2600Lives

If you ask me, it's about the same as the Commodore 64 version, and one of the best versions of Frogger around. With a good joystick, I can play this on my 800 for hours.

Looks to be either a Colecovision or an Atari 800 cart. Difficult to tell. Maybe put something else in the pic so we can get a relative size, as the Atari carts were quite small.

Man, I remember Demon Sword. I seem to remember it as being quite difficult, too. Love that branching sword, though.

One word... Whizz.

What a shame. I was a huge Dark Age Of Camelot fan back in the day. It was a kick ass game, and Mythic actually cares for their customers, unlike Sony.

What IS the soundtrack like in this one, anyway? Licensed stuff or original? The soundtrack is, for me, the only real reason to play the games anyway. I thought Vice City was kinda/sorta fun for a while, but I'll never EVER play San Andreas, even if they paid me to take the game home.

I always liked the infinite lives trick. Nothing cooler than getting several hundred lives and watching the numbers turn into strange symbols. Get too many lives, though, and it's game over...

Well, the new Oklahoma Naz...I mean Gaming Bill went was passed into law. WITHOUT any sort of involvement from the voters, I might add. Wonder if this means we'll have state investigators at the show to make sure everything stays decent? Investigator - Now, now. You must turn off this game. The violent imagery will scar little Timmy over there for life. Random guy at convention - But Mr. Jackboot sir, this is Super Mario Brothers! Investigator - Yes, and when Mario jumps on those little mushrooms, they obviously die! Violence, I say! Wait, mushrooms?? Drug use as well! Indecency! Blasphemy! You're coming with me... Seems we've entered the next stage of hell, folks.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hot chicks and video games do NOT mix, ok? It's like oil and water, my friend. If you tried in any way combining those two, the world as we know it may just implode in a ball of fiery death.

Well, Iron Man was in X-Men Legends 2, so... Anyway, not only is it going to be a cool one player rpg...but it's supposedly going to try to be an online rpg as well, ala Diablo 2. Each system that it's released for is also going to bring something slightly different to the table. I, for one, can't wait.

Been waiting for the announcement. Now it's official! Hey, Crossbow, check your PM's. I sent you one regarding the show a while back.

I'd like to see some genre discs, meself. An all classic rock one with tons of stuff from Foreigner, Journey, some more Boston, the Doobies, etc. An all metal disc (REAL metal, too) with Metallica, more Megadeth, Slayer, more Pantera. Hell, I'd even like to see a hair metal type of disc. Some of that stuff was pretty good. Def Leppard, Ratt, Winger (laugh if you will, but listen to Can't Get Enough and tell me you wouldn't love to play it in the game). I've heard they're even thinking of doing a country disc. I could definately see some Garth Brooks or some Johnny Cash in there, though most of the songs would be rather easy to play since most country guitar is somewhat simple in nature.

Only a small, very partial list. Drist wil be back performing a song called "Arterial Black". Black Sabbath - "War Pigs" KISS - "Strutter" Rush - "YYZ" Reverend Horton Heat - "Psychobilly Freakout" Van Halen - "You Really Got Me" Butthole Surfers - "Who Was In My Room Last Night" That's all being offered right now. My fingers already hurt at the prospect of playing the opening to You Really Got Me on Expert. And since an unexpected band like the Butthole Surfers made it on here, could we see some lesser known stuff like songs from Fight or Big Wreck? There will also be a new, rockabilly styled guitar hero as well. Man, I want Adam Sandler's remote from Click so I can make it November already!

Rip off? Nah, a complete and total improvement! Guitar Freaks had all that vanilla J-rock stuff. Ewww. Gimme some good ol' American rock 'n roll! Anyway, I'm hyped as hell about this one. I'll probably pick it up on it's release day, along with another guitar.

I have the exact same gun, except it's for the PS1, and it doesn't have an orange tip. I believe it was a Japanese import called the...Scorpion? Not sure on the name, really. It's a freakin' SWEET gun, too. The hammer acts as a reload button. The "clip" is removable, and you can put two double A batteries in there. That powers it's rumble function. It's even GunCon compatible, and it's an absolute BLAST playing Point Blank 2 with it. In poor light, it could pass for a real pistol, too.

I personally found Fusion to be extremely enjoyable. Nothing matched the intensity of hearing a door open behind you, knowing it was the SA-X, and knowing that it could kill you handily if it caught you. Great game.

