jaybird3rd

I really shouldn't say this, but ... ... with his straitjacket-like long sleeves and the completely featureless walls and high ceiling behind him, this video (judging only from the thumbnail, since I'm not watching it) looks as if it was shot in a holding cell deep in the bowels of a correctional institution.

Understood. I'll say this much about them, particularly the ones who have had to be blocked from participating in these threads: by carrying on in the petulant and childish way that they are, all they're doing is confirming why it was necessary to block them in the first place. The fact that some of them have also had to be kicked out of other venues, and for similar reasons, would also seem to confirm that they are the ones with the problem, not any of us.

I tend to agree. We've had lots of discussion of the "critics" here today, and I think we all understand their motivations pretty well, but I'd prefer not to see us dwell on them and what they're doing and more than we have to. The more we talk about them, and the more we call them out by name—particularly the people who have been blocked from these threads and can't respond directly—the more we play into their hands, escalate the issue, and stoke the fires further. As I've said before, I think the best way to answer them is to remain focused on the positive.

... oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I still have all my natural hair! (Despite some peoples' best efforts to make me pull it out.)

Me, president? Nah, I'm just a guy with the keys to the janitor's closet.

I won't speak for Tommy, but my impression is that IE hasn't begun its major marketing push into that demographic yet. The scheduled release is still six months away, and it wouldn't be wise for them to start a marketing campaign too early; if they did, the interest they generate might dissipate before the product is even available. It's easy for communities like ours to forget that, as passionate and as connected to the history of Intellivision as many of us are, our numbers are too small to make a venture like the Amico successful all by ourselves. We can help to promote it, but in the end, we're a vanishingly small sliver of the target audience. Most of that audience isn't yet aware of the Amico, but I'm sure that will begin to change over the summer.

I think we've already seen them changing their tactics. I'm sure we can all remember that, when the Amico was first announced, the comparisons to the Coleco Chameleon started almost immediately. According to these wizards of smart, the Amico was "just another Chameleon" and therefore "had to be a scam," and they worked so hard to squeeze the Amico into that mold that they began to see every positive statement as a "paid endorsement," every enthusiast as a "shill," and communities like ours as "cults of Kool-Aid drinkers." As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. The problem, of course, is that the Chameleon was nothing at all like the Amico; it was never supported by a realistic business case, and it never even existed other than lies and an empty Atari Jaguar shell. Now that we've seen much more of the Amico, its games, and the people behind it, the Chameleon comparisons increasingly look as ridiculous as they always were. I think that's why we're now seeing them drag out the poor Ouya so often: they may grudgingly admit that the Amico is real, but they'll insist that it is "doomed to failure" (for reasons they can never seem to convincingly articulate) and is therefore "just another Ouya." Of course, they're just as wrong about that as they've been about everything else, but they're too busy trolling discussion boards and comment sections to stop and realize how bad their track record has been. If they did, it might occur to them that maybe they should just sit down and shut up and let the marketplace decide what succeeds or fails, which is how it's supposed to work.

That's my impression as well: a dozen people or less are responsible for most of the anti-Amico negativity on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, here on AtariAge, and who knows where else. But on the positive side, we've seen many more enthusiastic new users signing up here as well, and they keep threads like this one busy at all hours of the day!

This information used to be a lot easier to find, but I believe that these are still the current rankings: 0-9 posts: Combat Commando (0 joysticks) 10-49 Posts: Space Invader (1 joystick) 50-99 Posts: Star Raider (2 joysticks) 100-249 Posts: Chopper Commander (3 joysticks) 250-499 Posts: Moonsweeper (4 joysticks) 500-999 Posts: Dragonstomper (5 joysticks) 1000-1999 Posts: Stargunner (6 joysticks) 2000-4999 Posts: River Patroller (7 joysticks) 5000+ Posts: Quadrunner (8 joysticks) (Of course, anyone who wants to can now skip all of this by becoming a subscriber.)

I seriously wonder what these people will do with their lives in about six months, when the Amico is shipping and people are having fun with it. Their entire world won't make sense anymore.

I grew up in the NY/NJ market, so I definitely remember the "TV Powww" games. They mention the Intellivision, but that particular video seems to have a mix of Intellivision and Channel F games; the Bowling, Baseball, and Shooting Gallery games are definitely Channel F. At least some of the Intellivision "TV Powww" games were featured in Sharp Shot, as I recall.

I agree. I think the best response to their particular brand of crazy is to bury it with positivity and productive achievement. At some point, it becomes counterproductive to continue to respond to people who can no longer participate in the thread, because it only allows them to influence the discussion even after they're gone. (And for anyone new who is seeing these responses out of context and might get the wrong impression, let me clarify: critical points of view are welcome here and always have been, as long as they can be expressed politely and dispassionately, no matter how much you might have heard otherwise. You'll find many examples throughout this thread.)

Fixed!

Probably not for much longer. We tried to roll out the red carpet for them with the "independent" thread, and they blew their chance. We don't need them here any longer if they're only going to persist in bringing more of the same negativity.

