one to the second one to the third one. They’ve really done some great things, and I think Master Sergeant has become a video game icon at this point.

I hadn’t played it for a long time, and they recently re-released it. I was asked to host the re-release at Nice Kicks in Austin. Once I played it again, it brought back so many memories. We just stood there playing it for a while, a couple of hours. It was really crazy. Video gaming these days is miles beyond [NBA Jams], but that being said it was just fun to go back in time and play it.

We don’t play it as much anymore, but when we did play it? Hours at a time. And again, that goes back to the family experience. I would maybe be on guitar, one of my nieces would be on bass, and my other niece would be on drums and we’d play different songs. It’s a great family experience. Those were great times. We would stay there for hours and someone like my sister-in-law would sing the song, depending on what we were playing, which was hilarious and would turn the party up. I used to like to play “Enter Sandman” by Metallica. It’s not the easiest song to play either.

It’s not necessarily my [favorite], but it’s a game that’s played a lot in my house. My wife will do it and work it out. I may stand by the side and do it. I try to stay out of the view of the camera though. The thing with when you use the Kinect system with Xbox is that these motion control capture things are saving that video of you in the hard drive. You get to go back and look at them, and it’s not that pretty when you look back and see yourself running and jumping. I do not look good hurdling; let’s just say that.

We’ve been playing that a lot. That goes into the family experience. Gaming by yourself or with the guys can get pretty old, and as a married man that doesn’t really work out too much. That got old pretty fast, have the guys come over to play video games. With the invention of the Wii and the Xbox 360 and these motion controls, it gives everybody a chance to get involved. Kinetics Sports is one thing that really brings the family together.

My niece and I will play that every now and then, and it’s fun. It’s not anything that I would ever let anyone in my house see.

It gets real offensive real fast. You’ve got to be careful. At first it used to be arcade style, where you’d be walking and maybe a head would pop up or something would run across the screen. Now you have to understand how to move through the terrain before you even get to hunt anything. You really feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m a big hunter or anything, but it makes you maybe want to go out there and roll with the hunters. Again, it’s the attention to detail that draws me into a lot of things in the gaming world. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

I think it’s probably second only to Madden in the extent that they go through to replicate the experience. They go through a lot of things, like right down to players’ hair, which is something they didn’t ever really focus on. Just to be blunt, video games producers and artists have had a hard time trying to incorporate peoples’ ethnicities into the game in a realistic way. It’s been very general, to say the least. Now I think they respect people’s individualisms; I think they understand it. You even have people’s tattoos now. For them having to do that, I’m sure it takes a lot of man-hours. But they put the work in, and I think people appreciate it.

They take it very seriously trying to replicate the face and the look of the field during a football game in video game form. When it first came out, it was very primitive in form but we were very excited about it because as primitive as it was – if you go back and look at it now – it was miles ahead of like Tecmo Bowl, which was more graphic based than reality based. With Madden, they’ve gone through great lengths to try and replicate everything – from different players’ catching styles and running. If you know your player and you know their style, you can play like them. You get very caught up in the game.

I like creating a player and trying different means of attack, like you could be a Brawler, with different weight classes, it’s interesting. You watch guys come up through the ranks [based on] how you fight. How you prepare for the fight or fight during the fight determines how many points you’re going to get and how your player grows. It’s interesting.