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Areala

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Blog Entries posted by Areala

  1. Areala
    All Croft-aholics know that Valentine's Day is the birthday of Our Lady and Savior, the Divine Ponytail. So what better way to say "I Love You" than to pick up the brand new Tomb Raider I - III Remastered collection from Aspyr and Crystal Dynamics?

    Yes, for most of us, it was love at first polygon when we caught our first glimpse of The Great One, whether it was that ever-so-alluring pyramid-shaped box or one of the many, many, many magazines whose covers she graced. And today, for a mere $29.99 US, you can take a trip down memory lane with the lovingly-crafted (or perhaps that should be 'Crofted'?) HD remasters of her first three adventures on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC, and Nintendo Switch. She's come such a long way since 1996, wouldn't you say?

    I'm seriously blown away at how beautiful these new versions look, and the reviews from the gaming community have been largely positive as well. More than just a texture-upscaled cash grab, Aspyr went to an incredible effort to polish these games up and make them more accessible to modern audiences. They added an entirely new modern control scheme based on controllers now having analog sticks. Subtitles have been added to all FMVs. Every game runs in a widescreen mode, compatible with modern display resolutions. Frame rates have also been uncapped, with a minimum 60 FPS now as opposed to the 30 FPS versions the original games were locked to. Icons have been added to mark where Lara can interact with various bits of the world. Boss monsters now have health bars so you can see how effective your attacks are. The original game had a lighting engine overhaul to bring it into line with how Tomb Raider II and III behaved with their in-game lighting. In-engine cutscenes have been lip synched. And all of these are entirely user-controlled, up to and including the HD overhaul: if you want to play the games as they originally controlled and looked, you can. In fact, you can flip back and forth between the classic and remastered look with the press of a button at any time, even during the FMVs and even the title screens, and the original graphical versions revert to their locked 30 FPS modes.
    But Aspyr even went above and beyond that. There are a ton of little, subtle changes to the remasters that really serve to make the games look like my imagination remembers them from back in the day. Cobwebs show up in corners where none existed before. Snow trickles in through the roof openings of Peru's cavernous levels. Ripples flow behind Lara as she wades through water. Design elements like plants, collectible items, and other decorative level details which were flat sprites in the originals have all been remodeled in 3D, giving the worlds a greater sense of depth. The games' soundtracks and effects have been remastered as well by Nathan McCree, their original composer, and the soundtrack to TR1 has been properly implemented for the PC version, something which required a mod for the longest time. The water itself has been retextured and animated so that it looks more like natural water. Enemies have all been remodeled, maintaining the original look and feel of the classic models instead of just upscaling the original texture-mapped polygons:

    And it keeps going. Each game also includes its respective expansion pack ('Unfinished Business' for Tomb Raider, 'The Golden Mask' for Tomb Raider II, and 'The Lost Artifact' for Tomb Raider III). This comes to a total of fifteen bonus levels, none of which have previously been available for console versions of the original games until now. An additional "New Game +" mode was added which increases the health and damage of all enemies, and re-implements the original console versions' Save Crystal system, forcing you to decide when to make those critical saves instead of being able to scum the system whenever you like. The number of available save slots for each game has also been doubled. Aspyr even left in several of the games' original faults, like the infamous 'corner bug' which allows Lara to glitch into areas she isn't meant to reach normally and upon which speed runners rely heavily to sequence-break. In fact, a number of the trophies/achievements are based on stunts performed by the games' speed runners and require one or more glitches to accomplish. You even get one for using the level skip cheat, and for locking Winston in the freezer, which is just hilarious.

    They added a Photo Mode, which allows you to pause the action at any time and take a snapshot. In Photo Mode, you can set Lara's expression, her pose, the outfit she's wearing, and the weapons she's carrying. You can also pan and zoom the camera to get in close and see the details on the new textures. It's silly fun, but it's something I absolutely adore and it lets you explore the scenery in ways previously impossible, or set up cute posed shots like this one:

    And yes, it works with the classic graphics mode too:

    About the only thing they left out is the nude code.
    In short, it's been a long, long time since I've been this excited about a new release, but this is just what I didn't even know I wanted. Those original Tomb Raider games were a huge part of my younger years. I've appreciated the approaches that Crystal Dynamics have taken over the years, with the likes of Tomb Raider Anniversary and the more survival-focused reboot trilogy, but those original games were some of my first major video game crushes, if you will, and Aspyr has certainly taken great care to showcase them, flaws and all, for both new and returning gamers alike. I couldn't be happier, and I think you will be too. Happy birthday, Lara!
    *huggles*
    Areala
  2. Areala
    Well, it's October, which means the desire for pants-wetting fear has come back into vogue for a few weeks. So what better way to celebrate spooky season than a write-up about some games which genuinely scared me at one point or another!
    Note that this is not a "best of" list, or similar type of ranking. The order here isn't indicative of a specific game necessarily being better than the one below it, or worse than the one above it. All I'm ranking here is how effective these games were at creeping me out personally. Your list (and you should totally make one, because your Retromags Goddess always wants to know these things) is likely totally different from mine, and that's totally cool. There are plenty of other places where you can find rankings of the "best" horror games; this is not one of them.
    Finally, just so we aren't quibbling over definitions, I'm going to consider anything "retro" to be either fifteen years old or two console generations behind. The latest we'll be going, then, is the early PS3/360/Wii era and good lord does that make me feel old. But enough about me: let's get to the scares!
    13 - Doom 3 (PC)
    While there's no denying the presence of some grotesque and horrifying elements in the original two Doom titles, it wasn't until Doom 3 that id decided to go all-in on the idea of making a horror-themed shooter. Time may have blunted its impact somewhat, but this is still a gorgeous game that has aged far better than its contemporaries. When Doom 3 originally released, I didn't even have a computer or a graphics card capable of running it, so the only time I could play it was at a friend's house. Driving back home after my first encounter with it, I found myself looking extra hard into the night, especially when stopped at traffic lights, to make sure nothing was creeping out of the shadows to get me. A distinctively unnerving experience.
    12 - Dead Space (PS3)
    Taking a lullaby or nursery rhyme and subverting one or more lines to make it creepy or weird is nothing new. Prior to 2008 though, I'd have struggled to come up with a way to make 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' sinister. Then EA dropped this trailer, and...yeah. Dead Space became a must-buy, and I was not disappointed. Nor was I entirely OK while playing it either. Everything about the original game was perfectly constructed and executed to deliver a claustrophobic, haunted-house-in-space experience. I loved every minute of it, and I've replayed it numerous times over the years, but this game made it difficult to want to go to sleep after playing it until two in the morning.
    11 - Echo Night: Beyond (PS2)
    A number of games (including one further down on this list) have used Beethoven's incredible Moonlight Sonata to their advantage, but only one of them has ever gone so far as to use it to inspire the game's actual setting. Echo Night: Beyond, developed by From Software, is set on an abandoned research facility on the Moon which, as you discover while searching for your missing wife, isn't as empty as it seems. With no mechanic for fighting the angry spirits which now inhabit the base, armed with only a flashlight, you have to explore, restore power, and interact with the calmer ghosts who are all seeking something that will allow them to move on to the next life. You have no life bar, but rather a heart monitor which reacts negatively to scary events, and if it rises too high, you'll die. Further complicating matters, the more panicked you get, the more of your peripheral vision you lose through vasoconstriction, making it harder to focus on anything except what is immediately in front of you. This game left me genuinely unnerved several times across my first playthrough, and most of the multiple endings are shards of ice to the heart.
    10 - Theresia (DS)
    I know what you're probably thinking: it's really hard to do horror effectively on a handheld system. If nothing else, the small screen size and the ability to quickly turn everything off should make it almost impossible to scare a player. And while the DS has a number of horror-themed games available, none of them had the impact on me that Theresia did. It's a mixture of visual novel and point-and-click adventure game, but it deals with themes of torture, political imprisonment, sadism, and Stockholm Syndrome. It goes to some dark, dark places, and it left me kind of a mess after finishing. To this day, I think about some of the places where this game goes, and I still get the shivers. Theresia makes you afraid to walk down a hallway, open a cabinet, even just sit in a chair. That is a profoundly absurd thing to say, but I'm saying it anyway because it's true.
    09 - Fatal Frame (PS2/Xbox)
    Most survival horror games prior to Fatal Frame gave you a small arsenal with which to fight your enemies. There might not have been a whole lot of ammo for the various firearms, but you had it nonetheless, and if you ran out, you could always use a knife, a lead pipe, a 2x4, or some other weapon in hand-to-hand combat. Fatal Frame, on the other hand, threw all that nonsense right out the window. "Your opponents are ghosts, and all you get to fight them with is a camera. All the while, you're trapped in a decrepit manor house in the Japanese countryside. Have fun!". Fatal Frame spooked me something awful my first few attempts to play it. Part of that was learning how the controls worked, as the game shifts between third-person for exploration, but requires the use of first-person when you're aiming the camera. But the other part is the atmosphere: Himuro Mansion is a crumbling ruin that bodes nothing good will come of poking around inside it, and yet since it's where your brother disappeared, it's where you've come to investigate. I love my brother sincerely, but he knows damn well if he disappeared while exploring some ancient abandoned house in the middle of nowhere that I am not coming to his rescue. If nothing else, Fatal Frame convinced me of that.
    08 - Kuon (PS2)
    Did I not just explain about how investigating a ghost-infested mansion out in the middle of nowhere is a bad idea? I'm pretty sure I did, but nevertheless, here comes From Software with their second entry on this list. At least Fatal Frame was set in the modern era; the poor shine maiden exorcists-in-training you have to guide through Kuon's world are from the Heian period, meaning this game takes place about a thousand years earlier, give or take a couple centuries. Depending on which of the two characters you select, you get either a very small knife, or a very small fan, with which to defend yourself, along with a limited selection of talisman-based magic spells, and that's that. So, yeah, running around in the dark fighting ghosts is bad enough when all you've got is a camera and a flashlight. Replace that camera with some magic charms, and the flashlight with a paper lantern, and you have the recipe for at least one sleepless night.
    07 - Resident Evil (PS1)
    First of all, I'd never seen this trailer before, and if that's the case, chances are good you haven't either, so give it a watch. My first encounter with Resident Evil was in college. The dorm where I lived had a large lounge area with a couple of big TVs set up, and one Friday evening not long after the launch of the PlayStation, a couple residents brought their console down, hooked it up to one of the TVs, threw in a copy of Resident Evil, and asked if anyone wanted to play. I watched a couple people fumble through the first few rooms, then I volunteered, convinced I had things figured out. Spoiler alert: I did not. Walking the halls of the Spencer Mansion unnerved me so thoroughly that the extent of my progress was to the first room with an item box, whereupon I made up an excuse about needing to use the bathroom, handed the controller to someone else, and got the hell out of there as quickly as I could. The problem was, this was a college town on a Friday night, and I lived on the third floor. Literally everyone else in the residence hall, it seemed, was either out partying, or locked in their room studying, and the utter silence (which normally I considered a godsend) I was hearing after having just played this game, frightened me all the worse. I was tiptoeing up the staircase, because I didn't want my footsteps to echo the way they did on the floors of the mansion. I locked myself in my room and thought everything was hunky-dory until I remembered we didn't have a private bathroom, so if I wanted to relieve myself, I had to go back out that quiet hallway and walk down to the shower/bathroom area. I can solemnly swear I have never peed so quickly in my entire life, and it was over a year before I got my own PlayStation, along with the courage to tackle the Spencer Mansion again.
    06 - Silent Hill (PS1)
    If Resident Evil brought George Romero-style horror to home consoles, then Silent Hill brought a creepy, distorted amalgamation of David Lynch, David Fincher, and David Cronenberg into our living rooms. My first experience with Silent Hill was sitting with my brother at a mutual friend's house, watching said friend tear the shrink wrap off his new copy and boot it up. The sun had long since gone down, we were all caffeinated, and excited to see what all the hype was about. We all learned a valuable lesson that day: you do not, under any circumstances, play a Silent Hill game in a pitch-black living room at midnight in a home situated beneath walnut trees, because you will hear something fall on the roof, and you will jump halfway out of your skin, and you absolutely will not sleep for the rest of the night. None of us even knew what to make of Silent Hill, just that it unnerved us at a deep, psychological level for reasons we couldn't articulate. Everything was wrong, but everything that was wrong was wrong only by a matter of degrees. It was so close to normal, and yet...! Subsequent playthroughs and in-depth analysis from the video gaming community have largely stripped away this game's power to scare me now, but that first experience has stuck with me since 1999.
    05 - Condemned: Criminal Origins (360)
    Monolith Productions has always enjoyed throwing some scares and horrifying imagery into their games, but Condemned: Criminal Origins took that to an entirely new level. It's about as close to a video game version of the film Se7en you'll ever see, with the player taking the role of FBI agent Ethan Thomas, investigating a series of homicides in Metro City. With every clue and every body, the case leads Thomas through urban-blighted hellscapes of tenement apartments, unattended subway stations, an abandoned department store, a closed down school, a burnt-out library, and more places that you could not pay me any amount of money to go poking around in IRL. Thomas has a department-issued sidearm, but that soon gets taken away from him, forcing him to rely on a variety of makeshift weapons like nail-studded boards and concrete-tipped rebar to defend himself from attacks by an increasingly-homicidal vagrant population. The melee combat is brutal and deadly, and the designers never seem to run out of tricks to startle, spook, and scare the player. Even when nothing is happening, Condemned is terrifying. If you play this game and claim it didn't creep you out, then either you're a liar or a Vulcan. The graphics are quite dated (and, honestly, the character models were bad even for 2005), but the sets, sound design, scripted sequences, and attacker AI are still top-notch. It's a pity they never got to finish the story, though, as this one ends on a cliffhanger which Condemned 2: Bloodshot failed to resolve.
    04 - Siren: Blood Curse (PS3)
    The original Siren on the PS2 is one scary-ass experience. The sequel, which we never got here in the US, is equally unnerving. But to get the full experience, you need to play Blood Curse. Released as a PS3 exclusive (and only as a digital version in North America), Blood Curse is a remake of the original PS2 game, with high-resolution textures, better controls, and much better voice acting. Blood Curse uses non-linear progression to tell its story, swapping between a number of different viewpoint characters at different times of the day or night. It forces the player to put things together by paying attention to the environment and what the other characters are doing, saying, and witnessing. The enemies you face, the Shibito, are un-killable zombies: you knock them down, they get up again, so your only defenses are to sneak or run past them, using the environment to distract them. But your characters also have a special skill, called sight jacking, they can use when a Shibito is nearby. You essentially tune into the enemy's visual frequency, and you can see through their eyes. Using this skill is of paramount importance, since it lets you get an idea on where the Shibito is, what it's focusing on, and how it moves around the level, thus allowing you to plot a (hopefully) safe route. It also allows you to hear the Shibito mumbling and gibbering to themselves, which is profoundly unnerving in its own way. I'm not sure when I've ever felt so tense playing a video game as I did with this one. The characters you control are all much, much weaker than the Shibito, and one wrong move will see you torn limb from limb. Even with perfect play, not all of the characters you control throughout the adventure will survive to see the end. If any retro game deserves the title of 'The Dark Souls of Horror', the Siren franchise is definitely it.
    03 - Silent Hill 3 (PS2)
    If I were ranking games on this list by the 'best' criteria instead of the scariest, then Silent Hill 3 would have been ranked number one. This is my favorite game in the franchise, and Heather is my favorite horror game protagonist of all time. But since this is only a ranking based on how badly it scared me while playing it, I have to put it in the number three position. Silent Hill 3 has its fair share of creepy and unnerving elements, but the truth is that Silent Hill 2, while scaring me silly, also helped immunize me to some of this game's tricks and imagery. Don't get me wrong, Silent Hill 3 is still scary, and chances are if I'd played this one before its predecessor, their rankings here would probably be reversed. It just didn't hit me quite as hard as...
    02 - Silent Hill 2 (PS2)
    Plenty of games prior to Silent Hill 2 managed to scare me. But Silent Hill 2 was the first horror game I ever played that truly got under my skin in ways I had never anticipated. This game's story dealt with ideas and themes I had never before confronted in a video game medium. When I first got this game, I was working almost exclusively second shifts at my job, meaning I usually didn't get home until almost ten o'clock in the evening, well after the sun had gone down. And since my girlfriend would be in bed at this point (she had to get up very early for her job), that left me with the run of an essentially empty house. So my traditional order of business was to get something to eat, get settled in, do some gaming until two or three o'clock in the morning, then head to bed. Silent Hill 2 forcibly broke me of this habit; there were numerous times where half my brain was saying, "Oh, keep playing!" and the other half was telling me, "You need to put down the controller, because I cannot take any more psychological abuse tonight." This was utterly unlike any other gaming experience I'd had up to that point, and even to this day, it's the only game that has ever made me turn it off due to empathy fatigue. Given the (some might say over-)saturation of horror in gaming media today, it's almost impossible to explain this to gamers under a certain age. It's like trying to describe the experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time in 1977: today, there have been hundreds of movies with better writing, better special effects, and bigger budgets, and kids grow up watching them whenever they want courtesy of the internet, smartphones, and tablets. In 1977 though, this was not the case. There simply was nothing like Star Wars, no one had ever seen anything like Star Wars, and regardless of how you feel about the state of the franchise today, in 1977 it was the asteroid that obliterated the pop culture dinosaurs. Silent Hill 2 left a similarly-sized crater in the world of home console gaming, and once it hit, there was no undoing the aftermath. The Pyramid Head could not go back in the bottle. When people proclaim Silent Hill 2 as their choice for best horror game of all time, those reasons, and what it did to gamers like me, are why.
    01 - Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (Xbox/PS2)
    Considering what I just wrote about Silent Hill 2, you might be confused how another game could hit harder or scare me worse than that game did. And honestly, up until I played Crimson Butterfly, I'd have agreed with you that there was simply no topping Konami's horror titan. But then Tecmo took everything they did right with their first Fatal Frame game, fixed a bunch of the things they didn't get quite right the first time, then saw how much 'horror' spice was left in their programming kitchen and were like, "Fuck it," and dumped every speck of it into the creation of Fatal Frame II. This game, where you play a young girl trying to reunite with her twin sister after they stumble upon the vanished Minakami Villiage while exploring the nearby woods, takes a scouring brush to your heart. There are four endings in the original PS2 offering, and none of them is happy, something Tecmo opted to change by adding a fifth to the Xbox version, which they dubbed the Director's Cut. Unfortunately, the canonical ending according to Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is one of the bad endings, so even this ray of sunshine is squashed. I talked about being creeped out and mentally overwhelmed by Silent Hill 2; Crimson Butterfly, on the other hand, physically overwhelmed me. It's the only video game that ever caused me to hyperventilate while playing, because I was literally that ensnared in the narrative. I've replayed every game on this list, some of them multiple times. Crimson Butterfly, however, I refuse to play through again. I've watched other people play through it, I've watched all the endings on YouTube, but despite the fact I bought the Xbox Director's Cut over a decade ago, it's never gone into my system. I've beaten every horror game I've ever sat down to play. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly is the only one that ever beat me in return.
  3. Areala
    In the past four months, I've completely destroyed more than fifty of my own books for the purpose of digitizing and sharing them with the rest of the world.
    This, I must admit, was something that past Areala had never imagined future Areala would do. After all, I spent years collecting these books, paging through them, enjoying the memories and worlds they unlocked. As a gamer, they were a part of my identity. I fell in love with them because they were books about a hobby I greatly enjoyed. They were glimpses into my own past, a repository of memories, and (sometimes) a way of avoiding GameFAQs or other online walkthroughs. They were, in a sense, a physical representation of my own history as a gamer.
    I didn't set out to collect these materials for the purpose of chopping them up. So what changed?
    Well, first, I knew I had duplicated some books over the course of my collecting. And sure, I could try and sell the extra copies, but they weren't terribly sought-after and wouldn't be worth my time considering the small amount I might squeeze out of them. When 22 other people have copies for sale starting at $0.74, there ain't much of a market for that book.
    Then I remembered, hey, you're an administrator at a website that scans and archives game materials and strategy guides; why not just chop up the duplicates and scan them yourself? So I took a few of them to the local copy shop to be de-bound, and I did just that. At first, I felt guilty; I've been a book person all my life, and every book is special, by and large, in its own way. Destroying these books when someone else could (potentially) get enjoyment out of them felt wrong somehow.
    Then I uploaded my first file, and as I watched the download numbers trickle upward, I realized something: yes, that single copy of the book I just de-bound and (ultimately) recycled could, maybe, have brought enjoyment to one other person. But by scanning it, by preserving it, by offering it up here, that one book could bring enjoyment to dozens, even hundreds, of others.
    After that, I started looking more closely at my collection, and I realized that, by and large, I was collecting these books simply to collect them. I wanted them not because I was constantly referring to them, or even had serious ties to them, but rather because I just...wanted them. But what good were they doing, truly doing, taking up space on my bookshelves? Could I do more than just part with the duplicates?
    To find out, I took a book of which I did not have a duplicate, Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus, to the copy shop.
    I chose that book for two reasons. First, physical copies of it are not that expensive or difficult to find. Seriously, $5 plus shipping could put a new one in my hand within a week or two if I regretted the decision. Second, it's a bloody mammoth book, well over 900 pages, each of which would have to be placed, by hand, on my flatbed. Did I have the time, the patience, the ability, to undertake such a task?
    It took a few days, a lot of experimentation with scanner settings and file manipulation, but sure enough, it turned out I did have what it took to convert that tome into a digital edition, uploaded to the Retromags server, for others to enjoy. What's more, others were enjoying it! Comments on the file indicated others had memories of this time in their lives as well: experimenting with the Doom level editor, remembering the days of dial-up access to WAD files and swapping maps, editing the Reject Table, and doing all the other things I messed around with as well.
    That settled it. Not only could I do this, but, in a sense, I had to do this.
    It's giving meaning to objects which, otherwise, were not providing much meaning on their own to me. It's re-igniting my desires, reminding me of why I got into collecting these books in the first place. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's also clearing out some much-needed space in my office.
    This way, I get the best of both worlds. Should I get the desire to flip through a Tomb Raider strategy guide, or one of Jeff Rovin's How to Win at Nintendo books, they're right there on an external hard drive backup, ready to be transported wherever I need them. Should someone else be curious about a book they've never seen, doing research for their own projects, they can sample it directly from the Retromags library. What's more, these are fragile, physical objects made from paper. A little bit of water, an unexpected fire, and their physical incarnations will dramatically decrease in utility and usability. The ravages of time will, eventually, crumble them to dust.
    Better we remember them, respect them, preserve them for others to do the same. Most of these books had limited print runs, coinciding with general interest in the subject, which for most people ran out years or even decades ago. The publishers of said guides are mostly long-defunct, and the ability to produce new print copies (to say nothing of the feasibility of doing so in a profit-driven manner) is essentially gone. Even Prima, that long-standing bastion of guide production, has moved to an entirely digital means of distribution for their new books. The physical print strategy guide, whether focused on one game or multiple titles, is a dying breed, well past its halcyon younger years and heading out to pasture. Whether it deserves that or not is an argument for a different blog post, but you can probably guess where I fall on that spectrum.
    My goal isn't to scan every single book in my collection. Rather, my goal with this project is to preserve the weird, the uncommon, the bizarre, the I-can't-believe-they-wrote-a-book-about-that-game pieces in my library. The older and stranger, the more interested I was in collecting it, so it only seems fitting that these are my focus.
    In destroying my collection, I have come to love and respect it far more than I had for years. These are physical artifacts, sometimes literally from my childhood, which deserve to be remembered, re-read, enjoyed, and used by others to chronicle the history of our hobby. De-binding them no longer hurts; instead, it feels good. Yes, the paper is getting recycled, the book itself is ceasing to exist. But the words, the pictures, the history, has moved far beyond the physical book's limitations. I'm destroying a shell to free the spirit within to travel farther and wider into digital immortality.
    What greater gift, what higher respect, could I show my beloved game book collection than that? ❤️
  4. Areala
    You've probably noticed over the last few days that I've been clogging up the "new images" feed with a literal metric ton of advertising material culled from gaming magazines. A lot of this work has been simply updating old images with better-quality copies. Phillyman started the Retromags ad database all the way back in 2009 by pulling ads from older scans of EGM and GamePro, but a lot of those issues have received new releases in the intervening years offering better resolution scans. We also relaxed the rules for image settings, so they can be uploaded at their original size, and I've had both the free time and the desire to work on that area.
    But if you've looked at the various ads galleries, you'll notice a number of new changes and additions I've been working to implement over the last year or two. Most galleries now have alphabetical sub-galleries, so no longer is the NES database a bulky, unwieldy mess of having to scroll through 27 pages to see if one particular game is represented! You can just click on the letter and have a quick look through a couple of pages.
    I've also been working to implement a new naming convention for images as I upload them, to hopefully provide a better historical context of when the ad was published. This can be especially useful for tracing the lineage of some games which had long development periods like Alien Resurrection on the PlayStation.
    At its most basic, the naming convention is:
    Game Title (Month, Year of periodical). Thus, a file name of "ABC Monday Night Football (January, 1994)" indicates the ad was for "ABC Monday Night Football", and was pulled from the January, 1994 issue of a magazine.
    Sometimes, a game ad will span multiple pages, in which case the naming convention is:
    Game Title (Month, Year of periodical) ## Thus, a two-page ad for Battletoads would read: "Battletoads (February, 1993) 01" and "Battletoads (February, 1993) 02". Easy peasy lemon-squeezy!
    On some occasions, multiple ads for a particular game might appear in the same month and year, either because the same periodical ran two different ads in the same issue, or because a different magazine ran a different ad for the game in its issue from the same time frame. The naming convention in that case becomes:
    Game Title (Month, Year of periodical) (##) So you might see "Tomb Raider II (September, 1997) (01)" and "Tomb Raider II (September, 1997) (02)".
    Finally, in the most complex case, you might see the same game receive two or more multiple-page ads in the same issue or time frame, in which case we combine the two previous conventions to produce:
    Game Title (Month, Year of periodical) (##) ## The example might thus read: "Tomb Raider III (August, 1998) (01) 01", "Tomb Raider III (August, 1998) (01) 02", and "Tomb Raider III (August, 1998) (01) 03" for a three-page ad, followed by "Tomb Raider III (August, 1998) (02) 01" and "Tomb Raider III (August, 1998) (02) 02" for a two-page ad in the same issue. This is so the sorting algorithm puts all the relevant pages for the relevant ads in the proper order.
    But we're not done yet. Sure, the ads for the video games are important, but there's a second (and, in my opinion, just as vital) component to gaming advertising history, and those are the ads for the companies that bought and sold the games themselves. Thus, I've added a slew of new galleries and sub-galleries to the "Game Related Ads" section of the database aimed specifically at holding these important artifacts.
    Mail order outfits like "BRE Software" and "Chips & Bits Inc." were huge advertisers in the pages of the major gaming publications of the day, and there's an awful lot of historical information that can be gleaned from their pricing lists. Gaming historians have even been able to use these price charts to narrow down release dates in cases where that information had been lost to time, and even identify games which were marketed but never released, all because an unknown name appeared on one of these ad sheets.
    But more than that, things like store-specific coupons, telephone tip lines, and other bits of ephemera which were a major part of the hobby in the pre-internet age are all interesting artifacts, reminders of bygone times, and important pieces of information on the timeline that is 'video game history'.
    When it comes to the final history of our hobby, there's no telling what could one day wind up being the lynchpin of someone's research about a particular game or company. Having whole magazines available for download, of course, allows people to dig at their leisure, but dedicated galleries allow someone interested in one specific type of material to peruse only that content if they so choose. And these mail-order operations, contests, coupons, subscription rates, and other miscellaneous bits and pieces of lore are woefully under-represented in the current state of archival.
    Finally, Phillyman has updated the magazine database to include a field that tells whether a particular issue has had its ads digitally extracted for the database or not! If you contribute to this aspect of the site, make sure you visit the relevant magazine entry, click on 'Edit', and scroll to the bottom to set 'Advertisements Extracted?' to 'Yes'!
    Ultimately, it's fun to mine these ads. It's hard work, sure, and it can take hours to plunder the contents of a single 1994-era EGM. But it's also relaxing to thrown on a lo-fi playlist on YouTube and just dig and reminisce. If that seems like the kind of busy-work you'd enjoy, then feel free to hop in and test the waters. We can build a bad-ass collection of high-resolution gaming ads based on the material already archived here, and you can be a part of it without sacrificing a single magazine or book from your own collection.
    How freaking cool is that?
    *huggles*
    Areala
  5. Areala
    Magazine demographics often come into play when deciding what ads agencies will submit to a particular publication. In the case of this ad, which came from the very first issue of Next Generation magazine in 1995, their attempt to reach an older, more mature audience meant they got stuff that wouldn't fly in the pages of EGM or GamePro, which were targeted at a younger teenage audience.
    Check this out though: that's an offer to write a horror fiction story for a video game inspired by Clive Barker, to be published by Virgin Interactive. In 1995, Virgin OWNED the graphical adventure market thanks to "The 7th Guest" and its sequel, "The 11th Hour". These were two of the best-selling CD-ROM games of the 1990s, and the opportunity to earn writing credit for penning a tale for a Virgin-published game would have meant near-instant celebrity.
    Alas, despite the ad's lofty promises of an intense life experience, it wasn't meant to be. So what happened here?
    Short answer: we don't know.
    The ad doesn't mention the game-to-be by name, but with a little detective work we can narrow it down. There were a lot of games involving Barker's writing or his properties (Hellraiser, etc...) that never saw the light of day, but Virgin Interactive was set to publish only one game involving him: Ectosphere.
    Barker's presence in comic books was growing by leaps and bounds in the mid-90s. He was writing for, or licensing his stories to, Marvel, Dark Horse, Eclipse, and HarperCollins at various times. One of those comics was Ectokid, written for Marvel Comics under their Razorline imprint (an imprint created just for Barker, I might add).
    Ectokid's nine-issue run tells stories of Dex Mungo, a fourteen-year-old boy with a unique gift (and curse). Dex's eyes don't work quite right. His left one's just fine: when he looks through it, he sees the real world, the same as you and I do. But his right eye sees beyond reality, into the spirit realm. To help him get through life, Dex wears a patch he slides from eye to eye depending on which version of reality he wants to view. Most of the stories in this line weren't written by Barker, but by other talents in the comic industry at the time (trivia note: Matrix creators Andy and Larry (now Lana) Wachowski penned five of them).
    Imagine the possibilities for a horror adventure game designed with an interface where, with the click of a button, you could "slide the patch" and reveal a completely different world. Properly handled, Virgin could have published something that made their previous hits look like ziplock baggie distributions from the 1980s.
    So what the Hell(raiser) happened? I have no idea, and neither does anybody else according to my research. Virgin applied for a trademark to the Ectosphere name in 1994, but the trademark is now considered abandoned due to non-use. Every reference to the game I've found simply labels it "unreleased" and there's nary a screenshot or box picture to be found.
    One other lingering question remains: since it's unlikely Virgin didn't get any response to this ad, who eventually won the position? My best educated guess would be David Sears. You may not know him by name, but Sears' first game-related job was co-adapting Harlan Ellison's story, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" to the PC adventure market with Ellison himself (and a fine job they did too). He went to work for Virgin Interactive afterwards. He's also been the creative director behind the first three SOCOM games on the PS2, MAG on the PS3, and Fireteam Bravo on the PSP.
    One of the best things about video game journalism is tracking down and solving little mysteries such as this, seeing what might have been. On the other side of the coin, four of the most painful words in the English language are, "What might have been?" What might have been indeed...
  6. Areala
    Today the Supreme Court of the United States voted to overturn 50 years of precedent, by overturning the decision in the case of Roe vs. Wade, which allowed for access to abortion in this country. This is a decision which will, without fail, result in the death and ruination of the lives of women and girls unfortunate enough to reside in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature.
    "But Areala, why would YOU care about abortion? You don't want to have kids. Hell, you're gay. You couldn't get pregnant with your wife no matter how hard you tried!"
    I care because I'm a woman with a functioning uterus, who could become a victim of sexual assault and be forced to carry my rapist's baby to term. Indiana, where I live, is convening an emergency legislative session in early July to pass a law ending all access to abortion in the state. This will likely be regardless of circumstances: rape, incest, being eleven years old, an ectopic pregnancy, a pregnancy where delivery or the continued carrying of a fetus could harm or kill the mother, it will not matter. Overturning Roe is overt violence towards women.
    Period.
    Paragraph.
    But that's not why I'm sad. That's not why I'm terrified.
    I'm terrified because Justice Thomas, in his opinion, wrote that overturning Roe was just the beginning. That it was time to reconsider other such legislation. Legislation like Griswold vs. Connecticut, which concerns access to contraception so people can partake of their own family planning. Legislation like Lawerence v. Texas, which protects the rights of consenting adults (especially of the LGBTQ persuasion) to engage in the sexual activities of their choice. And legislation like Obergefell v. Hodges, which opened up marriage equality to same-sex couples.
    A sitting Supreme Court justice told the entire nation that next, they would be coming for me and people like me.
    For those of you who don't know, I'm a lesbian. My wife and I got married on June 26th, 2014, after being together for seventeen years prior to that. In two days, we'll celebrate our eighth anniversary as a married couple, and a few months after that, our twenty-fifth anniversary as a couple. I don't much feel like celebrating. Because a sitting Supreme Court justice just told the country they're coming for me.
    Six years ago, when Trump was elected president, I wrote a post explaining how terrified I was of what this presidency would mean to me, and to people like me. I wrote that I hung on to a sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, things wouldn't be as bad as they seemed.
    I don't have even that sliver of hope any longer. They are coming for me, and for people like me and my wife. They have said it openly, without fear of reprisal, secure in the knowledge that I can do nothing to stop them.
    For the last several weeks, I have struggled with the worst bout of depression I've ever suffered. Yesterday, I was making progress.
    Today swept all that away.
    Today, all I can do is 'survive'. I can't be happy, I can't find joy in anything, all I can do is concentrate on taking the next breath, and then the one after that.
    I have no more energy, no more will, no more stamina or endurance or mettle or guts or reserves left to fight.
    This country is now a theocracy in everything but name. And after three decades of doing my damnedest to rise above, to fight the good fight, I am throwing in the towel. I surrender. I'm broken beyond anyone's capacity to repair. I'm powered now by tears, and when those run out, I fear I will too.
    I love you all. But I give up. It's over. They won. It's done. And so am I.
  7. Areala
    I'm awakened by the sound
    Of rain against my window
    It's getting harder to ignore
    But these tired eyes need rest.
    -- "Flourescent Skies", Assemblage 23
    I read a lot. I know this will make some of you wonder "when?" given the amount of time I spend going on and on about games, either playing them or writing about them, but despite the fun of interactive entertainment, there's nothing quite like a good book. Also, I make my living working in a used bookstore, and before that I worked in a library. Books, you could say, are in my blood.
    Blood...it's an interesting word. Sometimes the mere mention of it is enough to make a person squeamish. For vampires, it's the choice of the Undead Generation, while for us mortals the sight of it usually triggers the unsettling sensation that something is very, very wrong. I'm not a vampire despite my choice to keep rather late hours, but I enjoy reading about them on occasion. My genre of choice, in fact, when it comes to literature (or rather, "literature" as the literati snobs prefer to describe it) is horror. Like many readers of horror my age, I cut my teeth on Stephen King with the likes of "The Stand," "It," and "The Tommyknockers." But while Mr. King received the pleasure of busting my virginal horror maidenhead, and I still enjoy the occasional dalliance of impropriety with him via his short stories, my one true love ever since I first discovered him in 1995 has been Richard Laymon.
    The collective speaks out to me and asks, "Who?" A part of me enjoys answering this question, because Laymon is my favorite writer in the genre and I love the idea of introducing new people to him. There's another part of me, though, who will forever sit in her dark, quiet room at home, face against tear-stained pillows, clutching a threadbare teddybear and wishing for a release because Richard, my one true horror love, left me lo these long years ago on Valentine's Day of 2001, when he died of a massive heart attack at age 54.
    Scattered light through broken windows
    Far beneath fluorescent skies
    Voices calling from a distance
    So why am I still standing here?
    -- "Flourescent Skies", Assemblage 23
    All melodrama aside, I can safely say I know virtually nothing at all concerning his real life, save that he and his wife were good friends with Dean Koontz and often shared dinners with him and his family. Of his literary life, on the other hand, I am more familiar because Laymon struggled all of his life to nurture an audience in the country where he lived. Laymon's first novel, "The Cellar," was published in 1980 by Warner Books. It is a slim novel, clocking in at only a little over 250 pages in pocket paperback, but between those two black covers lurked a tale soaked through in blood, squelched nightmares from every oozing chapter, and provided an ending that didn't just thumb its nose at convention, but rather threw convention on its stomach and proceeded to violate it in every manner imaginable until it begged for mercy. Laymon is often credited with inventing the "splatterpunk" subgenre of horror, and with a read-through of "The Cellar," it is easy to see why. His first book sold well enough that Warner wanted another, and Laymon was only too happy to provide. 1981 saw the release of "The Woods Are Dark." It was the book that almost single-handedly wrecked Laymon's writing career.
    The tense, electric hum abides
    The wires meant to contain it
    Until it arcs through angry skies
    That look down with contempt.
    -- "Flourescent Skies", Assemblage 23
    Despite letting "The Cellar" pass through the doors of their press virtually untouched and uncensored, Warner Books decided to take a closer look at their second offering by Laymon, and one editor decided it was just too much. The manuscript was returned filled with edits, requests for revisions, orders to excise entire scenes and rewrite others, time and time again. Laymon fought as best he could, but as a newly-published author did not have the clout of a more established writer, and in the end, "The Woods Are Dark" was released with some fifty pages of cuts, rewrites, edits and, in the ultimate insult, whole sections that were rewritten by a line editor from Warner's own stable. When Laymon returned the manuscript after correcting all the spelling errors, grammar mistakes, plot compression, timeline distortions and flat-out idiocy that had resulted from the hackwork done to his novel, he was told that correcting everything he had identified would cost too much money at this stage and the book would be published as-is. To add insult to injury, the original cover artwork for the book was inexplicably passed over in favour of a cheap-looking and cheesy bright green foil-stamp design that would have looked out of place even on a romance novel of the times, much less a work of horror. The results were far too predictable: "The Woods Are Dark" produced miserable sales, despite a cover blurb from Gary Brandner who was enjoying considerable fame himself as the author of "The Howling," and Warner axed Laymon from their lineup. Just like that, a promising writer's career was utterly and capriciously ruined. The small remaining consolation to Laymon was that the UK publisher of "The Woods Are Dark" had the decency to fix the outright obvious mistakes in the text prior to its arrival on the shelves there.
    Laymon continued to write, but his US career as a horror novelist was effectively over. In the UK, however, he enjoyed a considerable amount of success, publishing sometimes two or even three novels a year, including three sequels to "The Cellar" which became known to his fans as "The Beast House series". In the late 80s, Laymon's career in the US began to pick up again. "Flesh" was voted Best Horror Novel of 1988 by Science Fiction Chronicle, and both "Flesh" and "Funland" were nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association. The 90s saw Laymon's work picked up by Leisure Press, and he slowly began to receive attention in the States. Reading his works chronologically, one can watch Laymon's skills grow and become more polished. Later books feature better characterization and better pacing, and Laymon's ability to create plots out of seemingly absurd situations became second to none. His 2000 release, "The Travelling Vampire Show," won the Bram Stoker Award. Unfortunately, Laymon died in February of 2001, and thus the award was given posthumously. The first book published in the aftermath of his death, "Night in the Lonesome October," is cited by many fans (myself included) as one of his best-written and most enjoyable novels; I re-read it every October as a memorial (needless to say, the blog title pays homage to this as well).
    Rivers overflow their banks
    And change their course forever
    Force their will upon the earth
    And wash it all away.
    -- "Flourescent Skies", Assemblage 23
    Today, Richard Laymon would have celebrated his sixth-third birthday, and my mind can only wonder at what he would have accomplished these past 9 years if he had continued to write. But in a career spanning a mere two decades, Laymon managed to publish more than thirty novels and seventy short stories and novellas, including a collaboration with Edward Lee and Jack Ketchum, two of his contemporaries in the genre, entitled "Triage." And finally, Laymon's work on "The Woods Are Dark" was vindicated, as his daughter Kelly was able to piece together her father's original manuscript from the files left behind. The original, unedited and uncut edition of the book was published by Leisure in 2008, and readers could now experience his vision first-hand.
    So, to the man who has tingled my spine more than any other, my companion on countless journeys through the darkest hearts imaginable, the individual who has scared me time and time again only to later remove the mask and reveal himself as just a humble author, and who inspired me to work on writing creepy stories of my own without worrying about censoring myself, I raise a humble bottle of Mountain Dew in thanks and tribute. Happy birthday, Mr. Laymon, wherever you are. I've already made reservations for our date this October. I'll not forget...and somehow, I don't think you will either.
  8. Areala
    Realizing I haven't posted a blog entry in well over a year is kind of becoming an annual event here in my Retromags world. I'm not as active as I should be, as I'd like to be, and much as I wish I could promise to change all of that, I don't make promises I can't be certain of keeping. One of the most recent things I blogged about was the question of what happens when one's desire to keep up with gaming flounders, and as it turns out, there's still no cut-and-dried answer to that. Playing video games used to be my go-to hobby, something I maintained with an excessive interest. I followed up on new systems, stalked new releases, anticipated new console systems, read magazines and books and really anything I could get my hands on that would tell me more about my favorite hobby.
    Now? Well, now I'm a woman in her early forties for whom gaming is still exciting, but only in the familiar sense. I am a "gamer" only insofar as I own video game systems and will occasionally turn one of them on to play for a bit. An hour or so of "Dragon's Crown" here, a two hour stint with "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance" there, and the occasional play-through of an RPG from the 16-bit era that brings back all the memories of what being a gamer in the 90's meant: lines at arcades for Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat machines, the console wars, EGM vs. GamePro vs. GameFan, and so forth.
    I'm more interested in what was than what is or what will be. In other words, I'm clinging to a past which recedes further away from me with each passing day, and in the worry that one day I will have only memories to occupy my thoughts, I'm struggling to pack my banks full of all the good ones. The best ones. The ones that made me who I am today.
    I'm also feeling the same way about a lot of other things in my life, especially music. Music hasn't always been enormously important in my life, but once I realized what it was, what it could do, and how much fun it was to make it, I've been obsessed with it. Not obsessed in the way that, say, a vinyl collector will obsess over finding a perfect-condition LP, but rather obsessed with it in the sense that I use it as a landmark, to recall feelings and put me back in the frame of mind I was in when something happened.
    "How does that relate to gaming, Areala?"
    I'm getting to that. Be patient.
    Welsh singer Donna Lewis released her first album, "Now In A Minute" in May of 1996. If those names don't mean anything to you, then maybe the title of her hit single will: "I Love You Always, Forever" was the most-played, most-requested song on pop radio stations the year of its release. If you lived ANYWHERE within earshot of the FM band, you heard this song. Maybe you hated it, maybe you loved it, maybe you were indifferent to it, but I fell into the second camp. Her voice mesmerized me with its breathy, ethereal qualities. To this day, it conjures up memories of the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years of college, where I spent a lot of time back at home and travelling with my mom and my brother to visit relatives. He'd just graduated high school, after all, so everyone was eager to lavish attention on him before he moved off to college.
    One of the things I loved to do back in my high school and college days, as far as video games were concerned, was get online and play one of the text-based Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, that you could find all over the place before "Everquest" and later "World of Warcraft" pretty much wiped them out. MUDs were free, online, open-world games that used an Infocom-style parser to input commands. The difference between a MUD and a normal text adventure was that when you quit playing "Zork", everything about the world stopped because you were the only denizen. A MUD, on the other hand, was always on (except during server upgrades or maintenance periods), and open to multiple players at all hours of the day and night. I spent a considerable amount of time in college, and even afterwards, MUDding.
    Most MUDs didn't have sound, and the ones that did used it for very small things, like a quick MIDI tune when you accessed their login screen, or a few bloops and beeps when you gained a level or died. Therefore, while MUDding, I often would put in my headphones and listen to a CD. And that summer, it was Donna Lewis more than any other band which dominated my listening time when I got online to interact with my friends.
    While "I Love You Always, Forever" is a catchy pop tune, and is the obvious choice for a hit radio single, I've always felt there were much stronger songs on the album than that one. If I had to pick a favorite, it wouldn't be that one. I love every track on the album, but the one which always stood out to me, mainly because of my background as a gamer and love of fantasy role-playing, was "Agenais."
    Much of the meaning of Donna's music is left up to your own interpretation, but this is clearly based on an idea or a dream she once had, perhaps a story she read that fired up her imagination. It's the closest I think I've ever come to closing my eyes and believing, honestly BELIEVING in my heart, that I truly was somewhere else. "Agenais" was every special area of every MUD I ever played on, where other people just like me came to congregate, tell stories, and live separate virtual lives unencumbered by the weight of reality and released to realize our fantasies. It truly was, in Donna's words, a "beautiful, magical place".
    What always fascinated me about the story she relates within the lyrics, however, is how one arrives at Agenais. You don't go soaring up into the clouds, you don't climb a mountain, you don't jump on a rocket ship and blast off to a different planet or sail across the sea to a new continent, or walk into the trunk of an enchanted oak tree.
    You float.
    To reach Agenais, you float to a golden crystal palace, lit by blue flames, where dancers twirl, wearing long, silver veils and white lilies woven into their air. You reach Agenais by closing your eyes and floating down. Like you were in a dream.
    Lewis's song is fairly basic, but infused with so much imagination that I've been in love with it for twenty-plus years. MUDding, for me, was floating down to Agenais. What else could it be, with carefully-crafted underwater cities, treetop mansions, dragon lairs, and all manner of pixies, fairies, goblins, elves, dwarves, wizards, halflings, gnomes, warriors, clerics, angels, thieves, bards, and all the rest?
    Lewis's final, whispered refrain, the minor-key musical notes accompanying it, have always carried an air of finality for me. As we get older, the fantasies of our youth become harder and harder to hold on to. Other things in life take priority, and many of our hopes and aspirations are put on hold while other things happen. In "Agenais", however, I have a four-minute remembrance of good times past. I link it to friendships made across thousands of miles. I link it to sleepy car rides back to Indianapolis late in the evening. I link it to my virtual persona, who now slumbers away in the database of some disconnected server, a collection of bits and bytes which, like all of us, slowly decay as the years go by.
    All that is left of her now is my memory, and the memories of those who knew her. In a hundred years' time, it will matter to no one that once, "Areala" existed in a realm called "Land of the Lost Unicorn", in the guise of a pixie cleric who followed the tenets of Moradin's True Neutrality in an effort to bring balance to the land. The people she met, the friends she made, the adventures she had, the enemies she fought, the puzzles she solved, the gear she obtained, the lives she touched, will not matter. She, in a sense, has already gone "floating down to Agenais".
    It's a somber thought. But not a bad one. Because, though the life of "Areala, Priestess of Moradin, wife of Carla, antagonist of Cougar, friend of Aspenamy, compatriot of Quenthel, nemesis of Belial, and Mayor of Lost Unicorn Village" may one day be meaningless to everyone else, it will have had value to me. And one day, hopefully later rather than sooner, when I myself find myself floating down to Agenais, I will carry that memory and many others with me into that labyrinth of golden rose-red colours.
    I'll have Donna Lewis, and music, and video games, to thank for that. And people like you who visit Retromags and help keep the retro dream alive for the rest of us who all have our own private visions, our own personal Agenaises, our own unknowable memories of what gaming meant. Thanks for reading. I'm heading to bed.
    *huggles*
    Areala 
  9. Areala
    Piracy itself is a topic for another blog entirely, so tonight we're just going to focus on Titan Quest itself and showcase a small sample of what happens when you take anti-piracy schemes to the next level.
    You remember Titan Quest, don't you? Of course you don't. It was developed by the now-defunct Iron Lore Entertainment, and published by THQ, Inc, and it was targeted at the market of people who were waiting for Blizzard to get around to releasing Diablo III. And like most every other PC game out there, it was pirated out the wazoo. Now, while this is clearly a bad thing, the designers of the game managed to shoot themselves in the foot via their own anti-piracy security checks.
    It doesn't seem like such a bad idea: you implement security checks for your software during the gameplay itself, and if the game determines that you are, in fact, playing a pirated copy of the game, it shuts itself down and you lose whatever you had been doing since your last save. In Titan Quest's terms, this meant that there would be certain milestones for playing that you absolutely could not get past if you were not playing the full retail version, including the very first cave that you explore. Step outside, security check, and BAM: you were at the Windows desktop with nary an error message or pop-up to tell you why the game had suddenly shut down. So pirates cannot play your game, period. What could go wrong?
    Simple: word of mouth. Titan Quest was cracked by software pirates very quickly. In fact, it was cracked a little TOO quickly, and our eyepatch-wearing software hackers missed a number of the security checks in the game code during their quick and dirty patching effort. This led to a game that was, naturally, impossible to play. The natural software pirate response? Accuse the developers of creating an amazingly shoddy product. And before long, the reviews of Titan Quest were coming out of the woodwork, promoting the game as a bug-ladden, impossible-to-play piece of garbage. This meme was even picked up by mainstream reviewers with legitimate copies of the game, and was often mentioned in their write-ups (ex.: "While this reviewer had no problems playing Titan Quest, it should be noted that numerous people have complained of game-breaking bugs that corrupt save files and make progression impossible. Make of that what you will.").
    Naturally, the company had to respond, and Iron Lore and THQ quickly began trying to perform damage control by not only releasing patches for the retail version, but also reporting that people who were experiencing such bugs were obviously playing illegally downloaded copies of the game and should really switch over to a legal copy to avoid such problems in the future. But the damage had already been done: in the mainstream press and gaming websites across the Internet, Titan Quest had already acquired a very bad reputation, and no amount of spin, damage control, or press releases and patches could possibly fix the situation.
    Titan Quest was, according to the publisher, moderately successful. An expansion pack was released in 2007 along with a Gold edition that included both the normal game and the expansion in one box. It made money. But it didn't make enough, and in 2008, THQ bid farewell to Iron Lore Entertainment, costing dozens of artists, programmers, sound technicians, managers and designers their jobs. It's a sad story, made all the more unfortunate by the fact that there was no way for someone who had pirated the game to understand that it was the third-party rush crack-job that was rendering the game unplayable and not a bug inherent in the software itself. Word of mouth on the Internet spreads faster than it can possibly be contained, and what seemed like a good idea in development wound up turning into a fiasco that ultimately worked at the forefront, with a few other factors, to cripple Titan Quest and prevent it from being seen as the game it was instead of the game people perceived it to be. You never, as they say, get a second chance to make a first impression, and nowhere is this more apparent in the gaming industry than the case of Titan Quest.
  10. Areala
    Sometimes you just can't be as hardcore a gamer as you want to be. Sure, there's nothing like sitting down and marathoning through a game like Dragon Warrior in a 20-hour stretch of levelling madness, but as you get older and summer vacations become a thing of the past, most of us don't get that kind of quality time in any longer unless you wind up both independantly wealthy and without a significant (or dependant) other.
    So what do you do when you want to game, but you only have an hour or less to pick something up, play for a little while, and then put it down again to return to the real world? Here's my list for the NES and my reasons. Feel free to pick it apart, gripe about your favorite game not making the list, or fuss about the order in the comments section.

