spacecadet

I love that both the Sega Saturn and original PlayStation had ports whose most common use was to soft-mod the system. They practically built in soft-mod capability. People are still finding new ways to exploit the Saturn's cartridge slot. I love that the Dreamcast required nothing but a boot disk to play imported games. (Yeah, it could also be used to play burned games, but I was big into Japanese games on the DC so I was happy to be able to put away my second Dreamcast.) On the PC, I think it's awesome that you can run other types of apps besides games That's gotta be unintentional, right?

I don't see why it should create jealousy in the community. They both run the same games. It's hardly the same as NES vs. 7800. It's more like A/V NES vs. original NES.

I voted "nope" but I'm really more of a "meh". I've always thought the cycle of hype, fresh criticism and nostalgia about this game was weird, though. It was so ridiculously overhyped at the time - kind of the "Fable" (the Xbox game) of the Dreamcast, with a lot of promises that couldn't possibly be kept, or that we didn't realize wouldn't work very well or be very fun in a video game. But everybody was very excited for its release. Then it came out and there was a lot of disappointment. People made fun of it for various things - for a while I used to greet my gamer friends with "hey guys, do you know where I could find some sailors?" Some people still liked it but it was considered one of the system's major disappointments for a while after its release - a game that, even if you thought it was decent, didn't come close to living up to the hype. But I don't know what happened; opinion seems to have turned really quickly back to positive. I can't think of many other games where that's happened. I've seen underappreciated games get "discovered" by a wider audience later, but those are usually games that didn't get *enough* pre-release hype, so people just didn't know about them until word of mouth kicked in. But everybody always knew about Shenmue, and most people at the time didn't seem to like it once they actually played it. I don't know if I can think of another game that was overhyped, mostly considered disappointing at release, and then beloved later. I wonder how much of it is just a kind of mob mentality, where some people think they *have* to like it in order to be considered real Dreamcast fans or something. As with anything, I'm sure some people genuinely do, but it seems disproportional to its reaction when the greatest number of people were really actively playing it.

We might just have different expectations. I grew up with Apple II's of various types; the ][+ was what made me want one in the first place, the IIe is the one I hoped to get someday, and the IIc is the one I ended up with. The original II's had linear keyboards that bottomed out easily. They didn't feel light, exactly - they still felt heavy, but the resistance was constant throughout the keystroke. The IIc had a clicky keyboard that felt like a poor-man's IBM Model M. So the Atari XL and Commodore computers always felt mushy to me. The resistance definitely gets stronger as the key travels downward. It's hard to bottom out either keyboard in regular typing, unless you are a really seriously heavy typist. I just recently got an Atari 800 and it's a little better. It reminds me more of an Apple ][+ keyboard, although still not quite the same. But even today I prefer either fully linear (unchanging resistance and no tactile bump) or clicky, tactile keyboards (which give way completely after the bump). The one kind of keyboard that I can't stand are ones that have greater resistance at the bottom than the top. The XL line and C64 had that; so did a lot of other computers in those days but I wouldn't call any others among my favorite computers, so I only mentioned those two. The ST definitely had a mushier keyboard, but it also isn't among my favorite systems so I didn't mention it either.

This has the risk of just turning in to a list of flaws of every system, so to keep it limited to my favorites and the things I still have to overlook about them: Intellivision: its cartridges feel cheap compared to its competitors, metal panels dent so easily that it's difficult to find a system that's undamaged these days. Dreamcast: LOUD in regular operation, and alarming in the sounds it makes; battery is *soldered* in! Apple II: they all yellow to hell, and until the IIGS I feel like the keyboards all had one problem or another (keys that pop off, switches that stop working, rubber membranes that stiffen up, etc.) Atari XL: I know there are at least 5 different keyboards, but all the ones I've typed on were total mush. C64: Same as Atari XL. Probably my favorite consoles ever are the Sega Genesis and Saturn; I tried to think of some actual flaws in those systems (as opposed to debatable design decisions) and I couldn't. There may be things about them that I would change if I had the power to do so, but nothing about them that I feel like actually got in the way of the end user experience. Maybe the original controller on the Saturn, which was about the flimsiest piece of plastic I've ever picked up. But they fixed that.

