miketheratguy

Seriously? I never knew that the issue that I randomly grabbed happened to be one of the final few.

I've got a digital copy of that Pocket Power that was given out for The Wizard, if you guys here at the site want to accept it as an upload I'd be happy to provide it (I can't recall when or where I got it nor can I vouch for the quality since I didn't scan it, but for whatever it's worth the offer is there). I never got to see The Wizard at the theater, which bummed me out. I don't even know why I wouldn't have. I'm guessing that it just must not have been playing anywhere near me. I (im)patiently waited for it to show up on Pay-Per-View and ordered it as soon as I could, recorded it, then watched that VHS recording dozens and dozens of times over. That quaint relic from the past went on to become something that a buddy of mine and I would ritualistically make fun of, MST3K-style (you watch that thing enough times you notice all kinds of little details, like the extras on the Universal Studios tram who give the camera the finger), and the reminder of what Jenny Lewis was like before she became an excellent singer and all-around mega-babe.

"Dead or Alive 3: Is this the game that will make you buy an Xbox?" No, Morrowind was. And then it was delayed by like half a year! BASTARDS! Robbed of Morrowind, my first Xbox wound up sitting in the trunk of my car until I literally forgot that I even owned one and eventually wound up selling it. In the trunk with it was that exact issue of Next Gen, which I got during my last month at Funcoland (when it was still called that). As a result that specific cover of the magazine is absolutely ingrained in my memory, a time capsule of a point in my life that was just around the corner from some big changes (namely Morrowind, a replacement Xbox, the awesome girlfriend that got them for me, and the move across the country to be with her). Good times.

All of it involves preserving someone else's material no matter how you slice it. Besides, I don't see the books being preserved anywhere else. If anything they're much more rare than the magazines are.

Sit in a car with stinky people listening to music to win a car? Hell, I've done that for nothing. That's an awesome story though. It's really kind of amazing to me how much the Macarena took off. The reason why I heard the Spanish version first (and, oddly, probably before the majority of other people in this country now that I think about it) is because it was featured in the background of murder revenge film "Eye For An Eye" which I saw in the theater at the very beginning of 1996. I liked it, I found it catchy but then kind of forgot about it until it got huge near the end of the year. I was confused why there were a bunch of obnoxious lyrics laid over it though. What's funny to me is that the movie contained another song by a foreign singer, this one featured much more prominently. THAT was a song that I searched and searched and searched for over the course of damn near a decade before the internet (Yahoo Radio's "Launchcast" in particular) finally ended the long journey. While Macarena had raved over the world and won all kinds of people billions of dollars, this quirky, haunting little indie tune failed to similarly conquer the world. I went nuts when I finally found it in 2004-2005 and it's been in my music rotation ever since. Some people may find this tune to be hell, but to me it sounds like VICTORY!

Yes, yes, yes and MORE YES! I have a ton of old video game books (Ultimate Unauthorized, Nintendo Game Secrets, etc.) and I love 'em, they're true relics of my childhood (even more so than many of the magazines) and I grab new ones whenever I can spot them. I would LOVE to see them preserved in digital form, and have considered sending you guys a couple of mine on more than one occasion to get the ball rolling. You've absolutely got my enthusiastic thumbs up for this one. While the mag scene is flourishing, actual retro gaming books are all but nonexistent. If you guys would like to go ahead with this project there are at least a couple of books that I could send you for scanning.

I like the red, green and white color scheme of this cover. Very pleasing to the eye. It reminds me of Christmas!

Truly awesome! At this rate all of the EGM gaps will be filled in no time! Thanks!

Oversaturation. That "Only Wanna Be With You" song was just completely omnipresent in the mid 90s. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it and eventually people responded with an equal level of resistance. See also: Me and superhero movies. I actually like the original Spanish version of Macarena because (A) I heard it first and ( B ) the most annoying, obnoxious element of the Americanized super hit - the babbling, vacant-headed valley girl who talks through the whole thing - is completely absent from it. Though the basic structure and chorus of the song is the same, the tone of the song is different. If you want to go back even further there's an even more basic rumba version that removes much of the instrumentation and sounds more or less like two guys singing in a Mexican club. The closer the song comes to getting what most of the world got in 1996, the worse it becomes. Coincidentally, Macarena topped the U.S. music charts for a record 14 straight weeks. That is until Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" - which is a phenomenal song - surpassed it.

