syntheticgerbil

Wow, Rodi, I didn't know anyone played on the MSX outside of Japan. I never even knew of it's existence until getting into the original Metal Gear games about 5 or 6 years ago. I'm curious, do you remember which games you played on it? The Sierra AGI adventures weren't my first games, but I do remember becoming advanced (Well, by Texas standards) in reading and spelling before Kindergarten because of Space Quest 1 and 2. I used to bug my mom to write down on yellow stick post-its™ in order to know to spell certain things I wanted to do in the games. I remember explicitly learning the difference between the words "close" and "clothes" when having to take off the suit in the locker room at the beginning of 2. Needless to say, I still didn't get very far until years later because I didn't understand what I needed to do and I couldn't read very well.

Sorry, I kind of love this thread, but I almost forgot there was this game that I also played on the yellow computer: I've still never beaten Dark Castle and have vague memories about it. I hear it's the precursor to Prince of Persia and Another World. I just thought of this because I remember being really young and making a cape to be this guy and fight bats. It was made with a brown blanket from Delta Airlines and was pinned with one of these: Those were impossible to open as a child and I had to continuously ask my mom to put it back on when it fell off. And you know what? The motherfucker from Dark Castle doesn't even have a cape on, does he?!

All I can say is to potential conflict going on here is... yahurr. -_pix9YV17U

Haha, I'm actually not that upset, really. It's okay.

Yeah, that episode was really upsetting, but I enjoyed it. I'm sort of embarrassed to admit I watch House, because in my head I think a lot of people hate it, but I'm not sure. I only got into last year because I needed a show I could relax to and do animation work at home in the meantime. House filled that gap best, and I ended up really liking. I've actually been trying to catch up and watch Season 6 at the same time. I still haven't seen any of Season 5 and I am halfway through Season 4. As an outsider, I still found the premiere for Season 6 to be excellent as an outsider and I always love how Franka Potente acts. Some of the episodes were iffy, but the last 4 or 5 have all been great in my opinion, and I love the dynamic of House making small attempts to change his personality, although I wish they would go further with it faster.

Which games deserve inflated review scores? This is a common protest I see on the internet when someone publicly criticizes something others love. No offense, but it's a forum and it's open to that kind of talk. The forum would be no fun if we all resolved to never talk about games we disliked for whatever reason. This is confusing, because what exactly is its stead? Why do you have to suggest a game to be released in it's place because Heavy Rain was criticized? The game is basically an adventure game, a genre which has become filled with overly pretentious, badly written, and cookie cutter games with similar graphic styles. Some of the stuff that Heavy Rain does has already been covered by Shen Mue or Pandora Directive. If your asking what adventures I would want, then Daedelic Entertainment has a tons of beautiful stuff finished or unfinished that should hopefully all come to the United States someday. I have no problem at all with adventure games staying traditional if they must, since stories are in just about every game now, it makes no difference to me. If you mean in its stead as games that are innovative, then I would say Heavy rain is passing off putting together older conventions as new things. So I would rather no game be in it's place. Motion Capture usually results in ugly. It can hardly be done correctly sometimes in movies over with 50 million dollar budgets and up, and more often than not, in the end it's cheaper to pay some good animators to do it. Everyone in Heavy Rain looks like they have down syndrome or their facial muscles aren't working correctly, no joke here. Uncharted used motion capture, but they still had animators do extensive work on the faces and just generally tweaking motion capture to make things look nice. I think if motion capture should be used for animation in games, then it should be used as a basic guideline, not your final animation in some effort to prove how real your animation and characters are. I know we can be forgiving of it's shortcomings as well, since it's a game, but for the amount of hype that Cage brought on it's realism 2 years ago, it's severely lacking, and seems to only serve as, "check out this technology we used guys!" Which of course leads to more interesting making of and behind the scenes videos than some animator at a desk saying, "Yep, I animated that pretty well." This is sort of the Avatar effect. I find all of these distressing in in a world where a few months back, every game journalist jumped on the bandwagon to say Tim Schafer should just write stories and not design games, because he's so good at the former. Yet Cage gets a free pass and rave reviews for creating mediocre stories with incredibly light gameplay. He doesn't only exist inside that game you know? He does do interviews, press releases, and make outrageous statements. And stated before, Adventuregamers did give him a sloppy blowjob when he went and had his own subforum so everyone could ask the genius questions about his theories on game design. More hype. More big talk. Underwhelming delivery. I hate guys like that.

You know, I want to say a handheld Tetris LCD game I had, but I remember playing this very early on: It ran on one of these: The graphics were all amazing shades of yellow, even though the stats on this particular ancient laptop say it had CGA capabilities. I always thought CGA was made by simultaneously running horrible shades of magenta and cyan along with white. Another game I remember playing on my dad's ancient laptop around that time was also some boxing game where you either played a white dude, a black dude, or a kangaroo. If anyone knows what that game was, please tell me. Also I'm not comfortable with this thread title saying I lost my gaming virginity. I must have been at most four years old. Yuck.

