Rex Nabours III is best known around town for playing in the oft-naked band Clockpole, but now he's joining with the charity Extra Life to raise money for the Texas Children's Hospital through a video game marathon.
Extra Life was started by the Sarcastic Gaming Community in 2008. The group was deeply affected by the battle of Victoria Enmon against acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The group showered Enmon with gifts, encouragement, and of course video games to try and help the young girl keep up her spirits.
Tragically, Enmon died later that year, but her fight lives on through the continued efforts of Extra Life and their 24-hour video game marathon pledge drives. It is one of those grueling bouts that Nabours will be contributing to.
"I did a Christian Weston Chandler (the Sonichu guy) covers album earlier this year with the intent of giving any money I made off of it to Autism-related charities because the dude is basically blackface for autism," said Nabours. "I also let people set their own price for it so while it was near the top of the Houston charts on Bandcamp for about a month and a half and is the most successful album I've ever done I only made about $15 on it. Seeing what was possible with that opened me to all sorts of other new opportunities and I decided Extra Life would be a good way to both do something interesting and actually raise money for something somehow."
Nabours' goal is $1,000 raised between now and the marathon. You can pledge your tax-deductible donation here. Nabours will be live streaming his playing starting on October 20, with streaming instructions to be announced once they're finalized. Don't think that this is just an excuse for someone to spend an entire day happily lost in a digital world. Nabours has gone out of his way to specifically tackle games that are off the main path because, well, they suck.
While that doesn't include a run of Superman 64, which frankly no one should ever have to live through, his itinerary does feature PC games like Ethnic Cleansing: The Game and Lawnmower Racing Mania. Some other truly unfortunate titles on his list are the unlicensed NES game Bible Adventures and the frankly unplayable Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis on X-Box.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that Nabours faces through is a promise to make it all the way through the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog. A combination of poor controls, malicious camera angles, bad programming, glitches, and a difficulty curve that is more of a vertical line has landed the game in more than one worst games ever list.
"Sonic 2006 is one of the most broken games ever and is almost directly responsible for the nightmare-inducing state of the current Sonic the Hedgehog fandom," said Nabours. "There's a bestiality subplot in which Sonic and a human girl fall in love and kiss a bunch, huge bouts of loading every five minutes, major game breaking glitches, monotonous mandatory sidequests and Sonic's shitty friends get entirely way too much screen time. It's one of the most painful games I've ever experienced."
Nonetheless, he's going to try and beat it in the name of raising money for curing sick children. Here's that link again to donate to his efforts.