Really?? Man, I would definitely pay the price of the FASTChip for a IIGS version... that would be a day one preorder.

I think most people who were paying any attention had heard of the O2, at least, but not that many people had it. I do remember that one of my friends did, but he was considered kind of an oddity. But I still went over to his house to play it a couple of times; I was curious. It wasn't like it was embarrassing to have one, just uncommon. I'm trying to think of a modern analog. Maybe something in between the Dreamcast and 3DO. I think the O2 probably sold about as well as the DC relative to its competition at the time (in terms of market share), but it was remembered later more like the 3DO.

Hotgames.com. It's become embarrassing to even say it these days, and I'll explain why in a minute. It started out as an Australian site mainly for PC game demos, then got bought by FortuneCity, which was a big web hosting company at the time, and moved over to the US to compete with the other big game sites of the time (none of whom were too big to catch yet). We were also in NYC, which gave us a different perspective (and access to different stuff) than the other big sites. There was a period of 3-4 years when it was as good a site as any of them, and we were getting about 400,000 unique visits per day, which also put us in the top 3 or 4 gaming sites at the time. Remember this was like 1998, so that was considered a lot. But the whole company was a victim of the dot com crash. First they laid off our entire technical team except for one guy who was also our sole designer, and he could barely keep the site running on his own, let alone add any new features. So while the other big sites were updating their designs and adding new features, we were stuck in 1998. Then they started laying off the ad sales guys, which became a downward spiral where we had less and less money. Then they started laying off the editorial staff, and that was basically it. I was the second to last to go. For a long time our parent company kept the url alive as a porn-based online gambling site. I was afraid to even put the name on my resume. It was really annoying, because we took it really seriously and we had a good site, but anyone I told I worked there in the future would think I was some porn scammer if they visited it. Now it seems to be defunct, which is an improvement.

Seller feedback of 1, that's why it was cheap.

When I started here, we divided everything into pre-crash and post-crash. Post-crash was the modern era. That included all Nintendo, even the NES. This site itself has been around long enough for that. For me, I still think of it that way, and probably always will. Call me old (I'm 46 - I don't think that's that old for this hobby), but I kind of think of any "retro" game store that flat-out tells you that they don't take Atari seriously as a bunch of posers. That's not a retro store, that's just a used game store. It's like all these clothing stores that call themselves "vintage" when they're really just thrift shops; it's not like you're going to walk in and buy a zoot suit and a flapper outfit. It's a lie. They're conflating "vintage" or "retro" with "used." And it may well be that most so-called retro game stores are like that nowadays; that doesn't change the fact that they suck and don't know what they're talking about. There will always be a group of people who know better, and there will always be certain stores that know better too, and those are the ones I'll shop at. btw someday these same retro game stores will only be selling Xbox 360 and newer games, and will be saying they don't take NES stuff seriously. To me, a store selling "retro" of anything shouldn't be "updating" its lineup like that. Retro/classic/vintage is what it is. You can add to it over time, but you cannot subtract. That's what separates real stores from fakers.

Oh, I forgot about that, probably because I've only read about it but didn't experience it myself. I was in the industry a little too late, so I guess it was someone else you probably heard it from. But I've heard it too. But sure, I believe it... even though they were in no position to turn down any press they could get, I could definitely see them shooting themselves in the foot. And that certainly would not endear them to a publication like EGM, but with a manufacturer/publisher that's going to help you long-term, you just grin and bear it. Nintendo is not particularly endearing when you're on that side of things either, but they're who everybody wants to read about so you just deal with it and get what you can from them, then write glowing stuff so you can keep it going. With Atari, though, EGM would have no incentive *not* to call them out on their bullshit. If they're not getting stuff *anyway*, and the magazine's already been forced to throw in with Nintendo, there's no reason at all to be nice to Atari in print. But, I guess there's also a small chance that the "too cheap to send out review copies" thing was actually Atari trying to play that same game but just not having the clout they thought they did. I'd probably believe either.