I think they also developrf Sonic Pocket Adventure sort of secretly as well, but I'm not sure, since most of those stages were ripped of directly from Sonic 2. I played up to somewhere within Sonic Advance 3 and got sick of the series. The only Advance game that didn't seem like a chore to play was the first one, and even then it didn't come anywhere near the fun of Sonic 2 or 3 hooked up with the Knuckles Cartridge.

I wish I could join in on this, but I still haven't played the first one. Been meaning to, if that counts for anything.

Birthdays for Moose Tabaccos! Have a happy one!

I guess I never thought of Monkey Island as having a rabid fanbase, but now that you mention it, I suppose that would explain the reason I never made the effort to visit any sort of Monkey Island forums, despite being a pretty big fan myself.

Complete agreement. Maybe there can be one review just giving the game a perfect 100 because it's hilarious to rewind, speed up, and slow down time. This also kind of pissed me off: No part of this con is spoken about in the meat of the review, so whatever they are trying to say, to me it seems like it's just leaving it as, "If you don't like this game, you must have a closed mind."

Ho-lee shit. Those scores are almost ridiculous for any game, I would say. I guess you wouldn't want to be that critic. Don't want to lose those advertising dollars as well. If a lot of people enjoyed the game, that's fine, but I seriously can't believe there's not at least one person who is publishing a review calling it complete shit. This tends to happen a lot around games with enormous amounts of hype, and it's hard to understand the reasoning and actual enjoyment until the dust has settled months later. And ending with a quote I found in a user review: "it makes me sad that a game like this gets a 9.5 and trash like GTA 4 gets a 10. Disgusting."

Very much so. Any of the Attenborough Life series really hit the spot when you are at home sick and have a nice cold Sprite™ to drink as well.

Haha, works for me, I suppose. She's not really any sort of media junkie, so I don't think she cares much about what constitutes a good genre movie. Most of the movies she watches are just things I have on DVD. I think her DVDs consist of maybe 12 chick movies I would never buy, some Peanuts cartoons, and a shitload of David Attenborough nature documentaries (She wants to meet him someday before he keels over).

Yeah, I had to rent it guys, because I was too lazy to go when people were actually gushing about it. Actually, it's hard to go to cinemas to see science fiction type movies because my girlfriend doesn't like the genre and I try to see movies we will enjoy together, even though I drag her to movies by my favorite directors, good or bad. It's no big deal since I'm not a big fan of science fiction though. She did end up enjoying Moon, though. Come to think of it, she enjoys the original Alien as well.

Perfect call!

I saw Moon finally, and boy was it great. I loved the look of the film, just how it felt, but I think I get a hard-on for space station type lonely environments as well, but I'm not a big space geek either. It felt good to look at the scenery of Sunshine too, which had a similar hue. Certain environments in Space Quest games have that kind of comforting loneliness as well. I was really happy

In a way, I wish I could be Steve. Is that too weird to say?

I just threw the Goldblum reference out there because I didn't remember what was going on exactly. You're right though about the references, I guess I was just mistaken. I did enjoy the episode thoroughly until reader mail and Gaynor is sharp. I guess unlike other listeners, I for one couldn't sit through 90 minutes of references at all, so maybe I'm just extra sensitive to them. That's not to say I don't get any value from the podcast, which is the exact opposite, since I enjoy listening to you guys just talk about games that I'll probably never play, and get even more excited when games I do play are talked about. Sorry to just shit on everything, guys.

This is a good sum of things, I would say. Although I enjoyed the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast, as well as most of Adventure, so I wouldn't say 15 years. Although I feel pretty sure it all has to do with Hirokazu Yasuhara still.

I guess this was my particular hope for things to morph more with Steve, which I do understand is a total of one episode so far, not helped by the way that reader mail seems to be filled with people flooding it with WIZARDBABOOHORSEBABOO I LOVE IDLETHUMBS BAGOLDBLUME. I mean, I'm well aware of the dynamics of all of this stuff, as someone who has faithfully listened to each recording so far. I guess I was hoping the break would be more "refreshing." Again, it's probably just because I'm in a terrible mood today. That's all fair enough, it is your podcast afterall.

This was a very sassy podcast. Anyway, I guess I can't gush, because I was hoping this thing would sort of start anew, but since I'm now at the reader mail, I guess I'm bored the same comedy references done many times over are still being thrown out there many times over. It's becoming frustratingly incestual. Maybe I'm just in a really bad mood today, but by now I'd say all the funny is completely milked out of references to "horse bag," "baboo," "goldglumblumeJudyblume," and "scoops." The milk is just turning into lactose traced blood out of a purpley sore nipple. Well then until Toblix's e-mail comes in, then things sort of get back in hand. Okay happy again. And MDK is the original gunhead from what I can tell. Which is odd because then Jake refers to the Virgin Interactive Genesis ports of those Disney movie games, which were made by people who went on to become Shiny Entertainment.

Will her tits and ass get more luscious as you slay more innocents? Only bad dudes have good sex, what better way to show it than through some ham-fisted moral choices?

EXCURSION IS THE NEXT TO DIE! OF COURSE! JESUS CHRIST!