JimmydelaKopin
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Posts posted by JimmydelaKopin
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Hey, hooken, my local dentist, has a cocktail Track and field, a cockpit Pole Position II, and standard Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac-Man, Popeye, and a few others...
Of course, this was before the flooding of Katrina. As water and arcade machines do not mix...
I think this might be the last time I see the free arcade at my local dentist.
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Goodness, look at the selections! I noticed the suggestion was pre-Playstation, but I also notice most of the nods go to games from systems just barely pre-Playstation.
Well, this gamer from the grave is going with Mountain King and The Empire Strikes Back for the 2600. John Williams on a 2600 is good; a classical piece like "In the Hall of the Mountain King" on the 2600 is priceless.
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Game Trader, a local chain of stores (maybe larger than a local chain, but I've not seen them outside the GNO Area), sells used consoles and games for the various popular systems, including Genesis.
From the look of it, seems like there are other store chains popping up to handle retro-gaming. Best bet would be to check out such a place. Most games there are cheap; it's where I've bought a number of my PS1 and PS2 and my SNES games.
And where my sister got our mom a 2600, with all appropriate cables and controls (as we still have all our 2600 games).
Retro-gaming store is your best chance at the game you want cheap.
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Cocktail cabinets were never popular for two reasons, each one unique to its setting.
They're not popular in arcades because they take up space. For the same room as a cocktail game and seats one could fit two standup cabinets and maybe a stool or two. More games means more money-making potential. This is also why larger-cabinet games like cockpit cabinets weren't all that popular in the 80's. Arcade owners wanted cabinets lining the walls and back-to-back making an island in the middle of the arcade.
They're not popular in restaurants because they require extra maintenance. Normal cabinets have a slightly-slanted control panel (some a heavily-tilted control panel). These discourage things like drinks being placed on them...where they can spill and ruin the game.
A cocktail cabinet, however, is a game that encourages it being used as a table. From sptential spills that could short out the game to an accumulation of 'rings' and stains from what has been set on it, such games mean extra work for the owners--more than the ordinary cabinet.
I've played cocktail cabinet games, though I've never seen too many of them. My orthodontist had a cocktail Quadrapong set on free play. I played Super Pac-Man at a local restaurant in such a way. And I've played Track&Field set on free play at my local dentist that way.
But on the whole, no, it's been primarily normal and cabaret cabinets for me.
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I'm sure you've heard about the recent events with self-righteous, frighteningly insane Jack Thompson urging software developers to make a game where a man kills everyone in the video game industry. How he offered $10,000 to a charity in order to have the game released, only to withdraw his offer when the game WAS released by two different underground game developers. How the editors of Penny Arcade put THEIR money where HIS irresponsible mouth was by donating the ten grand to a charity close to the video game industry.I keep reading the web page trails but still can't understand what exactly started this bizarre situation. Why would Jack Thompson ask people to create a violent video game? Isn't that what he is against? Sounds to me he pissed off some game journalists, they made fun of him and now everyone is overreacting.
This was Thompson's way of trying to be a Johnathan Swift railing against the depravity in videogames, based on the rather ludicrous assumption that gamers take games as seriously as they take gaming.
In all seriousness, he was no more serious than some Hollywood-type claiming that he or she "cares" about the homeless/the poor/the people suffering from some disaster/ etc. Just as such people say, "If only I could be there I'd do this and that," so was Thompson saying, "If they would dare make this game, then I'll donate money to charity."
And just as political commentator Rush Limbaugh has shown the phoniness of such concerns (by offering such people plane or bus tickets and so on), so has the two controversial programmers shown Thompson's phoniness by actually making the game he proposed.
Heck, the way everyone gets so bothered with this clown, I'm half-tempted myself to contact him to see if he'd respond in such a fashion to me. But, given all the forums I have to visit and all the work I have to do to wash my M:tG cards (they were soaked in Katrina and most are moldy now), I really don't have that kind of time to waste.
But if I did...
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Hey, good luck....and that's really what you need to succeed: luck, not signatures.
First of all, Thompson is a politician who practices law. His attacks on the videogame industry are his method of political haymaking. disbarring him wouldn't stop that one bit.
Second of all, I doubt if he's really done anything technically unethical to warrant disbarring, as, being a lawyer, he is no doubt ready to explain away all his garbage as either being political or satirical. (Remember, political speech has the narrowest standards as to what constitutes slander or libel or even false promise. Courts tend to let most political speech go simply because it is political, under the idea that free exchange of ideas and free debate can allow the citizen to discern the truth on any issue.)
