NovaXpress

If the 90s games are now called "classic" then the 2600 would be prehistoric. There really should be a 20 year time frame before anything is called a "classic."

No game will ever eat up as much of my life as the Civilization series has.

Cedar Point, ouch. Man, I miss it! I'm living in Omaha Nebraska right now, which is the SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL. Now I'm inspired to take a trip back to Ohio, I haven't been to Cedar Point since '93. No one from the Toledo area, eh?

After smoking a few mushrooms, ANYONE would have trouble keeping score. Man, there are a lotta mushrooms in the history of video gaming.

It's on at 9pm tonight central time, also midnight tomorrow and 2pm this Sunday

I would say that independent personal sites like Mega Man Fan's are a whole different animal. Such sites are a very positive element of the internet, serving the same function as 'zines. I no hip hop follower, but I assume a knowledgeable fan could see if the site was honest or not. Such sites are far preferable to the majors which are slathered with ads. Such sites cannot be compared to mainstream organizations like CNN, Fox, and even EGM. The bigger the organization, the more likely it is to have hidden influences. Even working on a small town personal ad-feeder such as the Omaha Reader was a naightmare of payoffs and personal motives. There really is no solution to this, just something to be aware of. Video game editors and writers want free swag and most are willing to B.S. their way into getting it. Even if the writers are honest, the editors get the final say. Even Bill Kunkel admitted that electronic Games was meant to be a cheerleader for the industry, not a critic. The lesson is: analyze and question your sources of information

The last RPG I was fully satisfied with was Arcanum, beautiful depth and imagination. The instruction book was incomprehensible however, and you're still the CHOSEN ONE who must kill the EVIL POWER which happens to be ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD. I wouldn't enjoy it as much today. The most brutal part of RPGs is all the wasted time. I refuse to spend one more minute killing Phantom Squirrels over and over so I can go up another level. How many hours have I spent in life tring to raise some numbers? I could have had as much fun with a good calculator! Maybe part of it is age, at 33 I might just be burned out on the whole damn genre for good. I resent games that demand hours of play in order to be rewarding. I'd rather play an old game of Tempest or mindlessly slaughter the innocent citizens of Vice City for a half hour than devote myself to a bad interactive movie.

Those of us who have worked in journalism understand these thing, but most of the readers are unaware of the process. Even if they don't trust the reporting, they're not sure why. As was said, the big lesson is: "There is no such thing as objective journalism." Ever. The only way to dela with this as a reader who seeks the truth is to know your sources. Find out how a journalist is biased and take that into account when you read their work. Use many sources and your own judgement in order to make the best decision. Now that you know just how much deception and bribery influences video game coverage, think about what goes into political reporting!

Here is a very enlightening article from the Online Journalism Review on the reality of those video game reviews we read. The total lack of ethics and respect for the reader may astonish some, but as a former rock music writer, I can say that all forms of entertainment journalism are equally suspect. If the writers don't please their subjects (bands, video game publishers, etc.) then they wont get access for interviews, won't get their stories printed, and worst of all won't get to party with them! http://www.ojr.org/ojr/ethics/1049994303.php

Ok, just now on Comedy Central I look away from my game of Extreme Warfare Revenge to see the little genius kid playing a game of Spacemaster X-7. As I suspected, this is a 20th Century Fox movie relesed in 1984. The title was probably brand new when they made the movie. On a side note, does anyone remember the original name of Spacemaster X-& when released by Sirius for the computer systems?

We all have a few games that are still fun, like a racing favorite or sports title. But how many do we have to own? I also grew tired of upgrading Madden every year for little improvement. Maybe gamers are becoming less willing to upgrade their games. I keep moving backwards, the most played app on my PC has been MESS for some time. A company to save the industry? Atari is dead and buried and meaningless today, despite what many around here want to believe. Atari was a great company because of the people involved and the time frame they worked in. Today Atari is just good memories and a logo. The only companies with real power now are the console manufacturers plus EA and to a lesser extent Activision. Infogrames and Universal are soon to be sold off, the development houses are closing at an alarming rate. We are about to see the kind of consolidation in the video game industry that we've seen diminish the music industry.

