miketheratguy

You make some good points, but we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I'm not fanning the flames, I'm posing perfectly reasonable questions. Namely, "For what reason did they decide that this story should be told with such a radically different cast? Implying that someone is anti-feminist (or, by extension, misogynist) for simply asking the question rather than accepting the information wholesale is like calling someone anti-patriotic for asking why America went to war with Iraq after September 11th. I can sympathize with a situation while still questioning certain aspects of it, the two aren't mutually exclusive. Nothing about GB fundamentally dictates that its cast be male, no. But following through with that logic, nothing about it fundamentally dictates that it's about fighting ghosts either. It's not a law, after all. Just because something is apparent doesn't mean that it has to remain static. Why not make the plot of a Ghostbusters reboot revolve around a mute Russian child who travels to Alaska to find the parents who abandoned him when he was born? If there's not going to be any standard of continuity from one film to the next, why stop at the cast? Why not change everything? And then, why not paint such a change as somehow progressive or noble heroic, by implication of the fact that the people who question it are being seen as "wrong"? Sure, plenty of people have made this a blatantly sexist argument by saying that the movie shouldn't star women, end of argument. I don't think that's the same as questioning the logic behind why such a choice was made. For not having seen the film, I'm confused as to why you're so quick to defend it. You assert that casting the film with female leads will open the door to all kinds of fresh ideas. Sure it might. Then again it might not. They took the gamble, and I guess whether that gamble is successful will continue to be played out on the internet and, more importantly, the eventual box office receipts. So far though? Idunno. Did you see any great new ideas in the trailer? Is there any evidence yet to view this as an improvement? I never claimed that there would be absolutely no difference between an all male and all female cast, nor that the resulting films would be completely interchangeable. I would, however, stop short of presenting the idea as some kind of inventive concept that will automatically make for a superior film. I anticipated that response to my mentioning of Coming to America which is exactly why I went ahead and used it. The cultural adaptation at the heart of the film doesn't derive form the main character's ethnicity, it derives from the fact that he's chosen to eschew the suffocating trappings of his royal lifestyle by traveling to a notoriously rugged and unglamorous city across the world. He's reacting to thugs, a crummy apartment, and the rigors of a menial job. He's not reacting to racism. As far as the specifics of the plot are affected it's all but incidental that the character is black. Change him from an African prince to an English one and you have the exact same film. The point is that regardless of all this, the characters are black. They could have been something else, but they weren't. It is what it is. So does someone have every right to come along and remake the movie using an all-white cast? Yep. Could the same story be told? Yep. Would it fundamentally change the events that transpire in the film? Nope. Now, would it be suspicious or at least a little odd to make such an ostensibly unnecessary lateral change? Would it be wrong for a person to be given pause and choose to question the motives behind such a change? Is a person fanning some kind of hateful flames for openly wondering whether a change is made for personal interests instead of objective artistic merit? These are the things that we seem to be in disagreement about. I don't take your comments personally. There's nothing wrong with having one's thoughts or opinions challenged, and right from the beginning of our interactions on this forum you've struck me as a good guy. It does bother me to be slightly nudged towards the misogynist column, especially since I feel that I've given the issue more rational thought than the spitefully entitled masses out there that you're lumping me in with, but I don't think that it's a personal slam. And remember that again, I'm not even particularly upset or emotional about the issue. I think the trailer looks fine, I'm not against giving the movie a chance. Like you, I ALSO believe that there shouldn't be a shitstorm of controversy just because someone decided to try to tell an interesting story with female actors (and to be fair, since we haven't seen the film, the ship has yet to sail on either of us making a call as to the success of that attempt). And, like you, I ALSO have no deep-seated personal affection for this franchise. I thought that the original was a lot of fun, the sequel was pretty dumb, and I've not played the recent video game. That's it, there you go. I'm not trying to bash the cast of this film (who, again, I have legitimate sympathy for) nor say that it's sacrilege for it to exist. I'm simply calling into question the mentality of changing something that didn't really need to be changed, just because someone could change it. At best, it's an amazingly satisfying change for the better. At worst, it's someone's personal agenda made manifest. Then again, maybe it's right in between: "pointless lateral move". You don't have to agree. But if you can honestly tell me that this change is so organic, so understandable, that you never even questioned it - that not even once before the shitstorm began did you find yourself wondering why it was done - then what else could I say? You're less cynical than I am.