Ok, here's a little inside baseball. I was a small cog in the gaming press machine in the late 90's/early 00's - I wrote for a web site that's now defunct, but at the time was the same size in terms of views and visitors as GameSpot and IGN. (This was the fairly early days of the web when every site was really small compared to now, so I'm pretty confident no one here has heard of it.) Then I worked in marketing for Take 2 Interactive for several years, and got to see the other side of things. I doubt much has changed since then. The whole "gaming press" is really barely that; it's more just publisher PR. And there are a lot of historical reasons for that, but the biggest practical reason when I was in the industry and I'm sure still now is that the press relies on the publishers for literally 100% of its content. If a publication doesn't get a game at the same time as everybody else, for example, they don't get to write that review in time to compete with other sites/magazines, which can basically sink an entire publication if it happens more than a couple times. It's not just reviews, either - it's exclusive screenshots, or hands-on previews, or developer tours, or whatever. There's almost nothing a publication can write without some help from the publisher that's the topic of the article. But that means you have to stay in the good graces of all the publishers. You can't write anything bad about any of the big ones anywhere (or at least nothing insulting or that can't be walked back or defended), and you have to actively promote all the big publishers any chance you get, because they're the ones with your fate in their hands. Of course that also means that when one manufacturer or publisher goes against another, you have to eventually take sides. You have to decide who's going to benefit your publication the most. Nintendo is famously cutthroat when it comes to its competitors. If you covered a competing system too favorably or gave it too much coverage, they just wouldn't deal with you. We'd have to promise them all sorts of things to get them to show us games, like top homepage placement, nothing but favorable or at least neutral writing (ie. not even so much as a clause like "while the last Kirby game was somewhat disappointing..."). Sony was similar, especially when it came to the Dreamcast. I don't remember the specific rules they had but I do remember they were pretty ferocious in trying to get us to not even cover the Dreamcast, and for a while they were refusing to send us games or pre-release screenshots because we were seen as too favorable to the Dreamcast. So that could easily explain EGM's comments about Atari. Atari by then was not going to help EGM sell magazines, whereas Nintendo would, so Atari provided an easy punching bag for EGM to curry favor with Nintendo. Atari also was not in a position to deny EGM anything even if they wrote negatively about them; it's rare when this happens, but EGM held the power in that relationship. I'm also about 99% sure that this is why Next Gen didn't last, because they probably didn't kowtow like all the financially successful gaming publications have. I often remember seeing wildly different stories in Next Gen than EGM or other mags had in a given month; I loved it, and it's actually why I used to buy it, but they always felt a little out of step with the industry and I'll bet it's because they weren't ass-kissers and propaganda writers, so they couldn't get the same access. I dunno, I could be remembering them through rose colored glasses, but that's what I remember.

I was gonna say Welltris too, but I find Welltris a lot easier than Blockout. I guess maybe it depends on how your brain's wired and what you can more easily "see" as far as where a block's going to land and how it's going to fit with the other pieces. I found it easier to visualize a piece's final position in Welltris. I just played Blockout on an old PC a little while ago and the blocks in that version, at least, do fall on their own, just slowly at first like any other version of Tetris.

This 3D game has a completely destructable world! Except for these cardboard boxes that are keeping you from moving beyond the level's boundaries. In RPG's, I always find it funny that random monsters seem to be carrying lots of cash. Somehow it's even more ridiculous than them carrying items, because it implies that they're planning to buy stuff. With an item, maybe they just found it on the side of the road and they're walking around with it in their mouth, like a dog. But 339 gil? That sounds like they're saving up for something. In the Fallout games, you pick locks with bobby pins. And there are just bobby pins lying around all over the world. In offices, in factories, in the middle of the desert, etc. I don't think I've ever in my life just run across a loose bobby pin. You can really extend that to a lot of things, but somehow finding random bobby pins seems even weirder to me than finding loose ammunition being stuffed in office desk drawers, in basically every game like that. Were all these employees planning their own office shooting sprees before the end of the world happened?