Now I realize all the little things that have been annoying me. I can't bear to spend any more of my gaming life pointlessly building stats. The game that finally killed it for me was Divine Divinity, once again I'm the chosen one to rid the land of terrible evil, yet the evil is on the other side of the planet and I have 3 hit points and a BROKEN LETTER OPENER (SOCKETED). Fortunately there's nothing but crudely drawn slime attacking me right now. It wasn't just the mediocrity of this game, but that all my Diablo and Ultima time as well began to look the same to me. I realized that I've been doing nothing but playing prettied-up versions of Rogue for 20 years and it's no longer fun in any way. I've killed the demon and grabbed the treasure and killed the diseased gnome a thousand times. I read a hilarious article on RPGs that really hammered all this home, called "How to Survive Any RPG." Check it out. http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=1255 Does any one else feel that another crash could be coming. More of my friedns are cutting back on games or just buying used/marked down titles. There is a lot of disappointment in the games out there, right now only Def Jam Vendetta and Zelda seem to be exciting people. I expect to see less than a dozen game companies in existance after this Christmas.

How good was the arcade market in '81? In the mall attached to Old Town was an Alladin's Castle that also did good business.

Check out the "Game Over" column at CNN Money, I have always found it to be very reliable and contain the most accurate predictions. In a recent column, it stated that the XBox and PS2 will probably not drop lower than $179 because Sony doesn't need to drop the price. sales are high enough. Just yesterday Nintendo announced that they will not drop the price unless the competition does, so it looks like its all up to Microsoft. Check out the article, called "How Close is the Playstation 3" http://money.cnn.com/commentary/game_over/

I always thought this was the worst easter egg ever. I found it the first day and thereafter it was an annoyance. Its the only easter egg that you can't NOT find.

My father worked at Sears back in the day and I used to gte a look at release schedules. They had Foxbat on the list for months, but shortly before release suddenly Raiders of the Lost Ark replaced it on the list. I wondered if Foxbat was a code name to hide the Raiders license.

I got my info from Electronic Games, Cliffhanger may be a Lupin take off as well, but many japanese geames were taken off of cartoons. No one in the US knew what a Lupin was at the time

Now I need a Cowboy Bebop game

Stealing other games was common and accepted practice for many years. Bally sold more Striker machines, a carbon copy of Pong, than Atari sold actual Pongs. And of course Pong was a rip-off of Tennis on the original Odyssey. This was just the way it was done. It all changed when Atari sued Magnavox over KC Muchkin's similarities to Pac-Man and won.

How many out there know that the player character in Lock 'N Chase is actually the original Lupin that inspired Cartoon network's Lupin III?

Battlezone? Interesting point, I hadn't considered first-person games where one didn't have a gun at the bottom of the screen. That's really the only thing that put Wolfenstein 3D and such into a different category for many. So now I'm thinking that the first-person shooter is merely a refinement of the first-person video game. Still, Battlezone would not have been the first. I know it was predated by Starhawk (1977) in the arcades and Star Raiders (1979) at home. So even this genre dates back into the 70s? I guess every type of video game is just a refinement of Pong.

The first platform game was Universal's Space Panic. It came out one year before Donkey Kong and clearly was a major influence. It was a total flop at the arcade but became a hit as Apple Panic for the AppleII and eventually joined Donkey Kong as a Colecovision launch title.

When Intellivision tried to port Disco #1 (a weird Qix-influenced arcade game by Data East) they found that the system was unable to freely draw lines and keep track of boxes. The programmers had to put the player on an invisible fixed track rather than allowing freedom to draw. The game was eventually released as Thin Ice. Is the 2600 limited by such restrictions? With both Amidar and Pepper 2 the player also is bound to a track.

No photos, at the time I wasn't as impressed as i should have been. They even had all the lights inside the store areas turned off for prime game playing. I believe that Old Town was attatched to the Southwyck Mall in Toledo. Games I remember as having their own room: Defender, Tempest, PacMan, MsPacMan, Centipede, Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Galaga. For another wild acrcade memory, a street fair I attened in 89 had a circus-tent arcade that hadn't been updated in years. I actually played Anti-Aircraft (arcade air-sea battle), Stunt Cycle (hilarious how the pipes were painted on the screen), and original Tank.

Then I would say, regardless of the Turbo issue, that we are guaranteed to see fake 80s games appear and may never know the truth. Maybe we're already playing a fake. So which would make the most money: a fake 2600 "9 to 5" or an original game sold through the usual methods?