September 2003 Archives
The recent OTA update to my Hiptop contained an interesting little addition: Terminal Monkey, a SSH/Telnet app. I know jack-all about SSH, but I do have a history with Telnet.
Years 2 through 4 of my college experience (and real world Year 1 thereafter) involved a lot of MUSHing on TinyCWRU. A MUSH is a variant on the well-remembered MUDs of the early internet. Essentially, shared text adventures. In MUDs you trawled dungeons, fought monsters, gained experience, all in the D&D fashion. In MUSHes, the emphasis was on socializing and building. TinyCWRU had no theme and no limits to how many objects you could create, making it open season for anybody who wanted to code... I'm not explaining this very well...
Basically, you have to think of a huge database. The database contains objects - which could be a door, a coffee mug, a killer robot, whatever. Each object has a number in the database and a series of letter codes (flags) assigned to it. An object with an R flag is a room, P indicates a player character, E is an exit. The MUSH program examines these numbers/flags and controls them in a fashion that mimics an interactive text-based experience. You create a character (P), walk from room (R) to room using exits (E) and enter in specific MUSH-recognized commands to interact with the various objects in the room. The commands start with normal adventure stuff like "say" and "look" and "get," but you can quickly develop into the deep programming language involved in creating your own objects... and by extension, your own rooms, robots, toys, tools and worlds.
TinyCWRU went public in October 1990, after an initial period local to students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Although I had two high school chums who went to CWRU, I was introduced to TinyCWRU by a college pal at my own school, Steve (who I believe heard about it from an old friend of his.) Steve and I created our first characters in October 1993... Tolby and StocDred, respectively.
Eventually, Steve and I got the idea to create something. In about a month we accumulated a decent knowledge of MUSH coding and started planning out a text adventure. The underlying basis of our adventure was the concept of keys and locks. To complete our adventure, a player would need to travel across our land (rooms described to simulate a spooky mansion and the surrounding acreage) and collect particular key items. Those items would grant access to other areas and eventually, a clever ending sequence that wrapped up the mystery story woven throughout the adventure. It was a great working relationship. I remember calling him up and asking "Did you finish the cave maze bit yet?" while I was creating the robot puppets that populated the rooms and revealed clues and storyline. Steve christened it "The Von Till Mansion."
We made some announcements and attracted a lot of attention, as it were. Our creation managed to impress the admin, and even resulted in my being "promoted" a rank to Senior Programmer... which understandably rankled my partner Steve, since he built just as much of the Von Till Mansion as I did. However, I was probably more chatty and social than he was, and over weeks of near-constant dorm room MUSHing I had developed friendships with many of TinyCWRU's admin. I guess I kissed ass.
The point is, it's still all there. Ten years after my first login, TinyCWRU still exists. I have no idea who's hosting it these days; it was relocated off CWRU's servers years ago. Of course, it's a shadow of its former self. In 1993 you could find 30+ people logged in at a time (and the popular MUDs could command many, many more) and 100's of different players over the week. Back then, TinyCWRU was a chat room, a multiplayer game, a creative toy box all in one. Today, it's a relic. The internet equivalent of cave art.
Rediscovering TinyCWRU via my phone's new Telnet ability, I can only imagine how my college career would have been ruined. TinyCWRU consumed a crazy amount of time just on my dorm room's Apple Performa 430, and I often got distracted in class just by having a blank sheet of paper in front of me. Much less the entire MUSH in my pocket.
If you're curious, check out TinyCWRU. You'll need to create a character, naturally, and once you do, type in the command "@tel #73168". That will teleport you to the opening room of the Von Till Mansion adventure (make sure you look at the dog's tag there to refresh your memory on simple text adventure actions.) I bet it still all works. And if you see StocDred, wish him a happy tenth birthday.
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Parry! Thrust! Beat down!