    10 - Tetris





    Everybody knows what Tetris is all about, so you'll forgive me if I don't discuss it very much. Note that we're only talking about the Nintendo incarnation here, or the single-player Tengen version. The two-player mode on Tengen's Tetris has been the cause of more violent conflict than I care to talk about, and is for the hardcore only. But single-player Tetris? You can zone out, play for a while, then put it down when you lose. Perfect casual gaming fodder, and it never gets old.

    9 - Super Mario Bros. 2





    This is on the list simply because it's a Mario game without a timer. You can mess around in any of the worlds of Subcon for as long as you like without losing a life, and sometimes it's just fun to see how many enemies you can skip a vegetable across or how far you can ride that turtle shell. Plus, Luigi's jumping animation is always worth a chuckle.

    8 - Arkanoid





    Sure, it's a shameless clone of Breakout. But even so, it's tons of fun to pick up and play. Bounce the ball off your paddle, break the blocks, lather, rinse, repeat. How much more casual can you get, really?

    7 - T.M.N.T. II: The Arcade Game





    This might surprise some people, but it's one of the most playable casual action games on the NES, with basic enemies that are a cinch to slaughter, and bosses that take a modicum of strategy. While a protracted game will probably make you want to add a second player and a 10-life cheat, when you've only got a little while and you want to bash something, the Turtles are your buddies here. Die, Foot Clan, die!

    6 - Balloon Fight





    Detractors of this title call it "Joust" with different graphics. But truly hardcore casual NES players (is that an oxymoron?) know that Balloon Fight easily holds its own against its cousin. For while the normal play mode is indeed like Joust, the Balloon Trip mode sets it apart from the pack as your lone balloon racer tries to get home while dodging lighting bolts, sparks, open water, and other hazards.

    5 - Ice Hockey





    Many people would claim that sports games themselves are casual gaming exercises, but I would disagree. Madden, for instance, is meant for hardcore football fans, not people who think it's fun to toss a ball every so often. Nintendo's own Ice Hockey is everything amusing about the sport taken to an absurd degree. With four players per team, two teams on the ice, and a time limit that can set the quarters to short, five-minute increments, Ice Hockey is meant to be picked up and played. Plus, it's impossible not to get a kick out of the zambonis that drive across the ice during half-time. With a second player, this can sometimes turn downright ugly especially when fights break out on the ice, but when it's just one player vs. the AI, you can dominate the crap out of the NES and feel good about doing it.

    4 - Dr. Mario





    Yes, I know, Dr. Mario is basically Tetris in drag, but it's still an amazingly good choice for pick-up-and-play time. Eradicating viruses with pills is what the world is all about in this day and age, and Nintendo gave us plenty of reasons to go visit the Doctor when this hit came out. Add a nice dose of cool tunes to enjoy while performing microbial genocide, and you have the formula for a casual gaming panacea.

    3 - River City Ransom





    Nothing combines butt-kicking with hilarious subtitles like the genius that is River City Ransom. Everything about this game, from the outrageous kung-fu moves to the grade-Z storyline of gangs taking over all the schools in River City is filled with charm and a tongue implanted firmly in the genre's cheek. While it's possible to play it as an epic combination of street brawler and RPG, it's just as easy to forego passwords and start from the beginning, smashing your way through as many gangs as you can. There are no lives to lose, so you can call it quits whenever you like, and the game will happily give you a password whenever you ask. One of the most immediately accessible and playable fighting games of all time. Note: beating up on a friend in 2-Player Mode B is for the hardcore only, as this will do nothing but encourage the giving of rug burns, wedgies, and other forms of torment in the real world.

    2 - Excitebike





    Seriously, what could be simpler than condensing the sport of motocross down to two simple buttons and five basic tracks? Nintendo managed to do just this with Excitebike, one of its earliest offerings on the console. Each of the five courses can be completed in under five minutes each, making it possible to beat Excitebike in under half an hour if you want to go that far. But what's far more enjoyable is setting it to Mode B and just knocking the AI riders off their bikes right before important jumps. Nothing beats the feeling of knocking that darn blue rider off his bike in mid-air with a strategic lane change.