I could be wrong but I don't remember reading that from them until around the time "New Games Journalism" started to be a thing and for a brief moment all these game reviewers thought that this was actually somehow something they should aspire to and not something that most people over the age of 12 laughed at. Then there were a bunch of scandals where reviewers were caught with their pants down accepting gifts in exchange for review scores, and I'm sure they wrote about that too and everything that was wrong with the industry (and still is). But I don't think they had any *serious* designs on "growing up", they just wanted their readers to think they were at least as good, if not better, than their competitors. But that's more a marketing/perception issue than an actual content issue. This gives me an excuse to link to my favorite parody video game review of all time, written in the style of an infamous real-world reviewer (who currently works for Kotaku, surprise surprise): https://www.somethingawful.com/news/new-games-journalism/1/ It has nothing to do with this discussion other than being an example of what people outside the industry thought of the New Games Journalism circle jerk, but I just think it's hilarious.

Next Generation was a better mag in general, with more interesting topics (a cover story on Treasure Games!) and writing that felt more upmarket. But they went out of business in 2002, the same year EGM announced a 25% subscription increase. So it's pretty clear who won that battle, and what kind of content video game readers really wanted. And that's probably a direct reflection of EGM's broader, younger writing.

I'm not sure why age suddenly has anything to do with anything.

"Easily" I think is a little too strong. I have this exact setup and at the least, you probably need to make an almost totally custom cable because the SF354 has a weird internal connector. I've actually been thinking about selling my setup and getting a different ST for just this reason - I'm ok with making cables but I don't even know where to get this connector and I don't want to destroy the cable that's already in the drive (which will destroy the drive, because I probably would need to buy another one to replace that cable). Here's a thread talking about this: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/211924-old-atari-sf354-hxc-floppy-emulator/ Supposedly there are regular 34 pin versions of the SF354 but I personally have not seen one. All the ones I've seen on Ebay are the 14 pin version. I think the SF314's do use a 34 pin connector but they are more expensive, and not common with 520ST setups. I would really recommend any ST with the internal floppy instead for this reason (the internal floppies do use a 34 pin connector). Not dealing with an external drive and its large power brick would be a bonus too.

I made an attempt to load both that motorcycle game and Hard Drivin' on my 386 IBM P70 with no sound card... unfortunately my floppy drive that I thought I'd fixed has decided to start acting up again (and I've never gotten my HxC to work with this machine). So nothing was loading last night. I did try running both Hard Drivin' and Pinball Fantasies in DOSBox, which is how I assume a lot of this footage was taken (if not all). I set the system to "none" for sound card, though I didn't alter the system speed because I assume it's probably not very accurate anyway. Interestingly, Pinball Fantasies gave me the PCM music just like in the video, but Hard Drivin' gave me nothing but sound effects. I don't even remember music like that in Hard Drivin' anyway. I didn't see any way to turn on music either. I just don't think it's there. Also, just because Pinball Fantasies played music in DOSBox doesn't mean it would on a real computer. For all I know the game defaults to assuming a sound card is present and DOSBox isn't fooling it into thinking there's not one. I still want to try a few games on a real system, but I need to get my floppy drive working properly again... ugh. That thing's been the bane of my existence for the last month.

Sounds like you didn't get very far into the video. https://youtu.be/pzNbGa05dfg?t=7m4s https://youtu.be/pzNbGa05dfg?t=8m18s https://youtu.be/pzNbGa05dfg?t=9m12s etc.

