wongojack

Like so many others seem to be saying, I contacted Curt once upon a time not fully understanding all of his connections to the world of Atari. He responded with patience, respect, and optimism and was a great person to talk to about Atari. He definitely had more to do and leaves a gap that cannot be truly filled.

TLOU didn't really seem all that impressive to me either. Especially the beginning. Another zombie story with an overly quiet hero who loses the only one he cared about . . . It seems like a story idea that the Walking Dead writers rejected. Plus the early combat/avoid segments just weren't fun for me. The game really picked up after the midway point where Ellie starts getting more things to do and more equipment. Still, I wonder how so many people got through that beginning and liked it. Regarding Uncharted 4 - I played U 1-3 on the PS3 and over there, I thought they were great. @Lost Dragon pretty much nails my opinion of those. With U4, right away, I didn't like the stupid sitcom marriage that they portrayed for Nathan. He wants to run away, but can't. But does anyway and lies to his perfectly understanding wife? He just seemed like the dumbest husband ever. That got me on a sour note right from the start. Then something about the way the game transitioned between "slide down rocks" and "murder 20 dudes" just felt like I could see the design of the game in a way that was too transparent. I felt like you were playing this home-life simulator and then the loveable (but stupid) husband character flew off to slide on some mountains and freaking choke some b!tch3s out. The pieces were good but together they didn't fit. Finally, when you got to the part with the Jeep in Madagascar, I just got bored. They made driving around and exploring a real chore. It just wasn't fun and took a long time to get on with the rest of the game. Same thing with the boat a little later. I did finish it eventually, but I can't remember a "last boss." Now even with all those negative things to say, I still have Uncharted: The Lost Legacy on my shelf and will play it. I will also play TLOU II when it drops in price. And there is no way that these comments would ever make me go so far as to say the PS4 is the worst console I've ever played.

@zzip YES! Even among IT people, I don't really know of anyone who has a seamless PC gaming experience in their living room. And I know some who try very hard at it . . . Something else I forgot to mention is that consoles are cheap. Maybe not at release but soon after. I usually wait 6-7 years to replace my main personal PC (been using laptops mostly in recent years), but when a console drops to less than say . . . $300, and I end up with some Amazon gift cards then it is hard to resist. I have both an XBox One (original) and a PS4 (slim). I got them deeply discounted and with gift cards or other coupons. I will likely do the exact same thing in the next generation as well.

Wow - the PS4 gets a mention! I've logged my complaints against the PS4 (and Uncharted 4) on these boards, and I even was persuaded earlier in the thread to side with someone claiming the PS3 was the worst console they'd played . . . but the PS4? Worst console? Not enough exclusives? I guess I understand the exclusives thing, but do you guys all have your high powered gaming PC hooked up to your main television with controllers charged and ready to go? I don't. Do you have stable enough Wifi to run the thing in another room and stream it to your TV or something? I don't have that either. The console provides an ease of use that often trumps weather or not I happen to be able to buy the same game for my PC. I have also noticed that the sales on PC digital titles aren't what they used to be. I personally find myself waiting and waiting for a sale price that I can live with and it often never comes. A used physical copy of the console game can often be found cheaper. I've hit 2 big problems when using a PC as a main gaming platform. #1 I often want to be in the same room as my spouse even if we are not playing games together. #2 Is that it takes time to set up for PC gaming in the living room. Not a lot of time but just enough that whoever might be interested in playing XYZ with me doesn't want to wait for me to connect cables and sync the right game controllers. I suppose another problem is that the gaming catalog available on PC is linked to my account. This is a small thing, but for someone to want to play a game with me, they have to search through the games that I own. Its quite different than looking on the shelf at plastic cases or even browsing through the games available for Xbox Gamepass. Anyway, all that to say that "yes" you can get the same games on the PC, but the experience is different.

No classic time for me this week. I also took a break from mult-day .ISO sorting projects and 2tb file copy operations . . . put some time in on the Modern Tracker but nothing special. I actually did receive some Atari 7800 homebrews from Al this past week, so I'll probably fire them up soon.