    1 - Super Dodge Ball





    Another Techno creation like River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball takes extreme sports to the absurd by placing you in the shoes of the fictional US olympic dodgeball team some twenty years before Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller made it the topic of a comedy film. A game which openly defies the laws of physics and gravity (often simultaneously), SDB is nothing more than a hilarious parody of all that is serious about normal sports games. It even includes the enormously fun "Bean Ball" mode, where you play one of the six US players who take over a school yard and proceed to smear one another all over the dirt. No lines, no rules, no fouls, just chaos. A two-player mode is provided, but see the entries for River City Ransom and Tetris for why this disqualifies it from "casual" gaming territory. Playing two-player Super Dodge Ball will expose you to behaviors outside the game that barely qualify as socially acceptable, while also introducting you to exchanges of verbal tirades and expletives that would make a Marine cry.
    As you can see, "casual" games don't have to be "dull" or "boring" games. There's plenty of action and fun to be found in games that are simple to just pick up and play for a little while and then put down when you're done. And even though the NES gave rise to the phrase "Nintendo hard" in describing games that are only for hardcore purists due to absurd difficulty, tricky jumps or relentless enemies, not every NES title fits that description. These are my 10 favorites. Got one you think I overlooked, or something that didn't deserve to be on the list? Speak your thoughts below!
  11. Areala
    I frigging love Parasite Eve for the Playstation. It's one of my favorite RPGs of all time (small wonder, since it's written and directed by the guy who directed Chrono Trigger and designed Final Fantasy IV on the Super NES, and scored by Yoko Shimomura who did the music for Breath of Fire, Kingdom Hearts, many incarnations of Street Fighter II, and Legend of Mana among others), and I've felt it never received the recognition it deserved coming as it did in the wake of Final Fantasy VII and being set in modern-day New York with a science fiction theme.
    One of the things I enjoy about older game magazines is looking through their previews for games and seeing the changes they underwent before going gold. And since a couple of my previous blogs have been poking fun at GamePro, I figured I could balance that out by writing something nice so people don't get the impression I hated them.
    So, right here, we've got a one-page preview from the Sept. 1997 issue of GamePro showcasing Squaresoft's upcoming release of (yay!) Parasite Eve!
    What I love so much about this is that none of the pictures that you see, save for one, are scenes that actually appear in the game. Rather they are amalgamations of elements put together for the purpose of giving a sense of what the game will look like. They're also at a much higher resolution than the final game elements, which means they're probably being shown on a development computer.
    Starting at the top and going down, we have the following:
    1 - Aya fighting with the animated skeleton of a T-Rex. While this happens in the game, it takes place in the Museum of Natural History, not out on the city streets. That backdrop depicting the police barriers and cop cars is used during a single cut-scene where Dr. Maeda is introduced. No rampaging dinosaurs to be found.
    2 - Aya and Dr. Maeda having a conversation in Carnegie Hall. Aya and Maeda do talk several times throughout the game, but Carnegie Hall is seen only in the first chapter of the game where it practically burns to the ground, and in the game's "bad" ending which you automatically get on your first play-through. The pair talk outside of Carnegie Hall, but this specific camera angle isn't used in the game.
    3 - Aya fighting the mutated alligator. This set actually does appear in the game in a slightly modified architectural format as the sewer system below Carnegie Hall. The mutant alligator shown here looks nothing at all like the final version in the game (which completely lacks eyes and spits electricity). Also at this point in the game, Aya's still dressed in her evening gown, not jeans and a leather jacket. She also doesn't fight the alligator on this part of the set, but rather in the more confined tunnels further back.
    4 - Aya and Daniel in the precinct. This is the only set shown in these pictures that looks exactly like it does in the game. There are usually a couple of other detectives (Nix and Warner) who hang out in this area, but chances are their models weren't completed yet.
    5 - Another look at Aya in the sewers from a different angle. Again, with some modifications, this set actually appears in the game but Aya's attire at this point is her evening gown, not her typical detective outfit. Aya visits another sewer later on in the game dressed this way, but the set used is far more industrial in nature as opposed to the artistic architecture showcased in the first sewer sequence.
    6 - Daniel, Aya and Maeda all talking on the Brooklyn Bridge. This particular set is used during a cinema sequence depicting the evacuation of New York, and can't be visited during the game itself. There are numerous times the three converse, but it's generally either in Precinct 17 or the Museum of Natural History.
    They get the release date wrong (it doesn't come out in Japan until March of 1998, and we don't see it until September of that same year), but since release dates change constantly this isn't a mistake on GamePro's part; they can only print what they're told, after all.
    So, why read old game magazines? To see stuff like this, of course!
  12. Areala
    I didn't make the connection until just now, but the cover to NP#11 is obviously an homage to the original clay modeled cover of the premier issue. We're now nearly two years into Nintendo Power's run but their momentum is only building from here on out. If you need to ask why, just take a look at that cover again: they're talking about the biggest, most hotly-anticipated video game release in NES history. Hey, piezanos, it's Super Mario Bros. 3!
    But first, more big news rocking the Nintendo World: Nintendo Power's going monthly! The magazine will still come out every other month, but they won't leave you hanging in the off-seasons. Instead, they're going to release six game-specific strategy guides that will walk you from Title Screen to Game Over. And all for the low, low price of $15 a year. And SMB3 will kick it all off. Nintendo cleaned up on this promotion, but there was a bigger one coming in just a few months that would force virtually every kid in the US to beg mom and dad for a subscription. More on the major give-away later on. For now, it's go time!
    We kick things off, as always, with Player's Pulse and the mailbox. Letters keep flooding in, so it's only right the first one is about a boy and his apparently-waterproof NES. Store your Nintendo in a nice cardboard box, and it too can be protected from the ravages of basement flooding! An idea so good, the guys in Washington are considering it themselves. Next, a note asking about a double-Mouser encounter in Super Mario Bros. 2 (that's called a bug, and while our programmers try to squash them all, a few still manage to get through. Be happy you saw it, it's a rare glitch!). A letter thanking Nintendo for not telling him how to beat the final boss in Strider because the feeling of accomplishment was so much greater figuring it out for himself (we told you, now keep playing and see what else you can master!). A letter from a concerned sister reminding everyone that setting limits on Nintendo is the key to maintaining good study habits in her house (we agree, make sure you're not neglecting your school work!).
    Video Spotlight has three profiles again, two being the rather pedestrian variety (I'm awesome because I've beaten XX games, sometimes play all night, and never use slow motion to cheat) and one who stands out from the pack in a good way: Andy Cunningham of Rocky Mount, NC is a 14-year old computer enthusiast, programmer, and game designer who aspires to work for a large software company one day and has already developed his own complete game called Super Dachshund with "ending screens, full stages, 20 different evil enemies and 8 incredibly challenging bosses." Man, finally, a Power Player who can really look back on his appearance in the magazine and smile for a good reason. Andrew Cunningham, if you're out there and you read this, please let us know what's going on in your life now!
    Be honest, this was why you picked up the magazine in the first place: an eight-page blowout on Super Mario Bros. 3. While it's little more than a preview at this point, with some stage maps, an overview of the game's eight worlds, and a look at the various new power-ups and types of blocks you'll encounter, it's more than enough to whet the appetites of Mario maniacs everywhere.
    I was never big into simulations, so the four-page Silent Service feature was pretty blah for me. Still, the game looks like it tries very hard to squeeze a whole submarine's worth of playability into the little grey cartridge. Military enthusiasts and sim lovers had been playing this on the PC already since 1985, but give props where they're due: it was developed/ported by Rare (yes, that Rare) and published by Konami's Ultra Games imprint and garnered decent enough reviews.
    Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, and Nintendo was there, as this Nintendo Power Report shows. There's a ton of stuff coming down the pipeline, so prepare yourself for dozens of new releases in every genre imaginable. Trying to cover every game they talk about in these two pages would be futile, but there were some titles mentioned here that failed to materialize, like a port of the PC fighting game Bruce Lee Lives and an American version of the infamous Japanese adventure/RPG Sweet Home. Cosmic Epsilon, a SHMUP from Japan, also never makes it stateside. Another game called Play Isle is mentioned, though research tells me it must have either been canned or released under another name as I can't find anything about it.
    Fresh from the arcades, it's Pinbot, the pinball game that plays you. Well, not exactly, but about all you can do with three pages on a pinball game is explain the table and give some pointers of things to watch out for. Nice if you're into pinball, but otherwise...meh.
    The next three pages go to the home console version of Midway's extremely popular skateboarding arcade hit, 720 Degrees. Once again, skate-a-holics will be right at home with the maps and tips. Gamers more interested in keeping both feet firmly on the ground will give it a pass, and never the twain shall meet.
    I may not have been a fan of the last two features, but A Boy and his Blob more than makes up for that. This four-page spread features a map of the entire freakin' first world along with fifteen tips and pointers for making your way past the puzzles. It also gives a run-down of the various jellybeans in your arsenal, what functions they perform, and how many you start with. This is priceless information for anybody who rented this game without the instructions, and I made good use of it on my way to restoring order to Blobolonia.
    Howard and Nester hit the courts for a game of beach volleyball against a couple of muscle-bound thugs. Howard gives some tips, Nester ignores them, and winds up eating about ten pounds of sand in the ensuing carnage. Cute.
    The misnamed Wrath of the Black Manta (who should really be the Purple Manta, since that's the colour of his outfit) owns the next two pages. It's a short preview, not much to go on, just a couple of stage maps and a tip for beating the first boss, but it's better than nothing and this is a game well worth checking out. It's no Ninja Gaiden, but we've got a few months to go before Ninja Gaiden II arrives in the USA, so what can you do?
    Astyanax gets four pages after its short preview last issue, and it's all maps and tactics for the first five worlds of the game. My brother liked this game a lot more than I did, so for him it was worth it. Also, some slightly risque artwork of the very topless Medusa boss on the last page, with only a couple of strategically placed snakes and a sword covering her bosom. Surprising to see, especially for Nintendo of this era.
    Top 30 find the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sitting at the top of the pack again, along with a surprise jump up the polls by Mega Man II, consigning Super Mario Bros. 2 to the bronze position by just over 1,000 total points. Duck Tales debuts in the #9 spot, just under Ninja Gaiden at 8 and Super Mario Bros. 3 at 7. All the other "new" games listed are down towards the bottom of the pile, and they consist of the likes of Wheel of Fortune, California Games, Paperboy, and Jordan vs. Bird. Flash-in-the-pan stuff that won't be around long enough for people to remember its place.
    A couple of heavy hitters in Previews this issue, leading off with Square's soon-to-be-inaccurately-named Final Fantasy. There's not much they can show yet, so it's mostly text hyping it ("More absorbing than Legend of Zelda! More challenging than Adventure of Link!") with some screenshots interspersed. They're right about one thing though, it does set a new standard for the console RPG and launches a franchise that's still around over two decades later. Code Name: Viper gets two pages as well, but even back then I remember thinking lead character Kenny Smith looks like he's running around without pants on. Even my mother commented on this. Super C, the sequel to the beast that is Contra, gets the last three pages...
    ...as well as claiming the artwork side of this issue's Poster. The reverse is a tremendous world map of Dragon Warrior, along with a list detailing what items are sold in each town and where some of the game's special items like the Rainbow Drop and Silver Harp are located. Quite useful for first-time explorers.
    If the last few issues have proven nothing else, it's that Nintendo Power loves them some Dragon Warrior and wants you to love some Dragon Warrior as well. To that end, in case you haven't gotten the idea by reading all the pages of coverage they've been feeding you for the last year, they present the Dragon Warrior Text Adventure. It's actually a pretty fun idea, writing up a 64-paragraph Choose Your Own Adventure in the spirit of the game. It's not a patch on the real thing, of course, but I played through it a few times and enjoyed it. Your mileage may vary.
    More game on the horizon for your Game Boy. This short feature is really only useful for the Nemesis stage maps, as the remaining quarter-page writeups with screencaps on Malibu Beach Volleyball, World Bowling, Heiankyo Alien, Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World, Flipull, Qbillion, Bases Loaded, and Daedalian Opus are hardly enough to whet one's appetite. Outside of Super Mario Land, there are few truly compelling reasons to own a Game Boy at this point. A small blurb at the end reveals some upcoming titles by LJN, Ultra, Data East, Tradewest, and Mindscape. The proposed portable T&C Surf Designs title never leaves the surf shop, and the Skate or Die-style game Ultra is working on smacks the pavement without its helmet on. No big loss in either case, I suspect.
    New Games absolutely explodes this issue, with eight single-page looks at Tecmo World Wrestling (is it just me, or does "Mr. Tattoo" Mark Rose look like a drag queen?), Abadox (a grotesque, inner-space-themed SHMUP that I loved as a kid), Bases Loaded II (I prefered the RBI Baseball series), Baseball Simulator 1.000 (think of it as a cross between Bases Loaded and Super Dodge Ball with the players being able to throw physics-defying pitches, the fielders able to perform truly insane feats of speed and dexterity, and the batters able to impart special aspects to the ball after a successful hit...great, great fun!), Al Unser, Jr. Turbo Racing (a Forumla-1 racing game with 16 tracks and cars fitted with nitrous oxide for the occasional speed boost), Battle of Olympus (Broderbund's video game take on the classic Greek myth of Orpheus and the Underworld), Xexyz (a side-scrolling action game where you rescue bathing women from fates worse than death...not kidding here), and Rescue: The Embassy Mission (think Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six but on the NES).
    Quieting the cries of frustrated gamers everywhere is the job of Counselors' Corner, and there's plenty of troubles to be squashed this month. Nintendo's game experts explain how to get into Nockmaar Castle in Willow, locate Erdrick's Armor in Dragon Warrior, find the key to the African mines in DuckTales, gain entrance to River City High in River City Ransom, cross the room of flames and acquire the flute from the acid fountain in Shadowgate, and how to get the mother's crown in Legacy of the Wizard (an answer so complex and convoluted that it requires two full maps with marked travel routes to explain). The profiles this month feature a woman, Denise Borovskis, whose hobbies include Aerosmith (what??) and beach bumming, but her favorite game is The Guardian Legend, so I'll let it slide for now.
    Who doesn't love a good cheat code? Classified Information dumps the skinny on some serious tricks and glitches this issue, including the infamous code to head straight to Tyson in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (007-373-5963, a string of numbers I've had memorized longer than most of the telephone numbers I've ever known), the trick to playing the other World Circuit hidden in the game, and a similar trick to go straight to the ending credits without throwing a single punch. There's also a 64-life code for Bad Dudes, the "use the Time Stopper on Quick Man" hint for Mega Man II, a simple way to score bonus points in Cobra Triangle, a temporary infinite magic trick in Hydlide, a couple of continue codes for Double Dragon II as well as a hint for getting some extra lives in reserve, a continue code for Dino-Riki, some in-game help for a couple of levels in Cybernoid, and a password to make you an instant millionaire in Vegas Dream. Solid goodies all around.
    Video Shorts unveils the Castlevania-esque 8 Eyes, The Magic of Scheherazade, Heavy Barrel, King of the Beach, Magic Johnson's Fast Break, poor man's Double Dragon clone Target: Renegade, the virtually unplayable Marvel's X-Men from noted kuso game publisher LJN (which somehow manages to score straight 3/5s in every category), Destination Earthstar, Top Player's Tennis, Vegas Dream, popular TV gameshow port Win, Lose or Draw, unpopular TV gameshow port Remote Control, Top Gun II, Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum, pinball sim Rock 'n Ball, and three titles for younger gamers: Puss 'N Boots, Fisher Price: Perfect Fit and Fisher Price: I Can Remember. A couple gems buried in a mountain of Meh.
    Back to the scoreboards for some NES Achievers. We have our first titled gamer on the charts, as Dr. Richard L. Carman finished Dragon Warrior. We also have our first four-person tag-team entry with Joshua & Susan Lara and Tony & David Czerniecki posting a score of over nine million in The Guardian Legend. Also two people from the same place (Rancho Cordova, California) sent in scores for Sqoon. A friendly challenge, perhaps?
    NES Journal starts off with the World's Second NES Power Trivia Quiz, a multiple-choice questionnaire testing your knowledge of all things Nintendo, including why Howard Phillips wears bow ties, how much damage your system would suffer if you dumped a chocolate milkshake inside, what to do if you catch a mistake in Nintendo Power, and what Mario and Luigi's last names are. Mostly obvious answers here, but a few amusing wrong ones too make it good for a chuckle. Jack Ra of Clifton, NJ wins the "design a jersey" contest. More tour dates for the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. And...hey, here's some Nintendo merchandise (like the Super Mario Bros. Super Show on VHS, or the Bike Cop bicycle alarm) you might want to consider picking up, hint, hint...
    Before she was Leonard's ex- on "The Big Bang Theory", she was Leonard's girlfriend on "Roseanne". Sara Gilbert gets the spotlight in Celebrity Profile this issue, where she waxes ecstatic about her experiences with Mario, Link, and A Boy and His Blob. She seems like she'd be fun to hang out with.
    Hello Pak Watch! Ninja Gaiden II, Crystalis, Chip 'n' Dale's Rescue Rangers, Golgo 13: The Mafat Conspiracy, Solstice, Castlevania III...are you TRYING to kill us with anticipation, Nintendo? All four games in the "Gossip" sidebars actually get released, as do the other five games on the "Gossip Galore" page...that's better odds than you'll get from any psychic in this day and age.
    Next Issue hints at some great coverage, with full features on Final Fantasy, Dinowarz, Super C and Burai Fighter. Now's not a good time to let your subscription expire, aspiring video warriors. Howard Phillips recaps the number of games covered in this issue, and thanks everyone for writing even though he can't personally read/respond to every letter. And finally, it's time for the 1989 Nintendo Power Awards! Fill out the ballot and you too could win a handful of fantastic NES games just for voting! Too many nominees to go into, but we'll cover the winners once they print the results in a future issue.
  13. Areala
    You're familiar with the cliche "Hindsight is 20/20" right? Of course you are, that's why it's a cliche. But that doesn't mean that we can't have some fun with it anyway. So to get this party started, I'm going to pick on Flux Magazine for a little while.



    Flux was a magazine from the mid-90s devoted to comic books, music and video games. It didn't last for very long (a mere 7 issues) but it attempted to brand itself as the more "mature" alternative to EGM and the like. What this meant in theory was that it was for older readers. In practice, it just meant they showed more pictures of scantily-clad women and occasionally dropped a four-letter word or two between the covers. Not hard to see why they folded.
    In any case, I just got myself a copy of issue #4 and when I opened it up to the very first page, I had to suppress the urge to snort Mountain Dew out my nose at the editorial. Now again, I remind everybody, this was written in 1995 right on the cusp of the transition from the 16-bit to the 32-bit era and nobody had any idea how it was going to turn out. With that in mind, here are the editorial predictions for a few of our favorite systems:
    I'll pause while you stop laughing. As we all know, the 3DO failed in every market it tried to penetrate. While the launch price of this behemoth was $700 at the start, by the time the above quote appeared, it was down to $500. The M2 never materialized, DOOM wound up being an abysmal port, Myst didn't look any better than it did on your computer, and about a year after Flux predicted a $100 price drop would make it THE 32-bit system to own, bar none, Panasonic quietly folded 3DO and wound up restructuring the company as a whole to make up for the financial beating they took on their game console that wasn't a game console. The only thing this system killed was its own parents. Ouch!
    OK, so they got that one right, but that's like hunting cows with shotguns--pretty hard to miss no matter how far away you are. Another one?
    I just...wow... Yeah. Clearly written by somebody who never got the chance to actually hold a PS controller, as they would have realized it was a standard D-pad, just with the diagonals recessed under the casing to make it easier on the thumbs. I can't be positive, but at this point I imagine the two games they would have been looking at were Ridge Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden (which were very good looking games at the time). The US release included more than a dozen titles, many of which went on to become system staples or killer apps (in addition to the two above, there was also Wipeout, Destruction Derby, Doom, Mortal Kombat 3, NBA Jam Tournament Edition, Warhawk, Twisted Metal, Ace Combat, Tekken and Myst just to name the breakout hits), and the price tag was $299, a far cry from the $450 one guestimated by Flux. And, just to spite them, there were any number of successful fighting games released for the "system without a D-pad".
    Another try?
    To be fair, the inaccuracy of the launch date isn't Flux's fault, as Sega maintained a September release date for the Saturn up until the infamous May E3 speech where Kalinske surprised everybody by saying that you could get it "today" at select retailers. There never was a backwards compatibility problem with the Saturn since nobody expected it to happen anyway. Unfortunately, the price tag combined with the presence of the 32X and the impending release of the Playstation worked together to bite Sega in the posterior. Kalinske left Sega in 1996, and by 1997 the Saturn was no more as focus turned to developing the Dreamcast. Sadly, a lot of Genesis gamers did jump ship.
    Want more?
    Just a reminder, but this was written over a year before the system launched (hence the reason they were still calling it the Ultra 64) and reliable information was hard to come by. No matter though, we still see mistakes. For one thing, Nintendo did deliver on the "great graphics at a low price" promise: the N64 launched in the US with a $199 price point (but they were right about the software being expensive at $60 vs. $40 or $50 for Saturn or Playstation titles). Also, an arcade port of Killer Instinct never materialized on the N64 (despite promises in the arcade game's attract mode that it was coming). Killer Instinct Gold was a port of KI2 that added some features (team battle, anyone?) and dropped some others (most notably the alternate endings that were possible for the various characters). False advertising? Only your hairdresser knows for sure...
    So what we learn in the end isn't that the editors of Flux were idiots, they just didn't have access to a time machine and were predicting as best they could. Some of their predictions were spot-on (especially the 32X one which basically says that by the time Sega gets the 32X up to snuff there won't be anyone left to care), but most of them missed the bullseye by a ring or two. And that's OK; they're human.
    Doesn't mean we can't look back and laugh at them though.
  14. Areala
    I feel like I've hit the wall, both creatively and when it comes to gaming. I've so far ignored this current generation of games, as none of the "next gen" systems on offer feel like they have anything to offer me, and yet this creates a conundrum for me. I honestly cannot remember the last time a game absolutely blew me away, and yet looking back through the past, through my own memories, I can see dozens upon dozens of instances. Some of them were gaming "firsts", such as the first time I saw 'Super Mario Bros.' in action and realized games could be larger than one static screen like the arcades offered, my first encounter with 'Resident Evil' where I learned the potential games had to terrify, or the first time I wandered through a fully-realized 3D city environment in 'Grand Theft Auto III' where you could just drive around and explore without being tied to missions or even time limits.
    In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize it's those "firsts" that have given meaning to gaming to me ever since I was little. Playing 'Dragon Warrior' on the NES, my first real RPG experience. Watching Sonic burn through stages at warp speed on the Genesis. Two-player racing battles in 'Super Mario Kart' and 'F-Zero'. Taking my first steps in the City of Vilcabamba level in Lara Croft's shoes within the 'Tomb Raider' demo.
    'Tomb Raider' was twenty-one years ago, the summer of 1996, and while there have been other games like it, nothing has matched that feeling of immersion, of danger, of solitude and exploration. Twenty-one years. I was nineteen.
    'Silent Hill 2' turns sixteen this September. I've never played another game that was so good I wanted to keep playing, but took me to places so awful to contemplate that I had to put it down just to process what I'd witnessed. I was twenty-four when Jess gave me the game for my birthday that October. Others have come close, but none have matched the horror of James Sunderland's journey through hell, searching for his wife Mary.
    I could go on like this, but it just makes me depressed. I have close to fifty games in my PS3 library, and not one I can name has left me with the feeling that I've experienced something life-changing. Have I had fun? Absolutely! I loved the 'Tomb Raider' reboot of 2013. 'Bionic Commando: Rearmed' is a fantastic port/update of the NES classic. 'Just Cause 2' is awesomely explosive open-world entertainment, and 'Saints Row 2' and its two sequels have picked up the mantle 'Grand Theft Auto' ditched when they opted for gritty and obnoxious realism over the comedic joy and silliness that comes from playing a video game. Nathan Drake's antics in 'Uncharted' are entertaining, but is Naughty Dog doing anything different from what Core Design did years ago and Indiana Jones did a decade before that?
    Even the lone game in my PS3 library I could name that gave me that kind of 'first' experience is nothing more than an HD port of two PS2 games. 'Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga' was ground-breaking in its mixture of fun and simplicity, but again, I'd played it already a few years earlier when it was 'Lego Star Wars' and 'Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy'.
    Then I think: 'Dead Space'. 'Dead Space' came closest. It did a lot of things right. But just like the 'Alien' films, 'Dead Space' became a victim of its own success. If the first game was a claustrophobic journey through the unknown, the second was the big action set piece where the protagonist went from ordinary survivor to badass hero, and by the third it was clear the people behind the series had lost all touch with what made it great in the first place. So, for the sake of argument, I'll say 'Dead Space' fits the mold, the requirements, for what I've been seeking.
    'Dead Space' came out in 2008. That was damn near a decade ago...what the hell happened to it (and to me)?
    Scanning the shelves, my gaze settles on 'Heavy Rain'. 'Heavy Rain' was bloody magnificent, I don't care what the haters say, but 'Heavy Rain' came out in 2010. Seven years later, what is there to match it? What is there to look forward to when it seems so many game companies are playing it safe? Can the field evolve further? I don't mean in terms of technological gimmicks like motion controls, touch screens, and VR headsets. I mean in terms of 'firsts', and meaningful firsts at that.
    'Parasite Eve' blew me away in 1998 with its cinematic storytelling and exploration of a New York City at the turn of the millennium under siege from a sentient biological threat. Its sequel ditched the RPG elements, opting for a more straight-up survival horror presentation, and its most recent incarnation for the PSP, 'The Third Birthday', abandoned the Parasite Eve name all together in favor of a pseudo-sequel starring an Aya Brea who feels nothing like the original, who sight-jacks her way through a tired third-person action shooter. Where is the sense in this?
    Though I never played sports, save for a stint in cross-country and track in high school where I was average at best, I feel at this point in my life like a has-been, looking back on her youth, vainly trying to hold on to memories of her glory days on the presumption that things will never change, in denial of the fact that not only will things change, but that they already have.
    Maybe I'm asking for something I can never have. People could point to the eruption of building sandbox games like 'Minecraft', but I've played 'Minecraft' and found it too complicated and too time-consuming for my tastes. I can watch other people play it on YouTube and enjoy myself vicariously through their creations and interactions with the world and other players, but I feel like I've aged out of the demographic who can pick up and play it or its ilk.
    So here I am, stuck between two worlds, aged out of one and left pining for another.
    The truth is, for me, there likely will never be another 'Tomb Raider' moment, another 'Resident Evil' moment, another 'Parasite Eve' moment, another 'Silent Hill 2' moment. Video games are no longer made for people my age. Controls are too complex, single-player is often an afterthought, and so much that we see walks the line of utter safety. Another 'Call of Duty', another 'Halo', another 'Medal of Honor', another clone, another me-too, another waste of my time.
    Whether I outgrew gaming or it outgrew me, I don't know. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. I have my memories, I have my flashes of inspiration, and I have the thankfulness that I was there to experience it all. I literally grew up with video games. But like so many of the friends I made as I grew up, life happened, people moved on, and so have I. Just as it would feel awkward to sit down with an old friend I haven't seen in fifteen years, it feels awkward trying to re-kindle my relationship with video games.
    I want to be the same girl I was twenty years ago, reading through the magazines, eagerly watching the commercials, lapping up coverage of everything interesting me, visiting the rental stores to try new titles, cracking open new demo discs, and immersing myself in that world. I want to be. But I can't.
    Whatever that was, whatever I had, I've lost it. It's left me, hopefully to take up root in someone else's imagination. I hope it's found another girl who watches trailers on YouTube and finds inspiration, who doesn't have room in her house for massive Lego builds but has plenty of RAM on her computer to play 'Minecraft', who grew up reading "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" and now picks up the PS4 controller to play through 'Outlast' or 'Resident Evil VII'. I hope she finds what I lost, nurtures it, makes it a part of who she is, and goes on to draw inspiration from it.
    Because I think it's done with me. And I don't see it coming back.
  15. Areala
    I've needed to write this since Wednesday morning, but I haven't been in the proper emotional state of mind to do so. I still might not be, and if that's the case, I beg your forgiveness but also your indulgence. Yes, this is political. No, I don't want to stir shit up. Yes, I want your comments. No, I won't delete dissenting viewpoints. Emotion ultimately fuels everything we do, but too much emotion can be as damaging to the body as overfilling the gas tank is to your vehicle. It's taken days to siphon off the excess of what I've felt since that first sinking feeling Tuesday night that Donald Trump would win the White House. Here's what's left: I'm hopeful, and I'm scared. Let's talk about fear.
     
