thegoldenband
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Blog Comments posted by thegoldenband
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We'll look forward to your return!
And I look forward to checking out that podcast too. I guess I really like this chronogaming thing, since I'm a regular follower of almost every series mentioned in the comments. There are a couple more I know of that weren't cited:
https://ps1e.wordpress.com/category/games/super-nintendo-chronogaming-games/
This one made it nine games or so into the SNES/SFC library before going dormant. (You'll notice it spells "chronogaming" correctly -- congrats for coining the term and starting the mini-craze.
)And:
http://superfamicomgames.blogspot.com
This has gone private for some reason, but wrote up reviews for the first 20-30 games in the SNES library before going dormant (and then private).
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Nice review. I quite enjoy this game, but all I can see when I look at the players are those anatomy-textbook diagrams of the female reproductive system -- hence our house nickname for it: "Fallopian Tube Boxing".
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Wow, last night I was thinking "Man, I miss Chronogamer -- I wish he'd come back", and there it is! Great to see these signs of life, and I look forward to your discussion of the world of robbers, wounds, scouts and terror.
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My fiancée recently found a bunch of RCA Studio II games in her family home -- no one has any idea where they came from (best guess is her late father). No console yet, but we'll look next time we visit.
That discovery led me to futz around with the Studio II in emulation, and in turn, brought me back to these entries and their hilarious takedowns of the games.
Of course I have very, very low expectations of the system, but I'm still oddly looking forward to either finding or buying a Studio II console and giving the real thing a spin. But I'm looking forward to the eventual return of Chronogamer even more...
BTW Space War seemed like the most playable/fun of the games I tried, though the new homebrews look promising -- there's a very decent version of Space Invaders -- and actually I kind of liked Bowling. Still, I can't imagine a stronger contender for "worst console ever", except in relative terms or if you give the Studio II a free pass for being so early.
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Your blog is certainly remembered/missed, and its return is eagerly awaited! (No pressure or anything.) Whenever you're ready to start back up, I look forward to it.
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I used to play the SG-1000 a fair bit in emulation, and I enjoy its library. Some of the games are mediocre at best, but it's got a very good version of Chack'n Pop, and Ninja Princess is good fun too. Not coincidentally, I translated both games (though Ninja Princess is a bit of a hackjob).
I like the idea of Hustle Chumy, but it seemed way too easy as far as I could tell. There was another game I could never get anywhere with...C-So, I think?
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"Also, is $100 good for a Genesis with a CD drive attached to it?"
Do you mean a Genesis + Sega CD, or do you mean a CDX or X'Eye? If it's the latter, the CDX is worth around $100, but the X'Eye goes for a bit less. If it's just a regular Genesis + Sega CD setup, then not even close -- a Sega CD unit in tip-top condition might break $50.
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Hey, I didn't know that Omicron was coming out! Great news for me, since it'll be the first published game to use my music (unless you count the massively changed knockdown tune from K.O. Cruiser).
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My girlfriend and I finally got around to playing this one tonight, basically for the first time. (Every so often we pay our dues, take a break from Frog Bog or Utopia, and play through one of the sports games.)
Your review captures the spirit of the game well. We've learned by now to always start with "disc level", but even at the fastest speed it's still a loooong game. Despite the impenetrable goalies, we managed a 2-2 tie. I think we each got one "knock the goalie down with your first shot, score with your second" goal, and one "how exactly did I do that?" goal.
I hope Chronogamer comes back someday! It's very much missed, especially on nights like these.
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If all your records are timing short, then there's a good chance your turntable is running too fast. Assuming your turntable doesn't have a strobe, another way to check is to compare a Youtube rip that's clearly from CD, and toggle back and forth between that and your vinyl transfer. Or you can compare with a CD of the same album, if you have one.
If it is running too fast, then somewhere on the turntable will be a screw that'll let you adjust the speed.
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Great review. I've owned this title for quite a while, but tonight was the first time that I really sat down and played it. All your observations are right on the money, especially the "Aha!" feeling you get when switching to Pro speed. Fortunately we played our game on High School mode, which isn't quite as slow as Zombie Playground mode. Still, a game at that speed takes about 48 minutes of real time, whereas the Pro clock is much faster.
Once you get the hang of the passing game, the fun factor goes up. Something nice about firing a crosscourt pass that threads its way through a thicket of defenders. Blocking is well implemented too, but it's strange that they didn't use the side buttons at all!
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Played this one tonight. Soccer seems truly dreadful, clunky and perpetually gridlocked, with very little rhyme or reason to the control. The following quote from the manual is very telling:
"Players can block each other if they make body contact and will become immobilized. If several players jam and are unable to move, use both joysticks to separate them. If this does not unlock the jam, press RESET and start a new game."
Worse yet, you can score from the side of the goal -- quite a nasty bug! We quit Hockey after a minute fearing it was more of the same, but perhaps we'll give it another chance now. At least the above warning doesn't fully apply -- the Hockey section of the manual has a similar quote to the above, but without the third line.
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My girlfriend and I busted out the O^2 for the first time in ages last night, and played this game (along with Smitheerens and a solo game of UFO). It's no Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack (we missed that shifty-eyed dealer!), but at least it moves along at a decent enough clip.
I may have to get her to play it again so I can blow her mind with the double down bug! I wonder if it works with insurance too?
Looking forward to your return to active blogging! Reading your entries really adds a lot to my experience of a game like LVB!, which hasn't had a lot of ink spilled about it...it makes gaming seem more like a communal/community experience, which is nice.
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I really love the Walken imagery in this post! Like Nathan, now I'll always be reminded of him when I play Dodge 'Em, and I think that's for the best.