Not much total time. I was playing through some games on a soft modded PS2. Nothing too interesting about these. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the PS2 version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game. On the other end of the spectrum, Heroes of the Pacific looked like it might give me that old Battlehawks 1942 fix, but alas, I couldn't even complete the first tutorial. The game wanted me to stall the engine and recover - I couldn't figure it out and kept crashing. PS2 Alien Hominid 46 ATV Off-road Fury 18 Downhill Domination 13 Extermination 50 FIFA World Cup 2002 21 Flipnic Ultimate Pinball 26 Ghostbusters The Video Game 51 Grim Grimoire 22 Heroes of the Pacific 12 Jeopardy 24

If it was like the old mainframe game where you explore sectors and travel and fire by direction and distance then I played it too. I think I finally tracked it down, but it isn't one that gets a lot of attention these days or there was too much competition for it to stand out: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=7341&d=18&h=0

We never had the "Datasette" in my house. My first memory of computer software is hearing Moonlight Sonata playing as a demo of one of the c64 music programs. I believe we loaded it from disc, but I guess that one could also be a cartridge. I quickly learned that playing around with music software wasn't that fun (when you are around 6 or 7), so we moved on to using SAM to try and synthesize different words. That was my first night with any computer. There may have been a game or 2 of Jupiter Lander and Choplifter mixed in there.

But how many C64 games have yet to be played? LOL It actually might be realistic to complete the set of games published by Commodore. <Shrug>

Gyruss? I first played it on C64 and it sounds great. I generally just don't notice music. I think Rob Hubbard didn't start until Thing on a Spring in '85, but I'm sure there were other C64 games with great music in '84 and earlier. Edit C64 games with music I remember from '84 or earlier Agent USA Bruce Lee Ghostbusters Summer Games Jumpman

I feel like we've had this conversation about the NES so many times that regulars like me, zzip, Bill, mbd30 should instead be having it at a local bar instead of on this site. I could've predicted how this was going to go. Anyway . . . I generally agree with zzip that the NES seemed like a machine for kids and the appeal of SMB just didn't reach me. However, I did find lots of enjoyment in the NES. Zelda and Metroid are still some of my most favorite games of all time. I just bought a Bionic Commando T-Shirt earlier this month. Therefore, there's no way that I could consider the NES the worst console that I've ever played. I wish we could all have a drink and play some games together to take this farther. That sounds like a lot of fun. You know what is probably the worst "console" I've ever played is that in-flight system on Air-Kreplakistan. You know the one that plays some weird version of Othello and the worst Pac-Man you've ever seen. You can barely control the thing with that recycled N-Gauge as a controller . . . that thing sucks.

Are there any outward immediately visible differences (besides the sticker on the back)?

I did get the impression they wanted me to go away, but they might have just been incompetent or uniformed about how Ebay actually works. If you don't want to deal with returns then why not create a listing that doesn't offer return shipping OR just don't accept returns? Just give me some clue that you are probably going to scrutinize any returns? I know from this second experience that there is an automated way to have return shipping labels created. I wonder why they don't have that set up? Anyway - I guess Ebay had my back in this case. Buyer beware.

Oh, I forgot that I had more info in case anyone is reading this at some point in the future . . . I actually bought the same X360 game from a different seller and it ALSO did not work. I followed the process to return that one, and I was given a return shipping label immediately upon filing the request for a return. I mean, I got it right after clicking the button and following instructions. I got it even before the seller "accepted" my return. I guess THAT is how this whole thing is supposed to work.

The seller is http://www.ebay.com/usr/decluttr_store?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2754 Well, this ended up in my favor but it was weird. The seller accepted my return through the Ebay system. When they didn't actually send me a return shipping label, I contacted Ebay and started a "case." I had to actually call Ebay to do this as there was no way to open a case within the return process. It seems the system thought the seller had done what they were supposed to (when they hadn't). At the same time as opening a case, I emailed the seller. On the 2nd email, they emailed me back. Despite starting my email from the return page and providing the Order Number, Item Number, and Return ID, the seller asked me for all of that information again and did not acknowledge that they had already accepted my item for return. Their responses didn't give any indication that they even understood the Ebay return process at all (and this is a seller with huge amounts of feedback). After 3 emails where they were asking me for essentially all of the information available in the Return ID, they told me to mail the item back and when they received it, they would refund me for the item and my return shipping. I waited for my case to be resolved to figure out what I should do. I had no confidence that the seller could follow through with their promise of refunding anything since they seemed to have a hard time even following the return process on Ebay. My lack of confidence was made even lower by their request that I print out the email thread I was having with them AND the return info to make sure that whoever opened the package would know what to do. I'm paraphrasing, but that is what they asked me to do. Eventually, Ebay found in my favor and just refunded me. The case was resolved because the seller did not respond to the case at all (no surprise). Eventually I got a 1 line message from the seller in a new thread that simply said "Thank you for your email. Please feel free to contact us if you have further inquiries." That was not a response to an email that I sent at all . . . just a random email that I guess they sent because they finally realized what happened and that Ebay decided in my favor. Who knows? Anyway, I think I will avoid ordering from them again. In their defense, I did order some very cheap XBox 360 games and most of them played fine. However the return experience for the game that did not work (which was also the most expensive game btw) was terrible. I have no confidence that I would have been refunded if Ebay had not stepped in. Then again, I did get refunded and they revealed how incompetent they are. Perhaps someone a bit more clever than me could figure out a way to use that to their advantage?

