Curious Sofa

Defense Grid is a completely amazing game and I love every bit of it. I will agree that I was a bit disappointed in the Portal map pack; just seemed more annoying than fun in the way of the challenge, but obviously YMMV. All of the map packs that came before this most recent one were amazing just like the original game and well worth getting.

It just seems like now, more than ever, the emphasis is so much heavier on a system that will be used as a marketing tool (as opposed to a system that will be used to create a better actual gaming experience) that I get nauseous just thinking about new systems. I've been annoyed with that aspect recently with the latest 360 Dashboard, and am relatively okay with how the Wii is going (and am anti-Sony in the same way that Reaperman is, they're simply too evil to ever give any money too no matter what the product). But I've no need for a new console whatsoever. To join the group who said this above, what's it going to offer that I'm actually interested in??

Got mine today, love the label!!! And of course the game is great. One of the games that's definitely better on real hardware than emulation, for reasons ephemeral enough that I can't fully explain. I have a really good Atari joystick hooked up to my PC for emulation, and there are definitely games that are better in EMU I've found (partially what the monitor / resolution do the for the graphics). But this one is particularly gratifying on a real TV, it just feels great to play. My favorite part has to be the sound effects, followed shortly by the feeling of control, the freedom it affords. Thanks so much for such a great treat!

I'd enjoy seeing pics, just for the sake of it, if you can easily get them. If not I'm sure my lazy butt can find them on the net elsewhere.

I second the recommendation for a Mouse. Star Wars needs more precise aiming than you can get with digital, it's got to be analog, and the mouse does "okay". I've seen some videos on YouTube of dudes hooking up Flight Controllers almost entirely for the purpose of having it play Star Wars in Mame, and that would obviously work too.

Completely awesome!

One major question, will AtariAge be there? I saw a comment somewhere that Al doesn't do shows like that any more... and that would be a shame. Anyone know for sure either way?

Probably still worth more than what he paid, depending on how crushed is crushed...

Ok nice to hear. I'll have to boot up Game Room today and play it for a bit and just leave it up and running for awhile, I have around a dozen titles purchased and in my arcade along with the max number of mascots populating it. Should be a good candidate for freezing. I would definitely do that, keep good mental notes about exactly what happened, and then like I said to Curious let the Xbox team know what's going on. Maybe it's the particular combination of games you have within Game Room, maybe that in conjunction with specific apps or saves you have on HDD....who knows. But I think Microsoft would want to know. With all those games and mascots you've obviously made an investment and it should work for you. Not that they will be able to help immediately, so it's always good to be understanding in these situations, but I'm sure that they'd want to start looking into it and help (not talking necessarily about the customer service phone people....but the true Xbox team always wants things to work right). Who knows, it may even take giving them a detail of everything that's on your HDD, if they ask for it at least, but it'd probably be worth it. I ought to let them know, it's true. It _is_ really upsetting, because I loved Game Room to _pieces_, and was a staunch defender of it in the Xbox forums up until they quit supporting it. But once people started reporting problems like mine, and I then developed said problems, ugh. It could really harm your 360 to have that happening, and I'm just not willing to run various tests or whatever I would have to do with them on the line to get it up to speed. Maybe if I get a new 360 at some point (and have a warranty on it! This one's run out...) I might redownload Game Room, but for the time being it frightens (and frustrates!) me. And thus why my initial post overstated, saying that "it _will_ crash your system". Since, well, it could, and does for me. So chances are slim I'll let them know, partially due to laziness, and partially for unwillingness to mess around with my 360 and freezing issues out of fear of breakage.

I'm in! And I don't know what happened to it or what it was, but I got to play Tempest on a 5200 at Classic Gaming Expo 2010 in Las Vegas. It was part of the AtariAge kiosk setup (right after I'd played Halo 2600). I only got a few minutes with it, but it seemed fairly complete and delicious. Maybe Al knows what it was / what came of it?