Third of all, the only occupation in which it is harder to strip a person of his license to practice than law is performing abortions. Lawyers aren't subject, generally, to laws or community standards concerning their practices; they govern themselves through the state bar. So one would have to convice a bunch of lawyers that one of their own has gone so beyond the pale as to warrant being ejected from them...a hard proposal at best.
So best of luck. It's not an impossible task to get Thompson disbarred...just a near-impossible task.
But don't forget...just because he gets disbarred in one state...doesn't mean he can't get a license to practice in another state.
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Hey, while Thompson and Phelps might seem similar, they really aren't.
Fred Phelps is the leader of his own small cult, a cult so brainwashed that, without his guidance, they can't even speak for themselves. (I witnessed that when the cult, sans Phelps, protested Nicholl's new GSA. Though they had their usual bromides, such as desecrating the flag and having provocative and offensive signs, none of them said a single word during the protest.)
Jack Thompson is merely an opportunist who's using the videogame industry to score political points, much like Kevorkian's attorney used medical murder and the Rikki Lake show.
As for his claim that his idea was a satire along the lines of Swift...please. It's not up to being a satire along the lines of Todd Loren, for crying out loud. A satire is supposed to be a serious proposal not merely proposing the absurd in a serious way, but also describing the detriments as benefits, so as to point out how skewed the values of what it being satirized are.
For this to work, the thing being satirized must be taken seriously (such as the English bias against the Irish poor and the English blind eye toward intrafamily brutality and family abandonment, the subjects of the original Modest Proposal.)
The videogame industry has never taken itself or its efforts that seriously. Indeed, many in the industry know that they're pushing crap on carts and discs, that their efforts are at best derivative and at worst forgettable.
As for the makes of GTA...as I've said before, they know that they're merely following a long trend in videogames concerning violence. Also, their games are merely mocking the sensationalized violence in other media, allowing the player to engage in it without restraint, much like Twisted Metal originally made fun of the freeway violence in Los Angeles.
For Thompson's idea to be considered satire, he would have to target all the media that sensationalizes violence: crime drama shows, hip-hop music, action movies, and so on, the same way Swift covered a whole slew of culture in his Modest Proposal.
Furthermore, the purveyors of such media would have to take it seriously. No one takes the action movies seriously--or crime drama--or videogames...on and on. It's mindless entertainment, and they make no claim otherwise.
But as to Thompson's hypocricy...he's a politician in lawyer's clothing. When local councilman Jim singleton promised a $5,000 award to the person whose information leads to the arrest and conviction of the person printing and distributing anonymous anti-Semetic flyers against mayoral candidate Donald Mintz, a private eye who just got his license figured 5 grand would be good seed money to get his own office. He investigated on his own, revealed the culprit, turned over the info to the authorities, and, after the guy pled guilty, went to Singleton for the reward...and got nothing for his efforts.
See, what we have here is what political commentator Rush Limbaugh calls "demonstrating absurdity by being absurd".
See, there's no way that Thompson would give 10 grand to any charity. That's fairly obvious if he gives conditions for the donation--and even allows his foes to choose the charity.
Thus, to prove that...someone actually made the game. Now Thompson is shown to have been making an absurd claim, one that he never took seriously.
He's no different from the rich man asking Jesus how to become a follower of Jesus...and he received no different a reply.
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Interesting idea in the articles, and one I touched on in a previous post: the arcades died because the arcade owners were seduced into getting rid of popular games for newer games that were hyped as being 'popular' but really weren't.
Yes, I wouldn't doubt that there were some who threw their arcade budgets completely behind newer games in hopes that they would prove to be as popular as the older games. In every business there are those who insist on putting all their eggs in one basket...and more often than not they wind up with no eggs for breakfast.
But there's more to it than arcade owners falling for the hype of arcade game manufacturers. As I said concerning the local market, we used to have 11 arcades in the GNO area. Now we're down to 4. Putt-Putt was replced by an Oschner Medical Center. Goofy Golf was replaced by a Home Depot. Fun-n-Games was replced by Pontchartrain Bank, which has since been replaced by a used car lot. Celebration Station and the arcade in the mall next to the Superdome sit empty; nothing replaced them yet. The arcade in the airport was replaced with an airport store, and the one in Clearview Mall was replaced with a Sears expansion.
