mickcris Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 I asked that "blow your balls off" debuffed guy what his stance on this now was and told him if he values his credibility he should admit he was either wrong or misguided.. His response... "It is comments like that, that have me having to make more videos. Ive been sick with the flu since saturday so it will come, and your comment wont be the only one being referenced. I will be making 2 - 3 more splitting them up since no one knows how to watch a full video. " Edited because I may have read it wrong and I was starting to feal mean about what I said. He is one of the true believers. I hadn't looked at his earlier videos before but i browsed them earlier. There was one where he did a power point presentation on why it was going to be so great. He will probably still be supporting it somehow in his new videos. Probably blaming us for it failing. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cybercylon Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 If these rumors are true about the Nintendo NX being cart driven, man.... after this sh!t storm, they're going to have quite the uphill battle making it sound like a good idea In this case, "carts" might be some sort of high capacity flash storage to store the game rather than using an optical drive. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pipercub Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Great video from Pat & Ian, as always! But yeah, Mike's schemes involving GameGavel and all that other shit are sleezy as hell if not illegal and the worst part is that he gloats about how sleezy he is: When I made my last video. I knew there were a few posts here that seemed to indicate that the true story is that GameGavel money, likely sourced from the RETRO mag Kickstarter was used to buy the Jaguar molds. But I stayed with Mike's retelling of the events just to show how convoluted his business dealings can be, plus there was no concrete proof. Excellent use of red underline, I ran out of money so I printed more. If one were to go to the RetroGaming Roundup forums and scroll up a few posts you would see this was Socal justifying what Pat and Ian called him out for doing in their latest vid, creating a new company to re-sell the molds and proprietary material developed under GG as well as scrape off those people as liabilities. How could that belong always and forever to a separate company as Socal claimed when that company did not exist until the 11th hour? I told Socal straight up that I considered that actionable and that if this thing funded it would come up. The world failed to notice for months and went on the epic roller coaster ride with this thing. And as Pat said, if you treat your close friends of many years this way........ 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gentlegamer Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 But Ouya! Ouya Ouya Ouya! Such crowdfund! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ha6Mb5_YQ 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+5-11under Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Adding to (or repeating/emphasizing) what some others have said... Mike seems to dream big. The bigger the better. He is also fixated on "cornering the market". Large markets. GameGavel to take on eBay: Get 10% of market and make millions+. ParcelGames to somehow corner the huge market in used games. Magazine: I'm sure there were high hopes to make it huge and memorable. RVGS/CC: become famous, sell the console, then manufacture and sell all the games. Unfortunately he tends to keep dropping the ball, and fails to invest enough of his own time and effort into projects. If the right person spent 60 hours a week working on GameGavel (or the magazine or the RVGS), over the course of a few years or more (while re-investing all profit), I'm pretty sure it could be fairly successful. A quick peak at the GG FB page shows very little promotion for GG; it's all for the magazine and RVGS. Taking some market share from eBay is possible, but it is not a 10 hours per week project. It's tough to make a million dollars with less than 5,000 hours invested. Also, he may dream big, but the dreams tend to not be converted into business plans properly. It's one man's vision thrust into the world with minimal thought and with minimal support/feedback/criticism from trusted friends and business partners (ParcelGames???). Big projects like these (GG, mag, RVGS) need lots of planning and lots of due diligence to be successful. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pipercub Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 So I was bored and did a little google search on some common terms used lately to describe the mysterious Mr Lee (Li) as described by Piko member Eli. As it turns out there is a place on Earth that has lawyers, showers, and rooms named after movies. Netflix HQ. Now am I saying or suggesting that Netflix was kicking out fake prototypes, oh no, that is insane, and the background in the pics matches a residential not a commercial environment. Still, one heck of a Venn diagram. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MotoRacer Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 In this case, "carts" might be some sort of high capacity flash storage to store the game rather than using an optical drive. I think you guys are taking my post waaaay too seriously Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keepdreamin Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 He is one of the true believers. I hadn't looked at his earlier videos before but i browsed them earlier. There was one where he did a power point presentation on why it was going to be so great. He will probably still be supporting it somehow in his new videos. Probably blaming us for it failing. I would advise you guys should probably just leave this one alone. I don't think he's pulling an Andy Kaufman, if you catch my drift. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