I think the reason for this post is that this is sound being played with no sound card and through the PC speaker. I don't think anyone is unaware that you could do stuff like this with external speakers and a sound card. This seems to be about an early DOS PC playing PCM music while playing a game, using the CPU alone, through the internal speaker, with no additional hardware. I personally don't believe this is real, but I can test it and I will. I've got a 386 machine with VGA graphics but no sound card; tonight I'll try loading up some images of these games and see if I can get PCM sound. One reason I don't really believe it is that I had one of the first 486 systems, and it came with a sound card, as did every other machine I remember back then. Most of these games look like they'd really require a 486 to run the way they are in the video. I think there were probably still some business machines at that time that didn't have sound equipment, but nobody'd be programming a game for a machine like that at that point. So all the DOS games I remember from that era either supported a sound card, or they gave you standard beeps and boops from the PC speaker.

Yeah, I think the late 90's were around the time that laptops started to become *mostly* on par with at least business desktops, but they were 3 or 4 times the price to get a comparable machine. Or you could still go way down in specs and get a laptop that was a lot less powerful than a typical desktop, but not that much more expensive. My ThinkPad 600X from 1998 was about as powerful as my desktop at the time, with one *big* exception, and that's the graphics card. The mid 90's were also the time when dedicated 3D graphics cards became available, and quickly became standard equipment for most gamers. But even without 3D, desktop graphics were still a lot more powerful than laptop graphics (I remember that being an actual term, "desktop graphics"). I remember before I got my 3Dfx Voodoo II, or maybe even concurrent with it, I had a Matrox Millennium, which was the fastest 2D card on the market. Back then, 2D graphics speed was still a thing you could worry about. No laptop could match it, not even close. And in 3D, forget it. There was no such thing as a 3D laptop. I don't think those first appeared until the 00's, and then they were behemoths. Laptop CPU's at the time were also not generally the same as their desktop counterparts, so you wouldn't get the same performance out of a laptop with a P133 as the desktop version. That's basically never changed, although I think it's easier now to determine whether a desktop and laptop really have the same CPU. A Core i7-8086K is obviously not the same model as a Core i7-7567U, but if these chips were out in the 90's, they'd just call them both "Core i7" and hope nobody noticed the difference. So really, laptops had gotten a whole lot better by then but they still weren't really the same as what you could do with a desktop.

I think gaming is like pitching in baseball. Some people can find other ways to win as they get older beyond the brute force approach most younger kids take. But it does get physically harder, and not everyone can make the transition, or at least not in every type of game. I've gotten better at certain types of games, especially maze games (like Pac-Man) and basic shooting games like Astrosmash and Demon Attack. I used to have to really concentrate on games like that to get anywhere but now it's like I see the entire screen all the time and can identify threats when they're a long way off. I usually get bored way before I really lose. When I do start dying, it's usually because I just don't feel like bothering anymore, not because I can't make it past that level. I know the next level will be basically the same thing, just faster, so I just get tired of playing and start thinking about what I'm going to have for dinner that night. Only then do I start dying in the game. I think some of that's the fact that games have thrown more at you over the years, so going back to those early games just seems easy now. More modern games, though, I feel like I haven't kept up with the current crop of gamers. I used to be about on par in most FPS's, for example - we used to play them after hours on a LAN at work (and I worked at a game company with other gamers) and I did ok. But these days, if I try to play online with these whippersnappers, I get my ass handed to me basically every time. It's an embarrassment. So I think what I'm not good at in my old age is making very fast, very precise movements. I've gotten better at seeing the entire screen and understanding what's happening on a 2D playing field, but add depth and then quick and basically random enemy movements to it and I have more trouble than I used to.

You mean the freaks of nature who are making the game? Because it kinda sounds like you want it done to your liking, and you're not the one making the game.

My Switch was one with a screen that wasn't flush on one side. When I got it back, it was flush on the actual side that wasn't before, but it still wasn't flush on the bottom on that side, if you can picture that. So they did like half of it. It still kind of bulges out from the case on the bottom nearer the right side. Also, I sent them a 100% pristine unit, and when I got it back, it had a bunch of scratches all over the back, like whoever had fixed it didn't use any sort of padding underneath when working on it. They weren't deep or all that noticeable, but it just pissed me off that I sent them a 100% scratchless, mint unit and it was no longer in that condition when I got it back.