This isn't just an ordinary movie or an original comedy though. This is a reboot of an existing (and wildly popular) franchise that has many clearly established elements, like you said - among them a cast of primarily male leads. I can get behind the logic of, say, seeking the talents of Steve Carrell and fashioning a movie around him (though I think that he's an example of how all comedies are NOT created from the cast up, as Evan Almighty was written before second choice Carrell was even approached). This case is different. To resurrect an existing, beloved, well-established blockbuster franchise with an entirely new cast is lame enough as it is. To do it by making sure that the cast is as radically different from the original as possible stinks of a conscious effort to make some kind of statement. Even if the movie WAS designed from the ground to serve as a vehicle for someone like Melissa McCarthy, I would argue that it was an irrelevant and wholly inappropriate misuse of the franchise. If this film really was designed backwards - that it was created to showcase a cast rather than the cast being chosen to suit the film - why did all the leads wind up being women? Was that just a coincidence? Of course not, it was someone's conscious choice. If this movie was made from the cast up then someone, be it the writer, the director, the studio or all of the above, made the decision to make the cast entirely female. Why? And with the lone male star taking the role a receptionist, the same role previously occupied by a female, to boot? If this wasn't done to push someone's personal agenda, or to transparently further political correctness, or to make some kind of self-righteous stance for equality, then why was it done? How does the movie benefit from all-female leads? Does this mean that no male actors were good enough, or even considered? Then if so, once more: why? Again, it's not the idea of an all-female cast that bugs me. It's the gimmicky message-motivated logic behind the casting that bugs me. People watch a movie called "Ghostbusters" because they want to see ghosts being busted, not because they want to be educated about equality. If the film delivers such a message then it's just going to irritate the people who didn't become Ghostbusters fans so they could be preached to about political correctness. And if the film DOESN'T deliver such a message then the whole endeavor was a pointless exercise to begin with. I'm not inherently against genre subversion but that doesn't mean that I think it's always appropriate or even necessary, either. I feel terrible for the cast of this movie. They didn't deserve the firestorm of controversy, none of this is (presumably) their fault. They're off visiting sick kids in hospitals while people bitch about the idea that women are starring in a franchise that they like. To which again, I say that that argument is missing the point. Those people shouldn't be complaining about women showing up in their beloved series, they should be asking whether their beloved series was brought back for the purpose of pushing someone's social agenda. I don't personally believe that this film was made to showcase the talents of a cast who, oh wow would ya look at that, just happened to all be female. I believe that this movie was made to showcase a cast that was specifically intended to be all female from the start. The former is cool, the latter not so much. One is earnest, the other has ulterior motives. For some movies it would be perfectly fine, for a movie like this it seems dubious. If you're not making the kind of film that requires a specific type of cast then maybe you shouldn't have gone out of your way to hire a specific type of cast. If you do want to hire a specific type of cast then maybe the movie that you craft around it should be something other than the reboot of Ghostbusters. Or do it, I guess, but then don't act surprised when a bunch of confused fans say "what the hell'd they do that for"? If someone decided to remake Coming to America using nothing but white people I really have a hard time believing that people would say "It doesn't matter, it's a comedy. Plot and character are what's key".

But the game itself takes place in like 3188 or something. Eh, who cares anyway. I'm too busy checking out Rynn down there.

