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Retroware TV's Video Game Years series is AWESOME!


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I know a lot of the Retroware folks are members on here and maybe everyone knows about The Video Game Years series, but I just wanted to bring it up for those who didn't know about this show. It is AWESOME! The way they approached the show, doing each year individually as an episode is sheer brilliance!

 

There are consoles from 1977 I had heard of but no one ever discussed and this show details a lot of them, even showing footage of their games. Fantastic!

 

If this series is ever available on DVD consider me a Day One customer. I love this show!

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Well, it's fun to watch the systems, but really...

At least the first one seemed mostly to be a bunch of guys too young to remember pong systems talking about how dumb they were...

 

I know I'm showing my age, but...er.. we liked the pong systems back then......

The "slight" variations? Those were fun too....

The light gun pong system we had? I remember the whole family liked that...

Probably not until the Wii did families enjoy gaming like that... (Although I'm betting the Wii had more family appeal)

 

They are still OK shows, but the guys from the game chaser's seem to be some of the few there giving props to the old systems.

 

desiv

(no, not Gameboy yet..)

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  • 5 months later...

By the way, Retroware are posting that they need some funding assistance to keep up this awesome series. I'm definitely buying into it because the show so far has been amazing.

 

I'm not affiliated with them, I just really love what these guys have done so far and I thought I'd get the word out there that they need help and this great show should definitely continue production.

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I'd never seen these before now. They're like a cross between VH-1's "Best Week Ever" . . .

 

And I love the 80s and I love the 90s and every other crappy show on various cable channels . . .

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0eltiN-Qg0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0eltiN-Qg0

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I dunno, I started to watch it when it first started, its the usual talent making random comments about stuff, nothing relevant though.

 

I would like it more if they spent more time on history and impact, rather than having local (to the website) talent making random, mostly uninformed, and sometimes ignorant comments.

 

for example

 

"everything had woodgrain in the 70's durh hur hur" ... well we may not feel that a woodgrain laminate with sharp edges and chrome accents is a style fashion now, but the designers of the late 70's did not like the round bulbus style of the 40's and 50's which is quite in style now (everything is rounded, and fat just like the jet age, paint it silver and black and bam)

 

I found little value in the show, as I am an self professed computer and electronics historian, its just random people saying random stuff about things they did not experiance in the proper time while doing absolutely no thought or research on the subject.

 

when the hit the NES / SNES age though the show will undoubtedly get overly fanboi political as the core audience is nintendo oriented, to the point I was outcast for having a reasonable argument against a few points in design theory ... though you wont see that now as their site crashed and they started fresh again (for the 4th time within 3 years, how damn hard is it to download a gz web host backup ... click dammit!)

Edited by Osgeld
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I found their coverage of the seventies refreshingly informative. I liked the idea of doing gaming year by year cuz it forced them to not leap immediately to the NES like so many others do. I agree they'll probably lose my interest once the NES arrives on the scene, but the early consoles they discuss (Astrocade, TI-99, APF MP-1000, etc) are hardly ever mentioned on any other shows so I was super impressed with their coverage..

Anyway, just thought I'd give them a little shout-out and I am contributing to this. The DVD will go nicely next to my Once Upon Atari.

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I found little value in the show, as I am an self professed computer and electronics historian, its just random people saying random stuff about things they did not experiance in the proper time while doing absolutely no thought or research on the subject.

 

I think it's supposed to be a fun show. And it is.

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I don't care for the show, or at least the 1977 episode. It's a bunch of smug 20- and 30-somethings foisting their ungrounded irony upon a previous generation and trying (too hard) to be funny. "Everything had woodgrain because people thought that's what made electronics good! Hur-dur!" They were basically just making fun of things they didn't really understand or have any real interest in.

 

To be fair, I'm talking about the Pong segment. That's as far as I could get before I couldn't take the stupidity any more.