Obviously, YMMV, but.... Defense Grid never crashed for me until I installed Game Room back on my 360. And it would completely freeze everything, had to manually power off the system and restart. Game Room also does nothing but freeze for me anymore, as of the newest update. I can get one, maybe two short games of Space Duel or Amidar or Crackpots in, and everything completely locks up. And until I deleted Game Room, every other game I had would freeze after about 5 minutes, stuff that never has frozen before. Castle Crashers, Halo Wars, whatever I played. Once Game Room was deleted, Defense Grid no longer freezes, nor anything else. Thus my comments on Game Room being a serious problem. Not scientific to be sure, but with some cause.

And on that note, I agree with Tempest that I really enjoy the 2600 port of Tutankham to the arcade game. But not because it is technically comparable by any means, it's almost a wholly different game. But I find it addictive, weird and fun, whereas I find the arcade game to be cool but missing the addictiveness of the 2600 version. I won't say that I prefer the 2600 version of Tapper, in fact I kind of think it sucks. The bonus stage in particular is nearly unplayable. But I find the off-key music on the 2600 to be absolutely hilariously awful, and it gets major points for this badness. I also think the person who prefers the 2600 version of Moon Patrol is insane, but hey, it's just an opinion, you likes what you likes. And I'm in the boat of people who prefer the 2600 Space Invaders. I don't even mess with the variations, I just like how it looks by comparison. I like the blockiness, the movements, the sound effects, the control, all much much better for me than the bland arcade game, but know it's a divisive game and issue.

Pm received, payment sent.

It's weapon heavy, which I realize you said you don't like, but my favorite video game of all time may be Rock n' Roll Racing. For the midi soundtrack if nothing else. It's an early game by Blizzard (of W.O.W., Starcraft, Diablo fame) and I love it to pieces.

And, I don't have a need to be extremely, pointlessly mean to anyone here and this is certainly going to sound like it... But from reading all of the main thread on Star Castle, and the amount of praise thrown the guy's way for his previous works (which were ports of arcade games to the Lynx, if I understood correctly), and the hunger and greed with which he ate up the praise, I've got to say.... I respect the craft of porting games, but he's got nothing on those who create original games. _Nothing_. Seaweed Assault? Fifty gazillion times better than this port of Star Castle. As are a whole ton of the games available right now in the Homebrew section of the AtariAge store. Sure, he did something that HSW _said_ couldn't be done _in the day_, before he went on to make the amazing Yar's Revenge. But maybe he partially said that because he wanted to make something new, on some level, maybe he had ideas for Yar's. In any case, what he did with Yar's Revenge was way beyond what this guy thinks he's done with Star Castle, and he doesn't get it. At All. He truly thinks he's bested Howard Scott Warshaw, and it's so disgustingly asinine, I don't know if I'd pay $1 for his Star Castle port with LED lights on the cart etc, the more I think on it. So please, cut the chatter about raising the intensely absurd amount of $ for this guy's port of Star Castle. If he ever decides to sell it straight up like any other homebrew author would do, fine. But as it is, this self-declared king of all programming deserves exactly the amount of $ he's getting for his work currently. And even less does he deserve any praise for porting Road Blasters to the Lynx, or whatever supposed masterpieces he thinks he's achieved.

Pm'd hugged but got no reply yet, so just posting here to ask to be added to the wait list in case another run comes out. Just love the effort and spirit that went into this, and enjoy playing on Stella for now. Games like this (and the corresponding instructions webpage) are a big part of what makes being an AtariAge person great.

Yep sounds like neither of you have much of an interest in anything Live Gold has to offer. Your points been well made. Good thing no one forces anyone to subscribe. I'm still digging the new dash. Got my Kinect hooked up and I think it's a lot of fun. Controlling the dash just by talking is a real...hoot. The dash is considerably better than the last in my opinion. Still wouldn't mind the option to switch between dashes. I'd love to pull up the old blades dash for shits and grins. Well, maybe that's the point of contention. No, no one is holding us at gunpoint and forcing us to subscribe. But they are sure trying their damnedest to force it, with all of the constant dashboard messages and linking of minor features that _would sure be nice if they were free to Silver members_ as gold only. My whole point for complaining currently is how they went about releasing the YouTube app. They basically had it on the front page, saying download me, no restrictions listed. So I did, then launched, then it let me know I've got to "Go Gold" to run the app I just downloaded. But we've established that I'm a cheapskate, and that obviously, if I want the harassment messages to go away, and to not have to wait to download demos, and to have YouTube on my 360, and to be able to send Xbox Live messages from my PC, I should just cough up the dough for a discount Gold card (or put it on my Xmas list). I still contend that the level of harassment and such to get me to go gold are significant enough for me to complain about, that's all. And maybe I'm being a whiny bee-hatch and ought shut my trap. So be it, trap shut, complaint lodged (and re-lodged, ad nauseum). And a side note, I don't think the new dash was what was crashing my 360; I happened to re-download Game Room, which I used to love dearly and which basically got me back into retro gaming. Now it is a toxic, broken application which _will_ crash and freeze your 360 if you download it... _even when not playing it_. Just having it downloaded will somehow cause other apps to freeze and crash. It's _real_ bad news. So, back to un-complaint status about the new dashboard from me.