Oh man, Doom for the SNES!!! I LOVED that game! Granted, since I didn't have a PC at the time it was my first introduction to Doom so there's going to be a bias, but I found the game to be great. Outstanding music, excellent use of mode 7 graphics (complete with fancy schmancy FX2 chip!). I thought that it was pretty impressive that a game like that turned out so well on the SNES. Though, granted, the lack of a level select or save feature did indeed suck. It's a funny coincidence that you bring that one up because after I wrote my post and then headed to bed last night I remembered a different game that disappointed me much more greatly than American Gladiators, because I actually had high hopes for this one. And I played it at exactly the same time that I played SNES Doom, during a memorable and formative time in my youth when, at the tender age of 17, my mom and stepdad and I moved out of my hometown to a completely foreign little hamlet 150 miles away. The house was beautiful but the town was tiny and I was separated from all of my friends and familiar locations. All I could do there was rent video games from the next town over to keep myself from being depressed. I owned (and was probably halfway through) Doom, but as a change of pace one of the very first games that I rented in this new town was The Secret of Evermore, aka "the game where an American team caused Squaresoft to trip and fall right on its face, breaking several teeth". I hated The Secret of Evermore. It was that rare game that was so dull, so boring, so indistinct and forgettable, so bland of personality that it transcended indifference and became something that actively annoyed. Here was a company that hadn't yet sold out to become "those people who made Final Fantasy VII and apparently nothing else", a company that had produced quality title after quality title of wizards, warriors, swords, sorcery, white magic, crystals, interesting characters, dazzling quests. But with Secret of Evermore? I don't even know. What I remember about the plot is that some stupid towheaded modern kid goes to the movies with his dog and somehow gets transported to the past where the goal is not to be a shitty game, and he fails. A game about traveling to different worlds and time periods? Like a year after Chrono Trigger, one of the most amazing games ever made and which covered the exact same territory? Way to shoot yourself in the foot. Secret of Evermore was touted heavily as the next Square game because this was at precisely the time when the company's titles like Final Fantasy III (USA) and The Secret of Mana, Evermore's spiritual predecessor, had broken into the public's consciousness and earned Square the reputation as a publisher of consistently solid titles. Before this time its worst-reviewed game was probably Mystic Quest, and only then because that game was designed for the entry-level RPG crowd. In other words everything they touched was pretty much gold, and then they hired out an American team to shit out The Secret of Evermore. I wish I remembered more specific things about it to complain about but I can't because the game was that frighteningly dull. I can still recall puzzles from Final Fantasy Adventure on the Gameboy. I can still recall enemies from the original Final Fantasy NES game from 1990. I hardly got to play Secret of Mana but I still distinctly remember the creepy intro scene. I remember almost nothing about The Secret of Evermore. I remember the dorky blond kid, the dog follower that changes form in each time period, and something about pyramids and a science lab. Oh and the very first boss that you fight which Square was apparently so impressed by that they stuck it on the cover of the box. I'd seriously never been so underwhelmed by a game that had such a high pedigree. I begrudgingly pushed through the game because I figured that I might as well get the most that I could out of it, and it still didn't leave an impression on me. I quickly sold the game and never touched it again. Meanwhile I spent the rest of that transitional summer playing Doom and Super Mario RPG, totally loving them both. Secret of Evermore? Crap on that stink.

Lol Ghostbusters II was okay. I didn't hate it either. It just wasn't a very satisfying follow-up to the original. I haven't ever laughed at anything that Melissa McCarthy has done, but I can't honestly say that I've ever seen anything that Melissa McCarthy has done...

For some reason, yes.

Wow, speak of the devil...

There's a bad Super NES game? Actually Mortal Kombat is a fine example. Great graphics, great sound, fairly accurate to the arcade. ...Minus the single most famous feature that made the game popular in the first place. I'll never forget when I was hanging out at the local video store with a bunch of the local kids and the FedEx boxes of Mortal Kombat came in. We all gathered excitedly and waited for the proprietor to set up his SNES in the store for us to check the game out. I was elected to be the first player since everyone there knew that I was good at the arcade game. Five minutes later we were left in utter confusion as to why Sub-Zero froze a dude and broke him instead of ripping off his head with the vertebrae still attached. The five or six copies of Mortal Kombat for the Genesis flew out of the store pretty much immediately. I'm tempted to say Rap Jam or Wayne's World but I'd rather choose something that I've actually played. Similarly it would be easy to say something like Shag Fu or Mario is Missing but the former is a multiplatform game and the latter is meant for an entirely different audience. I'm also tempted to say Drakkhen - which I did play, several times - but despite the fact that it's incredibly obscure and nigh-unplayable for newcomers, there's a lot about the game that I like. Hmm, you know what, off the top of my head I'm going to say American Gladiators. I don't really know what I expected with that game, I just know that it really sucked. It's one of the few SNES games that I remember renting blindly, based on my love of the source material, and having absolutely no fun with. I'll throw in a different game later if I can think of one that I really hated.