Adele? How the hell did she wind up in the choices? : / I absolutely love one song by Chumbawamba, I enjoy maybe one song each from Hootie and Creed, and while Vanilla Ice is a good choice he samples Under Pressure which is one of my favorite songs of all time so I can't say that I hate him completely. I'm pretty apathetic to most of the rest of the choices. Hmm... Yeah, I'm going with Limp Bizkit. I haven't been able to stand a single thing of theirs that I've heard. "My Way", "Nookie", "Rollin". Ugh. And Fred Durst is a dopey squealing douche. EDIT: I only just saw that twiztor thinks he's a douche too. Then again, doesn't everybody?

Hey, that's what women do I KID, I kid. I kid because I love.

Thanks, that's cool to know. I have a bunch of them on my ebook reader myself, some of them are just fun to browse through and reminisce. I've got a bunch of them ready to go as is but I'm still in the process of finishing up some of the titles. I'd say that I'm probably 80 percent done, something like that. In the meantime I noticed some problems trying to test some of the files on Mediafire. I tried a couple of examples before that Castlevania one that I posted and Mediafire wouldn't take them, it just got to a certain percentage in the upload and them reset the counter, over and over and over, always at the same spot. Even when I put the file in a rar container it did the same thing, which is odd. So, I suppose I'll still be at it for a little bit longer to finish the rest of the titles and try to figure out what's going on with uploading them. Once that's done I should be able to put everything into a single pack and get it online for downloading. I'll keep you updated!

Wow!!! A sudden and unexpected three-fer of EGM to knock my ass out of my chair! Awesome awesome awesome, thank you!!!!

Well.......sort of. It's the obnoxiousness of extreme that bugs me. I don't mind that there are superhero movies. And I don't mind that people enjoy them. It's a big world and there's something for everyone. But when SO many movies are about superheroes, and those movies SO dominate public interest, it just gets so irritating that one simply wants it to go away and give him a break. It's like the Kardashians. Sure, they pretty I guess, but is there a reason why someone's going on about them every time one of them sneezes? There are other pretty girls. There are other things to think about. They'd be less annoying if they weren't always on tv or being plastered all over the internet. Can the world maybe spend just a few minutes without them? Just a few? Please? I remember that when the recent Star Wars movie was nearing release there was so much relentless hype that the people who'd grown sick of hearing about it took to the message boards and started venting their frustration. They'd say things like "GOD, who cares? How can a stupid movie about XYZ have so much fanboy worship? Go see your stupid Star Wars movie in your Star Wars pajamas with your Star Wars lazer sword and shut the %^$ up about it already. I can't wait until a few months from now when my senses aren't assaulted by this movie's existence everyday, everywhere I go. And then in another year I get to put up with it all over again". That's basically how it became for me, but much more frequently. Because multiple superhero movies are released every year. And they won't even leave well enough alone. They're all about "building the universe" now. It's fine when The Avengers stuck a bunch of characters into a single movie. That's what that group is all about. But now it's like anytime I go to a website that even vaguely interests me there they are, a bunch of superhero articles and links all over the page. "Doomsday is going to be in Batman vs. Superman!" "Spider-Man's going to be in the next Captain America!" "Captain America is going to be in the next Iron Man and they're going to fight!" There's an increasingly convoluted Marvel universe. The DC universe is already getting off to a convoluted start with reports of Wonder Woman and even Aquaman, for some reason, being shoehorned into what started as a simple Superman sequel which then morphed into the battle between he and Batman which has now morphed into the introduction of the whole Justice League. There are something like 10 X-Men movies and I couldn't even begin to tell you which ones are reboots, which ones are spinoffs and which ones are origin stories. Every character is jumping into everyone else's movie. The Suicide Squad is introducing yet another new group of characters. The Spider-Man series is about to get its second reboot in less than ten years. And all the while, in every instance that I just listed off, merchandise! Commercials! Box office reports! Fast food tie-ins! Hype from your friends! Hype on the internet! Articles! Links! Rumors! Speculation! Casting news! Late night talk show appearances! On and on and on and on and on and on it goes, all year round without a ^%$(*%ng end in sight. I mean seriously, HOW much of this stuff can a guy keep being subjected to before he starts to go insane? I'm sure that all this crap is great for the people who actually love it, but for those who don't, man do we miss those days when we had this rare lost artifact called "moderation". Leonardo Dicaprio is a great actor, and I guess Kate Winslet is too (I wouldn't know, I haven't seen a quarter of the things that people raved about). But if someone is watching Titanic for either of them then they're watching Titanic for the wrong reasons.