I bought a PSX for Soul Edge and Castlevania: Symphony of Darkness alone, so the opportunity to play a sequel to this nifty weapons fighting game on a console that's still supported was too good to pass up. Soul Calibur apparently is regarded as the best weapons fighting game out there (as opposed to what? The fighting games where combatants rock paper scissors each other to victory?), so the sequel had a lot of goodness paving the way for it. I got the version of Soul Calibur 2 for the GC, but excepting the legacy character on each version, I'd imagine they're all more or less equal. Rumor has it that the graphics are sub par on the PS2, and insert tired, overused joke about the heft of the Xbox controller here. That, and c'mon. Link! The Plot: Hello, fighting game. Characters kick each other's butts. That's really all there is to know. Weapon Master mode, i.e. the version you'll have to play to unlock all the hidden characters, game modes and weaponry, does have a story line, mostly to the tune of "You adventure to a place named after a star, and you see a mysterious figure on the road. That figure says something to you that sounds sorta like a challenge, and then you must fight!" I'd like to offer them points for trying, but, well, nobody really is going to care. Confusingly, the game uses characters in the game, but gives them different names in YELLOW CAPS as if to suggest "The part of SHANANA, Guardian of the Plot Thing will be played tonight by Taki." Since I hadn't played Soul Calibur 1, I was still learning the names of the characters, and giving them other names was just bizarre. If I may make a humble recommendation, how about using the characters you already have in the plot? All of these characters are supposed to be competing against each other for the Soul Edge; why wouldn't they encounter each other and try to stop the others' quests? I'll cover this a bit more in game play, but Weapon Master, while pretty fun, makes no real sense as far as a story goes. You can choose whatever character you like to play any mission you choose. Instead of being the story of one lone fighter's quest to find and stop an evil sword and its master, it sorta turns out to be a squad of unrelated fighters who can be called up like Pokemon to kick ass and then go back into their Pokeballs. The only time you can't toggle characters is when you're in a dungeon, which is a nice touch, but frankly, adds zilch to the story continuity. I realize coming down on Soul Calibur's text-dump yawner of a plot and its weak implementation is silly; this is, after all, a fighter, not a RPG. I'm just confused as to why they bothered. Weapon Master mode is essentially just like the 51 Event Mode matches from Super Smash Melee; I can handle "Get through this string of challenging fight scenarios" just fine without any need for some overarching plot. In fact, I'd go so far as to say if you put some bait on the hook, like "Beat this pathway of fight scenarios and you get a goodie," I'd be perfectly satisfied with that. Simplify, man! The Gameplay: I'll break this down into the fighting mechanics (being the bulk of the fun) and Weapon Master Mode, which is a major portion of what you'll need to play when you get this game. Fighting: Sweet goodness. Soul Calibur has a very nice learning curve with plateaus. You can play the game to an average competancy just with button mashing alone. Some characters, particularly those with quick strikes, are excellent choices for novices, and frankly, that's good enough to set the hook. Link appealed to me first, simply because he's one of the few characters in the line up I even recognized, and I know he's a proven bad ass in Smash Melee. Frankly, this is an excellent game strategy; nobody likes having their ass mercilessly handed to them by somebody who Hadoken-cheeses them into the ground before they can even learn a few of the combo moves that are essential to playing the game. Street Fighter never appealed to me largely because of that; I never got a chance to even enjoy the game before I got frustrated by my character's inability to defend himself somehow against skilled onslaught. As sort of proof for this idea, I brougth Soul Calibur along with me on a visit home, and left it with one of my best friends on his wedding weekend (i.e., a weekend where friends would all be hanging out killing time until scheduled events). In no time at all, a round robin sprung up, and everybody was demonstrating at least competancy in the game in under a half an hour. Finesse moves are showy and fun, but you can compete with mere button mashing -- that's good party fuel right there. Pulling off combos is just for fun. You're not that much more effective pulling off the high powered moves, but you are more interesting to watch. Most of the combo moves are really simple (back-back-A, down-roll-back-B, A+B