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Idle Weekend December 25, 2015: A Very Dark Forces Christmas

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Idle Weekend December 25, 2015:

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A Very Dark Forces Christmas

Idle Weekend is visited by the ghost of video games past, present, and future, as Danielle and Rob excavate their holiday memories for your amusement, and look toward the year ahead. Hear about Danielle's bloody-faced determination in Diddy Kong Racing, and appreciate how Dark Forces taught Rob the true meaning of Christmas. It's a gaming miracle!

Discussed: Diddy Kong Racing, Dark Forces, Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight, open-world games, DLC, Vive VR, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Dreadnought (Robert K. Massie), Hannibal, non-Star Fox-related Star Fox flight sweater, the true meaning of Christmas

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Man this show, so happy, cozy, personal and wonderful! Keep it up guys! Loving it!

Speaking of Christmas memories, me and my brother knew we where getting super smash bros for the N64. We saw the ridiculous commercial where the people in suits beat eachother up and where super excited to play it.

Come Christmas and we were going away pretty far, about a 5 hour drive. When were almost there tragedy ensures, we forgot to bring the N64. Christmas ruined and we where inconsolable. Thinking back to it now though it's pretty funny :)

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Man this show, so happy, cozy, personal and wonderful! Keep it up guys! Loving it!

Speaking of Christmas memories, me and my brother knew we where getting super smash bros for the N64. We saw the ridiculous commercial where the people in suits beat eachother up and where super excited to play it.

Come Christmas and we were going away pretty far, about a 5 hour drive. When were almost there tragedy ensures, we forgot to bring the N64. Christmas ruined and we where inconsolable. Thinking back to it now though it's pretty funny :)

Man, I dunno. That's a pretty frustrating story even now. All that Smashing you could've been doing!

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Man this show, so happy, cozy, personal and wonderful! Keep it up guys! Loving it!

 

I've not listened to the third episode yet but that's a great description of this podcast. I love how 'quiet' it is - no shouty, over excited conversations. It actually calms me down and I love listening to it with a cup of herbal tea. :)

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Loved the Christmas stories on this show and how different the tone is to other gaming podcasts I listen to.

 

Personally, my favorite Christmas story is getting a gaming computer in eighth grade. My parents had bought the parts I had on a list rather than an entire computer, which in retrospect was an awful idea yet miraculously produced a working machine. So on Christmas morning me and my older brother assembled a computer for the first time and proceeded to troubleshoot issues for an eternity.

 

Then when we got it to boot we immediately downloaded source and proceeded to spawn a crazy amount of entities in Garry’s Mod and destroy them with nukes.

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Rob's story was very moving and also have to echo Danielle's sentiment that it displayed a far, far, far more mature attitude than I had at that age.

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The Christmas reminiscences were great. The segment made me a little sad, though, because I was trying to play along, but I don't remember my childhood with that much detail. It was kind of a weird thing to realize.

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Rob's story about not getting Dark Forces to run immediately brought back memories I try to repress of the weeks of futile struggle I spent trying to get a copy of Master of Magic, also a Christmas present, to run on my computer. I had played the brief demo of the game over and over, and was terribly excited about it, but somehow all that enthusiasm wasn't enough to get the game to run.

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Danielle and Rob stories was amazing! However I do also felt a bit sad because I can´t remember a single moment worth sharing, it was strange when I noticed.

 

The closest thing was we I got Daggerfall: I asked my father for game for Christmas and after begin in doubt for a while, I decided on Blood & Magic (AD&D RTS game), but I noticed the shop (which was in another state in Brazil) also had Daggerfall, which I only knew because of an ad from a american magazine which somehow my father had (I guess he bought in a shop which had it for sale here for some reason). However, the shop by mistake sended to us both games - Blood & Magic and Daggerfall, we quickly warned the shop that they send something extra, but they offered to my father just to pay just a discount price for Daggerfall, instead of the whole mess of we sending it back via mail (for both parties, which where in different states). We decided to accept the offer and I finnaly opened the box and feel in love with the game, I still to this day keep the box, manual, cd and other stuff which was inside.

 

p.s: Blood & Magic was a terrible game.

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Love the podcast and loved the christmas stories. 

 

My sister and I used to wish for some SNES game each Christmas and play hours and hours of it. That eventually stopped because my sister lost interest in games in Playstation era. However, she got very excited about Wii and the prospect of playing Zelda and Mario again, and so we got the console for the Christmas of whatever year the console launched. You could just see how nostalgic our parents got seeing us sitting next to each other on the living room floor, playing Zelda again.

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Gaming in the holidays is always a bittersweet thing for me.  As a kid, my older brother and I would, naturally, always ask for new games.  We would usually only get a new game bought for us at Christmas and our birthdays, the rest of the year we'd have to make due with renting or borrowing them.  So Christmas was always extra exciting because we'd each have a new game to sit down and explore and learn together.  Sitting in the dark, the glow of the TV, struggling to stay awake and eventually falling asleep as my brother worked on one of the original Zelda dungeons.  It's like, the very definition of home in some ways.

My brother's gone now.  It was a long time ago (like, pushing 2 decades), so it's not like that loss is anywhere near fresh.  But it's hard not to think about playing games with him when the holidays roll around.  I still like getting games for Chirstmas.  Even though I game a lot at times, it's often a guilty pleasure because as a grown ass adult I know there are other things I could or should be doing.  But Christmas is one of those rare times when once all the family time is done, I can just sit down and game guilt free.  And for the last decade Christmas gaming time has been spent with the lady and/or our daughter, which is wonderful in it's own way.  Giving a kid that Christmas squeal moment is actually better than having experienced it as a kid.

