miketheratguy

Hey, if I used that guy's definition of "simultaneous" I could say that earlier this morning I took a shower and emptied my cat's litter box at the same time. Coincidentally, what I did simultaneously accomplish today was the uploading of the most recent podcast episode onto itunes as well as the uploading of all remaining episodes, including that one, onto Youtube. That's something like 24 hours of Contra Code goodness on both sites! It's retro gaming podcast for all!

Fffffffeh! It's still not simultaneous if he's letting two of the three games idle at any one time. He fails! I will not be impressed until I see someone capably wielding one monstrous abomination Nintendo 64 controller with each hand and two more with their feet!!!

I definitely give them the points for effort since one could describe a very large swath of EGM covers as screenshots, promo material or just the game's own box art. With Gamepro I just felt kind of embarrassed carrying around a magazine that had such doofy cartoon characters on the cover. I mean it's this... ...Versus this.

Wow, I'm seeing this late. Sorry for such a delayed response. This is what happens when I get a reply without quoting my post, lol. I'm using that notification icon like a crutch! Anyway thanks, yeah, I loved the soundtrack of the NES Maniac Mansion so much that I literally put the little tape recorder (which I got during the same Christmas that I got Maniac Mansion) next to the tv and just sat there on the character select screen, giving a couple of minutes to each one so I could loop their personal themes a couple of times each (favorites, for the record: Razor, Bernard and Jeff). I'd then put the recorder next to my pillow so I could listen to the music as I drifted off to sleep, and sometimes I'd take it with me just to hold up to my ear and listen to on car rides. I only did this with a few games from around that time that had really great soundtracks Castlevania III being a standout - but Maniac Mansion was my obsession. I really, really wish that I still had the tapes but if I do I've never been able to find them since around that time. It's a shame too, because I used one of them to record a long night of Castlevania III and Mega Man 3 which I played with my friend (and podcast co-host) Howard on New Year's eve, 1990. We were so funny on that tape, and that night was so fun to look back on, that I listened to it pretty regularly whenever I went on a trip. Then I moved on to other things - namely, girls - and when I remembered to go back and look for the tapes again, they seemed lost for good. I did something similar when I bought my first CD burner for Christmas of 2000. It was a machine the size of a VCR and cost $200 bucks. Man, how things change. Anyway I had my cable going through the VCR and the VCR's aux outs going into the CD burner, so anytime that something came on that I wanted to get an audio copy of - say the narration of a documentary, a music video, a favorite movie (Used Cars) or what have you, I'd just have to turn the burner on and fire up the CD-RW. Like you said it was amateur but fun, and in my case I was actually able to snag a unique prize that made the whole thing worth it: A performance of the bluesy folk song "Waiting On the Cards to Fall" by Guy Davis which I randomly caught one night on an episode of Conan 'O Brien. I would later find out that the live performance was vastly different from (and vastly superior to) the album version of the same song, and the Conan performance also featured a guest appearance by drummer and vocalist Levon Helm. To my knowledge no official recording of that performance or rebroadcast of that episode exist, meaning that my copy of it was the only one in the world (with the exception of maybe the NBC archives). It's a really great performance and I felt really lucky to get it, and when I had the ability to do so I made it available on Youtube. It feels pretty cool to preserve something so rare, and if not for the fact that I happened to be recording Conan at that exact time it would have been lost forever. My ex-girlfriend became a stripper! That's why she's my ex-girlfriend! Not a zombie though, at least not yet that I know of.

Lol I didn't know that it had to be just a light tap on the reset button. What needless frustration that must have caused countless kids. Come to think of it I don't think that Sega's CD-X has a reset button either. Or if it does I've forgotten since I packed mine away quite some time ago. Everyone remember Nintendo's reminders to hold the reset button while switching off the system so that data would be saved in games like Zelda and Ultima? I have to admit, it's little bits of tactile nostalgia like that that make me miss playing on the actual consoles.