Wow - what a thread! Your story for wanting to sell this stuff is a good one. I think a little more work formatting the list of stuff you are selling would go a long way. As an example, seeing a list of SNES games and then immediately switching to N64 and Xbox stuff made me do a double take. Just use some Bold Italics =================== or even artificial breaks like a bunch of equal signs =================== The spoiler tags might also be useful to you to make spoiler tags type "[" + "spoiler" + "]" without the addition signs and quotes. Close spoilers like this "[" + "/" + "spoiler" + "]"

I actually didn't log any classic time this week, and even my modern time was down. The dip is mostly due to me deciding that I wanted to build a 2tb drive full of games for a memory card boot mod that I have running on one of my PS2s. This was a fool's errand as it took me the better part of the week to find all the ISOs, choose the ones I want (that fit under the 2tb limit), unzip the ISOs, and install them onto the HDD. In the end, choosing and unzipping the files was the most time consuming because I had to actually choose about 650 games that I thought I might like to play without wasting time unzipping games that might put me over the size limit. I was also dealing with a 5tb external drive size limit just to do all the prep. I thought installing games would be the longest part, but I actually found someone who had created an old-school batch script that helped make that step non-interactive for me. It still took 7 hours . . . This is the kind of retro-gaming "project" that makes one evaluate the hobby. I joke around all the time that I already own/have enough games to literally last me every minute of life that I have left on this planet. Now after having completed this project, I may have enough games on one HDD alone to last me that long . . . some anecdote about quality over quantity seems to come to mind. I'm not sure why exactly I shared this story in this thread . . . thanks for reading!

Carnival is the game that I immediately thought of when I saw the thread title. Although, I think the Coleco version let's you fire a shot to disable it which is almost required to enjoy the actual game.

PS2 007 Agent Under Fire 1 007 Nightfire 10 Aqua Aqua 3 Capcom Classics Collection 3 Frequency 3 Mortal Kombat: Deception 4 Time Splitters II 20 XOne Pac-Man CE II 60 This week was low on gaming, but high on gaming related activity. I chose to take on the extremely time consuming project of building a 2TB drive of games for my modded PS2. Most of the PS2 time above is just me testing games after I installed them. One interesting note is that I logged time for Capcom Classics Collection instead of an individual game within the collection because all I did was boot it up and play a few bonus videos.

jingoistic [ˈˌjiNGɡōˈistik] ADJECTIVE derogatory characterized by extreme patriotism, especially in the form of aggressive or warlike foreign policy. "jingoistic propaganda"

Can you update options in the menu successfully? Bios Skip etc?

I will respond to myself on these topics in case someone else ever has these questions. I cut the end off of one of the standoffs that I received and tried to push a screw through to make a through spacer, but that didn't work, so I just bought a 3/8 (1cm) spacer from a local hardware store and used a ~15cm machine screw. The other two spacers went into the GDEMU, so now it can easily be removed by just taking out one screw. Regarding heat, I did drop a single 2k ohm resistor into the same position as the photo above. I think that if I ever get around to doing more inside this unit (like replacing the battery) I will probably just de-solder the 12v regulator, but for now it seems fine. I played the unit from more than 5 hours without any real problems. One thing that doesn't seem quite right for me is that when I adjust the options in the Menu (stuff like bios skip etc) they never actually save. I click save and they get updated, but as soon as I start a game, the options have no effect and they are back to default once I exit and go back to the menu. I can't seem to find anyone else with this problem online, but I'm also not really finding a place to go an ask questions. Maybe this is related to my dead clock battery? I doubt it. I have tried two different SD cards and get the same behavior. Speaking of SD Cards, I bought a 128gb official SanDisk SD card. Not a micro with an adapter. Since I did this, the SD Card maker software has been MUCH more reliable.

I was just thinking about this cart recently. I actually reached out to @CPUWIZ to find out if there was ever a fix for the 2 games that didn't work. Neither of us knew for sure, but it seems the fix for Space Invaders and Moon Cresta would have to be in software. I don't want to sell, but I'd love to get my cart updated with any fixes if there ever are or will be such things . . .

I actually just ended up paying the $20 donation fee which got me in. I actually did get a PM for this - so thank you for that. I guess I should have waited . . . Anyway, now I have 2 invites to give.

If so, I would appreciate an invite if you are willing to send me one. PM me.