    For those of you who don't know, I'm a white, college-educated, college-town-dwelling lesbian from Indiana. Two years ago in 2014, my state declared same-sex couples had the right to marry. One year ago, the Supreme Court agreed and told the GLBT community to make with the festivities. And while I have only been married to my wife for a little over two years, I first met her in 1995, we began dating in 1996, and came out as a couple to our parents in 1997. This past October I turned forty, which means we've been together for half my life. She is my life. I would give up anything else, including my own life, before I would give her up.
     
    But even in a reasonably-liberal college town, we've not been unscathed by bigotry's claws. I've been harassed on the street by people I don't even know, who don't know me, only that I'm holding hands with another woman. A decade ago, my car was vandalized: tires slashed, windows broken, the word 'Dykes' spray-painted across the hood. In 2003, my immediate supervisor was fired by the owner of the bookstore where I work because of discriminatory harassment based on my sexuality. Despite this, I was not raised to be a victim. Chances are, unless you're a very close friend, you don't know about these things because I had those fights, I dealt with them, I moved on, and chose not to dwell on them.
     
    I have to dwell on them now, because I'm not at all sure when I'll have to have those fights again now that Republicans control the Executive, Legislative, and before long, the Supreme Court. I worry because of this:
     
    https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2802
     
    That's the "First Amendment Defense Act", a bill introduced to the House of Representatives by a conservative Republican from Idaho in June of 2015. Its sole purpose is to promote discrimination under a banner of religious freedom, by forbidding the government from taking punitive action against any individual who believes that "marriage" is anything other than one man and one woman, or that sexual activity should be confined to heterosexual married couples only, and use that belief to deny services or any other benefit as long as those beliefs are "sincerely held" (as if there's any such thing as a litmus test for 'sincerity' when it comes to issues of law). Furthermore, it provides legal cover for those who choose to discriminate in this way regardless of the consequences to those facing the discrimination. I guess my sincerely held belief that public businesses and services should be open and accommodating to all isn't worth legal protection.
     
    FADA currently has 172 co-sponsors. The sister bill in the Senate, introduced on the same day by a Republican Senator from Utah, has 37 co-sponsors. Both bills have been referred to separate committees and have seen no further action in over a year. That's the good news.
     
    The bad news is Donald Trump has promised to sign FADA into law as soon as it crosses his desk, which means I will have no recourse or access to justice or equality if someone decides their personal religious beliefs overrule my basic humanity. This is not preserving religious freedom, it is giving aid and comfort to those who actively seek to hurt and debase others. Is this a United States of America any of us want? Add at least one, and possibly as many as four, Supreme Court nominations for the new administration, and there's a real chance people like the ones who introduced and co-sponsored these bills will go all-out in rolling back the rights of people like me. I could very well go to bed married and wake up to discover my marriage has been dissolved or rendered legally invalid for the purpose of all the rights it grants us, ranging from the ability to make medical care choices for the other in case one of us is disabled, automatic property transferal in the event of a death, legal exemption from the compulsion to testify against one another in court, to the simple matter of filing our taxes as 'Married, Filing Jointly' instead of 'Single', in all fifty states. (News flash to people who hate gay marriage: you've heard of the 'marriage penalty', right? Yeah, getting married if you don't have kids makes your tax burden go up. Splitting up our marriage means we pay less in taxes, so if you really want to stick it to us, leave our marital rights alone so we can continue our increasing financial support of our public schools.) This is terrifying, and we don't even have children to throw into the mix to complicate things further.
     
    That's why I'm afraid.
     
    But there's another word in the title for this blog post, and that word is Hope.
     
    I derive that hope from the knowledge that Millennials now outnumber Boomers, and on a whole are far more accepting of those who aren't exactly like them.
     
    I derive that hope from the fact that, in 2001, public opinion against same-sex marriage in the US stood at 57%. Today, fifteen years later, opposition to same-sex marriage sits at 35%. Even among Republicans, support has been growing slowly since 2012.
     
    I derive hope from the fact that, in the two years since Jessica and I signed our marriage license in the county clerk's office, we've not faced a single problem of discrimination related to our status as a married couple.
     
    I derive hope from the friends who are already writing letters to their representatives and senators, reminding them that the will of the people doesn't involve hatred of those who aren't exactly alike.
     
    Most of all, I derive hope that Donald Trump did not mean all the things he said and promised, that he will take a more moderate stance, that the man we elected turns out to be more like the Donald Trump who wrote this book in 2000, the registered Democrat, the guy who appeared on Oprah back in 1988 calm, collected, and all business, throwing out reasonable ideas and suggestions for how things might be done differently.
     
    Right now, it's too early to tell. January 20th is still two months away. I wish that hope was all I had. But fear's right there too, gnawing on my insides. I'm terrified of seeing what I've fought to have for so long taken away. I'm terrified for my wife, who is not a fighter, who doesn't get political, who just wants to live her life, and who has no idea how to confront bigotry head-on without breaking down. It's easy for people like her to lose hope...and I'm afraid I don't have enough in my own reserves to keep both of us going if the worst comes to pass.
     
    So that's that. I'm afraid, I'm hopeful, and I know only one of those two can win. I need all of my friends now more than ever. Please don't turn your back on me.
  16. Areala
    The above song, "Santa Monica," comes from Savage Garden's self-titled debut album. It's the final track. Chances are, unless you're a huge fan of the band, you've never heard it. It got no radio play, there was no official music video, it's just one of those songs the world glosses over. It's also the one most completely out of place on the record. It's no pulse-pounding dance club track like their breakout hit, "I Want You". It's not a poetic profession of love like "To The Moon and Back" or "Truly, Madly, Deeply", their other two hit singles that year. "Santa Monica" is a quiet, low-key, un-rhyming introspective about being all alone in the middle of the gigantic mass of humanity such is California.

    It's not the song I bought the album for. In fact, I had no idea what the song was even about before I heard it, but it is, in my opinion, the best song on that record. I've never been to Santa Monica, but I've felt exactly what Darren Hayes is singing about nonetheless. Replace "Santa Monica" with my college town and this is my life. It's been two decades, and I've still never found a song that captures and encapsulates 'me' the way this song does.

    The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator is a series of statements you respond to by indicating how closely you associate yourself with them, and your options are ranges of agreement or disagreement with those statements. There are a bunch of online versions of these tests you can take for free, most of them take about 10 minutes, and their results are fairly accurate. The answers you provide will be tabulated, and the test will return one of sixteen different personality types based on eight different characteristics and how you weigh towards each one (Introversion vs. Extroversion, Perceiving vs. Judging, etc...). The end result will be a four-letter code that corresponds to four of those letters, and probably a graph to show where you're closely aligned with both given aspects, or whether one side tends to greatly outweigh the other. If you want to take a quick one and see what I'm talking about, try this one:

    http://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test

    I've taken this test numerous times throughout my life, and the result has been the same every time: INFP (Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perceiving). Those interested can read a nice, long description of what that all means here, but basically it means that at my best I'm a strong force for good and diplomacy, and at my worst my emotions grind me down into a bland wreck of a person who barely has the energy to interact with the rest of the world. Right now, that second part is where I'm at. It's a fight with myself I've been engaged with since I can remember, and INFP's are particularly prone to it because we live almost completely inside of ourselves.

    I've never been afraid of emotions, but I have been afraid of what actions I know those emotions could cause. In other words, I don't fear anger, but rather I fear what being overcome with anger could lead me to do. I don't fear sorrow, but I do fear what could happen if I spend too long being sad. More than once in my life, I have voluntarily spent periods of time in a stress center, which is a euphemistic way of saying I've allowed another group of people complete control over my life because I, an otherwise functional adult, was incapable of doing so. This is not weakness and it is not surrender, it is recognizing a problem exists that I am woefully unprepared to handle by myself. It's no different from recognizing that, rather than attempting to treat a broken arm at home, I would heal faster and receive better care by going to the hospital. It is also a problem that stigmatizes a large population here in the United States. People who have no issue going to a doctor to receive assistance with a cancer diagnosis look at people who suffer from depression and ask, "Why don't they just grow up and get over it?" Imagine the absurdity of asking someone who had a leg amputated and replaced with a prosthetic, "I don't get it...why can't you just walk like everyone else? Why do you need a new leg?"

    Depending on the day and my mood, I can get lost in a crowd of one. I could stand in the middle of Time's Square, on New Year's Eve, at midnight, and despite the crushing throng and overwhelming noise, the potential exists that I could feel just as alone as I am sitting here, writing this blog post in my office. My wife is outside working in her garden. My dog is outside running around, enjoying the sunshine. I am alone, and this is when I thrive. This is when I fill my reserves of energy, when I re-fuel the tanks that drain so quickly when I'm forced to be around large crowds of people. If I don't get this time, regularly, daily, I will retreat inside myself until I find it, and I will stay there until I feel safe enough to come out. This isn't something I can control, it's an automatic response like the nervous system reacting to pull your hand away from a hot surface. It is not something I enjoy. It's more like having an off switch that could be flipped by anything at any time, and never knowing what might activate it.

    But I have made peace with it over the years. I'm 39 years old, and I understand things will be this way up until the point that I no longer exist. The cost I pay for not being an extrovert is enormous in this society: I don't have a massive social network of friends, I don't garner energy by spending time with people, and my refusal to participate in social events is often seen as dismissive of those involved. Movies get this wrong all the time, where the introverted girl with the glasses just needs someone to yank her into the spotlight and let her shine so she can finally see what it means to be living. This does not work any more than ripping the shell off a turtle and putting it under a heat lamp would improve its well-being. Doing so would, at best, severely harm the turtle, and at worst, kill it. The turtle does not need to be removed from its shell in order to live a better life, the turtle needs the world to understand that it needs its shell to survive the life it has.

    Who is the most difficult adversary a Warrior Nun faces?

    Herself.

    She can get lost in a crowd of 10,000 or a crowd of just herself. She expends considerable energy dreaming of worlds that exist for no one but her, pursuing dreams that cannot possibly come true, and aspiring to goals that she cannot achieve, and suffers the heartbreak of seeing those dreams shattered, those goals unrealized, those worlds vanishing in the blink of an eye. And yet...

    Here she stands. Or sits. Or reclines. Still dreaming. Still planning. Still making goals. Still idealizing the hell out of everyone, hoping for the best, knowing she'll be disappointed, she can't win, that just over the hill there's only another hill, and the aftermath of every battle leaves room only for a new fight to begin.

    She would have it no other way. And neither would I.
  17. Areala
    Retromags member Softballchic and I spend a lot of time talking most nights, and it's often about video games: what we like, what we dislike, and what we're really good at. Last night the topic of achievements/trophies came up. On the PS3/Vita/PS4 model, acquiring every other trophy in a game rewards you with a final achievement, a Platinum trophy, which showcases that you've not just finished the game, but COMPLETED the game. By the time you acquire a Platinum in most games, there should be little ground left unexplored.
    I only have three games in my collection which I have enjoyed to the point I went after the Platinum: Borderlands, Fallout 3, and Dead Space. Of those three, only Dead Space requires you to complete the game at the highest difficulty setting in order to earn the reward. Her question for me was why Dead Space prompted me to not only attempt but complete a play-through on "Impossible", and what made me inclined to do so for that game versus the many other games in my library that reward you for playing at a higher difficulty. Why, indeed?
    I had to think about it for a couple of minutes, but I slowly worked out and talked through my answer with her as I gathered my thoughts. I did it for Dead Space because Dead Space made me think my way through the challenge.




    Dead Space is one of the greatest, most atmospheric survival horror games of all time, and at "Impossible" difficulty (which isn't unlocked until you've beaten the game once), it gives you absolutely no quarter. Ammo is scarce, enemies have more health, and dish out significantly more damage to Isaac when they attack. A sequence early on in the very first level has you running from your first enemy encounter since you're unarmed; hectic on Easy or Normal during your first play-though, it becomes downright murderous on "Impossible" as a single mistake will result in that Necromorph tearing off your head mere minutes into play. Why would I do this to myself?








    The answer is: "Because Dead Space understands difficulty balance far better than most other games, and requires the player to make active observations about the world around them in order to counter-balance that difficulty." In other words, Dead Space gives you all the materials you need to create a working hypothesis of how its world works, and from that infer what may be required of you if you set the game to a higher difficulty level. Not only that, it requires you to specifically adopt a play style which seems counter-intuitive in order to have the best chance of survival, and chances are the first time you play Dead Space, you will do exactly the opposite. An "Easy" run through Dead Space and an "Impossible" run through Dead Space are two completely different animals.




    At this point, it's impossible to discuss playing the game without some spoilers. I'm not going to give away the ending or anything, but I am going to talk about weapons, encounters, and tactics for dealing with some generic situations which may spoil the tension if you know about them beforehand. You've been warned.
    So Dead Space does the typical difficulty spike like every other developer does when it comes to Impossible" mode: enemies soak up more hits, and they hand out violent beatings the same way McDonalds now serves breakfast: all day long. The difference is, that's where most games stop with the whole "balance" thing. If an enemy you can kill in ten seconds on Normal takes fourteen seconds and twice as much ammo on Hard, many developers think that's all it takes to challenge the player. And I don't mean one or two devs, I mean nearly all of them, even some of my favorite studios which made some of my favorite games. This is how Naughty Dog handled Uncharted. Bethesda's done the same with every Elder Scrolls game since Oblivion. Bungie and Halo. iD Software with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. The list goes on. But isn't that kind of lame? If harder modes in your game simply force the player to fight longer and expend more ammo to achieve the same end result, then what are you really doing except making the player endure something more uncomfortable?




    Some developers, like Konami with Silent Hill 2 and 3, offer better choices. Those games let you fine-tune the experience, giving separate difficulty levels for combat and puzzles, which is awesome since Silent Hill's combat mechanics are a little on the loose side, and it lets you enjoy at least three different play-throughs where you can be surprised (and intimidated if you don't know your Shakespeare) by the puzzles. I don't mind this as an option, but it does make for a lot more work on the developer side, since now they have to come up with three or four times the number of puzzles they would traditionally.
    Dead Space (and I'm only talking about the first game here, because holy hell do parts 2 and 3 fly off the rails at this point) handles the difficulty transition so elegantly you might not notice anything beyond the more powerful enemies, so let me point out how it succeds where so many other games fail. Dead Space requires the player to figure out the rules of the game's world, and adapt to fit them. For instance, my first playthrough was similar to everyone else's: I was looking for new weapons, anxious to walk around with a full arsenal of three or four guns/tools I could swap out depending on the circumstances. Because of that, I got ammo drops for all my stuff, and it seemed like the game handed out ammo in a random fashion: this locker had pulse rifle clips, this storage bin had fresh pack of blades for my ripper, and this guy dropped a canister of fuel for my flamethrower. By the end of the game, I had grabbed every weapon from the shop, had ammo for all of them locked away in my Storage area, and felt like a roving badass capable of taking on the world. This is exactly how the developers expected you to play the game for the first time, and if you try playing this way on "Impossible" you will watch yourself get torn limb from limb in a continual orgy of carnage because it will. Not. Work. This will come as a vicious surprise despite the developers giving you fair warning about it in three different ways. Were you paying close enough attention to pick up on them? Because I sure as hell wasn't my first time through.
    The first is the presence of the "One Gun" trophy, a reward for finishing the game using nothing but the Plasma Cutter. By its very nature, this trophy's existence relays a crucial fact to an observant gamer: it is possible to finish the game using nothing but the very first weapon you find. This may sound the same as beating Resident Evil using only the knife, or Silent Hill 2 with nothing but the nail board, but it's not even in the same galaxy for three reasons: the plasma cutter is an obscenely powerful and accurate weapon in its own right; it can be upgraded throughout play using your limited supply of power nodes to do more damage, hold a larger clip size, and reload faster; and playing without the other weapons allows you to focus on upgrading it to the exclusion of everything else but your own suit, ensuring you can make it powerful enough to keep it viable though all twelve chapters. A Knife-only Resident Evil run, on the other hand, gives you no way of turning your blade into a zombie-dismembering, one-size-fits-all tool of the apocalypse.




    The second is something you're likely to notice only if you're making a "One Gun" run, or are very observant when playing normally. With very, very few exceptions, the game always drops ammo for the weapons you are currently holding. There are a couple places where you will always get a pulse rifle clip or a rack for the line gun whether you're armed with them or not, but otherwise the game will only spawn ammo for the weapon(s) in your inventory. In other words, the more guns you lug around, the less chance you have of getting the ammo you need right then and there. At lower difficulties, this isn't a problem, since you can always spend money at the various shops to load up. On Impossible, this is a death sentence. Money spent in shops needs to go towards power nodes and upgraded rig suits, not more ammo for your oversize arsenal. Ironically, though it sounds like the worst idea in the world, one of the best ways to tackle Impossible mode is to limit yourself to just the plasma cutter, thus earning both trophies at the same time.
    The third is Stasis. Your first time through the game, Stasis feels like such a gimmick, one the devs used to give you a new way of solving puzzles. Can't get through that short-circuiting door because it slams too quickly? Hit it with Stasis and run on by. Need to slow down a rapidly-spinning metal object so you can grab something behind it with your Kinesis attachment? Stasis to the rescue. Using it on enemies is practically an afterthought, with a couple of exceptions for a boss fight here and there, and up until the last chapter or two it honestly feels like cheating since it turns otherwise normal fights into "shooting fish in a barrel"-style carnival games. And while you can upgrade your Stasis using some of your valuable power nodes, it's hardly necessary considering how rarely you use it in life-threatening situations, how freely the game drops Stasis recharge packs, and how frequently you encounter the recharging stations after points when you've used your Stasis to get past a particular obstacle. Only a complete screw-up requires as much Stasis as the game implies you need, right? You can see where this is going. Only a complete screw-up requires as much Stasis as the game implies you need on the lower difficulty settings. On an Impossible playthrough, that Stasis meter on the back of your suit is all but a second health bar, because if you're not using it, then you're taking more damage than necessary, and if you're taking more damage than necessary, you're spending money on health packs instead of better armor, and that means you're dying. Those power nodes which feel wasted on Stasis upgrades during a standard run? Those are among the most valuable improvements you can make on Impossible, because mark my words, those recharge stations you ran by laughing at before will be the only thing saving you from violent dismemberment this time around.




    Dead Space encouraged me to earn the Platinum not because it made the game harder, but because Impossible mode fundamentally altered how I needed to approach the game, thus making it an intellectual as well as a physical challenge. Its hard parts seem insurmountable when you start, but only until you re-wire your playing style to compensate. It's more than just making enemies tougher, it's forcing the player to pay attention, acknowledge their limitations, then turn around and use those limitations to their advantage. You don't brute force your way through Impossible mode; trying that shit will get your spine stomped into the deck plates. You finesse your way through Impossible mode, which in turn makes you feel like even more of a bad-ass once you've finished.