galax Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 To those doubting if Mike know the prototype was fake or not - There are two shots of the console at NY Toy Fair, one inside the clear plastic case and one outside, in order to get those "hardwired" controllers out, he would have had to have lifted off the top half of the shell and unplugged the SNES controllers first, and I don't care how oblivious someone claims they are, when you see a PCB stamped with "© 1995 Nintendo" all possibility of pretending you thought it was a new FPGA board go out the window with it. Debuffed ages ago by Piko ages ago; extension cables. Mike knew it was a SNES + SD2SNES though. One day he'll likely explain how he's "not a hardware guy" and was misled. Yeah right. It's shady that he doesn't want to risk anything, wanted to set up a walled garden, and is shuffling ownership away from partners (though I really don't see anything technically illegal in that as others have alluded). Transferring money and assets among majority owned firms without full knowledge and consent of other owners is a serious type of fraud known as tunneling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_(fraud) - obviously not as serious as Conrad Black who was convicted in 2010 of tunnelling around $400 million from Hollinger, but anyone doing this type of thing is not someone that you want to be in business with. Imagine that you own 25% of Redro Magazine, and MK (Mortal Kombat) owns 75%. If MK transfers $1000 from Redro Magazine to Redro VGS (which he wholly owns) then on one end of the deal it cost him $750 and on the other it made him $1000. Instant profit! Except MK defrauded you out of $250. Same thing if he 'sells' products (or advertising) among the companies at non-market prices. As a minority owner of any of these companies you'd want to know well in advance about every transaction between them. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PlaysWithWolves Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 I watched this video out of curiosity. Very good overview, even if I'd prefer less crude language in the pictures. I'm only posting a reply to note that with the act alone of researching and contacting the SNES CPU chip maker (WDC), he did more investigative journalism than most tech websites. This was a fantastic video, and a great overview of the entire Retro VGS / Coleco Chameleon saga. The animation showing the DVR board overlaid on the board in the Jaguar case was absolutely perfect! Also includes a lengthy list of links so people can go through all the source material. This will be a great video to point people to who have never heard of the Retro VGS / Chameleon, both now and in the future...Al 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PlaysWithWolves Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 About the debuffer: He's pretty small-time and not likely affiliated directly with the Chameleon; I actually get a little kick out of his enthusiasm and hope to see more on the Chameleon. His two catch phrases alone earned some fun in this thread. But then, I also enjoyed this Nova Scotia man's enthusiasm with amateur weather forecasting, and I live in Maryland: He is one of the true believers. I hadn't looked at his earlier videos before but i browsed them earlier. There was one where he did a power point presentation on why it was going to be so great. He will probably still be supporting it somehow in his new videos. Probably blaming us for it failing. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VectorGamer Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Yeah, maybe instead of saying "well-meaning", something like "he actually intended to do real business" could be more appropriate. He didn't want to set up an actual scam to take money and run, or to sell a fake product on the shelves. I'm not buying that anymore. He was a fraud from the very beginning. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jennytablina Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 ^ His ideas have serious problems because they go too far into the absurd. But ripping off ideas is actually one of the safest bets to make in business. After all- Henry Ford did not invent the car. Most inventions or ideas never take off in their first iteration. It's usually a competitor who solves a problem and finds success. Also, for someone who wants to make his hobby his work, he sure doesn't understand his market, or just doesn't want to listen to them. I see his biggest Achilles heel is his constant need to go to crowdfunding. I don't get it. I guess the easiest explanation is "he doesn't want to put his own money on the line." But I think the true reason runs much deeper than just that. I think successful crowdfunding is a symbol of acceptance in his mind. If he hits the "Successfully Funded" milestone, then he feels his idea has been accepted and he is an unquestionable success. Whether he delivers or not is no longer an issue, he can blame whatever problem got in the way of delivery as being some force beyond his control. As long his campaign was successfully funded then he's right, he's successful, he's accepted, the haters were all wrong. The problem is this is how a lot of project creators view crowdfunding. Did you manage to hit your goal? Well done! But that's not the end of the story - you still have to deliver a product even if you are securely funded for it's development. This is where Crowdfunding starts going south for a lot of projects. A lot of people call Ouya a "success" and that's reasonably true of the KS which did STUNNINGLY well for a mini-box with already aged android architecture even at the KS start. But it really cannot be