And one was forced into the local coin-op distributor's warehouse, as its location was replaced by a convenience store.
A good deal of the arcade loss around here is due to the landlords finding tenants that could afford more rent than the arcade owners could pay.
Also, like I said, one company, New Orleans Novelty Company, became not only a coin-op distributor but also the owner of a 3-arcade chain (which it still has). They used their funds to undercut the prices of other local distributors, made other arcades dependent on them, and then raised their prices, thus putting serious hurting on the independent arcades that were left. Now there's only one non-NONC arcade left, and it's struggling.
Think about it. This is about more than the arcades themselves. It used to be around these parts that one could find a coin-op videogame in every grocery store and convenience store and drug store--and Lakeside Mall had a number of them in the general areas. What happened to all these games?
The store owners found different ways to generate the same revenue: vending machines, crane machines, ATMs, and the like. And since the owners of the machine--and not the stores themselves--do the maintenance...that means less money spent by the stores.
I'm not faulting business here. They have the right to get a profit as best they can.
But I am saying that these businesses have gotten their profits at the expense of the game manufacturers...and at the expense of gamers.
Did home gaming become popular enough to kill the arcades? Not in the GNO area. Around here, the death of arcades and the dearth of available coin-ops forced gamers to seek out home gaming as an alternative.
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The biggest problem here...and perhaps I'm not right in the head for being the one to point it out, but I'm a gamer, so I'm proud to be weird...
...is that Jack Thompson doesn't know how to write a videogame.
When he sees a game like GTA or any of its clones (I wonder what his opinion is of my favorite series, Twisted Metal), he only gets a visceral reaction from it. Thus, his idea for a videogame is a visceral plotwagon with less input from the player than even a Channel F game.
He should examine videogames in general. They're all pretty violent--the popular ones are, anyway. Sure, the problematic idea nowadays is the ability to score points through killing NPCs--that is, extras, the non-antagonist characters.
However, every videogame with such a feature also has the consequences of that feature, either through triggering a faster-paced protagonist-centered gameplay mode or through punishing the player that is distracted in such a way. (For examples: in Roadkill, killing the wrong people at certain times can trigger gang warfare or even a riot, with all the antagonists determined to kill you. In Twisted Metal, focusing on killing the 'spectators' means you're not paying attention to the other vehicles...which is usually fatal for you.)
Sheesh, I wonder what he thinks of Bump-n-Jump, where one can score points by deliberately crashing other cars or even crashing dump trucks.
All this visceral fool of a lawyer can see is the violence, not a plot or storyline. Maybe he should visit an exorcist; he seems to be possessed by the spirit of Fredric Wertham.
All in all, his 'videogame' idea can hardly be called such. Even a chooe-your-path book has more interaction. No one would make his game because it would be little more than a tract--or rather, screed--one could load into a console.
He should stick to chasing ambulances and let the experts at making games do what they do best.
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Yeah, but where's Final Fight 2?
That's the one thing I like about the SF Anniversary Collection: at least Capcom hasn't forgotten about what has gone before there. Granted, they could have incorporated Sf and SF: the Movie somehow onto there (well, probably not the latter; the actors no doubt have clauses in their contracts triggering royalties for their likenesses if their versions of the characters were rereleased)...
...but what about the semi-popular sequels, like Final Fight 2 and Street Fighter 2020?
I want to play games I can't get anymore, not games that I can play anywhere!
...or maybe that's just me...
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One good thing about Playstation 1 games is that a number of them can also be used as CDs. Twisted Metal 1's "Drop Dead" is one of the best tracks around!
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Okay, maybe my family was the one that bought the only bugged cart of the game for the 2600.
But here's what I mean:
On each board on the 2600 game there are certain gems set up in such a way that one is over another (not in the game, but in the layout, disregarding the illusion of depth for the moment). Usually the bottom gem is touching a wall of the layout. Concerning said pairs of gems: if the bottom one is stood upon by Bentley, he gets a scrolling score until a set number is reached to send it to the next wave. (Incidentally, if a gem eater stands on the lower gem, it will stand there forever eating gems until killed.) If the top gem is taken by Bentley, it removes itself and the lower gem.
The only way to progress is to get the 'infinite' gem and stand upon it before the other gem-takers take the top gem in said pairs. If all the gems are taken, the wave does not end; instead, one is stuck on that wave until one starts another game.