    So what video games have you gone back to experience at higher difficulties? And did you enjoy playing them, or was your experience one of frustration and/or annoyance? Let me know in the comments, and as always, thanks for reading these ramblings from your humble Warrior Nun.
  18. Areala
    The recent death of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, who starred in such memorable films as "They Live" and such immemorable ones as "Hell Comes to Frog Town" and "Sci-Fighter", really got me thinking about movies that were ahead of their time in one way or another. So I'm not boring my readers to death, I'm restricting myself to the five best examples that I believe fit this mold and I'm only allowing one John Carpenter flick on the list. That said, here are my picks:
    5) John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)
    Let's get one thing straight: Carpenter's sci-fi horror epic is not a remake of the 1951 film "The Thing From Another World" no matter what you have been told. Literally the only thing (no pun intended) these two films have in common is a set-up which can best be described as, "A creature from another planet terrorizes a bunch of humans in an isolated setting."
    Carpenter's film is what the 1951 version should have been in the first place had it not decided to ignore virtually all of the John W. Campbell, Jr. short story ("Who Goes There?") upon which it was based. John Carpenter did not remake "The Thing From Another World", he made a film which made up for the fact that the 1951 film failed to make it in the first place. His is perhaps the first cinematic apology where one director looked at the work of a previous one and said, "I'm sorry, he got it all wrong. Let's fix that." Or at least it's the first one that actually followed through on that promise.
    Let's get another thing straight: I love "The Thing From Another World." It's a beautifully-shot, excellently-produced, competently-acted black-and-white scare-fest from an age when the biggest thing the Western World had to fear was the Red Scare of Communism. Like the 1956 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", it holds up to this day as its own film. But let's not for one minute pretend it bears more than a passing resemblance to the original story which inspired its creation.
    Carpenter's film was ahead of its time for many reasons, especially the practical effects and make-up of Rob Bottin which still hold up to this day, but it was hamstrung by a release date that saw its tale of alien invasion and body horror derailed by Spielberg's heart-warming story of a boy trying to help a gentle extra-terrestrial find his way home. After audiences were done crying over "E.T.", they weren't interested in viewing aliens as the bad guys and the film languished at the box office until people re-discovered "The Thing" in all its g(l)ory thanks to the video rental market.
    4) The Blob (1988)
    I don't care what you think about the 1958 original, where a going-on-thirty Steve McQueen tries to pass as a teenage heart-throb and manages to beat back his outer-world adversary using an ordinary fire extinguisher. On the other hand, I care quite deeply what you think about the 1988 remake which had exactly one purpose: to take everything they couldn't show in the 1950's and rub your nose in it until you felt the need to take a long shower.
    The entire horror franchise is built around the idea that there are rules all great horror films follow which determine who's still alive when the credits start rolling, and the first thing director Chuck Russell does with his version of "The Blob" is to gather up all those rules into a neat little pile and urinate on them. The 1988 Blob-fest doesn't care if you're supposed to be the hero of the story. It doesn't matter if you're the guy riding to the rescue. It doesn't matter if you're a scrappy kid, or a beloved family pet, or a virgin, the hero's love interest, the heroine's love interest, the well-intentioned secondary character with the heart of gold, or any of the other tropes which should guarantee your survival because sometimes, though no fault of your own, shit happens and you're gonna die.
    Russell's version of "The Blob" pre-dates "The Walking Dead's" 'anyone can die at any point for any reason even if it's just because the writer is a sadistic prick' attitude by twenty-two frigging years, which is probably why most people don't have the first clue it even exists. It doesn't help that neither Matt's younger brother Kevin Dillon nor Shawnee Smith (who you know from the "Saw" series even if you don't recognize her by name) are exactly big-name draws at the box office. This Blob got lost amid horror's declining late-80s years as movie-goers began to tire of horror films becoming nothing but sequel-generating cash cows where the bad guys were the most charismatic people on the screen and got the most cheers, even when they were butchering innocent teenagers. It fits into no molds of preconception, relentlessly toys with the audience, and does not shy away from showing any of the face-melting, body-digesting, small-town-consuming horror we've grown accustomed to seeing today.
    Also, by some coincidence, the screenplay was developed by Frank Darabont, who would go on to create "The Walking Dead" a couple decades later, and features Jeffrey DeMunn, who would go on to play Dale on "The Walking Dead". Ain't life funny like that?
    3) Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
    "New Nightmare" bombed because audiences at the time didn't understand what Craven was trying to do. They went in expecting a brand new installment of "Freddy Krueger slices people up with his wit and razor-claws", and instead got their brains handed to them by a director postulating a more metaphysical reason for the existence of the horror film. As opposed to entertainment, what if horror films existed to take the 'bite' (or 'slash', or 'machete') out of something truly scary?
    The idea of a horror film taking itself seriously at a meta-level was about as difficult a pill for audiences to swallow as the previous year's attempt to do it with blockbuster action flicks, "Last Action Hero." Audiences were not ready to see people like Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, and Robert Englund playing Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, and Robert Englund respectively. "New Nightmare" dared to forge new ground and ask some serious questions about the role of the horror movie in today's society, and it was met by yawns and jeers from an audience who only showed up to watch half-naked bimbos scream and run up the stairs when they should have been running out the front door.
    Two years later, in 1996, Craven would be given a second chance to confront a similar theme with "Scream", but let the record show he tried to drag us into uncharted territory with "New Nightmare" first. Sadly, like with Crazy Ralph in the "Friday the 13th" films, none of us was willing to listen the first time.
    2) Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
    People went absolutely ga-ga over "The Blair Witch Project", a low-budget feature shot using no-name actors wandering around in a forest and arguing about who was more lost and exactly how screwed they all would be if they didn't get home by the end of the weekend. This "found footage" genre of film exploded overnight, garnering a ton of praise for its unique premise, and spawning a slew of imitators like "Paranormal Activity", "Cloverfield", and "[REC]". What everyone forgot was that twenty years earlier, Italian director Ruggero Deodato used this exact same "found footage" technique to frame "Cannibal Holocaust", his own entry into the splatter film genre.
    You thought the marketing campaign behind "Blair Witch" was crazy, with all of its claims of being a true story? Well, none of the people behind the production of "Blair Witch" ever got dragged before a judge to find themselves indicted on murder charges. See, the no-name actors and actresses used by Deodato actually signed a contract before filming began, the terms of which required them to disappear from their own lives for a full year after Holocaust's release. In theory, this was supposed to lend credence to the whole idea that, while half of the film was comprised of actual footage shot by Deodato and using a named actor like Robert Kerman, the other half was comprised of the legit footage shot by a group of documentarians who were actually assholes and got what was coming to them. in other words, Deodato's intention the whole time was that people would think these people were really dead.
    It didn't help Deodato's case that the special effects on Holocaust were ridiculously effective at conveying the death, impalement, and dismemberment of cast members, and he was forced, in the middle of an Italian courtroom, to re-create the film's most iconic effect (a woman impaled through the groin with the tip of the pole protruding from her mouth) to prove it could be done without actually driving a pole through a young girl's torso the long way. It also didn't help that the animal deaths shown on screen were not faked in any way, which kinda lent credence to the theory he might have been batshit insane enough to murder some humans if he thought doing so would pay off in the verisimilitude department.
    Deodato eventually got the charges dropped when he was able to get the supposedly-dead documentary film crew to show up in court (not an easy thing to do when your stars are living completely incommunicado in a pre-Internet and pre-cell phone age), thus proving that they hadn't been ground into cannibal chow in the jungles of South America. After that fiasco, the "found footage" genre of horror film fell out of favour for the most part until Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez proved it could be a money-maker again in 1999.
    1) The Mist (2007)
    I watched "The Mist" at a midnight showing on its opening day in November of 2007, by myself, in a theatre where there were maybe fifteen other people who, like me, had nothing else going on. By the time the credits began to roll, I felt like I had gone the distance with Rocky. The novella, by Stephen King, is one of my favorite short horror stories of all time, and I have a personal theory that the only person who understands how to translate King's work to the big screen is Frank Darabont. "The Mist", "The Green Mile", "The Shawshank Redemption"...all of the best films made from King's prodigious body of work have been helmed by this man, and it's clear he 'gets' King like no one else. I was expecting to have a great time.
    What I absolutely was not expecting was to get the ever living hell scared out of me, my mind absolutely screwed with, and an ending that took the next logical step from where the novella leaves off. No, I'm not spoiling it--if you haven't seen it, I refuse to tell you anything else. Go watch it right now.
    "The Mist", both the novella and the film, is a dark, dark journey down into the twisted roots of human psychology, groupthink, and what happens when all of society's rules go out the window and our safety nets we all take for granted are uprooted and blown away. But Darabont's film gleefully bends, twists, and shatters the rules of an ordinary horror film with a screenplay that goes out of its way to prove even the most well-meaning and heroic protagonists can be wrong, with devastating consequences. Like Chuck Russell before him, Darabont has no qualms handing out fatalities to the deserving and the undeserving alike. We don't even know the state of roughly half the people trapped in the market at the end of the film, but it doesn't matter. What does matter is a choice made in the ending, a twist from that in the book, which King himself was so impressed by that he's gone on record saying he wished he'd thought of it thirty years earlier when he wrote the story. Said twist has made "The Mist" one of the most debated horror films of all time, with one camp deriding it as being pessimistic and nasty, and another camp hailing it as a cinematic triumph.
    I've never had a horror film brutalize me psychologically the way I felt after leaving the theatre in the aftermath of "The Mist." At the end of most films, you hear the audience start to stir, stand up, walk around, applaud, etc... At my screening of "The Mist", nobody got up. Nobody walked out during the credits. There was no applause. Only when it became clear Darabont wasn't going to offer up some slice of hope in a post-credit sequence did people begin to talk. It's a talk that keeps going to this very day.
  19. Areala
    There are a couple of Retromags members on my PS3 friends list, but I'm not sure if you all knew that outside of blasting Necromorphs in Dead Space, or ruling the city streets in Saint's Row, I spent an awful lot of time in Sony's online avatar-based virtual world called PlayStation Home. If any of my readers ever ran across me on there, feel free to chime in and say hello in the comments--I was "Areala" on there, just as I am here. I know, how original, right?
    Anyway, I got involved with Home in December of 2008 once the Open Beta phase began and have been visiting
    off and on ever since, right up until yesterday evening, 31 March 2015. That night, if you clicked on the Home icon, the virtual world launched as normal. Today, clicking on the Home icon results in the download of the new version of the software, v1.87, a 19MB file that updates Home for the last time. Upon launch, instead of the connection screen, a simple message is displayed thanking the user for his or her interest in Home, but informing said user that unfortunately the service has gone offline for good.
    This came as no surprise to me, since Sony announced they would be taking the PS Home servers offline all the way back in September, giving us months to prepare for the closing. As one of my friends that night remarked, "In November, I was like, 'Five months? That's an eternity.' Tonight, I'm like, 'WTF I been doing for the last five months?'" It's true: no matter how badly we would deny it, the future always becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past becomes a story we tell ourselves when we want to remember the good old days. So today, while it's still fresh in my memory, before time and life strip the feelings away, I'd like to write my farewell, my tribute to PS Home and all of the fun, the laughs, the memories, and the friends I made along the way. I connected to the US server. Users in other territories may not recognize some of the spaces and will likely have different memories, as every territory (North America, Europe, and Asia) had their own servers with their own content, with crossovers and content migration being more the exception than the rule. Pics and videos incoming, just FYI.




    Speaking of videos, you probably noticed the one up at the top there. If this isn't the earliest video promo for PlayStation Home, it's at least the earliest one that I remember. Sony showed it on the giant screen on their Central Plaza area but also blasted it across the airwaves on TV stations. Eagle-eyed observers noted something strange about the graffiti on the wall: there seemed to be a 12-character alphanumeric code written there. Users who plugged the code into their PS3's
    "Redeem Code" feature were rewarded with a pair of silly hats. As this video premiered only a few months after Home started its Open Beta period (which it never left over the course of six years), and the code expired a week or so after it was issued, avatars seen walking around with a bug-eyed Goldfish (male avatars) or an equally bug-eyed Shark (female avatars) on his or her head years later could easily be identified as someone who had been there for a long-ass time. Needless to say, for my last night on Home, I donned my shark hat in memory of those early days.




    If you never got involved with Home, or only booted it up once to see what was up and didn't give it a chance, it's difficult to explain just what about Home was so charming. Viewed from the outside, it could be called a simple cash grab by Sony. Much like Second Life and other virtual chat spaces, Home offered a plethora of digital items for sale: clothing and hairstyles to change your avatar's appearance, personal spaces for when the default Harbour Studio suite got too small, and a whole mish-mash of furniture, decorative pieces, appliances, gizmos, gadgets, and goodies with which to decorate those personal spaces and truly make them your own. Part graphical chat application, part multi-player Sims-style experience, the early days saw a very quick divide form between the folks who were willing to drop money on new clothing vs. the new players (or noobs) who were too young or too broke to fork over a buck or two for some new duds. It wasn't uncommon for new players visiting Central Plaza for the first time to get virtually shunned by the more experienced denizens, who turned up their noses and insulted the 'clueless noobs' for daring to pollute their social clique with their blue Home logo shirts and default jean and shoe ensembles.
    This wasn't helped by the people who thought to take advantage of the relative anonymity afforded by the hordes of similarly-clad new residents by actively griefing other members of the community, either through overt comments about others' gender, race, or sexuality, or the less-overt-but-no-less-irritating act of simply parking their avatar as close to yours as possible and repeatedly spamming the Quick Chat macros (simple phrases like, 'Hello', 'Goodbye', 'Yes', 'No', 'I have no
    keyboard', and 'Follow me' which were meant to help players quickly communicate the basics without needing to boot up the virtual keyboard) or starting a dance routine involving a thrusting pelvis and your avatar's virtual front-side or back-side depending on which they thought you would find more irritating. Yes, there were assholes a-plenty on Home in those early days, but eventually you learned two simple ways of dealing with it: stay out of Central Plaza, or hit the Select button to mute whoever was harassing you and report them to a moderator. Early on, when Home only had a few spaces, it was far more common to see a random Mod's voice pop up in the chat box, issuing warnings from invisible avatars and kicking users who were being abusive. I remember getting a good laugh when one of these would-be griefers decided to harass a moderator by calling his sexuality into question ("<Mod> is gay!") only to get frozen in place by the Moderator's developer tools and have to endure a "time out" where he wasn't allowed to move or talk to anyone, and attempting to send a personal message to the offender was met with the response, "<Avatar Name> is in time-out and cannot respond to you." Particularly egregious offenders could (and did) find their PSN accounts banned completely from Sony's servers, preventing them from playing online at all or even accessing the PlayStation Store to buy new content. These ban times could range from a few hours all the way up to a lifetime depending on the severity of the infraction and whether or not you were a repeat offender. I'll give them credit: Sony tried to control Home when it first opened. After a year or so though, with new public spaces cropping up all the time, and an online player base that expanded into the millions worldwide, finding a Mod was like finding a unicorn: people weren't sure they existed any longer, and didn't know where to start looking anyway.




    But what I remember most, and what kept me logging back in over the years, were the people. Whenever you gather together several million individuals into a particular area and give them creative control over their virtual lives (even if this only extends to their wardrobe and their personal spaces), you're bound to see some absolutely insane things. One of the earliest examples of this was a sort of playful cult that sprung up around a particular set of rewards one could earn from playing the Echochrome arcade machine in the bowling alley: the Homelings. Dressing themselves all in white and selecting a bald hairstyle from the default options, and presenting themselves as a sort of cross between the Borg and E.T., Homelings wandered the streets and pavilions of Home in their never-ending wait for the return of Mother (their mothership, as Homelings fashioned themselves as aliens cast adrift in the cruel digital world), and loosely organized into clans. No one, not even Sony, could have predicted the enormous swell of Homelings who would occasionally swarm into a public space and organize a chant in an attempt to summon Mother. Other Homeling groups were content to just gather in large numbers and dance the night away, to the bemusement of regular Home-goers and the terror of the newbies who didn't understand why all these similarly-clad, shaven-headed people were trying to recruit them into the Collective.




    But even though there were a multitude of Homelings wandering the servers, there were far more individuals than members of the collective, and ultimately I believe what drew so many people to Home for long periods of time was the ability to define one's self as one saw fit, and alter that definition at whim. This came slowly, as most of the clothing and reward items available to wear for the first few months were exactly what you would expect: simple, basic clothing. T-shirts, pants, shorts, shoes, gloves, and hats all showed up in the weekly updates, often weighted more heavily towards the male avatars than the female ones, but it took several weeks before Sony moved beyond the idea of just providing basic clothing. The first major clothing update involved two new outfits for both boys and girls, and was meant to help settle an age-old debate: both genders received Pirate and Ninja outfits. This was a theme Sony would repeat a number of times throughout the life of Home, including such things as Zombies, Hamsters, and Turkeys. Later additions to the clothing lines included characters and items from various video game franchises such as Street Fighter, Tekken, Little Big Planet, Killzone, Uncharted, Silent Hill, Dead Space, Resident Evil, and Ratchet & Clank.
    The original outfit I gathered up for myself after deciding I wanted something to make me a little more unique was slightly nerdy/hipster. I wanted to create the look of a bibliophile, someone who might work in a library or a bookstore, but was off for the day: a pair of glasses, a green beret, a denim jacket, jeans, and a pair of red sneakers. I occasionally swapped the denim jacket out for something else, a simple t-shirt or a light tank top, but that was my projection to the world, and I was fine with it.




    Then it all changed. Shortly before Halloween one year, Sony opened a new shop in the Mall space, called "Costumes", and you can guess what they carried. Now, instead of dressing in normal clothes all the time, you could pick up an outfit you wouldn't be ashamed to go Trick or Treating while wearing. There were only a small variety at first: Roman toga, medieval warrior, etc. But the one which stuck out for me, which wound up defining my look for almost the rest of my years on Home, was the angel outfit.




    I've always loved angels. My tattoo is of an angel. My middle name is a variation on the word 'angelic'. So when I saw there was an option for me to walk around Home dressed up as an angel, I knew I had found what I'd truly wanted. The only thing I didn't really care for was the halo: since it was an angel costume, the halo was one of those stick-mounted ones you put around your neck which suspended the little golden glittery disc over your head by a few inches. By some coincidence though, another company had designed a number of various fantastical headgears and put them up for sale, things like an arrow through the head, devil horns and whatnot. One of the items on their list was a halo which levitated above your head, unattached to anything. Voila: I had my halo, and my angelic persona was born!




    I spent the next several months dressed up as an angel, though I got some funny looks and questions from people who wondered if I was aware Halloween was over, but given there were people running around dressed up like giant hamsters with fake axes imbedded in their skulls, this tapered off after a couple of weeks. Mostly, people didn't pay any attention to it beyond noting that they liked the outfit, and then we went back to talking about video games, or life, or whatever was on our minds.
    Sometime around the start of 2010, I began to notice something odd. Whenever I was hanging out in a public space, whether it was the Central Plaza, the Gamer's Lounge, the Mall in front of the waterfall, or Sully's Bar in the Uncharted space, it wasn't long before a stranger would walk up to me and ask if I was a real angel. My response, as the question always came out of the blue, was to laugh and say, "No, of course not!" This often got a response similar to, "Oh, OK..." and the random person would walk away. I kept encountering this phenomenon though. Finally, one evening as I was sitting in the Lounge, another random person approached me and asked the question. I decided to see what would happen if I answered in the affirmative. And suddenly this person, who I had never met outside of this virtual space on PSN, began pouring out his soul, looking for justification that he was a good person, that he was not worthless, that he mattered. I read his messages as he slowly typed them using the virtual keyboard within Home to relay them, one sentence at a time. I just listened, only replying when he asked me a direct question. And afterwards, he thanked me for listening and not judging. As he walked away to join a group of people dancing on the second floor, I reflected on that and decided if anyone asked me that question again, I would always answer in the affirmative.
    I met dozens of people in this way: people who had stories to tell, anxieties to share, questions to ponder. Maybe they were who they said they were, and maybe they weren't--in the virtual world it's impossible to tell if anyone is telling the truth. But their stories felt authentic: the army sergeant who, at twenty-four years of age, was feeling the burden of command after learning his unit was returning to Afghanistan for the second time; the nineteen year old who wanted to marry his girlfriend but wasn't sure their relationship could survive long-distance; the forty-something housewife who cheated on her husband over a decade ago during a moment of weakness and wanted to confess to someone; the eighteen-year old kid who was joining the Marines in an effort to prove himself to his own father even though the thought terrified him and he wanted to be part of the Coast Guard instead; a retired police officer who still hadn't gotten over the death of his partner all the way back in the 1970s, before I was even born. I heard many, many different stories during the time I walked as an angel on Home. All of them were important. All of them were personal. All of them were snapshots of the sort of lives going on all around us that we never think about because their lives are not our own.