Ahh, I remeber when I first went through this game. Early '98. I had just quit my crappy job at the pawn shop and started at a used game store (which I LOVED for the first year there). I had bought the game at the pawn shop for 5 bucks, but was working so many hours there, I didn't have time to go through it. I was working FAR fewer hours at the game store, so I started it up. Ahh, playing Super Metroid and listening to my new Fight cd. Good times. It still ranks as one of my favorite all-time games, and always will. Now, here's hoping that we'll get one more Metroid game on the GameCube before Nintendo stops supporting it.

The adventure catagory has never been the same after Sierra went out of business. Now THOSE were adventure games!

Wow, taking a shot at Pro Wrestling, quite possibly THE best wrestling game ever made? That's low, man. Starman would kick those guys asses nine ways to Sunday if he got a hold of 'em. Allright, get a load of this from the article itself. "The DK Rap takes the cake for the longest pile of literary crap in the industry. Even if it is only number seven in the list, the DK Rap takes the cake as the only song in history that actually sounds like vomit." Not only is that whole sentence one huge grammar error, have these people ever even HEARD a song by, let's say Britney Spears? Or Raffi? It's certainly NOT the only thing that sounds like vomit. Ok, they actually used the phrase "Teh Suxorz" in the article. Nothing like a good dose of 133t to turn me off from reading further... They called Street Fighter Alpha 3 the greatest fighter in history. I'm sure that there's about 9 BILLION gamers out there who'd disagree. Garou-MOW? Street Fighter 3 Third Strike? Soul Calibur 3? They actually downed on Castlevania Symphony Of The Night's soundtrack. Unbe-freakin-lievable. "All Your Base" became a household name… at least for sweaty nerds that eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 7:00pm." Ummm...is anyone else TOTALLY confused by this line? And to top it off...a Stephen Hawking joke. Wow, this article had it all. Stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, and sweaty nerds eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 7:00pm. Thank you IGN. Truly, thank you. If I had just half the wit that those writers had...well, then I'd be just about a half-wit.

Hard mode is MINE now. Every song completed, several with 5 stars, and only 2 of the bonus songs to go (Decontrol and Breaking Wheel). I've gotten most of the way through Expert as well, with No One Knows giving me MAJOR trouble. I've gotten a good many of the Expert bonus songs completed, too, but OMG, Cheat On The Church is totally INSANE on Expert! It's WAY harder than BATM on Hard mode, that's for sure. Those multiple Green-Orange chords just destroy you at the end of the song, and you're gonna be out of star power to get through the middle solos by that time for sure. Well, I'm gonna go try and get through No One Knows now.

With my guys, I managed to down both Emerald and Ruby Weapon (wasn't easy, but I did it). My main group was Cloud, Barrett and Cid, usually. Once you get Knights Of The Round, pretty much nothing can stand up to you at that point. Sephiroth is a huge honkin' joke compared to the two Weapons. I concentrated a lot on the summoning, and that seemed to work very well for me. Oh, and if you have the patience to get Cloud's Omnislash break, you can hack anything to pieces in short order.

Oh, it's definately through the interest that people pay to redeem their stuff. Lemme show you how it works. A person comes in with a game they want to pawn. You always ask if they want to sell it outright, or just get a loan so then can get it back later. If they want to sell it, you might offer a little more than what you would pawn it for, since you can get it to the floor for sale quicker. All items sold to a pawn shop MUST be held for a minimum of 10 days before they can go out for sale, and I believe that differes from state to state. Ok, so you loan them 5 dollars on this game. It will cost them 6 to get it back out within a month's time. That's pretty much the interest rate, a dollar on every five until you hit the 200 dollar mark, then it begins a slow decline. IF they pick up the item within the first month, it's only the 6 dollars to get it back (even if they get it back that same day), BUT, if they go over that period of time, the interest begins to build up. Most shops offer 60 days of grace to get your stuff back out, so by the end of the entire 90 days, it would be 8 dollars to get back out. The interest would build at a dollar a month, so if someone had a 100 dollar loan, and it was 120 to get back out, they'd owe a total of 160 dollars at the end of the 90 days. After the entire loan has expired, the stuff goes out for sale. Pricing can be VERY subjective. Typically, you loan half of what YOU would sell it for, not what it's worth. So, if we were selling games at 10 dollars each, we'd loan 5, and there would be a total of 8 dollars of the shops money invested in the item when it hits the floor for sale, so you'd only make 2 dollars. Sell a lot of games, though, and you make some nice profit. Remember when you try to talk the guys down on games and stuff that they likely aren't making but a couple of dollars on them, so don't get upset when they won't budge price wise. Other items were different, usually. I personally loaned a guy 75 thousand dollars on a platinum and diamond Rolex watch, the most beautiful I've ever seen in my life. He needed cash and didn't have any liquid funds at the time. We priced the thing at over 200 thousand, by calling Rolex themselves, and we would have sold it for around 150 thousand or so. Pawn shops make lots of money, believe you me. Now most of them do things called payday loans, which is another matter alltogether.

