miketheratguy

Thanks for the info. Again, I think I figured that the book would be a mangled mess once everything was said and done but I was trying to hold out the hope that the pros had a way of doing it that would leave the book in a still-readable state. Bummer!

Hmm. So probably no real shot at having the pages shuffled into a nice, neat pile, reheating the glue, and cramming the pack of pages back into the glue with anything resembling grace or neatness.

Interesting. I'd assumed that full destruction of the book was necessary in order to properly scan it, I was just hoping that it wouldn't be. So the pages don't retain any stickiness that would allow them to be packed back together? The glue remains inside the spine of the cover?

Wasn't sure if this was the right section or not since it's not directly related to the site, but it's still a "how do I" subject so I figured I'd give it a try. So anyway I just got a scanner over the weekend. It's nothing industrial or even expensive. It's a basic Canon all-in one scanner / printer / copier from Wal-Mart. I should point out that I probably wouldn't be using it to contribute anything to the site. Not that I'd be against the idea - in fact I think it would be cool to help out - but rather because I'm sure that it doesn't come close to the site's professional-quality standards. I bought it primarily to make backup copies of my photos, drawings and documents but then I started thinking about how fun it would be to make my own ebooks (the resolution limits won't matter as much on a small screen). I have no idea how to cleanly go about doing this though, so I figured that I'd ask you guys. In short, how do you go about de-binding a book that uses glue other than staples, and does the book have to be completely destroyed or is it at all salvageable in the process? Is there a way to get it back together once you're finished? I'd love to hear your advice as I take my first amateur steps towards book preservation.

I'm kind of in the same boat. While I did own a Genesis as a kid, it was never my favorite system. I always played the NES, and then the SNES, far more. Though I did adore the Genesis for Sonic, Toejam and Earl, King's Bounty and Starflight, it wasn't something that I really played a lot with any regularity. As such, it wasn't the system I usually bought or even rented games for. This helped me to avoid pretty much all the games that were notorious for sucking. So, looking back at what games I actually did own, I'd have to say that maybe Super Thunderblade was my worst. I don't even remember if it was a particularly poor game - I don't remember it being god-awful or anything - but it was the game I played and liked the least. It came with the system when I bought it from a friend of mine so it was just kind of a "whatever" title. Fun fact: After another friend of mine completed Final Fantasy for the NES I asked if he'd sell it to me. After just a bit of effort I got him to trade it to me for Super Thunderblade plus five bucks. A few years later he would go on to tell me that it was the worst deal he'd ever made, lol.

I saw like four episodes of that show and found it hilarious. It was so absurd and stupid as to be totally amusing. I liked Assy's Hispanic partner who reminded me of (and may even have been) Luis Guzman. I remember an episode having to do with a stolen bicycle or something and I think the partner feebly tried to talk Assy down as he shot at the guy. Or something.

"How appropriate. You fight like a cow".

Those are exactly the type of unexpected selections that I was hoping to see. LIES!

Totally true! Popularity has always been an indicator of quality. Why I bet that if you looked at the top charts of the last decade or so you wouldn't find even ONE song that sucks reeking ass! Thanks for adding some tunes all the same.

Who doesn't love video game music? I'm guessing that many (if not all) of the people on this forum were tapping their toes to chiptunes well before they discovered the likes of Michael Jackson or Metallica. So I've got a question for you all: What are your favorite underrated video game tunes? I'm not talking about soundtracks now, but rather individual tunes. Those unique singular ditties that got stuck in your head or still give you joy today. Remember, the key word here is underrated. It's subjective, sure, but you probably know what I mean. We all fondly remember the Super Mario Bros. theme and we all know that Ducktales' moon theme is the best thing since canned bread, but what about those phenomenal tracks that never seem to get the attention that they deserve? Maybe the games were just unpopular, maybe the tune you're thinking of was an ending tune or came at a point in the game that most people didn't get to see. Maybe the tune is from a popular game but you never hear anyone talking about it because it's overshadowed by another, more famous track. Whatever the case may be, I'd love for us to trade some kickass music that we probably haven't heard before. Here, I'll whip out a few examples that I hope some of you haven't heard (and agree kick most excellent ass): No one played this, right? If you say that you've played this you're either a liar or a glutton for crappy games. Either way I salute you! Everyone loves Sonic, but how long has it been since you heard this beautiful theme? And now, going in about as far in the opposite direction as I can imagine, I present this "tune" from the PS1 version of Doom. It's a haunting slice of darkness that's perfect for listening to on very loud earbuds as you walk deep into the woods in the middle of the night.