First of all, I'll simply say that there's more that goes into maintaining the forums than most users realize. Second, I am not the one who is out to "get revenge" on anybody; you're confusing me with certain other people who still can't get past their petty grudges. Now, let's not allow this thread to be sidelined any further.

I would not disagree with you. If nothing else, it's become too big and unwieldy to maintain, so at some point we'll need to decide what to do with it.

This is what they're referring to; it's a (very) long-running thread about the company currently masquerading as Atari and their "Atari VCS" crowdfunding project, which has been a slow-motion train wreck for years; posting pictures of tacos became a bit of a running joke over there. However, I'd recommend that you skip it: there are occasionally bits of news, but in my opinion that thread has mostly become a giant pile of garbage.

I am so ready!

I'm sorry if this is blunt, but seriously ... these are the kinds of playground-level insults that these schoolgirls have been in such a righteous snit about for months??? If I were on the receiving end of that kind of treatment—which I have been, and worse—there's probably an 80% chance that I would simply shrug it off as harmless hot air from a blowhard who isn't worth my attention. If it were something that really steamed me, I would simply contact the person directly and say "You know, I'm a little upset about something you said, I'd like to talk about it." That's the kind of conflict avoidance and resolution that Real Live Grownups™ practice all the time. What have these children chosen to do instead? They've continued to sullenly slink around in these threads at all hours of the day and night, carefully cataloging every (real or imagined) gripe and insult, nursing grudges over them for months on end, as they persist in posting their little passive-aggressive quips and barbs at every opportunity. The pettiness and malice of these people knows no earthly bounds. As I've said before, the Internet must be an unbearable hellstew of horrors for anyone who's triggered into such a bad case of Global Thermonuclear Butthurt over something so insignificant and trifling—especially at times such as these, when we should all have much more important things to worry about. I know exactly who you're referring to, and that is a blatantly dishonest representation of what happened. Why on earth would any of us ban anyone merely for suggesting that someone should become an AtariAge subscriber? Subscriptions help to keep the lights on around here, literally and figuratively; we love our subscribers, and we always welcome more. That "explanation" is so illogical on its face that anyone genuinely interested in finding out what really happened—and who isn't just out to collect negative talking points—should immediately question it. (For anyone who is interested, this particular member was given second chances, and let back into this and other Amico-related threads, multiple times. They "suggested" that Tommy should become a subscriber as a veiled insult and an insinuation that Tommy was just a freeloader who was out to get free advertising here, something that would be clear if you saw the exchange in context. The exchange escalated from there, and spread into other areas of the forums, until the member had to be blocked again. The "suggestion," such that it was, was only part of a much bigger picture, and not even the part which precipitated the action.) As I've said a million times before, the few people who have had to be blocked from these threads—and there have been less than a dozen out of the ~260 members who have posted here—were blocked because of their repeated bad behavior. That's it. Not because of their point of view, not for refusing to drink someone's Kool-Aid, not for "daring to ask too many questions," and certainly not merely for "suggesting that someone should become a subscriber," no matter how noisily they might continue to insist otherwise. If anyone is genuinely interested in any specific cases, feel free to contact me directly and I can give you the exact reasons why they were blocked—every case was documented in detail, and no decision was made without the consensus of the moderating team. Well, I'm sorry if any innocent individuals were caught up in anyone's sweeping generalizations, but taken as a whole, the collective behavior of the people we're talking about has been atrociously awful and immature from the beginning. Theirs is not the behavior of genuinely well-meaning people who have legitimate grievances. Even in cases where those grievances may have started out as legitimate, they chose to handle it so unbelievably poorly that as far as I'm concerned, they've ruined whatever credibility they had and thereby forfeited the courtesy of being given the benefit of the doubt. If anyone wants to avoid being lumped in with the jerks, they should simply refrain from behaving like a jerk, and they'll probably be fine. That's my attitude as well. I won't claim that anyone who would create this much drama and negativity about a video game console like the Amico must be clinically insane, but at the very least, it's clear that their priorities in life are way out of whack. I don't think we should allow them or their deranged obsessions to sideline the conversation here any further.

Hey, you two! Get a room!

Some games that the Intellivision could handle with ease just don't scale well to the 2600, no matter how much extra ROM and RAM you pack into the cartridge, and I think Loco-Motion is one of those. BurgerTime was another, although I appreciate Ron Surratt's valiant effort with his 2600 version.

... and with that, I think this bickering between you two has gone on long enough. Take the rest to PMs, please.

Are your lives so devoid of real problems that you need to go out of your way to find such obscure subjects to bicker about? Knock it off or take it to PMs, or the thread gets locked.

I've found myself asking the very same questions about the people I've had to block from these threads. Now, I'm as human as anyone else, and there are times when I've let certain things in life bother me more than they should have. But I can honestly say that I've never let myself stew in my own sour juices about them until I'm spitting with rage. I can only hope that if that ever happens to me, I would still have the presence of mind to stop myself and question the choices I've made that got me to that point—because they would have been my choices, no matter how much I might try to blame somebody else for "setting me off" with something they may have said or done. I certainly hope that I'd do so before (for example) sitting down to record a podcast where the whole world can see me in that state ... or before going completely crazy on discussion forums, as a few people here have done for reasons I'm still not sure I fully understand.