Right after I moved out on my own, my first real job was at a pawn shop. While doing some much-needed cleaning of the cabinets in the back, I stumbled across a box of SMS games and a Power Base Converter. This box was STUFFED with games, probably about 50 or so. I asked the manager how much he wanted for it, and he told me that I could have the whole thing for 20 bucks even. So, that night, I rummaged through it. About 10 or so of the games were doubles, mostly of the sports titles, but there, in the bottom in a case with no insert...was Phantasy Star. I spent the entire winter that year plugging through that game. Was it ever difficult! The internet wasn't something I even knew about at the time, so there was no help available, either. I got through it, though. There were other great SMS games in that box, too. Golvellius, Lord Of The Sword, Spellcaster, Psycho Fox (a personal favorite), but nothing can compare to that first winter living on my own trying to find my way through those ultra-cool hand drawn 3D dungeons. All hail the SMS!

I've been hammering away on this game for the past 2 weeks. I've only got 3 songs left till I destroy Hard mode. They are, of course, Texas Flood, Bark At The Moon, and Frankenstein (those long solos just KILL me, and I'm usually out of Star Power by the time they come up). For some reason, I found Cowboys From Hell to actually be easier than Medium. I dunno. I've even gotten pretty good on some Expert songs (I can five star Higher Ground every single time). Anyway, this is an amazing game, and I can't wait till November! P.S. Listening to Faith No More right now! Last Cup Of Sorrow.

Stolar killed the Saturn, pure and simple. Just like Tramiel killed Atari. Wanna know why? I'll give you three reasons. Football...Baseball...and Basketball. Ok, four. Hockey. Sega seems to think that every gamer is a fat, hairy armchair athlete who plays fantasy league stuff, so they must go for the sports games! The main problem with both of the systems is that they didn't realize (via Stolar) that the RPG had evolved from a niche market to having a HUGE chunk of the gaming populace slavishly devoted to it. Sony's marketing didn't kill the Saturn (though it certainly didn't help it either), lack of RPGs and other quality titles did. While the PS1 gave the world Final Fantasy 7, still considered by many to be THE greatest videogame every made, and many other quality RPG titles, the Saturn was dredging along with more and more sports and racing games. Sure the Saturn had some high quality and damn innovative games like Scud and Nights, but they just didn't have the appeal that most of Sony's stuff had. The DC...well, I'll never understand why that one failed. Wait, yes I do. Football, Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey. Once again, Sega proved that they hate us by shoving yearly updates of every freakin' sports title they could muster at us, along with myriads of me-too racing games. Name three DC RPGs, besides PSO. Right. There aren't three. On another note, both systems seemed to forget two sports that are HIGHLY popular, that being boxing and pro wrestling (yes, I know it's not a sport. Shut up.). Games like WWF War Zone and Wrestlemania 2000 sold huge numbers for the other systems. What did we get with the Saturn? A crappy version of the WWF Arcade game, and the DC got one of the WORST wrestling games ever made with WWF Royal Rumble. The PS1 gave us the start of the Knockout Kings franchise, which has been a big success. (sigh) I guess Sega just hated non-sports gamers. That's all. Of course, the market is flooded today with tons of sports titles, but there are OTHER options for every system today, too. The PS2 and XBOX have several damn good RPGs, some excellent boxing titles, and the best wrestling games ever made. The GC is sorta behind the curve as far as RPGs are concerned, but they have other interesting titles to make up for it (like the Metroid Prime games). In closing, Stolar should be tied up alongside Tramiel and we should be allowed to throw broken controllers and E.T. cartridges at them.