    I spent my final night in Home sitting by a fire on the sands of the virtual beach in the Southern Island Hideaway, one of my favorite public spaces to hang out. Friends, some of whom I had not seen in months or even years, popped in and out as the evening went on and the time for the servers to close loomed nearer. Sadly I had to work early the next morning so I had to go to bed before the servers went offline around 2 A.M. my time. But while I was there, surrounded by friends new and old, I reminded myself the last several years had been totally worth it. Someone asked of the group sitting around the fire if we had any last words for Home, and numerous people jumped in to say thanks for all the memories, to wish one another well, to express their love and fondness for people they met there. My final words spoken on Home were, "So this, then, was our story...and we told it the best we could." They seemed as apt as anything else that had been said thusfar. And it was true: Home wasn't just a collection of spaces, clothes, furniture, mini-games and collectibles. Home was a collection of stories, all bound together between the pages of one single, massive online world. It was our story from the very start, and always had been.








    After sitting quietly for a few seconds, I stood up among the crowd of dancers and frolickers who had shown up to party down to the last fireworks display on the island and warped to my favorite Private space. Home had two kinds of spaces: Public spaces were those anyone could enter or warp to at any time. Private spaces were "owned" by an avatar, could be re-decorated to the owner's liking, and could only be entered by others via an invitation. In Home, your home literally was your castle and unless you rolled out the welcome mat, you were guaranteed privacy. My most-loved private space was the Rainy Day Apartment, a small studio apartment situated in a building with a corner-balcony, and a beautiful view of a harbour that could have been any number of different locations in the real world. Dusk had fallen, raindrops drizzled from the clouds passing overhead, and all was tranquility.








    Within the Raindy Day Apartment, I had assembled a small bathroom, a kicthen/dining room area, a reading space with a comfortable chair and plenty of bookshelves, and a water-themed meditation section with a tub for relaxing in after a long day. But I didn't head to any of those areas...I simply went to my bed and laid down. While on the bed, there were a variety of poses one could choose for laying out. I chose the one which put my avatar on her side, then settled her in to sleep for one last time before I pressed the 'Quit' button.








    In my mind, it was important to do this before logging off for the final time. If my avatar was asleep, she would never 'feel' the universe fade out around her as the server powered down. Whatever she dreamed in that now-endless virtual sleep would be her company through eternity, and as we all know, dreams can house an infinite number of adventures. Maybe this world is nothing more than her imagination--unlikely, but there are always possibilities as a certain green-blooded, pointy-eared Vulcan was so fond of telling his captain.
    In closing, I'm reminded of a lyric by the Counting Crows: "If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts." Maybe PS Home was more like a dream than we realized, a film in which every avatar walking the virtual landscapes was director, producer, screenwriter and lead actor. And if memories truly are films about ghosts, then I hope the movie you've just finished reading, my movie, my story, has not been a boring one.
  20. Areala
    Let's Read - Nintendo Power #9
    1989 comes to a close with the Nov./Dec. issue of Nintendo Power, but the big N isn't leaving the 80s behind with a whimper. They're going out with a BRICK. Or rather, a bunch of bricks in the form of a puzzle game from a Russian mathematician that would turn adults and children alike into absolute zombies in the coming months. I'm talking about none other than Tetris, and its impact on the gaming world makes it ripe for inclusion as this issue's cover feature. "Get 'Tetrisized,'" ordered Nintendo. "I obey!" replied millions people all over the world.
    Just because the last three issues haven't possibly contained enough information about Dragon Warrior, there's a free 36-page strategy guide bound into this issue. Probably the best feature are the few maps of the dungeons it provides (including one for the Dragonlord's castle). Calling it a "strategy guide" isn't really correct as it only tells you how to get on your feet, gives a rundown of the backstory that is recycled from a couple of issues ago, shows off some of the items you can find, and offers up some basic tips for gaming later on without actually telling you how to do much of anything. It also has a $2.50 cover price, despite the fact it's free with the magazine. How strange...
    Enough with my grousing about Dragon Warrior. Let's get this show on the road!
    Mail Box gets us off to a slow start, with a subscriber complaint about moving and not receiving two issues of NP. Nintendo's reply: NP is mailed third-class, so you've got to call our Customer Service number and update your records there, since the post office won't automatically forward third-class mail. Ouch! Next up, a 75-year old man beats the first quest on the Legend of Zelda and composes a poem to celebrate the experience (apparently, his wife was about ready to divorce him over it). The poem won't win any awards, but it's kind of sad to think that twenty-one years later there's a chance the man who wrote it is no longer with us. Immortality finds some of us in one way or another...funny how that works, isn't it? The mailbox closes with a hilarious spelling error ("Control Dick" instead of "Deck"), a crafty editor hawking the NES Cleaning Kit (only $9.95), and a sycophantic suck-up begging for pics and autographs from all the Game Counselors. Riiiiiight...moving right along...
    Video Spotlight drops props on three "normal" power players, but the ultimate bomb comes from a sixteen-year old Georgian by the name of Greg "The Absorber" Saluzzi (nope, not making this up...dude apparently took his Power Player Name from a pack of paper towels). While his list of accomplishments is pretty good, he also claims to have beaten both the Japanese Contra and another game called "Red Ninja". Now, I've no idea what this "Red Ninja" game is because the only "Red Ninja" game I'm aware of is the one that was released for the PS2 and Xbox back in 2005. My guess is that he's talking about "Ninja Gaiden" or "Legend of Kage" unless he's some sort of time traveler. People from Georgia are weird like that though...
    The first major feature to kick off here is six pages of goodies on Willow. Yes, it's a licensed game based on the movie of the same name, but it bucks the trend here and winds up being a pretty darn fun title that does not suck. Some might call it a Zelda clone, but it does plenty of stuff differently from Zelda (including some monsters and bosses that are huge for the NES) and has more of a role-playing, character-building aspect to it instead of the more simplistic adventure style used in its competition. Six pages isn't a lot, but it includes a plethora of hand-drawn maps for the first several areas of the game which makes it pretty useful for beginning players.
    Cover model Tetris makes its NES debut next, with six pages of information that includes two pages of Howard Phillips' own tips on how to handle the higher levels of speed. Note that this is Nintendo's version of Tetris that is discussed here; Tengen's Tetris, despite also being released in 1989, isn't talked about. You know how it is when lawsuits start getting thrown around...the air doesn't clear between Tengen and Nintendo on that front until 1993.
    This issue's Howard & NESTER is a let-down, being nothing more than two pages of duck-themed and moon-themed puns. Howard and an unnamed duck take a rocket to explore the moon, and Nester naturally stows away to get a piece of the action. Once they land, Nester is promptly "ab-duck-ted" (his word) by a bunch of lunar ducks and it's up to Howard to use his knowledge of the Moon level of Duck Tales to save the day. Meh...nice try, but no cigar on this one.
    Fortunately after the H&N debacle, we get a four-page preview of Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road. Now, by itself this game was nothing special and it featured a hard-as-nails AI that played Stewart to win. When combined with the NES Satellite though, this game could turn four friends into psychotic, violent assholes in about three minutes flat. There are probably more productive ways to spend an afternoon with three buddies, but not at the time this magazine came out.
    Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II gets six pages devoted to it, and about the most useful information presented are the massive maps of the Wind level. I have to say, I really liked the original Wizards & Warriors but the sequel never appealed to me as much. The first was just action pared down to a minimum, while the sequel introduced a bunch of new game mechanics that did more to annoy than enhance the experience.
    To kill some space, we get a two-page mini-feature: Top 10 Game Endings Exposed. All right, can you say SPOILER TAGS PLEASE?! Nintendo proceeds to wreck the endings to Contra, Ikari Warriors, Castlevania, The Goonies II, Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Rad Racer, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Kid Icarus and Wizards & Warriors, no doubt irritating anybody who hadn't managed to finish them yet. While I agree with most of the games on this list as having decent endings, and I know the NES library was still pretty small at this point, the entries for SMB and Ikari Warriors have to be a joke, right?
    Robocop gets four pages of thug-busting, gun-slinging excitement next. Building on the preview we saw last issue, this one walks the player through stages 2, 3 and 4 and provides hints on the bonus stage and a taste of what's left to come in stages 5 and 6. For such an awesome film, the NES version of Robocop can't stack up very well. Not the worst game ever, but not a good use of the license either.
    After Robocop, we get a four-page look at another 4-player title: NES Play Action Football. This game wasn't licensed by the NFL, and so it can't use the names of teams, logos, or likenesses of players; while you can pick Denver or Chicago, there's no mention of Broncos or Bears to be found. Sports titles never appealed to me so I have no experience with this one, but it looks like it tries to do an awful lot of things right, and the four-player feature would let a crowd play. Looks like it could be fun, but I have my doubts it's as good as Tecmo Bowl.
    Next up, Nintendo's got some "killer" peripherals in the pipeline, including the Power Glove and the U-Force. The next three pages are devoted to showing off these tools of the elite, as well as explaining how they interact with a few examples for each one. Playing Super Mario Bros. with the U-Force sounds decidedly complex though: "Wave your left hand to move your character, and shake your right hand to jump and fire." No thanks, I've got my control pad right here. Also: Bad Street Brawler was one of the four best games you could pick to demonstrate the Power Glove? Seriously, Nintendo? Do I HAVE to *facepalm* again?
    Previews, previews, who wants previews? I do! And Nintendo is only too happy to showcase a group of five Winter Winners. Featuring the likes of Wheel of Fortune Jr., Jeopardy Jr., The Three Stooges, Stealth Eagle, and Godzilla, one has to wonder if those constitute the winners, how bad were the losers? Admitedly Three Stooges is somewhat entertaining, but the rest of them...? Maybe for the under-12 set.
    In case you forgot, Game Boy is here and boy is it loaded! We've got five pages stuffed with maps for Super Mario Land, Revenge of the Gator and Castlevania: The Adventure, plus some screenshots for Motocross Maniacs, Tennis, Baseball and Alleyway (a rather fun Breakout/Arkanoid clone). What's more interesting from a historical perspective is the list of "coming soon" titles, which shows Final Fantasy Legend listed with its original Japanese title, Saga. Also shown are Grid Iron Gladiators and Phallanx, neither of which ever arrive on the Game Boy (though Phalanx does appear later on for the SNES).
    More Previews, this time the NES gets to hog the spotlight for a little while with pages devoted to Shadowgate, Silent Service (three pages each), A Boy and His Blob, and 720 Degrees (two pages each). AB&HB became such a noted and classic adventure game that Nintendo resurrected it on the Wii two decades later; Shadowgate got similar treatment when it was re-released on the GBC as Shadowgate Classic. 720 Degrees was, of course, a port of an already successful arcade game.
    The Guardian Legend. One of my favorite video games ever made, it tops my list of "franchises that really, really, really deserve a current-gen reboot". The likelihood of that ever happening hovers somewhere around "fat chance" and "*LOL!*" given that nobody on Earth knows who owns the rights to it since both developer Compile and US publisher Broderbund have been pushing up virtual daisies for years. No matter--this feature is absolutely awesome, giving a complete overview (with screenshot maps) of the first four areas of the space station, showing where to find a number of special weapons. It's the sort of thing that's useful even today in the Gamefaqs era. I made extensive use of this back in the day and I'm not afraid to admit it.
    Ah, Counselors' Corner, how useful will you be this time around? Things start off useful enough, with a number of hints for finishing off the fourth stage of Dr. Wily's castle in Megaman II. It's followed up with a couple of tips for Faxanadu later in the game, though finding the Black Onyx really isn't that hard (the game pretty well railroads you towards it). Two tips for Strider come next; while they're nothing that a bit of patience and strategizing couldn't tell you, the information on Flash Blade's pattern is useful. A generic "level up a lot" tip is presented for RPGs in general (though in this case it pretty much means Dragon Warrior since there's not a lot to choose from on that front yet). Pointers for throwing out the super shots in Super Dodge Ball follow which is useful information, but we close with a "duh DUH duh" so-called 'hint' for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which asks how to perform an action that is completely automatic once you have the proper equipment. Seriously, NP, there was nothing else you could have used to fill that space? Grrrr...
    Classified Information presents a bevy of game-breaking insanity this time around, including a "how in the hell did they find that?" trick for both Solomon's Key, and RoboWarrior, a bit of money mooching in Faxanadu, some jumping tricks for DuckTales and Strider, a recommended order and weapon usage guide to taking out your robotic foes in the Dr. Wily stage of Megaman II, and a 1-Up trick for both Ninja Gaiden and Cobra Triangle. All told, not a bad haul.
    This issue's Top 30 is nothing but one enormous upset after another. Let's talk Megaman II sitting at the top of the heap, having leapfrogged up eleven spots to capture the pole position. Let's talk Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles performing a similar stunt to jump from 16 to 5. Let's talk Dragon Warrior's debut at #7. Sure, we still have Mario and Zelda hanging around in the top 5 but talk about your upsets. Equally surprising, Super Mario 3 is nowhere to be found after placing 20 last issue while Metroid drops a whopping 11 places down to 21 on the list. Nothing's for sure in the world of Nintendo.
    Video Shorts only covers six upcoming titles. Jaleco's Goal! gets a page to itself. Arcade conversions of Thundercade (which is very well done) and P.O.W. (which is utter shite and doesn't deserve the plethora of 4's and 5's it receives from the editors) share another page. Twin Eagles, Back to the Future, and Black Bass share the last page.
    Proving that some people have more free time than sense, NES Achievers offers up some truly odd submissions alongside the traditional ones including a guy who scored over a million points on Double Dragon, no fewer than three people laying claim to finishing Predator (something even the North Koreans frown upon as being torture), and one girl who managed to max out the score on Super Pitfall (don't these people have homework to do...?).
    Nintendo is coming to a children's hospital near you (at least, if you live in California). NES Journal unveils the new Capcom Children's Corner which is setting up shop in various pediatric units in California. Initial donations include 3 NES units, a bevy of 36 games, and a hands-free controller to each of 10 hospitals. While this is a great way to pass the time for kids recovering from injury, NP makes sure to remind us that it's not a good enough reason to get yourself sent to the hospital (and you just know some nutjob out there probably did it anyway). There's also a contest to design the new Nintendo Power jersey, and a prelude to the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. Movie-wise, we've got The Wizard about to hit screens everywhere (which, despite being essentially a 90-minute Nintendo commercial, still manages to be a fun film to watch). Fittingly enough, Fred Savage is the celeb featured in the Celebrity Profile this issue.
    Pak Watch also pulls out the big guns, calling for Super Mario Bros. 3 to be arriving soon. 8 Eyes and Abadox are also on the way, and a sidebar informs us that Asmik has chosen the name "Bronty" as the name of their little dinosaur mascot. Something must have happened afterwards though, because when the Game Boy game featuring him ships, his name has morphed into "Boomer". Whoops. Later on in the gossip column, talk is made of two games under development for the Matchbox toys license (Web World and Urban Convoy) which never see the light of day.
    Finally, Howard Phillips closes out the issue with his traditional letter, this time reminding fans to go see The Wizard when it opens (there are two million free mini-Nintendo Power issues to be given out, after all). He also takes a minute to show how Nintendo Power has grown and developed in the past year, and points out that the success of the Game Boy shows limitless potential for video games in the coming years (he has no idea how right he is).
  21. Areala