Like I said, kinda bittersweet.  If you've got those memories of gaming with a sibling, or cousin, cherish them.  They're more precious than you may realize.

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PC gaming in my earlier years (and hell even today) gave me the same frustrations. I became very reluctant to purchase PC games because I was 1) a poor child with no income and 2) never sure if my computer would be able to run the games. I only bought a dedicated graphics card for myself in 2011 after years of not knowing anything about computers and just buying Dell pre-mades (well it was my parents who purchased them). I remember back in the early 2000s watching my friend play Jedi Knight II (Dark Forces III anyone? haha) after school. He offered to lend the game to me but I declined, knowing my computer wouldn't be able to run the game. I did purchase Jedi Academy (Jedi Knight III?? Dark Forces IV???) on impulse when I found it for $10 in 2005 or 2006, having bought a newer computer in 2005 (still with onboard graphics though), and having a blast with it. It was the first time I played a game online too, so Jedi Academy holds a special spot for me. Of course later I returned to Jedi Knight II, which obviously has a better story. I tried playing Dark Forces last year and couldn't get into it though, maybe I'll just skip it and start playing Dark Forces II.

 

I don't really have any Christmas stories to share since my family doesn't really celebrate it. Maybe it's because back in 1995 my sister and I came downstairs to find a (large!) basket of sweets, and asked my parents why they bought them, since they don't usually like us eating chocolate! They told us very half-heartedly that Santa brought them to us, but we didn't believe them. My sister and I dismissed the idea of Santa Claus immediately after hearing about him. I think we kept putting our plastic tree up for the next few years, but stopped putting lights on it a year or two before we abandoned the whole thing. I guess this counts as a Christmas story.

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It wasn't a Christmas gift, but along the lines of the Dark Forces installation nightmares, I had something similar. 

 

There was some PC Gaming expo here back in, I'd have to say it was 1995 or so?  I feel like there was an early version of Win95 there that Microsoft was advertising, so 95 sounds right.

 

I'm there, and one of the games that had a booth was Crusader: No Remorse.  They had some kiosks set up, and I played a few minutes and was totally sold.  So much so that my mom took us from the expo over to Best Buy so we could buy the game.  And I've got that game in my hands, when I notice the requirements printed on the box: 8MB of RAM.  My machine had 4MB.  I was crushed. 

 

Then one of the employees at the Best Buy is like "hey, don't worry, we also sell this!" and points out to me a piece of RAM doubler software.  So, awesome, my mom buys me the game and the RAM doubler, and everything's good, right?  Of course not, because those RAM doublers are a total nightmare and don't really make you able to play 8MB required games on 4MB.

 

I managed to get Crusader installed and try to load it, and it just stays on this loading screen.  It's animating, so my machine hasn't hard locked, but this is the worst loading time ever.  For reference, I tried to load this game up on a Sunday night, and by the time I went to bed, like 3 hours after I tried to start the game, it still hasn't loaded.  So I left it on.  And came back Monday after school, and the game had loaded.  I then tried to start a new game, which went into a new loading screen.  I got past that screen when I came back from school on Tuesday.

 

I left that game running for several days straight, before I finally gave up on it.  But I did manage to play a couple levels of that game, where I'd finish a level and then just leave the game loading the next level, which I figured I could start back up on the following day.

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Then one of the employees at the Best Buy is like "hey, don't worry, we also sell this!" and points out to me a piece of RAM doubler software.  So, awesome, my mom buys me the game and the RAM doubler, and everything's good, right?  Of course not, because those RAM doublers are a total nightmare and don't really make you able to play 8MB required games on 4MB.

 

Ha! I vaguely remember that bullshit

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Getting video games at Christmas was always frustrating for me because our Christmas celebrations have always been at my grandparents' home, which is in another state entirely from my gaming PC (and consoles, when I was still playing on those) and it would be several days (and most or all of my vacation, too) before I got back home to actually try them out.

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Ha! I vaguely remember that bullshit

We had the Mac RAM doubler (imaginatively named "RAM Doubler" on our old Performa 630CD, but in the end it didn't really matter whether or not it worked since everything was in the middle of transitioning from 68k Macs to PowerPC-- our computer had a 68040 processor, so either something didn't require a PPC and we could run it, or it did and we couldn't, and all the RAM in the world wouldn't help.

 

I think it says a lot that I somehow remembered all of this garbage from 1995 but couldn't say what processor my current machine uses if you put a gun to my head.

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Rob's story about not getting Dark Forces to run immediately brought back memories I try to repress of the weeks of futile struggle I spent trying to get a copy of Master of Magic, also a Christmas present, to run on my computer. I had played the brief demo of the game over and over, and was terribly excited about it, but somehow all that enthusiasm wasn't enough to get the game to run.

 

The struggle to make old PC games run came up in an Austin Walker Twitter conversation a few weeks ago, and it reminded me that I have never heard the sound on Master of Magic. Because of what we had to do to load into HiMem to get the game to run, there wasn't enough memory to have sound.

 

My dad bought it later on GOG (a year or so ago) and was playing it with sound effects. I freaked the fuck out, it was almost alien.

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