Good man. Always nice to see the Final Fantasy IV love. And hell, your first Dreamcast acquisitions almost mirror my own. It's been fun to read everyone's responses to this question. A lot of great and predictable games showing up in some of these lists, plus a few unexpected clunkers.

I loved, loved, loved, loved, LOOOOOVED NBA Jam TE. As I mentioned in the NBA XTREEEAM IN YO FACE!!! thread I'm not really one for sports games that aren't about combat of some sort, but NBA Jam was the exception. That game was so....well, just so damn fun. TE, in particular, got the most of my attention. The first home release of the game was great but TE arrived when I was 16, going on 17, and I hadn't yet gotten my own car. So, I was right at the age to appreciate the golden years of video games, but not yet at the point where I was the person behind the steering wheel. The solution? The SEGA Nomad, one of the coolest things ever invented. I hate the fact that this thing bombed because it was, and still is, an amazing little machine. It was a portable Genesis - straight up, just a portable Genesis with a control pad, buttons, and a rich backlit LCD screen. And what games did I enjoy on this machine? Oh yeah. Mortal Kombat 3, Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Super Street Fighter II, Gemfire, and NBA Jam: TE. That game was an absolute blast for long trips. Oh, the hours I whittled away running onto those gimmicky point modifiers on the court and killing my opponents with infinite shoving tricks. And thanks to all kinds of crazy hidden codes and crazy cameo appearances I was able get to just chill in the backseat with Bill Clinton in the palm of my hands. I got to be just like Monica Lewinsky! NBA Jam was rad. NBA Jam: Tournament Edition was even radder. End of.

Almost forgot! I myself did not have the hint book that came with the game (it was $7 bucks I think, and I just talked myself out of trying to convince my parents to write a check for a $7 dollar hint book for a game that I'd already beaten) but the guy who ran "The Power House", one of the two most prominent rental places in town, had a copy. It was actually really cool: It was set up in a straightforward question and answer format and because the answers were anaglyphs you couldn't read them unless you used the 3d filter insert that came with the booklet. This was an awesome idea because it prevented you from accidentally seeing the answer that you didn't yet want revealed. I believe that somewhere I DO still have the poster that came with the game. It was great - an in-universe bulletin board that seemed to be hanging in the halls of whatever school the protagonists attended and which was full of all kinds of little clues for the game. Probably the coolest pack-in freebie this side of the infamous "Startropics letter". I think that I've got the hint book in digital form (though if I recall it's useless as anything more than a curiosity because one can't read the anaglyph print) and the bulletin board poster can be found online.