B, etc) and there's so dang many of them that are similar in execution that you'll often be surprised what your fighter does. I'm not all that hot at down-roll-back, so most of the time I'll pull off a different move than I had intended, but those are generally effective enough. Learning combos is really a matter of see-and-do -- training mode has a move list, and you can see the character demo the move until you get it. The only thing it's missing is a demonstration of which buttons are being pressed; it lists them, but the timing is fairly critical, and displaying the controller would have been helpful. A minor quibble. I'd argue that learning Soul Calibur has 3 main plateaus to its learning curve. The first is simply learning when to use horizontal, vertical and kick attacks; recognizing the characters, and appreciating the cool stuff they can pull off. After that, you start learning how to pull off combos and which combos work best when chained together. I'd imagine the peak of your learning is when you can do this with ALL of the characters; I'm nowhere near that good yet. Even at the level of fancy beatings I'm at now, I can still get my rump handed to me by my fiance, who favors smacking me in the face with long ranged weapons before I can even get close enough to do something impressive looking. Curse you! A few of the characters (Voldo, Ivy, Yoshimitsu) are utterly pathetic until you learn at least a few combos with them. I'd still argue that Yoshimitsu is still relatively pathetic even after you learn a few of his fancy moves, but that's just a matter of taste -- dude's just fruity. Characters generally seem well balanced; 2 of them are jack of all trades characters that copy, either partially or completely, the style of other fighters. Necrid, the Todd McFarlane designed character (I guess they made a deal with him so they could use Spawn in the Xbox version?) is fairly dull, and he summons energy representations of several other fighters' weapons. Yay. He does have a few of his own unique moves, making him at least a little more fun than Charade, who randomly takes on the weapon and moves of one fighter when each round begins. Weapon Master: I've mentioned my general annoyance by the plot previously, so I won't harp. Weapon Master mode is essentially a web of fight locations, and each time you successfully beat a fight, you open up pathways to new areas where, surprise, you can fight some more. All of the fights have some trick to them to make them something other than "Fight this guy!", and the trick ranges from fun to absolutely infuriating. The fun ones are generally excuses to make you train up, like "Only air combos deal damage" or "Only hitting the other fighter against the walls of a cage deals damage". Those make you learn some finesse you wouldn't have otherwise bothered with, and I'll admit to retreating back to Training Mode just to learn how to lift characters into the air and smash them back. More common, sadly, are ho-hum beat fests -- the dungeons are boring excuses to string fights together. You only have to defeat them once and move on, but there's already a Survival Mode in the game; it's not much more fun to play through an "unexplored dungeon" where each room has a fight. The really obnoxious ones are less of a test of skill then they are of luck. I'm not offended by "Beat up 5 characters in a row with limited healing between each round," that IS a test of skill, and that's very appropriate. The horrible ones like, "If you fall down, a bomb on you kills you, but your opponent can fall down all he likes" or "Your opponents weapons are electrified and stun you, but you don't have that ability" are just dumb. There's no penalty for losing (in fact, you get a pittance of experience and gold) and can retry the fight all you like, but it just becomes a luck test -- will the AI sucker punch me, or can I get off a string of uninterrupted pinning and rapings before that happens again this time? After a while, I got tired of playing that game, and just opted for cheese -- you can usually Ring Out your opponent by knocking them out of the arena, and some characters (Voldo) excel at easy to pull off, effective knock backs. So, in fights that just weren't satisfying, I swapped characters and pounded my opponent out of the park. It wasn't any more satisfying, but it got the job done, and I never intend on playing those missions ever again. I've just about beaten Weapon Master mode (once you beat it the first time, there is a second, tougher set of missions that unlocks a few areas you couldn't access previously on your first trip), and I sorta doubt I'll bother to replay it once I've seen and done everything. You earn money from your fights (some are big cash cows you can fight over and over again) which you spend on weapons, character costumes, and other special