Katie Dippold, who wrote "The Heat".

Oh man, those splash pages used to drive me up the wall. There was a time when seemingly every single Retromags download began with one, meaning that I'd have dozens of icons on my computer that were a big black void with the Retromags logo on top. I had no idea what issue I'd be looking at unless I hovered over the icon to reveal the full title. I couldn't bitch though, it was a small price to pay for such an awesome and greatly appreciated resource. And it did cause me to go on a journey to find programs that would enable me to convert and edit the files, allowing me to remove those pages. I've since used those programs hundreds of times, they're very handy (one of them is the very program that I've been using to add the packaging art to the game manuals). Thanks again for explaining things, it's all good and I appreciate the apology as well as your intent to help. Ultimately it wasn't the biggest deal, I was just really confused and taken aback at first. I started to type and eventually delete probably half a dozen replies because I wasn't sure how to interpret what I perceived to be your dismissal or what I should say in response. You don't still have any of the magazines that you provided on replacement docs, do you? There are probably still some gaps that I could fill, if I could find copies that aren't marked.

What the??? Where in town is this?

Alright, elephant in the room right off the bat: I am absolutely not against a film with all-female leads (exhibit A: "The Descent", easily one of the best horror movies ever made). However I am against needless gimmick casting, and that's exactly what this project has always struck me as. It feels to me that rather than someone coming up with a new Ghostbusters movie because they had a great new idea for one, they simply said "hey, what if the Ghostbusters were women?" and came up with a movie from there. And it goes both ways - if someone resurrected the Alien franchise with a male lead I'd question the motives behind that choice as well. It's not the existence of an all-female Ghostbuster team that makes me roll my eyes, it's the seemingly arbitrary manner in which such a thing came to be. Now, having said that, the trailer looks fine. Nothing particularly amazing, nothing particularly offensive. The mood and comedy seem a little subdued but the effects look decent. The characters seem likable enough with the few lines that they have. I'm sure that I'll see it at some point. Besides, it can't be worse than Ghostbusters II. ...And Kristen Wiig with brown hair and bangs is a babe.

My favorite manuals were always the ones that took the time to itemize various aspects of the game. The Legend of Zelda is a prime example: One by one it described every special item, every enemy, every dungeon master. Stuff like that made reading the manuals more than just a means to learn how to play, it made the manuals fun little world-builders that helped to immerse me in the games. It helped a lot when the manuals were in color, and Zelda wins in that department as well. Unfortunately Konami's manuals were almost always shit, mostly black and white and usually filled with dumbass puns. Nintendo was much better with their booklets. Capcom was pretty decent. Square and Enix were phenomenal, going beyond mere instruction manuals by providing full guidebooks. Ohhh, so there's an inherent interest in directing people to replacement docs, eh? I'm very disappointed to learn about this shameless self-promotion. In all seriousness I have no qualms at all about sites like that one. I used to get lots of my manuals from that site and Vimm's Lair. They serve their purpose, even if many of the manuals are slathered with watermarks. That's never something that I even understood. The sites don't own the material, so what's the point of putting their labels on them? Do they receive commission? Is there a competitive manual archiving industry in which they want to be recognized as the leader? Do they get crazy ad-fueled revenue when someone sees a manual with their name on it and rushes to the site with an army of friends? It reminds me of movies I've downloaded where the uploader hardcodes his leet haxxor name onto the picture. It's like, "who exactly are you trying to advertise to"? So anyway I'm not bothered by Areala's link, sites like that are a great resource for old manuals (the watermarks and pointless download limits notwithstanding). I just figured that after working to compile cleaner and more interesting copies (in my opinion, anyway - I think it's really cool to have the packaging art) for my own personal use, maybe someone else would like to have them too. And I was never going to fight with her about the misunderstanding or anything. Based on what I'd said in my first post her response just sounded like a burn, and I didn't want to think that that's what she meant but I didn't know how else to interpret it, so I figured that the best way to address it would be to just kind of nod with acceptance and show myself out. Once she explained that she'd misread my post things made more sense. Pfft, no. Not now, anyway. We're referring to a bygone fantasyland where games came with supplemental materials, not web addresses where you can download the instructions along with the 15 percent of the game that's locked away on the disc.