Yep, that's the boring cheese pattern that I was talking about for SimCity, lol. I mean I guess if it works then it works, so more power to whomever likes to employ it. But that kind of hints at exactly why speedruns generally aren't for me: You're not watching someone playing a game so much as watching them "going through the motions" as they exploit whatever shortcuts or memorized patterns will get the game over with in the quickest fashion. To me that's kind of a shallow experience. That's not to say that it doesn't require talent or that anyone who chooses to watch it is in any way "wrong" or unjustified, it's just that when you're the kind of person who likes to watch a game being played to have the experience of exploring the various levels of depth, challenge and entertainment value that it offers, a speedrun is going to be fundamentally insufficient for that purpose. It's like watching someone beat Super Mario Bros. 3 in fifteen minutes by using the warp whistles to skip all the way to the last level: Sure, it takes knowledge to apply that shortcut and skill to go on to beat the game, but it would have been nice to see the person "earn" it by showing what it's like to go through the other 85% of the game that was completely dismissed. But again, it just comes down to personal preference. It's like the longplay / let's play comparison: Some people prefer to hear commentary, some people don't. There's different reasons to appreciate both. Though I call folly on the guy who finished Maniac Mansion and SimCity at the same time. He really didn't, he just did all the prep work in SimCity while Maniac Mansion sat there waiting and then switched to Maniac Mansion when it was time to put SimCity down and let the population grow. Here I was expecting to see video of some guy simultaneously playing both games with each hand.

Interesting, I definitely did get the impression that you were more of a PC player by far. Your further explanation makes sense. I actually did mean console games when I asked that previous question, but I think that I phrased it poorly. What I should have said was "did any console games stand out enough to win you over like the PC games did". The ones that you listed are good ones, and I've played all of them but Lolo and, surprisingly, Metal Gear. That one would be interesting. I think you're right about Lolo, it looks like an interesting enough game but probably not one that we could wind up saying a lot about. I wouldn't rule out a PC game or two somewhere down the line, but I do think that I'd probably need some help getting them set up. We'll see what happens. In the meantime I agree that Maniac Mansion Deluxe is probably the best version of the game out there, though I do miss the great music of the NES version. As for SimCity I did see a video on Youtube once that laid out a very boring and repetitive zoning structure that wound up growing to megalopolis stage within maybe a half hour, so I suppose one can rush through the game with relative speed if they know the cheesy success pattern.

That's actually a really good question. I have to admit that we'd never really considered doing PC games, since neither of us grew up with one (and Howard, in particular, only began playing PC games within the last few years). It would also be kind of a learning curve to figure out which versions of each game are best, what games are emulated with which program, and how we'd go about setting up DOSBox (since last I tried my computer was way too fast to run it correctly). We're born and bred console players - it is, by far, the gaming platform that we're most familiar with - but I don't think that either of us would be against trying out some PC games at some point. It probably wouldn't be right away but I definitely wouldn't rule it out. Let me talk to Howard once we get together to hammer out the next episode and see what he thinks. In the meantime, we're always open to requests. Since you grew up as more of a PC gamer, are there any particular console games that won your interest when you were growing up? You might remember from our inaugural episode that I was already disheartened just seeing someone zip through Mega Man in fifteen minutes, lol. I don't know if my ego can handle seeing someone speed through Maniac Mansion and SimCity at the same time.

Oh yeah. That was about as ubiquitous as the Konami code when I was a kid. I mean how could it not be? Punch-Out was a bitch! And it seemed that every savvy Nintendo player on the playground knew of the Justin Bailey code, but none of us ever knew who he was or what was his significance. It didn't take long for apocryphal tales to spring up about how Justin Bailey was this one kid's cousin or how this other kid knew him and that he was an expert Metroid player or helped design the game, etc. I never really looked into it but my understanding is that Metroid's password algorithm was flexible enough to give you results with all kinds of passwords, and that "Justin Bailey" was just one example. Still, I like wondering about stuff like this. Who was the first person to have tried out that code, and how did it become so famous? There was an X-Men game for the Sega Genesis that required you to hit the reset button in order to progress to the final stage (or some such thing). It was a neat trick similar to the kind of stuff that you'd go on to find in the first Metal Gear Solid. The problem? The Sega Nomad didn't HAVE a reset button so if you planned on playing the game in portable fashion, as I did, you found out the hard way that you were shit out of luck. You didn't have a SNES Game Genie? Aw man, you missed a whole lot of cheatin' fun. Though none of that really came from Mortal Kombat, I don't remember there being any particularly great codes for that one.