goodies that matter only to the "must-have-everything" collector, but once you get all those, I don't think $ has any more use to you. There's no gambling for trophies like in Super Smash Melee, there's no real expensive things to save up for; once you buy everything you can, you're pretty much done with Weapon Master mode. That's sort of a pity; it's vital that you bulldoze through the game to unlock all the characters and modes of play, but without any real incentive to play them again, I'm not going to bother. What would be nice: Allow you to play some of the odd mission options in Vs. mode. Super Smash Melee has a whole suite of options you can invoke to make Vs. play customized; why can't I play electrified cage matches versus my buddies? The only things you can select are weapons, % life, and the stage you play on, but Weapon Master has all sorts of options (characters heal, characters take damage over time, only the weapons are visible, only X type of attack deals damage, etc.) that you can't select in other modes. That's a shame, because I'd love to play me some air supremacy matches. I've gotten pretty good at Link's up-stab and tornado swirl... The Aesthetics: Gorgeous eye candy. Soul Calibur 1 was stunning on the DreamCast; not that many improvements were made, but, well, they weren't really all that needed. Skin textures are generally lacking, but hair and clothing movements are spot on, and a lot of love went into the physics. There are some clipping issues for clothing at times (Talim has poofy sleeves that often intersect with her torso), but these are simply nitpicks. If you're a fan of such things, boobies jiggle nicely. It's not overtly jug shaking like Dead or Alive, but Ivy, the whip-sword dominatrix looking character, has nice cans. I'm also pretty sure you can see Taki's nipples. Tee hee, I got to say nipples in a game review! Sounds are a bit on the lacking side. Music is flat; even the Zelda theme doesn't really play out quite right. The narrator usually says something pretentious at the beginning of a fight, to the tune of "Two fighters, linked by destiny. A sword calls to each of them" or some garbage. That gets old real fast, and there's no option (that I know of) to knock it off. Fighters generally have something stupid to say both before and after the fight that makes me wonder about the quality of the translation - notable quotables: "Your soul makes a poor meal" (Cervantes) Frankly, the rod comment makes me laugh every time, particularly when it's randomly generated against a large breasted opponent. Link and Voldo don't actually say anything, so they earn big points in my book for not being obnoxious. Final Thoughts: It's one of the few fighters that lets you whale on a downed foe for a few seconds, and then gives you a cinematic replay of the last 5 seconds of brutal abuse. In fact, kicking them when their down is what Vs. play is all about; I still remember laughing my head off the first time I played Soul Edge while the same buddy I loaned Soul Calibur 2 for his wedding weekend was pounding my face into the ground for the camera's delight. Soul Calibur 2 doesn't miss a trick off of the originals -- it's a nice, gussied up version, a solid fighter all around, practically begs newbies to give it a try, and has enough variety to make it a fun party pleaser. It's just too bad Weapon Master mode is more chore than single player experience. |
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I don't know why these sorts of announcements always shock and surprise me; we've known about a Kingdom Hearts sequel for some time. It's just nice to know that somebody somewhere has been working on it, since Kingdom Hearts meant so much to me as a gamer / Disney fan. Here is the first official info (from the Tokyo Game Show)... KH2 for PS2, and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for GBA. Yes, GBA!
Chain of Memories will take place immediately after the events of the original PS2 Kingdom Hearts. KH2 is reportedly several years later (note Sora's slightly older look). That artwork is also teasing Mickey himself in KH2... although draped in some kind of ninja hoodie.
I remember my early excitement for Kingdom Hearts, a game I was tracking well over a year before release. And despite my storied misgivings while playing the game, that excitement is back. Even stronger, since the natural inclination is to believe that Square Enix has ironed out the ugly wrinkles.
The other side of the coin is what the Mouse House themselves intend to do with Kingdom Hearts. Rumors have whirled around breathing of a Kingdom Hearts movie or cartoon. The format? Who can say. Could be a fairly pedestrian half hour cartoon series... or a direct-to-dvd animated film, maybe even CG animated. Or it could be a project doomed to Disney Development Hell, never bubbling to the surface.