Oh okay, that makes me feel better then. Linking to a manual site and ending the post with a winking "you're welcome" makes perfect sense in the context of trying to help someone who's looking for such a thing. For me, seeing that post in response to what I'd said read more or less as "Yeah, you know what? We're good, thanks. You know that this other site is a thing, right? Maybe you can try it after you piss off". Needless to say I spent several minutes utterly confused as to why you hated me.

Thanks? I mean like I said, the manuals on websites like that one don't include the packaging art and have huge watermarks on the covers (and sometimes, each of the pages). I really spent a lot of time trying to improve them and was just curious to see if anyone else would like to have them. If you're not interested that's cool, next time just tell me. Forget I brought it up, you can delete this thread.

Err.. ....... . . . .. ..... Super.........Mammary 2?

Hey everybody, over the last few weeks I've been working on a project and was wondering if it would be of interest to anyone else. I've been scouring the net and collecting all kinds of old video game instruction manuals, mostly for the NES but also some for the Genesis, SNES, Playstation, and a handful for the Atari 2600, Dreamcast, Gameboy, Sega CD, PC, etc. I've compiled several hundred and put in a lot of time to improve each one. I added the official box art to each game's manual, using scans of the actual boxes whenever I could find them (which results in a nostalgic collection of lightly worn box covers that feature the occasional crease, shrinkwrap, or vintage sticker). The front page of a pdf is typically what's used for the file's icon, so when you put these on an ebook reader that has a virtual shelf display you get what looks like a bunch of game boxes sitting on the shelf of an old rental store. In addition I ended each manual with a scan of the game's rear cover, again using a shot of the real thing whenever possible. The result is a digital collection of classic video game manuals that are bookended by images of the packaging material that you'd have if you owned complete physical copies. The collection will seem pretty random since it's not all-inclusive, but is rather a collection that represents my own personal history of games that I own, have played, or am otherwise interested in. It takes hours upon hours to find, download, and edit multiple images into hundreds of pdfs and I had absolutely no desire to do this with games that I've never played or don't care about. There are a couple of old torrents and packs out there that do include more complete collections of manuals for a dedicated system, and there are also a couple of sites that archive some of the manuals in my collection as well. The difference is that some of the manuals in the torrents are arranged as multiple jpegs, many of the ones on the download sites are stamped with watermarks, and none of them have the cover art or rear packaging shots that I've added (because I prioritized scans of physical boxes when adding front and rear cover art, it was unavoidable that a few of those covers do have small watermarks. The manuals themselves don't). I'm assuming that there's no place for the manuals here on the site itself, but maybe some of you guys are like me and would simply like to have them for your own digital book collections as a curiosity or nostalgic keepsake. If any of you are interested let me know and maybe I could pack them up on mediafire or something. Here's NES classic Castlevania as a sample. http://www.mediafire.com/download/9r2th9ougbscphx/Castlevania_I.pdf

I bought my 3DO for Wolfenstein and loved it. If I remember correctly Super Street Fighter II was also really good on that system. Quarantine and Hell looked compelling but I never really got to play them. Always wanted to check out Killing Time, the ads made it look crazy. I was actually pretty disappointed with the movie. Like many SNL films it demonstrated that when the characters of a sketch are expected to fill the universe of a feature-length film the results are almost never successful (there have been some exceptions, of course, but I think this is generally the trend). Many of the situations that the Nerd found himself in weren't all that funny, the script didn't give anyone any particularly witty dialogue, and there was too much emphasis on sidekick characters that appeared out of absolutely nowhere. My biggest laugh came right at the beginning (when the Nerd's boss pulls a gun on him for some reason) but I reacted to the rest of the movie with little more than the occasional polite chuckle. I love the Nerd but found the film to be overlong and much less entertaining than many episodes of the show. That said I don't regret stopping to check it out, and respect his ambition and affinity for cheesy low-budget storytelling.