    Another Year Passes

    By Areala,

    Holy crap, it's been well over a year since my last blog post. How on earth does that happen? I guess 2014 just got away from me, that's all. There's really nothing else I can say beyond that. I haven't abandoned the blog or anything, I just don't have all that much to say about gaming at the moment.
    Most of my work here on Retromags as of late involves the magazine database. Just as few minutes ago, I put the finishing touches on the index for issue #50 of Computer Gaming World, and before the day is out I'll probably do issue 51 as well. Why not, after all?
    For those who didn't see the topic posted on the forums, Indiana legalized same-sex marriage on June 27th. That day, my partner Jessica and I made our way to the county clerk's office to obtain our license. We exchanged vows, a kiss, signed our names on the certificate, and it was official: I was now Mrs. Areala.
    Things seemed tenuous for a while afterwards. The attorney general filed a challenge, and suddenly it wasn't clear if we would be considered legally married or not. After several other states challenged, the cases as a whole were brought to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that Indiana's ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and we could breathe again. A further challenge to the Supreme Court was met by the court electing not to hear the case and side with the 7th Circuit's ruling.
    It looks like the Supreme Court will be deciding this case before too long though, because the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled the opposite way in another case involving a different state's ban on same-sex marriage. So it's back to holding my breath, wondering if the rights every other married couple obtains automatically will be stripped away from us, our license invalidated, and the discrimination against me for having fallen in love with another woman continued. Guess we'll be filing our taxes separately again this year, even though the Federal government says we're legally married. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed in the hopes that reason will win out over fear.
    I don't discuss politics on the Internet mostly as a personal choice, because you know what they say about opinions. But this last year has certainly been a rocky one for myself and my wife. We have been together now, living exclusively as a couple, for seventeen years. That's longer than most heterosexual marriages last in this country. I'm as committed to her now as I was the day I took the chance to tell her that I'd fallen in love with her, and I'm still as ecstatic about our lives together as when she whispered back, very quietly, that she loved me too.
    Video games are slowly evolving to include same-sex relationships among the characters, and more to the point they're positive ones, not flamboyant stereotypes. It shouldn't be too much to ask for the same treatment by the real world.
    In any case, the blog's been quiet for a bit because I'm been working to scan covers and index magazines, not because I don't have anything to say. There's only so many hours in the day, and I have to prioritize. So I haven't abandoned writing here, there just hasn't been anything worth saying more than working for the site over the last year. I hope you'll forgive my silence.
    *huggles*
    Areala
  22. Areala
    Dear Daddy,
    I hope it's OK that I call you 'Daddy' because it's all you ever heard me call you when I was a little girl. I suck at buying cards, so this letter will have to suffice. Basically, I just wanted to let you know that I love you, I hope everything is well, and that I've been trying my best to be the sort of kid you'd be proud to claim as your own.
    A huge part of who you are influenced my formative years. Whether it was a quick trip into town to pick up a bite to eat at McDonalds, helping me play the Gorgar pinball machine down at the local pizza joint when my arms were too short to reach both sides, or bringing home that old TRS-80 computer and showing me how to shoot the aliens with the joystick, a lot of who you are rubbed off on me.
    Dungeons & Dragons, video games, comic books, and that off-beat sense of humour, you passed all that on to me. Your love of fantasy and Tolkien in particular, your enjoyment of Lovecraft, and your skill with writing? Yeah, I picked those up too. Your creativity and dislike of math? Perfect fit.
    I have so very few memories of you from when I was little. I remember Civil War re-enactments, trips to the park, getting up in the morning to say hello to you as you came off an overnight shift and went to bed. I remember somehow completely failing to be the perfect daughter, being so unbelievably stubborn about unbelievably dumb things that it's a miracle you decided not to abandon me to the wolves.
    I remember our first dog, a big, brown, country stray with floppy years, who showed up on our porch and hung around our house for several days, all the while you telling mom not to feed him because if we did, we'd never get rid of him. I remember getting up one morning with mom to find you outside on the back porch, sharing some of your breakfast with him, because he looked so hungry and you didn't have the heart to send him away. And I remember you building him his very own dog house over by the garage, lining it with a nice bed of straw, setting it up on cement blocks, even shingling the roof, so that he'd have a place to say warm when it was cold, a place to stay cool when it was hot, and a place to stay dry when it got wet. Because that's just the kind of person you were: once you took anyone or anything into your heart, you did anything to ensure they were taken care of.
    Daddy, in a couple of months, it will have been thirty years since you died. I think about what life would have been like if that had never happened. I think about what it might have been to have you at home, helping me with homework, encouraging my talents and helping shore up my weaknesses. I wonder if, three decades later, you would be proud of who I am, who I've become, where I am in my life right now.
    I'll never know. And each passing Father's Day, it hurts more. I'm reminded that you're not here. I can't pick up a phone, I can't write you an email, I can't send a text or a Facebook message or a physical card and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about you. Thanks for helping me turn out the way I did." All of my grandparents are gone. I can't call Grandpa C. to let him know what a great job he did raising you. I can't call Grandpa B. and thank him for helping my mother become the strong, caring woman she is today. And I haven't been able to do so for many years.
    I don't know what the next decade is going to bring. I'd like to think you'd be really good friends with my in-laws-to-be. I'd like to think you'd approve of my choice of partners, that she'd be everything you'd want your kid to have out of life. But the simple fact is, I don't know and I never will.
    Be that as it may, I'm still writing you this note because I've never forgotten you, even thirty years after you were taken out of my life. I'll always love you. And in my heart, I know that no matter how much time and space separate us, I'll always be Daddy's little girl. Happy Father's Day.
  23. Areala
    Even if you played the daylights out of Resident Evil, even if you can beat the game handily with an S-ranking and one hand tied behind your back, you've never seen Resident Evil quite like this...
    EGM previewed the original Resident Evil for the Playstation back in issue #75 in their "Next Wave" column. This was over two years before the game made it to the US, and still very much in its beta stage. And wow, what a difference a couple of years makes! Click that picture to your left and check out this treasure trove of retro goodness.
    The polygon count for characters in these images is far lower than the final product, but what's even more awesome is to see the two-player mode not only discussed in the text, but shown in the screenshots! Yeah, that's Jill tagging along with Chris in several of those images. Way before it had a street date announced in Japan, Capcom was forced to ditch the two-player mode. These pics from EGM are one of the only ways to get a glimpse at what could have been. It's not until the PS2 era that we get a truly multi-player Resident Evil experience, so the idea we might have had it in 1997 is intriguing to say the least.
    A few other changes are also immediately obvious, like the room with the snake encounter. And what are those weird things on the floor of the wallpapered hallway? Everyone remembers the dobermans busting through the windows in the final version...were those some sort of wriggling insect enemy they did away with? Dead chunks of a gun-blasted zombie? The world may never know...
    In any case, enjoy this forgotten look at this genre-defying Playstation classic!
  24. Areala
    You know what? I'm sick and tired of this decades-old mantra being trotted out by every two-bit critic who can't even be arsed to involve himself or herself with the object of his/her derision. I honestly thought we were past this nonsense when Roger Ebert first decided to throw the idea that video games cannot be art out into the open years ago. One would have assumed that the immense number of people (both gamers and developers alike) who took offense at this might have made him re-think his opinion. No, it's not the gaming equivalent of, say, the Dred Scott decision (in which the courts of the United States claimed that no person of African ancestory could claim citizenship), but it's still a very narrow, short-sighted, and frankly irresponsible opinion held by a man who has shown, time and time again, that he should be smarter than this.
    Roger Ebert's blog at the Sun Times currently hosts his article whereby he takes his time in preparing his response to a 15-minute talk given by Kellee Santiago at USC. Ms. Santiago was speaking extemporaneously, while Ebert freely admits to "tak[ing] an unfair advantage" by not having to respond in kind at the time. He already knows that he's going to wind up on everybody's shit-list, but at least he's up front about it.
    Ebert brings out a whole host of arguments against Santiago's assertation that games are already art and attempts to play with every definition of "art" that he can find, including the one from Wikipedia which Santiago cites as being the most articulate one she's seen: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." By this definition, Ebert claims, the game of chess is an art. I personally don't think that this is too far off from the truth. After all, isn't there a reason we refer to those who have come closest to perfecting their play of a game which, by its very definition can never be fully perfected, as "masters"? We reserve the same title for the likes of Hokusai, da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Van Gogh who, like our modern-day game designers like Miyamoto and Wright, also deliberately arranged elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. Why is there a gulf here?
    Another claim Ebert makes that divorces a game from a work of art is that "you can win a game." The problem with this statement is that it assumes two things: first, there is no such thing as a video game that you cannot win; second, that once a game has been won, the ability to experience it again must somehow diminish its impact on its audience. Both assumptions are entirely false. The first assumption, that all video games can be won, can be wiped out by going back as far as the 1970s when video games were in their infancy. I'd love to have Mr. Ebert explain to me exactly how it is that one goes about "winning" a game like Space Invaders or Pac-Man, where there is no "final stage". In fact, it would seem that Pac-Man and Space Invaders are thus the antithesis of a video game under Ebert's definition, because you cannot win them, you can only survive long enough to lose later than another player. Unlike chess or checkers, where a winner is (usually) assured, games like this only offer the ability to place your initials on the High Score screen as a method of tracking one's prowess. It doesn't prevent you from eventually losing your last spaceship. But we don't even need to go as far back as the 1970s to find an example of this, thanks to video games like The Sims. You can't "win" The Sims; there is no point at which the game stops and congratulates you for reaching the final level, building the largest house, or having enough neighbors, children, relationships, or titles at your virtual job. The second assumption is likewise invalidated by the fact that other forms of art such as painting, sculpture, and even film, can be experienced multiple times while still having an impact on the one experiencing them. One can read the same novel by Nicholas Sparks and still be moved to tears. One can watch the same comedy and still be moved to laughter. One can observe the same work by Munch and still be slightly unnerved, or look at the same painting by Picasso and still be confused. A video game is no different in this regard at stimulating the emotions.
    Ebert even manages to shoot himself in the foot with the assertation that: "Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among." Of course they will - any gifted film director will tell you how much he admires the work of those who came before him, and any gifted poet will be happy to tell the world about her favorite inspiration. Guess what happens if you ask a game designer about the work that he or she admires? That's right - you get the same answers, for they too were motivated by the genius of those who were there to "invent" this artistic medium. It would be a rare thing indeed for the creator of an FPS to claim they weren't at all influenced by John Carmack and that little-known game called "Doom," for the developer of a simulation title to ignore the creations of Will Wright, or for the makers of a 2D platformer to say that Shigeru Miyamoto's "Super Mario Bros." didn't affect their desire to create something just like it. There, Mr. Ebert, are our gifted artists, the ones who inspire today's designers, and we respect them just as much as you would respect the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Peter Jackson, or James Cameron.
    It wasn't very long ago that comic books weren't considered "art," and were in fact demonized as being morally repugnant and pornographic, having no merit in either a literary or artistic sense. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find any sane individual who believes that outdated definition. Likewise, it's easy to point at a video game today and say, "Well, what about 'Game XYX', surely that isn't art!" It's also possible for me to point to a work by Jackson Pollock and shrug and claim it looks like something my niece created by dumping her Crayola tempra set all over the living room rug; my personal lack of emotional response to abstract art above "Eh..." does not universally disclaim the work in question from having artistic merit. And while Plato, Aristotle, Seneca and Cicero all agreed that art should be defined as "the imitation of nature," it seems like Ebert conveniently forgot that human nature includes a little something known as "the imagination". If you're going to start defining art as anything that imitates nature, then I'm sorry, but you have to exclude any work of fiction that has ever existed, or any element of any written word, painted picture, or finished film that doesn't stick 100% to nature as we know it. Know how "Lord of the Rings" won all those Oscars a few years ago? Sorry...according to our four philosophers up there, and apparently Ebert himself, neither it nor the books that inspired the films are art, because there are no elves, dragons, Hobbits, orcs, wizards, Ents or magic rings to be found in nature. What a shame, but at least the esteemed professor isn't around to see his work so cruelly dismissed; whatever shall we tell J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and Guillermo del Toro?
    Ebert likewise wants to know why gamers seem so intent on pushing this definition of video-game-as-art". "Why aren't they content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves?" Well, Mr. Ebert, maybe it's because game designers are sick and tired of having the rest of the "artistic" community look down their noses at them for "just making video games." Maybe it's because the rest of the world cheers and jeers at the Oscars, but at least the winners and losers are noticed by everyone else. When was the last time you saw the mainstream media reporting on the Game of the Year other than to perhaps quote a couple of sales figures? Maybe it's because avid gamers like myself are sick and tired of people, like yourself who don't even play the games they are so ready to demonize, telling us that no matter how much fun we are having, no matter what emotional responses are being provoked by our play, that we're just "wasting our time." We gamers can and do get emotionally invested in our works of art that we follow - we get scared when the zombies come after us and we're down to our last clip in the handgun. We break into fits of laughter when the comic relief shows up to save the day by pantsing the villain. We tear up a little bit when Sephiroth shows up to murder Aeris, a character in whom we see so much good and innocence suddenly ended for no reason. Maybe we keep trying to explain ourselves to you over and over and over again, but like a scratchy record being played on a worn-out victrola, the best you can do is trot out your tired old mantra from the last generation to say, "It's not art. It's not art." Maybe...just maybe...that pisses us off.
    Finally, in an ending that I'm sure Ebert feels is the best way for him to get a subtle wink in at the audience, he lets Santiago have "the last word," and proceeds to quote the six components which he feels now form her definition of video games as art: "Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management." He concludes by letting this list "rest his case" for him. It's a pity, because by doing so, he apparently fails to realize that claiming these six items disqualifies video games as an artistic medium, he also obliterates not just cinema but virtually every other modern form of what he clearly considers art from the list of art itself! I'd think it would be obvious to one so well-schooled in the nature of cinema as Mr. Ebert that those six points can all easily be applied to the creation of a modern-day motion picture, a television show, a comic book series, or even a modern-day classic such as the works of Cormac McCarthy that Ebert cites in his screed. By all means, find me an acclaimed film, an award-winning novel, or any other soul-stirring, well-known work of art produced in the last 50 years which has managed to do without just one of those items on the list.
    I rest my case.
  25. Areala
    Let's Read: Nintendo Power #4





    I've had a change of heart and decided to continue my "Let's Read" series for a little bit longer. I'm having fun doing it, and that's what counts, because this is my blog and I am allowed to change my mind for no reason whatsoever, so nyah.
    As you can see from the cover shot, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is the focus for this issue. This is a posed cover with an actor dressed as Link looking down on a manequin made up to look something like a sleeping Princess Zelda lying in repose on a stately bed. Sure, it's not Simon Belmont holding a severed head, but at least it isn't a pair of track shoes with afterburners. Thank goodness.
    Nintendo Power #4 - January/February 1989 - 105 pages - $3.50
    Wrestlemania - Once again, the game featured on the cover doesn't get first billing in the magazine. This WWF (not WWE; they haven't lost to a bunch of pandas yet) game scores six of the biggest superstars in wrestling, including both the iconic Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. Sadly, Nintendo's religious censorship rears its head, as Hogan's power-up in the game, which is a golden cross on a chain, is referred to as a "Golden X" instead. I guess this is technically accurate, as a cross rotated at a 45-degree angle will resemble an X, but it's kind of insulting to Hogan anyway. Hogan and Andre get full-page write-ups, while Bam Bam Bigelow, Ted DiBiase, Honky Tonk Man, and Randy Savage have to share pages with one another. As a personal opinion, I always thought Nintendo's own "Pro Wrestling" was the undisputed king of wrestling titles on the NES, but several of my friends at the time swore Wrestlemania kicked its keister. You be the judge, brother.
    Captain Nintendo - Part two of the "so bad it's bad" piece of fanfic which premiered last issue. Three more pages of character non-development, cringeworthy slangtalk from a computerized AI, an entire room of Nintendo Game Counselors, Link fighting Mother Brain, and Gannon flinging fireballs everywhere. The hero doesn't even get the girl in the end. Eventually, this idea for a new mascot for Nintendo was re-written and turned into the cartoon series "Captain N: The Game Master," which apparently left the original editor who wrote it in a bit of a huff (somewhat understandably, as it always sucks to see something you create turned into something else). In any case, outside of the TV, this is the last time we'll see Captain Nintendo in this magazine and children everywhere have slept far better for it since.
    The contest this issues is Writer's Focus which asks aspiring writers out there to craft their very own game-related story somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 words for the potential to win one of several scholarship bonds. Not a bad idea really, though again, I'd have hated to be the editor forced to wade through the slush pile that I've no doubt got dumped in their mailroom.
    Sesame Street 1-2-3, a game for younger NES gamers, gets a two-page spread here. The cart itself is actually two games, with "Ernie's Magic Shapes" is a matching game where the player must help Ernie create the object he needs by matching shapes and colours, while "Astro Grover" has you learning shapes and numbers as you help some extra-terrestrial visitors get back home. Cute games, but very simplistic and meant for children who are in pre-school or kindergarten.
    We finally get to our cover feature with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - seventeen pages of Link-y goodness as NP gives us the skinny on power-ups, magic spells, enemies, bosses, and even provides some hand-drawn maps of the overworld and a number of the dungeons as well. As if that isn't enough, it scrolls right into the poster for this issue as well, which features an artistic representation of the overworld on it's front side, and some "Skate Or Die"-themed artwork on the back. Neither side is worth destroying the magazine in order to remove the poster, but the Zelda map at least is functionally helpful for navigating.
    The back of the poster merges nicely right into the Skate Or Die feature, with plenty of screenshots and breakdowns of the different events, including a pair of very valuable maps for the "Jam" and "Race" events showing where all the paths lead and pointing out some areas where you can score extra points. They don't mention the bonus score for jumping on the police car at the end of the Jam, but maybe Nintendo was trying to discourage those gnarly board riders from tormenting The State too badly. It was such a more innocent age back then...*wistful sigh*
    Howard & NESTER has an Olympic theme to it. This might have been more appropriate to last issue, where "Track & Field II" was the cover feature, but it's still amusing, with Nester having been picked to compete in a variety of stadium events and fouling everything up for himself and his fellow athletes, even with Howard as his well-intentioned coach. The final line of the comic actually made me giggle, so they're doing just fine.
    Counselor's Corner gets innundated with questions about Super Mario Bros. 2, especially how to find the Warp Zones. Additionally, the Counselors point out a potentially game-breaking bug in the fight with Fryguy and give a workaround for it (though it will cost you a life to restart the level). Golgo 13, Wizards & Warriors, The Legend of Zelda, and Castlevania II also get some tips and pointers. We also get introduced to four more game counselors, including Brian Taney who is one of the editors for Nintendo Power.
    Classified Information - Agent numbers return for everybody's favorite NP regular feature. Double Dragon starts things rolling with a couple of amusing little glitches in level 1, a way to beat level 2 without fighting the boss, and the now-infamous Infinite Hearts trick. Mega Man comes next, with the pause/unpause trick to do massive damage to enemies with one shot from a weapon as well as a recommended order of attack for the stages. The Konami Code shows up again, this time for Lifeforce. A way to cheat your way to wealth in Gauntlet, some tips for Bionic Commando, a way to bypass an annoyance in Blaster Master, and a couple ways of helping you rig the games of Track & Field II round out this issue's contribution to game domination.
    Now Playing starts off with "Marble Madness" scoring the first few pages, with some hints about enemies and maps for a few stages. Very useful, as this game requires a lot of memorization before you can even think about getting beyond the first couple of levels. "Operation Wolf" follows with a short run-down of the items you can find and very brief discussion of the resistance you face in each of the game's six stages. It also spoils the game by showing the last screen with the president congratulating you on a job well done. What's scary is that he doesn't look like Ronald Reagan or George Bush so much as a stereotypical caricature of your everyday fat-cat tobacco lobbyist. Maybe Konami was trying to tell us all something? A triple-play segment takes a look at three new NFL titles: "John Elway's Quarterback", "Tecmo Bowl", and "N.F.L. Football" all get their pros and cons weighed. Something to consider: people are still playing "Tecmo Bowl" (and "Tecmo Super Bowl") to this very day. I don't like sports games and even I play "Tecmo Bowl". It really is that damn good. As if to belabour this point further, Nintendo got Doug Reed of the Rams to play and rate each game, and Tecmo Bowl got the top score. Go on ahead, break out the ROM and play a few quarters; I'll wait for you to get back.
    Back? Good. Feel free to let me know who you escorted to the Super Bowl in the comments section (go Colts!). Also, I can't help but think that the artwork at the bottom of page 72 depicts some of the manliest cheerleaders I've ever seen put on a uniform. C'mon, editors...was that the best you could do?
    Finally, "Metal Gear" inches into the spotlight, with Kojima no doubt utterly clueless that it's the start of a franchise that will be going strong even twenty years later. Unfortunately, Nintendo of America manages to screw up a bunch of things in the localization process - the main baddie is "Vermon CaTaffy" and not Big Boss (no doubt playing on the name of Colonel Gaddafi, the leader of Libya since 1969), and FOXHOUND is referred to as "the Fox Hounder Group." On the brighter side, they show off a bunch of the weapons and equipment that can be found, show a couple of floorplans for the base, and give some hints for taking care of the bosses. And really, for all its translation gaffes (several of which have since acquired Internet Meme status), it's still a great foundation for what is yet to come.
    Video Shorts kicks off with a mini-preview of "Friday the 13th" with four screenshots, and a hilarious mis-identification of Jason's mother's head as a "blue cave wolf". "World Games", "Star Soldier", "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde", "Bump 'N Jump", "Rampage", "Othello", "Robowarrior", "Spy vs. Spy", "Gyruss", and "Q*Bert" also receive mini write-ups. All in all, nothing to get terribly excited about.
    Pak Watch gives us our first look at "Ninja Gaiden" (predicting it will be huge; they're right of course). The 'gossip gremlins' make an appearance to talk about the Consumer Electronics Show (this is before it became known as E3). Four basketball games come out of the locker room, "Robocop" gets delayed, "Bayou Billy" still has no firm release date, "Guardian Legend" (one of my favorite NES games of all time) is previewed, games based on the TV shows "Knight Rider" and "Air-Wolf" are coming, Data East is rumoured to be converting "Bad Dudes" to the NES (yes, and they foul it up horribly), "Defenders of the Crown" will let you play as Robin Hood, and Konami is bringing everyone's favorite fab four reptiles to the NES soon, though they assume it will involve an overhead view and lots of equipment selection a-la "Metal Gear" (which, come to think of it, would have made a pretty darn interesting Turtles game...). And... "Jump Burger" is coming. Don't ask me what that's supposed to be..."Burger Time" has been out for a year at this point.
    The grand prize winner of this issue's Power Poll gets 5 different controllers, including an NES Advantage and an NES Max. Second prize is one of 10 copies of "Zelda II", and third place gets one of 50 Nintendo jerseys (still modeled by Howard Phillips). New to this issue is a fourth-place prize, where NP is looking for 100 people to critique the magazine itself. Power Critics get an ID card, notepad and pen and get to tell Nintendo Power what's cool and what's not about the magazine for the next six months. More than likely, this led at least one lucky winner to a future career in journalism.
    NES Journal starts off with a showcase of a new hands-free controller which costs $120, but allows people who can't hold a normal NES controller to still play the NES. Not a bad idea, all told. Then, the bane of arcades everywhere shows up: the Play Choice-10 machine, which let you essentially "rent" Nintendo games for a few minutes at a time with every quarter or token you deposited. I imagine Nintendo made a mint off this sucker. They're still selling the Zelda and Mario hint books too, in case you haven't got yours yet. NP debuts another mini-column in this issue called "Sound Waves" which looks at current trends in pop music. In this case, Debbie Gibson, Julian Lennon (the son of ex-Beatle John Lennon), and Huey Lewis & the News all have new material coming out. Another one of those "space filler" things, I assume. The Celebrity Profile this time is US male Olympic volleyball star Karch Kiraly, who brought his NES to help the team kill time between games in Seoul, South Korea. Then, Nintendo would like to remind you about their forthcoming "Nintendo Cereal System". I actually remember eating this stuff when it came out...it wasn't bad.
    This issue's Mail Box has a nice letter from a mother about how she and her four-year old son play the Nintendo together to help it stand out from the goofiness of some of the others. Another writer asks about Dragon Warrior, which has been delayed for the moment though Nintendo won't say why exactly. Long-time subscribers to Nintendo Power, though, know that it's probably so that Nintendo can backstock enough carts to meet the demand when they offer it as a freebie for new subscribers sometime on down the road.
    NES Achievers doesn't break much new ground here, though one Ginny Rescigno throws down the gauntlet with a score of over three-quarters of a million points in "Mighty Bomb Jack".
    Jose Carlos Quinones is the featured Power Player of the issue, bringing NES representation all the way from Puerto Rico. Also, Alex Thayer holds Raphael from the TMNT and Samus Aran from Metroid up as his role models. One of his listed goals is to get his father to quit smoking (wonder how that went...?)
    Another few upsets at the top of the Top 30, especially with "Double Dragon" kicking up five spots to number 4, but mostly with "Super Mario Bros. 2" doing a super Luigi-esque high-jump into the #1 position with more than three times the number of votes of #2-ranked "Legend of Zelda". In addition, "Metal Gear" falls down to #8 and the screenshot for it features the hilarious "I FEEL ASLEEP" grammar error from one of the first screens. They couldn't find anything better to represent Konami's hit than that?
    Now, at the end, we see that "Ninja Gaiden", "Hudson's Adventure Island" and "Zelda II" (again) will all be primary features of the next issue. Howard Phillips provides the closing editorial about Nintendo's trip to CES and promises that the next issue will be the most "powerful" yet. I don't know what it is, but there's always something so upbeat and positive about Howard Phillips that you just can't help but love him.
    That's all for now...see you next issue!
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