Another announcement of interest from TGS is Nintendo's wireless GBA adapter. This gadget will finally break the ties of the venerable Link Cable. My gut feeling is that this was planned as a built-in for the GBA's successor, but Nintendo re-engineered it to trump the wireless claims of the N-Gage and the Sony PSP. Tomorrow's technology today, thanks to capitalism. Bad news: this adapter will not work with old games, only new ones. You're stuck with the Cable there. Good news: Nintendo is giving it away for free with next year's Pokemon Red and Green revamps. Kickass game and essential peripheral? Terrific. The only remaining blank spot is how long it will take Nintendo to release a wireless GBA adaptor for the GameCube. Any way you look at it, this is a sure sign that Nintendo has every plan to keep the GBA on top of the pack.
We've come to the point where we don't expect Toys R Us to have anything in stock within a week of the release date... much less when the week includes a hyped-up hurricane. But mysteriously and happily, we found Simpsons: Hit & Run; in fact, the last GameCube copy available.
That's not to say it wasn't a Geoffrey-sponsored scavenger hunt. My first pass of the racks came up empty, so I checked the PS2 side of the aisle. The PS2 stock is much better organized. Alphabetized, even. When Hit & Run appeared in PlayStation format, we figured the Nintendo edition must just be well-hid.
It was. The slips were part of a spastic mess of identified tickets attached to a support pillar in the middle of the GameCube display. I was so excited I completely forgot to look for Boktai, that GBA game with a built-in sunlight sensor.
The second surprise of the day came when the game didn't suck. It's GTA-lite, a weapons-free driving and exploring game set in a fully-realized Springfield. It's a shame that Simpsons: Road Rage was ever released (now more than ever), because having played RR steals a lot of the visual thunder from Hit & Run. In both games, you drive around Springfield, so lots of settings and sight gags necessarily appear in both. Kind of a shame. If RR had never been existed, Hit & Run would come off a lot funnier and fresher. So if you've never played Road Rage, you have no excuse to do so now. Hit & Run trumps it on every level. If you have played Road Rage, hopefully you'll find driving Marge's vaunted Canyonero just as amusing... again.
In other car game news, Rhonda and I are playing the heck out of Starsky & Hutch, a PS2 driving/shooting game based on a license that has no right to shelf space these days. If you'll recall, this game was the reason I bought a light gun a month ago.
You would expect that a Starsky & Hutch game would get a lot of bad reviews, and you'd be correct. But I'm here to say that the game isn't all that bad, and it has one huge mitigating factor: $20. For some reason, this game is $20 brand new (I saw it for $20 at both EB and TRU, so don't assume it's a retailer-specific deal. Plus, at EB you got a soundtrack record. Yes, a record. While supplies last, I'm sure.)
I've already leaped to the game's defense on GameGirlAdvance.com and I'll continue to do so here. This is a mediocre-looking game that is perfectly playable. There's some slowdown, average graphics, indistinguishable cartoon voices for the leads, and an unforgivable amount of Huggy Bear lionizing. But it's fun regardless. Let me paint you a picture: I'm sitting on the couch in the driver's seat, controlling the Striped/Red Tomato with the Dual Shock. Rhonda is in shotgun position, armed with, well, a shotgun... in the form of the GunCon2, anyway. I drive like a madman through the streets of Bay City, chasing and ramming whatever vehicle I'm told to chase and ram. (It's all very Grand Theft Auto at this point.) Rhonda then acts as the muscle, shooting powerups in the sky and peppering the enemy cars with lead. She even gets to peg gun-toting baddies along the sidewalks or leaning out of the car. As if to emphasize the game's quick, dirty style, she doesn't even need to reload! ...which in most games turns into a request for carpal-tunnel anyway.
See, that's just great. Easy, cooperative fun. When these sorts of multiplayer console games were discussed five years ago, the standard line was "Gaming is a solo activity. You can't expect people to buy games that require two or more people to play." Well, Adventures of Cookie & Cream did it. Starsky & Hutch did it (for $20.) And the forthcoming Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles will do it with a cherry on top.
Nothing happened.