Now I wonder which Atari games can be mapped on to other Walken roles. Outlaw reconceived as "Heaven's Gate: The Videogame"? I don't think I want to find the game that resembles his cameo in Pulp Fiction...
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So glad to see you back! Psychologically speaking, I think it's telling how much kids enjoy Circus Atari -- I know I certainly did, back when I was in single digits. For all our attempts to shield kids from reality's hard edges, sometimes they love to embrace the "splat". (Cf. Stand By Me and/or the famous Bing Crosby anecdote about his son's pet!) Though then again the clowns, like Wile E. Coyote, do get back up again.
And heck, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe isn't as bad as all that, is it? I know a lot of people hate that game, but I have no problem with it since it's exactly what it claims to be...
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I'm going to have to track this one down (or a Harmony cart) and give it a spin, in hopes that we find it more engaging than the INTV Horse Racing cartridge. I really enjoyed the "backstory" and other details in this entry. Looking forward to your Circus Atari review!
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With your review in metaphorical hand, I'll try to make some time soon to delve into this one, channeling my grade-school self (who would've certainly dug this game!) as best I can. I never heard of Stellar Track back in the day, but my mom had a Model III on loan from work for some months, and I really enjoyed the handful of simulations and text adventures that mysteriously came with it, many of which would probably frustrate me to no end now. I'd imagine that the TRS-80 version of Star Trek would've gotten some major playtime had I owned it back in the day.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to your Steeplechase review!
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I too am one of those who never played Adventure back in the day, basically due to happenstance. I think we got our VCS in 1981 or so, when I was five years old, and most of our games came as part of a gift from my cousin, who allegedly found a couple dozen carts that'd been thrown away (I'm still not sure whether that story was true or not). Many early Atari titles were in there, but not Adventure.
As I recall, most of the VCS games we got afterward were bought used from the local video store. If they'd had Adventure I'm sure I would've asked my folks to grab it -- after all, I loved Raiders of the Lost Ark, and even tried hard to like Swordquest: Earthworld -- but, again, happenstance. (Maybe it wasn't showing up used because people liked it too much!)
So Raiders and Swordquest -- and to a lesser extent, Superman and Pitfall -- those are the games that, for better or worse, retain that kind of childlike resonance for me. (I recently beat Swordquest for the first time, on real hardware, and even though I was using a walkthrough, it was eerily like being six again.) Your post makes me want to play more Adventure, and see if I can invest it with that same resonance, since it's certainly a more deserving game than Swordquest...
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Great post. It's extremely useful to know when real hardware makes a big difference. Many games lose very little if anything from emulation, but others really do need the original gear, especially the controllers, to get the right "feel".
It's also useful to know which games are outright fun, and that game looks like a blast. Nice video editing, too, and your daughter's comments are priceless. Looking forward to your VCS entries!
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I had much the same experience with Earthworld. When I was a kid, I found it at first beguiling, then bewildering, and ultimately dispiriting. And yet it retained a certain, almost mystic quality in my memory -- partly because it was so totally inscrutable and partly because of those little cryptic, fragmentary tunes that would show up out of nowhere.
Tonight, having recently picked up a 2600 with 40 loose carts (for $5!) that included SQ:EW, I decided to finally exorcise that old ghost. It took me about the same amount of time as it did for you, and I had similar feelings of anticipation, nostalgia, and closure. And I, too, made a point of ending the game on my zodiac sign of Libra!
Now, as I look at scans of the comic online, I wonder how I didn't spot the hidden images in those drawings...though in my defense, I was no more than seven years old at the time. I certainly noticed the prime number clue back then, but didn't know how to apply it. Someone else wrote of their suspicion that some of the finalists probably just "reverse-engineered" the comic, and didn't actually know how to trigger the clues in-game. I still have no idea how anyone figured out how to trigger those -- like you, I never got more than the first two. The number of possible combinations just seems too high to hit on it randomly, and yet I can't see any substantive clues in the comic.
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Nice piece of music though - I wonder what sort of musical limitations the Intellivision may have had. It certainly seems at least as capable as the 2600.Have you seen
? That Youtube video helped sway me into buying an Intellivision recently. I love the TIA with all its limitations and quirks, but the Intellivision definitely seems to have the more capable sound hardware. -
Very glad to see your blog back in action! I recently picked up an Intellivision II with a sizeable lot of games, and your reviews have been instructive, informative, amusing, and/or helped to confirm my impressions. I look forward to more entries.
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Not exactly, just some weird quirky interaction between those particular keys. Maybe they share a trace on the circuit board, and the designers didn't expect them all to be hit at the same time (??).
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Chris,
It turns out that the problem's completely on my end, and was caused a USB keyboard I've got plugged into my laptop that, for whatever reason, can't handle the key combinations in question. When I tried it using the laptop's own keyboard, everything worked fine. (I got the keyboard fairly recently, and I guess I'd never had occasion to try that particular combination of keys, but when I went and tried Battlezone just now I ran into the exact same problem...)
My apologies for taking up your time with this!
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Chronogaming is a Mini-craze?
in Chronogamer
A blog by Mezrabad
Posted
Fortunately the person behind that Super Famicom chronogaming project started a new project focusing on RPGs -- two of them, actually:
Super Famicom RPGs (SFC RPGs that weren't localized, plus PC Engine RPGs)
This Map Is Completed! (strategy RPGs on all consoles)
The blog author is on AtariAge, and mentioned that the scope of the original SFC project was just too broad (understandably).
There are a bunch of other chronogaming projects that have surfaced over the past 5 years but most are video- or Twitch-based, rather than text-based. Frankly I love the written reviews, and am pretty much at saturation point when it comes to video content, so I'm glad to see you continuing in blog format!