Like I said, maybe I was the one who got the sole bugged cart. Who knows?
But for that reason, I never liked Crystal Castles for the 2600.
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Just remember that the original 2600 version had a flaw in the game:
one needed a set number of gems to go to the next level, and one could only get that set number by getting the lower gem or certain pairs of gems. Getting said lower gem gave one as many gems as needed to get to the next level, while getting the top gem would get rid of both of them. And if all such pairs were taken before you had enough gems...you were stuck on the wave
(This flaw was removed in the PS2 emulation of the game.)
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One thing as well one has to take into account:
Concerning the Atari 2600 and other popular systems, the owners of the systems didn't prohibit 3rd-party gamemakers (that is, gamemakers that weren't owned by the system maker and didn't have permission from the system maker) from making games for their systems.
When Nintendo hit the American market, that was the first thing they did--and Sega and Sony followed suit. Thus, the reason for fewer crappy games nowadays is that gamemakers need the system maker's permission fto make said games for said systems.
But...that does mean that the system makers WANT said crappy 2nd-party games (games made by other parties with the permission of the system maker) for their systems. Hey, it does make the 1st-party games look better by comparison, doesn't it?
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I'd go with the traditional SFII clones--Art of Fighting and World Heroes--and maybe King of Monsters.
...and Puzzle Bobble.
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Read the new article. Why does 60 Minutes and the like keep returning to Jack Thompson?
As Rob Ryan put it, "Freaks attract freaks."
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I hear most of this talk is faulting the management side or the technical side...but I think the real blame here is the idea of turning Atari into a "family business" when the family itself was dysfunctional, let alone incapable of handling a business.
I used to work for a family, the Zuppardos, that own a couple of grocery stores in the area where I live. The founder of the stores, Mr. Tony, still goes to the stores every day and still oversees a number of decisions and even occasionally deals with distributors personally--but he has over 50 years of experience in the grocery business.
The next generation--Roy, Peter,and Joey (who runs the grocery store furthest from my house)--were groomed into the business by Mr. Tony, and they bring their experiences of working at the lesser jobs with them as store managers now. Incidentally, Peter is also a practicing lawyer, and he brings that with him as well to running the Zuppardo's two-store chain.
The third generation, Jennifer, Joseph, and many others, were groomed into their positions running the stores under their parents by being made to work their way up. Joseph still remembers his first job at the store: shopping cart retrieval and grocery bagging as a teen.
The point is that each generation brings up the next in the business through observation and through direct experinece of 'coming up through the ranks'.
Contrast this with what happened with the Schweggmann family. The Schweggmann patriarch built up a multi-store chain in the GNO area for a number of decades...and then decided to retire and let his son take over.
His son with no practical experience in the grocery business. His son who's more interested in politics. His son who had a pot farm on the family estate.
In no time the stores start raising their prices, buying up new stores and building more stores, and begin oversaturating the area...while not being able to generate enough money to finish paying for all these buyouts. In less than a decade after the younger Schweggmann took over, the chain goes bankrupt and is now a faded memory in these parts.
The problem is that Jack Tramiel treated Atari like an heirloom instead of a business. Every time that happens to a business, it fails.
And that's what happened to Atari.
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Um...depends on the PC, doesn't it? The C-64 (my family's old computer) used a disc drive, and we sometimes used it for non-gaming reasons (which was supposed to be the reason for its purchase)...but usually we just plugged in C-64 cartridges in the cartridge slot on the keyboard, plug in some Atari 2600 controllers (they were compatible with the C-64) and play games on it.
In effect, the Commodore 64 is a gaming console that could be used as a personal computer as well. I would say the same could apply to other personal computers. (Of course, if this is secretly an anti-MMORG rant, then you got my vote.
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If I owned a cellphone and went with a customized ringtone, I'd try to get the Mountain King theme. The slow sad piece...and then for important calls I'd have "In the Hall of the Mountain King" just like when you need to get the crown to the mountaintop.
Anyone else?
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Yeah, back in the day, that was how we linked up with Compuserve (the internet of our day) or talked with other computer users that used the same type of computers. You manually dialed the nomber on the phone, then set the headset on the modem, and then you were "linked up" with either Compuserve or another computer.