Today marks my one year anniversary of playing Animal Crossing. I've played every day since September 17, 2002. I was hoping that something cool would happen today, but nothing did. I can't say I'm surprised; that would be a pretty awful way to hide a secret in the game, wouldn't it? Very very few players would hit that goal. But it would have been great to get Super Mario Bros. in the mail this morning. I would have went straight to the message boards and posted in all caps.
So let's reflect on what I've accomplished after a year living in Animal Crossing.
- Catalog completion: fossils, stationery, K.K. songs.
- Completed the fish and insect collection screens.
- One painting to go, and my entire museum is finished.
- For several weeks, I had every single villager wearing the Noble Shirt.
- Collected the complete Harvest series, Jingle series and Igloo item sets.
This is not a complete list, but here's some items I still have never found... even after a full year of playing plus tons of eCard purchases: Well (from the Western set), White Bishop, Red Corner, Lawn Mower, Surfboard, Diver Dan, Life Ring, Pagoda, Bonfire, Propane Stove, Daisy Meadow, Pulse Shirt (plus several other Gracie designs), Green Pinwheel, and about 20 different gyroids. Feel free to contact me about trades, but no universal codes please.
So do I continue? Honestly, yes. I missed several special events over the last year... like next week's Fall Sports Festival, for example. But get this: once you get the special rare item from an event, you can never get it again. I found this out at the recent Harvest Moon party. Last year, Tortimer gave me the special Moon item, and I sold it for quick cash. This year, no item. Just small talk. I assumed that every year you could collect the event-exclusive items again, but that is not the case. I'm more than a little pissed about that. Seems like playing one particular day over the course of a damn year should earn you the right to multiple copies of rare items. (Or in this case, replacing one that was foolishly sold.) I guess Nintendo anticipated cheating time travellers that would beam from year to year to collect a house full of Moons. Thanks again, you cheating bastards.
You may have noticed the text ads over in the sidebar. They're from Google AdSense, a relatively new pay-per-click ad service. If fourhman.com delivers X amount of clicks on those ads, I will eventually receive X dollars.
But what I find interesting about it is the kind of ads it creates. It's supposed to "read" your content and select ads based on what your page is about. I actually kinda respect the concept here, because at least the ads are trying to be relevant to people who are reading the site... people like you. It's not like going to a TV station's website and seeing ads for refinancing your mortgage.
So on fourhman.com's video games page, you'll see ads for video games for sale. Perfect. On the card games page, it's currently generating links for Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I guess that's more or less okay.
It gets a little hazy from there on out. The Pokemon Sapphire Diary turns ads for precious gems... despite the word "pokemon" being 10x as common as the word "sapphire." Perhaps I need that accent over the "e". The Animal Crossing Log has the service completely stymied, so I added a short introduction using the words "Nintendo" and "game" as many times as I could.
As for this weblog stuff, who knows. Everything was video game related until I wrote that posting about showtunes and now I'm getting ads for Annie sheet music. Always in motion is the future.
Anyway, although it would be nice if those ads would cover my hosting bill, I'm not worrying about it. Consider it more of an experiment in robotic intelligence, as Google's spider apps do their best to understand this site and create ads that make sense. And if you see something you like, I hope you don't get ripped off by the end vendor. Now for some random keywords I hope will generate some Good Deals For You.
Wireless router. Apple Macintosh. Comic books. The Simpsons. Harry Potter. T-Mobile Sidekick. iPod. Resident Evil. The Muppet Show. Star Wars. Dragon Ball Z. Yoga DVD. Surround Sound. Super Monkey Ball. Maine Coon. Superman.
Or maybe you'll just see more ads for Broadway shows.
The other day Rhonda asked me "What are you doing humming showtunes?" I stopped in mid-walk. I was humming something from Les Miserables; who knows how I got that stuck in my head. I did have to do an internal double-take though, because I never really considered Les Mis showtunes. I guess it is, by definition. I've always thought of showtunes as the simple, silly, dippy musical songs. Like from freakin' Oklahoma, or The Music Man. Where the corn is as high as an elephant's eye indeed.