Thanks for the feedback. First of all, I personally love being thorough. I want to individually discuss every character and stage and piece of music. In-depth discussions of things that I like make for my favorite podcasts, so that was something that I hoped would make ours stand out too. Howard and I are definitely planning to mix things up between games that we've both played, games that only one of us have played, and games that neither of us have played. There's always going to be a bit of a bias towards games that we've both played since we have the most fun going back and giving them a second look, but we're also intrigued by the concept of tackling games that neither of us have grown up with. The situation of choosing a game (or, uh, having the GameMaster 2400 choose it for us, anyway) that only one of us have played is likely to be the one that comes up the least, since I'm the one who played the most games growing up and I'd feel kind of bad to repeatedly stick Howard into situations where he's playing catch-up. That said, we're completely open to all three categories and intend to keep mixing things up. In fact, the only real criteria that either of us had going into this (aside from the games' release windows) was my insistence that the first 10 episodes be a good mix of different genres across different systems so that initial viewers didn't get the impression that we were only going to stick to one type of game or console. We both enjoy talking about other items that were released in the same year of that episode's game, so that's something that's definitely going to stick around. In fact in each episode we tend to want to talk about more things like that but we have to hold back a little bit for the reason that you mentioned - sooner or later we're going to be covering the same year quite a few times and we're going to want to have things to keep talking about. We've discussed it though, and figured that there's always going to be SOME type of candy, or cereal, or toy, music video, whatever, that we can discuss at some length if need be. There's obviously a finite supply, but we figure that there's probably enough to sustain us for a while. Thanks Juggalo, I hope that you give it a listen and enjoy what you hear! Ah, I'm glad that you came on board and gave our podcast a shot. You seem to have liked it, so I'm happy about that too. I'm absolutely going to have all the episodes on Youtube - possibly after this weekend, in fact. I do regret that they won't have all kinds of neat visuals to go with our dialogue, but if integrating them means that I take forever to get the things published then it's just not worth it. As you heard I'm a big fan of the longplays, which allow me to reminisce by enjoying nothing more than the game's own audio and video. While I can see the appeal of let's plays, I generally just don't like people talking over video game footage. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that most of the let's plays, I've been exposed to WERE the more obnoxious, hypoglycemic reactionary types that I absolutely abhor, so I was really kind of turned off by the whole package. I don't doubt that there are some really good, really restrained and informative let's players out there though. Don't mind speedruns too much but if I'm watching video game footage it's because I want to be immersed in that game (without actually taking the time to go back and play through the whole thing again) so for me the idea of seeing someone whiz through the game as fast as possible while he and a group of people talk through it is interesting, but not as useful. Plus so many of those speedruns are tool-assisted, which I simply don't get. Is it really a "speed run" if you're just exploiting game code to trick it into letting you skip to the end more quickly?

Thanks a lot! I feel that the sentiment of "your show made this task faster / more tolerable" is some of the best praise that a podcast can get. Being something of an avid podcast listener myself, it's one of the ways that I myself discover which ones are the best ones. I agree about Howard's mic, we've actually talked about it before. We record the show by getting together on Skype, and he speaks through a nice expensive microphone attached to his computer while I speak directly into a headset that's attached to my Vita (which is what I'm Skyping with). We're not quite sure then if it's his mic that's a little quiet or mine that's a little loud, but he does what he can with the audio mix using software on his computer. The discrepancy is actually even more noticeable on the raw cut before the editing and publishing, but we seem to be getting a bit better at figuring some of this stuff out. And yeah, if I recall correctly Punch-Out was finished sometime around April of last year and I think we did TMNT in May, but then things happened in the summer (including a two week vacation on my part) to kind of slow both of us down. The huge gap in episodes is really my own fault, I'm the one who does the first pass of each episode to look for cuts or issues and in the case of TMNT I just kept failing to remember to get around to it. We were also getting discouraged, myself in particular, when it seemed that no one was really listening to the show. We're passionate about the project, but of course passion can only take a person so far before they start to think "is this really a worthwhile expenditure of my time"? Still, we always meant to get back into things, and I think that I just needed something to motivate me into wanting to get things rolling again. The feedback I've gotten here has a lot to do with that, and I think I also needed to remind myself that we knew this would be a labor of love, something that would take a while to gain an audience, and that it's still worth doing as long as Howard and I are having fun. He just delivered a second edit of episode 9 to me last night, so after I have the time to review it it should be ready to go live. And I'm going to get to the Youtube uploads as soon as I can too. I'm actually kind of surprised that you flew through all 8 episodes already. Really encouraging to know that you enjoyed them! Any suggestions, questions, or thoughts about any of the individual episodes?

