Areala

6 hours ago, Whiskcat said:

Hello I'm new to this board. I have a small collection of PC mags that I want to make sure are recorded in history. Not sure if you guys have these or not, but before I sell them, I want to make sure they are added to the database if you dont have them. 

Holy cow, that's some GOLD right there!! Those are beautiful.

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Areala

You had me at "bewbs". <3

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Areala

Still, 'Game Review' is a better filler text than the racist rant that wound up in the middle of a GameFan review...

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Areala

My wife and I bought our home in 2009, and when we moved in, we picked up a new 50" HD TV. It only does 780p and 1080i, but I refuse to buy all my movies again just for a clearer picture, so I've avoided going to Blu-Ray with a couple of exceptions like "Planet Earth" (where you really do want to watch it in HD). My Blu-Ray player is just my PS3 with an HDMI cable, so it's not like I don't have a way to play them. We just have a lot of movies, and neither one of us is really a "graphics whore".

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Areala

Holy cow, one ex-magazine employee shows up and now they're coming out of the woodwork! Welcome to Retromags, Mr. Bieniek.

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Areala

Welcome to the forums, Chris! And double-welcome since it's so rare we see someone from the biz publicly announce they were in the biz.

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Areala

6 minutes ago, textfiles said:

Mark contacted me. He is recuperating. Thanks to everyone for caring and being concerned.

Thank you so much, textfiles! If you write back, do let him know we send our best wishes for a speedy recovery!

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Areala

YAY! I got The Who, The Clash, Dinosaur Jr., Queen, Matthew Sweet, Nirvana, RHCP, and Weezer! 8/11, totally fun, would play again.

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Areala

On 5/28/2017 at 5:56 AM, kitsunebi77 said:

This is a really fun video, btw.  See if you can guess all the famous album covers without peeking at the real ones in the background.

I got about 75% of them! I was so proud of myself, since I don't usually do very well with guessing album cover tributes. But many of those records (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Weezer, Nirvana, Matthew Sweet, etc...) came out when I was a teenager, so that helped.

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Areala

Also, not a recent discovery, but one I keep coming back to is Hannah Trigwell. She does original music, covers of popular songs, guest-appearances with other bands...her voice is absolutely stunning. This is her cover of "The Scientist" by Coldplay with Boyce Avenue which, I'm not going to lie, I like WAY more than the original:

And here's Hannah & Boyce Avenue again with "Let Her Go", which is a trainwreck of a song when performed by Passenger, but absolutely nailed by them on this cover:

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Areala

So I've still not seen the Ghostbusters 2016 reboot, but a couple of weeks ago we put the soundtrack in the stereo at work and I absolutely fell in love with one of the tracks on it. This is "wHo" by Zayn Malik.

I've listened to some of his other songs, and they just don't strike anything with me. But this? This was beautiful. It makes me want to see the movie just to find out what scene it was used in.

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Areala

Radio Shack's closing some 1,000 stores, but the biggest closure of all is the building housing their headquarters...and that means everything must go.

https://ubidestates.hibid.com/catalog/103245/radioshack-auction--1/

There are over 700 lots of merchandise up for grabs, and most of them are vintage/retro goodies. For example:

• Some Tandy Corporation Australia Branch newsletters
• An assortment of Realistic scanners, radios, and magazines
• A TRS-80 Model III computer
• Framed pictures of the Tandy board of directors
• A slew of computer books and manuals
• Tandy Software Packs
• More Tandy Software Packs
• SO. MUCH. TANDY. SOFTWARE.
• A Painting of George W. Bush

So go have a peek and spend some money on history.

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Areala

Food for thought:

Nickelback is to the 00's-era music scene what Nirvana was to the 90's-era music scene.

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Areala

9 hours ago, te72 said:

Preferably at a bowling alley. What? It's what I was doing when these songs came out... can we throw in some Oasis while we're at it?

Totally!

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Areala

On 5/26/2017 at 4:32 AM, kitsunebi77 said:

So basically what you've done here is list a bunch of music that no one would admit to liking, but would instigate huge sing-a-longs if they came on at karaoke.

Yes, and I'll never pretend differently.