So in my little brain category cubbyholes I ranked Les Mis over and above that sort of thing. I guess it was mainly a matter of content... the melodrama of love / justice / war winning out over the likes of Big Trouble in River City. Dead Orphan Gavroche over Little Orphan Annie, if you will.
Either way, I never considered myself as a guy who hums showtunes.
I didn't even own a copy of Les Mis, except perhaps for an old dubbed cassette which I would rightly refuse to listen to today. So I figured a trip to the iTunes Music Store would be fruitful. I downloaded a "Highlights from Les Miserables" album and quickly shuffled it off into the iPod.
As a rule, my family never watched musicals growing up... much less entertaining exposure to Broadway shows. Except for The Muppet Movie, I suppose. Plus, I was a kid during the weird time when Disney was between musical productions... the era enclosed by Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh and The Great Mouse Detective, all of which averaged about one song each. And none of which would be considered "musicals," I'd say. Hell, except for Pooh, they aren't even considered great films. Disney is still waiting for the planet's last remaining Black Cauldron fans to die off. I'd wonder aloud why I even grew up loving Disney stuff except that I know the answer: marketing.
And now "On My Own" is stuck in my head again.
(By the way, that drawing of Kermit is from Muppet Central, a great Muppet fansite.)
All I really need is a long list of unlockables and I'll play any game you hand me. So it is with Soul Calibur 2, a game I probably would have skipped were it not for the list of hidden weapons and costumes and other such junk. I don't play a lot of fighting games, but I believe the equation went something like this: unlockables + Link + unanimous gushing reviews = purchased. If you're going to buy a fighting game, you might as well buy the best one around.
Our neighbor kid came over to play SC2 the other night, and he kicked my ass. He even cranked down his life % and he still beat me around. Ah well, he has a Dreamcast, so he's probably well-versed in mad Soul Calibur skills. Plus his part time job is to haunt the store game kiosks whenever his mom takes him shopping.
He cracks me up with his views and opinions on video games, and I often wonder if I was that way when I was 10. I guess he gets these ideas from school friends and crappy magazines, but he always has some crazy notion about the best way to beat a game. Months ago we played a lot of Lord of the Rings: Two Towers together; he finished off the last couple levels of my saved game and unlocked the Orthanc bonus level. This week he decides he wants to play TT again to beat Saruman (we never did beat him back when we first unlocked it.) But he's convinced that Legolas is the best character to do it, so he starts a new game to train up Legolas since I had concentrated mainly on Aragorn in my file.
All those younger-skewing game rags feed into that: BEST CHEATS INSIDE! UNLOCK SECRETS NOW! UNBEATABLE MOVES! And schoolyard legend bolsters it up. It reminds me of when he knowledgeably informed me that my best chance of getting a Charizard card was to buy only boosters with a picture of Blastoise on the wrapper.
Here's the staff of the first video game magazine I ever read:
These guys are from Game Informer Magazine circa 1992, although it sure feels like more than a scant decade separates the magazines of today from those chumps. Who knows how I even subscribed to this mag, since I didn't even own a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis. And anyway, it was produced by FuncoLand, so it was primarily a means to encourage kids to buy games. It was basically a catalog dressed up with articles and reviews.
From an article on "The History of the CD-ROM": Only time will reveal the winner between CDTV and The Imagination Machine. ... Already waiting in the wings is Sony's Play Action Station CD-based system. ... Nintendo is also in discussions with Sony to make their CDs compatible on the Play Station.
From an interview with Bart Simpson: Anything you'd like to say to your fans? "Stay cool and don't have a cow, man."
The highest reviewed game in this particular issue is Kid Chameleon, a Genesis game, with an overall score of 9 out of 10. No game reviewed scored less than 6.25 (Super Golf for Sega Game Gear, and that's only because Ross the Rebel Gamer gave it a withering 4.75. Ah, the days when games were graded to the hundredths column!) The cynic in me suggests that all these high scores are simply to keep FuncoLand in business, but perhaps I'm forgetting the innocent, exciting, every-game-is-cool times.