I don't think anything is worth the trade-off of physical ownership, especially when the existence of a popular digital distribution service is hastening the extinction of physical media (and is, when I get right down to it, a service that essentially gets in the way of my ability to play games without offering any practical benefits in exchange). To each their own though, this is just my personal opinion.

I like this idea, it's similar to something that I did back on the THQ forums. Writing is kind of my thing, which most of you can probably tell by how lengthy my posts usually are. The closest thing that I have to a diary is my gaming podcast, which I obviously talk about in its thread. That's pretty much the only venue where I make note of current events in my life. The last time that I kept any kind of diary or journal was way back in late 2001, when I was going through a breakup with my girlfriend of four years, and writing my thoughts down every day was the only thing that kept me sane. I do actually keep what I call a "Christmas document", however. I'm a big nostalgic nut for Christmas and every December I add to an ever-growing Word document, describing what's going on for that particular holiday as well as recording as many memories and thoughts of Christmas-related things (movies, old toys, commercials, etc.) that I can think of. If I ever have kids it's the kind of thing that I'd like to pass onto them someday. I'm actually thinking of starting a food journal. I'm never going to be big and fat but once I hit 30 a while back the metabolism slowed and I slowly started morphing away from the gawkily skinny kid that I used to be all my life, so I'm currently dieting. I lost 20 pounds over the course of a couple months and seem to be sticking to my diet better than I expected I would, but I keep hearing that maintaining a daily caloric intake journal increases the chance of staying on track that much more.

I remember both of those for sure, since Ikari and Metroid were favorites when I was a kid. I was actually going to ask if anyone was familiar with the mysterious "Justin Bailey" so it's nice to see that someone else is. Also good to know that I wasn't the only kid calling it the "Contra code".

No worries, I'll just be excited to hear what you think if you do. It's also worth pointing out that we should have our most recent episode online sometime this weekend (our ninth) and I'm going to start putting the rest of the episodes on Youtube since I've gotten feedback that some people don't like using itunes. Howard and I were kind of out of the game for a while (things really slowed down last summer and fall) but we've been newly invigorated with a sense of motivation and interest, and that's due in part to the positive reactions that our show got here on this forum. So thanks to everyone who did check us out, and we'll be hoping that it continues!

Really? Wow, I don't remember that. That would explain it though. Useless!!! Cure 4 for EVERYBODY, and Bahamut and White for everybody ELSE!!!!

Ha, that's crazy! I memorized some of the Game Genie codes for Final Fantasy II as well! To this day I remember that 8267-OD62 gave you infinite magic. I don't know why I remember that one over the infinite health code but I'm guessing that I probably used the former more than the latter because it didn't take all the challenge out of the game. Plus if I recall correctly the health code was two lines (though I could be wrong). That second paragraph describes me exactly (well, minus the D&D and Magic details). I was always a geek, always heavily into gaming and socially awkward. Painfully shy as well, so by 7th and 8th grade I only had a few close friends (though I suspect that this was due to having GAD more than anything) and just kind of quietly kept to my games while everyone else went on to play sports and go to parties. The fact that you were the same would have made it more likely that you would have stood out to me. Hell, the mere fact that you played Final Fantasy II would have guaranteed that I'd make a pass at you.

Lol that sounds like something that EGM would have said but then again I'm sure it was a sentiment that the staff of roughly every video game magazine shared. Wow, was that the actual code? If you knew that without having to look it up then I'm really impressed. Man, I would have loved you when we were kids. Granted, my love would have gone unrequited, but I think I would have to have loved you all the same.