Ah, another thread that's been revived from years of decay. Another thread that I'm all-too happy to see! Maniac Mansion is, without question, one of my top favorite games of all time, on any system. That game had such an impact on my life that I couldn't even recount all my memories of it without writing several dozen paragraphs. I could seriously write a small book about the game - a fitting endeavor since I made a 20-page comic book about it when I was 12 and got the game for Christmas. I will give a short version of the events though, because this game - and this thread - deserve no less. So it's the fall of 1989 or perhaps the spring of 1990 and I'm 11 years old, going on 12 some months down the line. I'm at my friend Matt Harvey's house and he's showing me some games on his Apple IIe. I LOVED the Apple IIe. It was my introduction to computer gaming and I spent many an hour at the library browsing their catalog and asking to play things like Zork or Stickybear Math. Matt though - Matt had the setup. The computer was presumably meant for the family but he's the only one I saw using it, and he had one of those old floppy disk containers that housed like 100 disks. You know the things I'm talking about, right? Everyone here is old enough to be familiar with those things? They were those little - Here, one of these things. Ignore the fact that some millennial hipster is using them for CDs. And don't let wordpress know that I stole their photo. They seem to want to make sure that everyone knows where it came from. So anyway Matt's got one of those things and I swear he had dozens upon dozens of disks. It blew my mind that there could be that many games in one place. And there were MULTIPLE games per disk! Very few were official store-bought floppies; Matt had an older brother and he'd apparently copied a bunch of games from his friends. "Copied"??? You can COPY computer games too? It was overwhelming. So Matt shows me a few games. Aliens, Montezuma's Revenge, a hilarious indie parody game called "Dino Smurf" in which you controlled "Smurfbutcher Bob" and had him traveling through time to kill Smurfs. If that doesn't date this memory then nothing will. So anyway he's showing me the games and one title really sticks out - "Maniac Mansion". How could a game with a title like that NOT be rad? I thought that it would be some kind of haunted house game but what I got was oh so much better. I'll never forget the amazement that I felt at being able to choose a party of characters that all had unique personality traits and skills. I'll never forget how incredible it felt to actually interact with the characters' environment, whether it was making them open doors or making them take items from a shelf. The game was one of the first and most prominent in my history of gaming discovery. You know the feeling: That special game that makes you stop and think "holy shit, this game is presenting me with a level of depth, content, complexity and / or fun that I never thought possible before". I loved the game fully, and immediately. It took my heart and never looked back and I'm perfectly okay with that. Once I got the controls and figured out what I was doing (and, again: once I allowed my mind to think outside the box of what I considered possible for a game to that point) I was able to plunge deeper into the game, to the point that I didn't want to stop and hang out with my friend. It actually went so far that there were times when I asked to go over to his house, secretly doing it only so I could play the game again! I played it every time I went to his house. I forced myself to watch the shitty TV show that was not even slightly loosely based on the game. I had fits of ecstasy (not THAT kind. I was 12 years old, you drunken pedo) when I read the Nintendo Power "Pak Watch" preview that announced the game's impending arrival on the NES. I wrote comics. I drew pictures. I typed stories. I begged for the game as my number one Christmas wish and I tape-recorded the music right off of the tv so I could listen to the soundtrack. I bought every gaming magazine that covered it. I showed it to both of my parents and every one of my friends. And yes - ohhh, yes - you better believe that I still have that very same 1990 first edition NES copy to this day. Maniac Mansion, I salute you. In recognition of your rabid awesomeness, I can only offer this equally awesome tribute in return.

Man, some of these necro jobs are crazy. But I love it! It's fun to see some threads that I wasn't around to participate in the first time around. I don't have many gaming regrets, retro or otherwise. A few bad rentals here and there, sure, but thanks to my picky nature I've managed to stay mostly on the positive side regarding gaming purchases. Still, it hasn't been a perfect record. I'll never forget stumbling onto the knowledge that Mortal Kombat II, my favorite game in the series, was ported to the Sega Saturn. Being that the best version available (that I was aware of) was for the SNES, an awesome machine but one that was nonetheless technologically inferior, I sprang forward to get my hands on a used Saturn. This was around the year 2001 so the system was still kind of in the valley of that pendulum swing between "no one wants this" and "it's an expensive collectible". I made some calls and found out that a Funco in Gurnee, Illinois - 45 minutes away - had a used Saturn sitting around. I had just three more questions: Do you also have a copy of MKII, have you ever played it, and if so, how does it compare to the arcade version? The answers were "yes", "yes", and "arcade-perfect". That was it. I was sold. I drove on down that same day and excitedly paid my fifty bucks or so to pick up the system, plus probably a tenner for MKII. I got it home, hooked it up, and my first reaction was "The graphics are great"! Then, a few seconds later, my second thought was "What the hell is up with the sound?" MKII for the Sega Saturn was most certainly not arcade-perfect. It looked nice and sharp, sure, and I seem to recall that it played about the same, but the audio sucked. Lots of the sound effects were good, but others were missing entirely. Shao Kahn (the announcer) didn't say "Round 1" or "flawless victory" or even "Joe Blow wins". Other voices, like some of Raiden's garbled yells, were gone. The music sounded like a blippy MIDI remix and sometimes kept playing when it shouldn't have, yet also had the tendency to cut out completely during the fatalities. The music during the "climbing the tower" next opponent segment was changed altogether (to something much worse). Long story short the game looked good but sounded like shit. I also hadn't anticipated having to wait through load times whenever Shang Tsung morphed, something that was true of the Playstation but that system's Mortal Kombat game was much more advanced than this was. This was honestly like a Sega CD game. I felt pretty disappointed, and I don't think I touched the system again after that week. I don't even know where it's at right now. Probably a storage box somewhere. Probably my BIGGEST gaming regret though? Dropping 70 bucks on the SNES version of Samurai Shodown. It was such a total impulse buy. I liked the game in the arcade, but never really loved it. MKII was my baby. But one day when I was 16 I hopped a bus to the local Kmart for something to do. Lo and behold there was the game, now available on the SNES. I hadn't expected it, I didn't know that the game was out yet. And right then and there I thought "I can be playing Samurai Shodown at my house! RIGHT NOW"! And boom. Almost every remaining dollar of my last paycheck (last one as in "final", since Wal-Mart fired me two weeks before) was gone in a flash. I left the house with about $75 bucks to my name and boom, just like that, now I was broke. I distinctly recall walking outside the store and sitting on the bench outside to wait for the bus. In my solitude, away from the beckoning shine of the various products on the store shelves, I had time to collect my thoughts. All I could think was "This might not have been a good idea".