Well I wasn't, so I didn't. I go back and forth. While I like the idea of a Maniac Mansion follow-up, and I'm sure that if the same creative team was behind it it must have been good, but so much of what I loved about Maniac Mansion doesn't even seem to be present in Day of the Tentacle, while a bunch of stuff that I'm NOT interested in is. The original cast of characters is all but gone for some reason, replaced by some bizarre combination of crazy chick and burnout dude. And rather than focusing on a 50s horror movie kind of plot, the characters....go back in time to interact with famous figures of history? ....Huh? That's not to say that any of those things are inherently bad, just different. I liked Maniac Mansion BECAUSE it was just a straightforward exploration of an ominous house in which you avoid strange characters and try to figure out how to use all kinds of seemingly random items. Traveling to the past and talking to George Washington strikes me as so left field and stunningly boring that it's always been difficult for me to reconcile that the two games even have anything to do with each other. From an outsider's perspective it almost seems like one of those situations where someone designed a completely independent game and then the studio bought it and shoehorned in the license to make a faux sequel. I grant that my knowledge of the game is pretty minimal and my perception probably way too harsh, and that the game could very well be amazing. I'm not against trying it sometime, and as a huge fan of Maniac Mansion I feel as if I should. But at the same time it seems so wildly different (and, in my opinion, aesthetically unappealing) that I wonder whether it has any of the elements that attracted me to the original game to begin with. Thanks for posting the trailer though. I did watch it, and it looks like it's probably a quality game, but it didn't do much to give me a different impression.

Darn, not late enough to include the anniversary issue. Still a pretty good window though.

Last video game system, yo.

Yep, since I only had consoles (and since the Sega CD was the only one to feature a Monkey Island game) I never played any of the others until Escape in 2001. I enjoyed it well enough, and appreciated the many references to the original, but in comparison I also found it less funny, less immersive, more obscure, and altogether less memorable. At this point the second one appeals the most to me because it seems so similar to the original, though I do hear a lot of people say that Curse was the high point. I liked the HD remake of the original game but not quite as much as I thought I would: being so used to the lines as they sounded in my head made the official spoken readings sound kind of odd and overly campy, and the music sounded "different" rather than "better". To me it was kind of a lateral move. So while I will play LeChuck's Revenge at some point, it's hard to say which version it will be. I do love Manic Mansion - thoroughly, in fact; it's one of my absolute top favorite games of all time - and it's actually this love that's made me NOT play DOTT yet. When I was about 13 or 14 and heard that MM got a sequel, I was crazed with excitement. Then I saw photos. Where are all the other characters? Who are these new people? Why is the interface so sloppy-looking? What's with the wacky post-modern art style? I've heard some people say that DOTT is actually even better than Maniac Mansion, but it looks so profoundly different to me that it's always been difficult to work up more than even a passing interest in playing it.

I would argue "relatively" cheap. Sure, the core price of games is a little less than it used to be at one time (I remember having to pay $70 bucks for SNES titles like Street Fighter II Turbo and Secret of Mana) but they're also more than they were at a different time (NES games were about $50, Playstation games were $40). The fact that prices aren't much higher these days is actually kind of amazing, since so many other things have gone up with inflation. At the same time, they're gouging us in other ways. To get a full title anymore you all but have to drop a hundred bucks for both the core game and the DLC that completes it.

Hey, I'm only referring to the price. What are yoooooou thinking about?

I'd legitimately be curious to see what that would be like since the only other one I played was Escape and Howard would be consumed with irritation at having to do it again. That reminds me of a good point that I wish I'd remembered during the podcast: While the special edition of the game doesn't have any new music or gameplay enhancements (that I can recall, anyway), it DOES have fully-voiced dialogue. That would have ameliorated at least a little of Howard's distaste for the suffocating silence of the game.