I agree with pretty much all of your points. Firstly, I'm surprised to meet someone else who doesn't play any games of this console generation. To be fair I technically do, but all of my modern gaming is done on the PC. When the PS4 and Xbox1 dropped I didn't see any reason whatsoever to "update" and here, a good two years later, neither have shown me anything to change my mind. This generation is the first since the Atari 2600 that I haven't jumped into the next wave at opportunity one, and when I realized that I was kind of taken aback. It really said something, to me at least, about the changing climate of the industry and how reluctant I am to be a part of it. I definitely appreciate the convenience of digital. After all I wouldn't be here if I didn't - all of my NPs, EGMs, PSMs and whatever else are packed away in storage boxes and quite the pain to dig through, so having the majority of them here in digitally archived form is incredibly useful. It's honestly kind of amazing to me that a good hundred or so pounds of sheer magazine are all stored on an SD card the size of my thumbnail and readily accessible in seconds on my ebook reader. 600 movies sit on my hard drive, ready to watch with little more than a few mouse clicks. A thousand songs are on my ipod and I can skip to whichever one I want to listen to in seconds. The next generation won't even know what it was like to have to rewind a VHS tape before returning it to a video store or stop and fast forward a cassette tape a dozen times in the hopes of landing on a certain song. These are amazing times that we're living in. At the same time, I value my physical collection. I like holding my old video game magazines in my hand, tangible flashbacks to my childhood that I can actually hold and page through and even smell. I like shopping for items by walking into a store and treating my eyes to aisle upon aisle of merchandise that I can actually pick up and examine. I trust myself enough to properly care for the games that I buy rather than let an online entity "store" them for me and potentially dictate how and when I can access them in the future. I enjoy owning my games, not just "leasing" them or whatever the modern fine print says I'm doing when I hand the cashier my money. Digital delivery (and storage) is an incredible thing that's made our favorite hobbies more convenient than ever, and I'm more or less okay with it as long as we continue to have the option of choosing media that's physical. But we're at a precipitous point in the industry where I worry that maybe the beast that we're feeding is eventually going to take a big enough bite that we'll be left without any fingers.

Always have to go with the Konami code, which my friends and I grew up calling the Contra code. Insert cheap plug for my retro video game podcast The Contra Code! Try it today! Seriously though, that was probably the first experience that I ever had with a video game "code". I couldn't believe that something as simple as an arbitrary series of button presses turned games like Contra and Life Force from intriguing titles that I couldn't survive for ten minutes into exciting memory-making machines that my friends and I conquered over and over and over again. I'll never forget the first time that I played the SNES version of Mortal Kombat. I'd somehow missed the reviews and had no idea that the game wouldn't contain blood or gorier fatalities (committing murder was okay as long as the victim didn't bleed). I'd never dealt with such obvious video game censorship before. So I'm standing there at the video store hangout with a few of the other local kids, waiting for the game to come in. It does, and the store proprietor says that it's going to take him a little while to process and sticker the new games but that in the meantime he can boot up the store's SNES and let us play. I was the most familiar with the game so I was elected to play it and show everyone the cool "death moves", and I excitedly obliged. It took all of three or four minutes for the atmosphere of the room to turn from giddy exuberance to abject confusion. It took only a few minutes more for the inevitable anger, frustration, and crowd of kids exiting with Genesis copies of the game. Except for me, because I didn't have a Genesis then. :( So I feel your pain. In fact, I don't know if you followed it this closely, but there was a time when people were so pathetically desperate to somehow restore blood to the SNES MK that EGM magazine printed a user-submitted Game Genie code that turned the game's little pixels of grey sweat into little pixels of red "blood". It was stupid and it was half-assed and you can bet that I ran out to rent the game and use the code immediately.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic because all I've done in the general "future of video games" topic like this one is bitch. If you're being serious though then thanks, I appreciate it. I've actually lurked / browsed / downloaded from Retromags for something like 7 or 8 years, I think, but for some reason never joined the forums and finally just decided that I should. As much as I probably do come across as snarky in some of my posts I actually am a pretty nice and easygoing guy, just your average everyday harmless geek who grew up a passionate video game fan and has a lot of memories and opinions of them. If my comments have an enjoyable tone a lot of it probably comes from the years I spent as sort of the elder mascot on the now-defunct THQ forums, where getting into conversations and debates about video games (and wrestling) with dozens of people was a regular thing. It's fun chatting with people here, you guys are generally closer to my age group. I can't remember what game it was but I just read about that very thing happening not too long ago. Then you've also got situations like the notorious debacle that was the SimCity launch in 2012 or so, when the game - which required a persistent online connection for basically no reason other than to disprove the company's suspicions that you were a thief - was so overloaded with players trying to connect that the servers crashed. This of course meant that millions of people who'd just legally purchased a sixty dollar game couldn't even play it, even just by themselves in an offline single-player mode. That's.... well that's really just ridiculous. I'm not personally familiar with Diablo III but my understanding is that they had their own nefarious scheme to "verify" its customers. Apparently the game could only be played once you went online, signed up for an account on the game's website, and registered your game with that account. This "tethered" that SPECIFIC copy of the game to you and you only, based on all your personal details and login information. What did this mean? First it meant that you couldn't ever sell the game, unless you wanted to give your detailed information to whomever you sold it to. On top of that, this was a violation of the game's EULA, and the company of course reserved the right to ban your account if it found out that you'd violated the EULA. And what happens if, for any reason, the company decides to ban your account? That's right, your tethered game is now disconnected - meaning that you can't ever play your game again. If I'm wrong I'm wrong but this is my understanding of how Blizzard handled Diablo III, at least until enough people had the good sense to complain. All this (and more) profound inconvenience for paying customers just so the publishers can prevent someone from playing their game for free, which a pirate with even a shred of determination is going to wind up figuring out how to do anyway.. The most frequent arguments I've heard in favor of gaming going exclusively digital are variations of the theme "I don't like having games all over the floor". So wait, let me make sure I understand: You're telling me that your existence is so disorganized and your living space so insufficient that you'd rather trust an impersonal third party corporation to take control of the things that you've spent money to own than even be given the choice of permanently and independently accessing physical versions of your own possessions? O... .....Okay...