My god, another one? This is awesome! I officially declare 2016 to be the year of EGM.

Oh right, I guess if I looked closer at the ad there I'd see that it was for Windows 95, of all things. I wasn't even aware of that game then, I thought that the only one from around that time was NBA Hangtime. I think the remake was simply called NBA Jam. Or maybe it had a different adjective like "NBA Jam Radikal" or "NBA Jam Scrumptious" or "NBA Sweet, Sweet Black Tar Heroin Straight Into Your Veins" or whatever other soulless buzzword companies like to attach to things these days.

I don't care for most sports (and by extension, most sports games) in general but man, NBA Jam was the shit. That was probably my second-favorite game of 1994. I was really excited for the remake (which, I'm assuming, is the very game in this thread) until I read that you couldn't play online co-op. Who makes an NBA Jam game in the 2010s and leaves out online co-op?

This is one that I've never heard of before. I wish I'd had access to an all-SNES magazine growing up.

^ Yeah. I think it's best that I not spend too much time in this thread.

I've never really known why the 95-97 era EGMs were so hard to find, but for me they've always been. Hard to find in libraries, hard to find on Ebay, hard to find even in stores back in the day. The magazine had a relatively garish, sloppy and disorganized appearance back then which makes it probably my least-favorite epoch of the publication, but since these issues were so hard to come by (and since they're so new to me now) I find them to be a fascinating addition to the collection. It's stuff like this that makes the site so great!

Ah, I've always loved this issue. I distinctly recall that they reviewed the PS2 by throwing a party at Sybaris, which I found really cool because I'd just taken my girlfriend there a few months prior. The place looked just like it did in the photos. That's actually the exact reason why I waited six hours in line to get mine. I grabbed a bunch of dvds from Blockbuster (where I worked at the time), drove over to the WalMart about 20 minutes away, and joined the other dozen people who'd already gotten in line ahead of me. Before long another dozen or so showed up behind me. Much anxiety ensued until the electronics manager came out and announced that they only had enough units to supply maybe four people past me, and I felt really bad for them as they turned and left the store with groans of extreme disappointment on their faces. But then the manager spread around cookies and let us pull up camping chairs from the nearby outdoor section and the next few hours were the sweet, sweet sensation of confidence at knowing that we'd leave the store with our brand new dvd players PS2s. I can't even remember the first time that I really got into the system for some hardcore gaming marathons, though Summoner and Dynasty Warriors 2 were the first games that I really enjoyed on it. Tekken Tag Tournament was fun at first as well.

A white supremacist, a black racist, and an illegal Mexican immigrant walk into a bar...

I remember this issue being fairly forgettable for some reason and the cover is one of the laziest things they've ever thrown together (come to think of it, the last cover was pretty lazy too). Still, I guess the layout and GIGANTO TEXT does catch one's attention. Besides, it's EGM!

The hits just keep on coming! Yeee!