And yes, compatibility was a problem then. Tandy/Radio shack had their own computers, Atari and their own computers, Commodore had theirs, Apple had theirs, and none of them were compatible. Not like the 'one-computer world' we live in today, with built in modem circuitboards and the like.
Oh, and back then you actually had to dial the number too. Touchtone was gaining popularity, but there were still plenty of dial phones around too.
Great, I'm 33 going on 63. I really feel old now.
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Of course personal computer games are real video games. Man, I could play Kickman on my Commodore 64 for hours! Just don't include those all-text games from Infocom.
...what?
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Frogger II: Threedeep for the 2600.
...what?
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Every time I come to this threadcity, it's an ADVENTURE.
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Raindog, pal o'mine, I think you're missing the point. The "arcade" as is considered in this discussion is a place filled with coin-op amusement devices that do not offer prizes (excepting the ego boost that comes from defeating a game, getting a high score, and so on). If you want to include prize and ticket machines as arcade fare, then why not go all the way and include 'video poker' and slot machines and call casinos 'arcades for adults'?Because if I walked into a casino 25 years ago, I wouldn't have seen a row of Pac-Man machines flanked by Asteroids and Battlezone. The kind of place that's filled with ticket games now is the kind of place that was filled with Pac-Man in 1980.
This isn't semantics, it's the evolution of an industry from one you and I like to one we dislike.
Hey, pal, depends on the casino. I remember EF's purple-shoed Unknown Arcader checking out the scene in a Bally's Casino, and it was wall-to-wall Pac-Man machines. The article even included photos of it; it blew my mind, to say the least.
But seriously, my point is that "arcades", as traditionally defined by gamers, are places with amusement devices that do not offer prizes. They might include some ticket or prize machines (the local Putt-Putt had 3 Skeeball machines and one prize machine), but the place must be dominated by non-prize amusement devices.
Put another way, when I was a kid and I wanted to go to the arcade, my parents entertained no delusions about me going there with $10 and returning home with any sort of prize. They knew that $10 was gone forever, and, aside from the entertainment of the videogames and pinball, I would get nothing for my time and money.
Not so with ticket machines, prize machines, etc. You'll eventually get something from the machines (unless you're really unlucky). And one plays such machines not for entertainment but in the anticipation of getting something for playing it.
Put yet another way, before there were videogames there was pinball. And people knew the difference between a pinball machine and a slot machine--and they know which one spits out real money on occasion. (The closest pinball came to doing that is when the machine's owner would buy the credits from the player if the player racks up a number of them, so as to encourage others to play the machine. That's how my father played pinball essentially for free or even made a little money off of it.)
My point is that there are all sorts of amusement centers: arcades, prize places, casinos, even the print shops across the Pacific. Arcades are amusement centers, but not all amusement centers are arcades.
I do agree, though, that I do not like the trend toward prize places, if only because the majority of machines are geared toward children. Man, I loved playing skee-ball at Putt-Putt!
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Which Classic Video Game System Sucks the Most
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted · Edited by JimmydelaKopin
I voted 5200. Here, the story behind the vote.
My family owned a 2600. We still have the 100+ cartridges for it. so I have my most experience with it.
I played the Intellivision at a neighbor's house and the Odyssey2 at my uncle's house, and liked them.
I've personally owned the SNES and Genesis, and I like them too.
And our PC was a C-64; loved that one too.
Incidentally, I played the Vetrex at Service Merchandise and like that one too. I hope no one voted for it, if it's an option. That would be just wrong.
So, in voting for one in which I had no experience, I went back to my childhood days. Back when the 2600 was looking old and dated with its graphics...my family was wondering which new system to get. It was down to 3 choices: the 5200, the 7800, and the Colecovision.
I wanted the Colecovision for all the games I had never seen before on it...in particular Pepper II. But that one was too expensive, so no go.
What settled the least favorite in my mind was the fact that the 2600-game adapter for the 5200 was not distributed locally. We had 100+ games--and Atari expected us to just junk those games for a limited library of games, all of which also appeared on the 2600?!
Don't think so!
For me, the ability to 'port old games onto new systems is a big plus. I shouldn't have to buy a new system as well as keep the old system around if I want to play both the new and the old games from one company. If a company manufacturer doesn't want its systems to be compatible, they should adapt (or put up the money for adapting) older games to the newer system, in my view.
sheesh, the videogame industry may be progressively transient, but it doesn't have to be that progressively transient.