I just got this one in the mail yesterday and have probably logged 3 hrs on it already. It's the most fun I've had with video pinball without getting Elvira and/or the Party Monsters involved. Glad you dig it! If you're a fan of this, I would first recommend _against_ the pseudo sequel, Dragon's Revenge. I'm not sure offhand which game (if any) on the TG16 this was a port of, but it's just simply not as good. I would secondly recommend checking out the downloadable Virtual Console for the Wii versions of the TG16 games (if you've got a Wii), Devil Crush and Alien Crush. They are like Dragon's Fury (since Dragon's Fury is a port of Devil Crush I believe?) but a bit more satanic in nature.

And just for perspective's sake, the guys saying "It's only <$5 per month..." Well, you could also say it's $180 for 3 years, I mean, you can play the numbers around however you wish. I find it very offensive as a person who's got no interest in... what did onlysublime say.... "the party chat feature alone is worth the cost of Xbox Live Gold. Sometimes I'll boot up the Xbox just to talk to people. No gaming involved." Well, that's fine, but not only do I have no wish to engage in "party chat features" (I'll do my talking on a computer on forums like this, thanks), but I'm not going to pay for a "no gaming involved" membership on a game console. But hey, apparently I'm a cheapskate, so be it. I do only tend to buy a new game or two per year, and then I get it used for neighborhood of $40 tops. I buy lots of XBLA and XBLIG games, but for a consumer like me $50 or whatever per year for Gold is crazy. but if you buy ten new $60 games a year, perhaps it's just a drop in the bucket.

And also, yes I'm a bit of a cheapskate BUT.... Do I _seriously_ have to have a gold f'ing account to use the YouTube app? I have NO desire whatever to play with / against people online, so I've never "gone gold" as I am CONSTANTLY encouraged to do. Then they start making "silver" members wait an additional week for demos. Then they make it so that silver members can't take advantage of special deals like sale of the week or whatever. All fine, but annoying. But they seriously aren't going to let me take advantage of the YouTube app if I don't pay them $60?? Beyond asinine.

Room booked! Stoked and ready (as I have been since last year's show)! Now to try to save up some $ for goodies at the show...

I'm not hating on how it all looks, but I'm having crashing / freezing issues just since the update. I do not like. I also am still not accustomed to finding things, as the above poster mentioned, stuff like Indie Games are hard to get to. Jury's still out, but for the time being, big thumbs down based on the freezing / crashing alone.

Got a bunch of stuff today from Ax, it's all either at least as good as described or in one case a whole ton better than described. Awesome seller! Bump!

I'm in. Just found out about this a bit late. And I'm in for all the right reasons, as well as to thwart The Video Game Critic. He reviews a lot of games, sure, and it's nice that he does Classics. But anyone that would give Cosmic Ark a C-, the Dreadnaught Factor (5200) a D-.... he's clearly not giving some games a shot, and/or is completely insane. I respect not pulling punches, but some of the homebrews he rips on, he's just simply wrong, both in principle and in accuracy (helps to read the instructions, dude). Off to PM huggy I go. Oh, and LOVE the instructions / info page, RT!!! :thumbsup:

You know what's a whole hell of a lot better than Star Castle? Yar's Revenge. And not just because it's significantly less than $32,000 to acquire, complete with box and manual.