I don't think that there is an inherent problem. I don't need to see something that I'm not interested in to know whether or not it annoys me. If I stood outside your window every day for the next three weeks and kept on shouting about how great The Walking Dead is, I'm guessing that it wouldn't take very long for you to be sick of hearing about Walking Dead. It's not a point about whether the films are actually good (and I'm guessing that most of them are), it's just a matter of how frequently I have to be assaulted with hype about them. It gets old fast and makes me wish that they'd just go away for a while.

I didn't like mainstream comics as a kid. Like, at all. I had an X-Men comic when I was a little boy and I remember absolutely nothing about it. I couldn't care less about superheroes, and still can't. I haven't watched a single Marvel movie and likely won't ever watch the vast majority of them. In fact, every time a new one comes out (Deadpool is an exception) I get irritated because it means weeks and weeks of hearing about the same tired babble. There's such a thing as oversaturation, and how we haven't gotten there YEARS ago with that shit I'll never understand. There are literally something like 17 superhero movies scheduled to come out between now and 2020. I mean, really? Anyway rant over. I have always liked Batman, probably because I don't consider him to be a superhero. Never read the comics though. For me it was always fringe or underground stuff. I introduced Howard to Groo the Wanderer, that character in his avatar, so we've both loved him since childhood. I loved TMNT. The only other comic I can say that I devotedly looked forward to was the extremely indie, extremely limited run of something called The Eye of Mongombo, which tells the tale of a cynical Indiana Jones-type character who gets turned into a duck by a vengeful voodoo mystic and has to seek out the legendary titular gem if he's ever going to get back to normal. It's snarky and it's full of swear words, so I loved it.

Ah yes, one of the worst covers in the history of the magazine. Now it's time to see whether the content itself still holds up. Thanks a lot!

What better way to celebrate Halloween than practicing necromancy? Tootsie Rolls? Malted Milk Balls? Candy corn? Three Musketeers? Man, some of the people in this old thread hated some really tasty stuff. I hated the waxy gobs of stickiness that got stuck on your teeth which Howard mentioned. And like Areala, I too hated Bit 'O Honey. Never a fan of Mike and Ike's either. Or were they Good and Plenty? Whatever. Whichever ones were the pill form of black licorice. which is about the most god-awful yet still-edible substance I can possibly think of. You know what the worst was though? Pennies. Yeah, great, that's what every kid wants. Some heavy things that you couldn't even eat, the literal monetary equivalent of maybe one third of an actual piece of candy, just because some asshole felt that it was it was the marginally superior alternative to throwing away the disposable pieces of virtually unspendable currency that were cluttering up his house.

Lol that would be awesome. Almost art. Let the thread die for a year and then resurrect it with a post that links the thread to itself.

"Once more unto the breach, indifferent friends".

...Nin... ...."Nintendo Fun Vision"?

I too remember the hype around The Bouncer, but the thing that I remember most about it (certainly not the game itself, which I couldn't be arsed to play) was how sharply and decisively that thing sank like a lead rock. If video games were movies then The Bouncer would be Snakes on a Plane. The most amusing thing to me is that they were wrong about both. - Prime Tom Cruise clip.

Indubitably!

Folly! PSX Doom all the way.

You haven't truly met an MKII obsessive until you've met ol' Miketheratguy, and you'll hear all about it in our next podcast episode.