For the most part I liked it. The first time I was there I met Richard Dreyfuss at the airport and saw the Hollywood sign in the distance during my bus ride into town. The second time that I arrived at LAX I got on the wrong bus and got lost, getting off somewhere in downtown LA at 1 in the morning. I was terrified that I was going to get raped, killed and eaten by street gangs but I took note of the intersection where I nervously awaited the next bus (and the huge skyscraper that was there in front of me as I waited) and later discovered that the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa is kind of like smack in the middle of the high-rise business district. Even after being there for a few years it was still pretty surreal to see palm trees and cacti everywhere. Awesome being able to look out the window and see mountains. My girlfriend attended a pretty high-end school (Scripps) and the landscaping of the campus was beautiful, lots of gardens and statues and fountains and open-air buildings. We lived right down the street from a botanical garden, which was nice. Many things like Wal-Marts, Mcdonalds and shopping malls felt pretty much just like they do back in Wisconsin, though it was weird getting used to different grocery stores like Vons and Albertsons (both of which we liked). Weather was hit and miss - I generally prefer colder temperatures so it was kind of rough being in the wide open sun, but I remember that there were often really nice cool breezy evenings and nights. Traffic was amusing - it seemed like everyone lost their minds anytime it rained. Lots of wildfires in the area, seemed like they happened not too far from the college every year. Didn't get to meet many people since we lived on campus and didn't have the means to get out much, but I suppose that they weren't much different than back home. Much skimpier clothes on a lot of the ladies. Several people told me that I had a midwestern accent even though I was pretty sure that I sounded exactly like they did.

Lol your PS2-buying experience was a lot more straightforward than mine. I had to race home from work, borrow $300 against my next paycheck, then rush to the local Wal-Mart where I spent five hours waiting in line to get my system. Honestly can't say that I regret it though. Standing in line (and sitting, once someone got the bright idea to grab folding chairs from the camping section) with fellow gamers, chatting about the new machine and what games we were most looking forward to, was a fun experience of shared anticipation and community. And once Wal-Mart counted how many systems they had in stock and cut off the line at the limit point (leaving quite a few dejected customers and only a few people left in line behind me) they gave us snacks and vouchers that allowed us to move around and come back for our consoles at midnight. I waited in line for 11 hours to get the Wii - outdoors in the winter, no less - and I couldn't even care less about the system, I did it to snag one for my girlfriend. Incidentally your PS2 experience reminds me of this: When I told my friend about my 11 hour wait he told me that he simply called local secondary chain Shopko, found out that they had several systems in stock, and drove over to get one. He didn't have to wait because apparently, like your store, everyone just assumed that they'd be sold out and went elsewhere.