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This series would be so much better without all the attempts at trying to make it funny. Yes, it is nice to not be overly serious and even laid back to some degree. I get the need to appeal to the masses but honestly I think the audience that really appreciates this content does not need to be fed constant jokes. Some of the guests just seem to try too hard to out do each other, there is no need to try to make every sentence funny. More accurate content and less satire would make it much more appealing. This constant misinformation is annoying to, much of their views and opinions are the same tired myths that those who didn't actually experience seem to cling to, information that is easily confirmed through just a little effort to research as opposed to the same tired fanboy beliefs. Because of this I am not compelled to help fund or support this show, I refuse to invest in yet another source spreading misinformation and tired poorly researched "History" of gaming. I really want to like this, I honestly do, I liked the people involved and I enjoy silly fun of these guests in the context of their characters or shows but when you are dong a series on the history of gaming then it is time to hold back on the comedy and rumour and guess work or label it as a mockumentary or parody.

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I love to that show. It's not super informative, but it's nice to have some funny comments on stuff. Better then those hard to watch homemade video's that you can't understand because sound is to weak and hurt you're eyes.

I know it isn't easy to make a good show, so 'm glad people make then, but try to improve you're video's. You don't need super expensive stuff to make good looking video's.

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I love to that show. It's not super informative, but it's nice to have some funny comments on stuff. Better then those hard to watch homemade video's that you can't understand because sound is to weak and hurt you're eyes.

 

I know it isn't easy to make a good show, so 'm glad people make then, but try to improve you're video's. You don't need super expensive stuff to make good looking video's.

 

That's what's sad about this. They have the tools to make high-quality videos, but they are wasting it on making these I love the 80s rip-off videos.

 

youtube.com/watch?v=QpYR7QIvSTs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpYR7QIvSTs

 

This stuff is barely watchable when D-list actors and comedians make lame comments about things they know little about, but when clueless non-celebrities make even lamer comments, it's painful to watch and not fun at all. Instead of ripping off this overused, over ripped-off 'fun' style, how about ripping off something like Beakman's World? That show was fun and informative.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7QvOKFm3wg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7QvOKFm3wg

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  • 5 months later...

I watched a few episodes and thought it was OK, but it’s marred by that insular “Youtuber” self-promotion vibe, where it’s like, “let’s all take turns doing our wittiest ad-libs in front of a green screen so everybody in Youtube-land can see how cool and hilarious we are, then we can all publicly pretend we like each other’s Youtube channels, which should get all of us more subscribers”. The problem is, most of those guys don’t have nearly the showbiz chops they think they do, so more often than not their attempts at humor translate as contrived and lame.

 

I used to enjoy perusing gaming stuff on Youtube, but I’m starting to find my threshold of pain is growing ever lower for this sort of schtick. I much prefer podcasts.

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It also doesn't help that a lot of the guys they feature don't really have idea what they're talking about. The 5200 and C64 segments in the latest episode were utter jokes because of that. Fucking YouTube gamers I swear...

 

I expressed my displeasure at the handling of the C64 segment to them directly and was told they obviously love the C64 and that's why they spent hours doing the segment on it. I chose to disagree. That the C64 was only big in Europe was as laughable statement as there could be. As I tell people, between the crash and when the NES finally took, the C64, for most people, was all we had to game on for new stuff.

Edited by H.E.R.O.
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the 64 was huge in my area, once in middle school one of the English teachers wanted to put together a writing lab area where students could come in and use word processors, or other teachers could use the space for math tutoring etc. She causally mentioned it to a few people and BAM there was a entire classrooms worth of 64's almost instantly (I was the little helper hooking it all up). This was in like 90, so people were starting to move on to more modern machines, but to basically snap your fingers and have a pile of them appear was not an uncommon occurrence.

 

Course now that my 128 is dead I cant find one without paying a small ransom for one heh

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I'd have to echo Osgeld on this. The show is fun for what it is I guess, but I'd much prefer to have a serious show talking about the technologies of the time, their impact, and spoken from people of that time, especially the technicians and programmers. Some of the guys on the show are better than others, but some like the game chasers offer no value at all.

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They "updated" the C64 segment I'll presume after my opinions about the shoddy treatment of it in the original. They didn't add much of anything. Guess I can only hope they don't beat on Colecovision too badly but they will...they will. You can tell. It's not NES so it means nothing to them.

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