called a success by any measure as an actual platform. Sadly a lot of the details of how hard they failed has gone largely un-noticed, Games press turned a blind eye when things at Ouya started going south bar a few things. They did produce the system, but messed terribly with backers, sending them early systems with wifi issues and dodgy controllers, some waiting almost a year past the point they started shipping consoles, missing controllers in orders ect. But that's only the beginning of the problems. At launch the dev environment was insecure, they couldn't attract many indies who could actually make *good* games (mostly lazy halfhearted efforts with exception to Towerfall) , when they attempted to attract indies with their "free the games" promo, they actually managed to scare most of them off with the terms and conditions (which required being successfully funded to $250,000 before they would chip in). They had also scared off the bigger fish by taking a "we're for the indies and those other guys are like, THE MAN, bringing us down!" stance. Ironically the few people who went for it actually scammed their own KS projects, with suspect large amounts pumped in by fake accounts. Ouya was forced to split the payout for "free the game" projects in order to maybe ensure an actual game was developed, rather than people running off with $$. By that point, interest in Ouya had dried up, people who already owned the system (mostly just as a nice emu/media stream box) already had one, and everyone else got bored and forgot it existed. So the money dried up and they ended up selling the business to Razer. Who also quickly found out that they had inherited debts to devs and angry backers who never got a system. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Ha ha ha, you're funny. When was that, exactly? Now! Homebrews! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickcris Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 About the debuffer: He's pretty small-time and not likely affiliated directly with the Chameleon; I actually get a little kick out of his enthusiasm and hope to see more on the Chameleon. His two catch phrases alone earned some fun in this thread. But then, I also enjoyed this Nova Scotia man's enthusiasm with amateur weather forecasting, and I live in Maryland: https://youtu.be/zVKIZTx_gB8 Yeah. He is definatly small time. I dont think anyone belives that he had a stake in the console. I don't really think people should be posting rude comments on his videos like they have, but his videos have amused me. I am just kind of interested in what he is going to say now that he has been let down. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RupanIII Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 In this case, "carts" might be some sort of high capacity flash storage to store the game rather than using an optical drive. Could Be.... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TPA5 Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 About the debuffer: He's pretty small-time and not likely affiliated directly with the Chameleon; I actually get a little kick out of his enthusiasm and hope to see more on the Chameleon. His two catch phrases alone earned some fun in this thread. But then, I also enjoyed this Nova Scotia man's enthusiasm with amateur weather forecasting, and I live in Maryland: That guy is awesome, he's like a Canadian treasure. I remember subscribing to him years ago because he deserves it. More people should find something to be that passionate about. Instead, most people find their passion swimming in the vast lagoon of drama that is the internet. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PlaysWithWolves Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Same here. His images are always too small for me to read. I can't eat popcorn to it or read it. Enlarging the image produces a fuzzy unreadable mess. I wonder why it's so small (180 × 145)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 [..]River West Brands is a marketing company, much like Retro VGS so it isn't shocking, as both are legit companies RWB probably knew before hand their could be major problems, and wanted to get the Coleco name out above all else, especially since they have no experience in Technology based physical goods. [..] So RWB took a free ride on RetroVGS for some exposure, for better or worse. As they say, press is press! RWB saw MK running around spouting things and yelling all over the place. So they stuck their name on him for a little while, then gracefully backed out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Mike's Linkedin subheading now says "Celebrating the History of Video-Games" (with the hyphen). I know what VideoGames are. I know what Video Games are. But I don't know anything about Video-Games. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Loguidice Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 The sooner we all standardize on "videogames," the better. 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dj_convoy Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Or video games. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Loguidice Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 Or video games. When terminology goes into common usage we tend to combine them rather than keep them seperate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gentlegamer Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 vidya 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HkryCrkStudio Posted March 10, 2016 Share Posted March 10, 2016 But then, I also enjoyed this Nova Scotia man's enthusiasm with amateur weather forecasting, and I live in Maryland: I am so happy you posted this I just subscribed to his channel. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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