I have many, many, many great memories from my gaming past, but I'll describe the first and most impactful one that always comes to mind. It's long, but it wasn't then it wouldn't be the special memory that it is. I bought an Xbox in 2001 specifically to play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I didn't own a PC but had read about this particular PC game as being a profoundly immersive RPG: The ability to wander around at will and take on hundreds of quests, kill any NPC, loot any dresser, steal any item, even take the forks from every dinner table. A day / night weather system, spell crafting, dozens of individual skills that are raised not by applying experience points but by repeatedly performing the actions governed by those skills. The game promised a level of depth and exploration that I'd never experienced before, and I couldn't wait to play the Xbox conversion that was supposedly going to launch with the console. Except it didn't. I waited several months only to see the game delayed several times, and eventually it seemed like it was never going to be released. This game was literally the ONLY reason I'd purchased the system, and at one point I put it in the trunk of my car and wound up forgetting that it was even there. Eventually I sold it and moved on. Cut to late 2002. I met a beautiful, intelligent, shy little geeky girl and we fell in love immediately. Literally day one love at first sight. We spent pretty much all of our waking hours together, until she had to fly off to college only a few weeks later. Debating whether we should maintain the relationship and undergo the frustration of waiting months to see each other again or breaking up and celebrating the brief time that we had, we both decided to keep things going. After she traveled to her college across the country we talked every day, and she even sent me a ticket to fly to see her for Thanksgiving break. When she came home the following summer we excitedly picked the relationship back up as if we'd never been apart, and by the end of the summer she surprised me with an amazing offer: For her second year she was getting a room to herself, so why not come live there with her? I did, and it was amazing. California was a whole different world from Wisconsin, and I now got to spend every day with my beloved girlfriend. We often took the bus to leave her college and visit the nearby villages and shops, and it was there that I was a bit heartbroken to see that Morrowind had in fact finally been released. I pointed the game out to her, telling her the story of how much I'd wanted to acquire it, and we moved on. A few weeks later my birthday arrived, and I was shocked when my girlfriend opened our door with a big heavy box in her hands. Turns out it was a new (used) Xbox and my very own copy of Morrowind. I hooked everything up immediately and was taken by the game's atmosphere, graphics and character creation right off the bat. My girlfriend was really intrigued too, but she had to run off to class. While she was gone I putzed around in the game, just being filled with awe at what I was experiencing. Everything I'd read was right: I could travel anywhere, attack anyone, steal anything, and basically just adventure freely and experience the breathtaking vast world of the game however I wanted. I played the game all day, stopping only when my girlfriend got back so I could grab some food and let her have some time messing with the game. That night, when she went to sleep, I played some more. And it was there, during that first night, that I realized just how amazing my life was at the time. I was sitting upright on our bed, my back against the wall facing the television, as my girlfriend slept quietly beside me. The tv cast a soft glow on the room, illuminating new and exciting surroundings that I still wasn't quite yet acclimated to. Outside the window was a whole different type of life with different weather, different trees, different places and different people. And here on the television was a game experience like I'd never seen. As I sat there playing it that night I was becoming acutely aware of just how incredible the game world was, and just how much freedom I'd been granted to play in it. I had so many options in front of me, so many characters to talk to and places to go and quests to conquer. I felt myself almost overwhelmed, excited not just for the game in front of me but for the possibilities of the future of gaming. And I felt grateful, thinking that maybe the reason why I hadn't been able to get the game originally was because I'd somehow been destined to have that awesome experience in that particular place, at that particular time, and with that particular person. I'd played hundreds of games before that night, but that was the first time that I really felt completely sucked into another universe. Yet whenever I looked away from the screen, I saw the woman that I loved sleeping next to me. Everything just came together to give me a sense of palpable joy and inner peace that I could never explain. In those moments life just seemed absolutely perfect, and I was filled with a sense that everything was bright and limitless. Thanks to Morrowind, and my wonderful girlfriend who was there to share the experience with me, I'd been struck with the feeling that some of the most amazing experiences of my life were ahead of me. And they were.

That's awesome though. I never even thought to check Amazon for them. Even though yeah, you're right, fifty bucks for two dozen candy bars is a little insane. Then again they ARE pretty big bars, and some of that cost is understandable given international tax rates or whatever. It's definitely something I'll keep in mind for when I have super expendable money. Don't go out of your way or anything but yeah, I'd be curious what the going rate would be for a box of those things.