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Areala

14 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Man oh man.  Not to derail the conversation but did anybody ever have a band that they liked just to annoy someone?  I remember buying the Type O Negative album Bloody Kisses just because hearing the song "Christian Woman" annoyed my girlfriend.  And perversely, I sort of came to like the album.  It didn't last long, and though I bought the follow-up album as well (the one the above song is on), by that point the novelty had worn off and I lost interest.  I actually just discovered that the singer died in 2010.  Who knew?

*LOL* Who knew? Anybody who was a fan of Type O Negative.

"October Rust" is the only album of theirs I care for, but that's because it was intentionally produced to appeal to a broad musical base. The rest of their albums are barely listenable to my ear, but "October Rust" is so beautiful that I don't care. I discovered them thanks to the soundtrack to the first Mortal Kombat movie.

If you want music to annoy other people, I have plenty of recommendations I can give. Joan Osborne had a hit single in the 90's called "One of Us" that is simultaneously catchy and annoying as hell. Meredith Brooks did the same with a song called "Bitch", and so did Merril Bainbridge with "Mouth". And if Faith Hill's "This Kiss" doesn't make the rest of your friends want to destroy your stereo, you have better friends than I do.

I also know of no one else besides myself who loves Chumbawamba's "Tubthumper" album, so playing that's all but guaranteed to get people throwing trash at you...although Japan went nuts for "Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen" which (for all of you who are not Kitsunebi, since he's the one who exposed me to that bit of aural agony) is literally about a guy who discovers he has a pen, a pineapple, an apple, and what happens when he tries to combine them, so clearly there's no accounting for taste over there either.

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Areala

My brother told me about the current sale on GOG.com, so I had a look and grabbed 'One Unit Whole Blood' for $1.49, which is insane considering complete boxed copies of this sell for around $30-50 online. It's the original 'Blood' game made by Monolith Software using the Build engine, so it looks similar to Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D, the 'Plasma Pak' which was Monolith's official expansion mission, and 'Cryptic Passage', the Sunstorm/WizardWorks third-party add-on. GOG usually throws in some extras as well, so there's the game's soundtrack, all the manuals, and even the music video for Type O Negative's "Love You to Death", which was included on the second CD that came with the physical release of the game in 1996:

'Duke Nukem 3D' will always be my favorite of the Build trilogy, but man, 'Blood' really is something else. 'Duke 3D' and 'Shadow Warrior' are light, filled with humourous jabs and pop-culture references galore, but always with tongue firmly in cheek. 'Blood' pays homage to gothic literature, horror films, and pop culture as well, but Caleb's wise-cracks and one-liners are muttered and snarled. Duke and Lo Wang revel in the humour, Caleb's only got time for the killing, and the bloodier the better as far as he's concerned.

It's not surprising, since he's essentially a reanimated zombie, doomed to an un-life of grief by the evil god worshiped by his cult, who slew the other three acolytes in front of his eyes, including his beloved Ophelia. Caleb's been grinding his teeth in a hollow grave for a long time. Duke's out to save the planet and get the women; Lo Wang's a skilled assassin targeted for termination by his former employer, but while they may not be paragons of virtue, they're still good people at heart. Caleb, on the other hand...doesn't really have a heart. He's willing to slay anything and everyone who gets in his way, up to and including the big bad guy Tchernobog himself. The world's gone to hell, and Caleb couldn't give a rat's ass: he's happy to let everything around him burn while he repays every cultist and hell-spawn back with napalm, shotguns, voodoo dolls, bundles of dynamite, and his pitchfork.

I'd forgotten how much fun this game was, and if you're at all a fan of the old DOS-based FPS games from the 90s with a GOG account and haven't already put this one on your shelves, do yourself a favour and spend that buck-fifty. 'Blood' is a bloody good time.

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Areala

I think you guys are falling for yet another April Fools joke here.

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Areala

I remember back when I was writing for Game Bunker doing research for an article about sexuality in console and arcade games in the early 2000s, and running across some of these titles. One was for either a hanafuda or mahjong game where winning the hand showed you an FMV of your designated female opponent prancing around in her underwear or a swimsuit. I remember thinking that some of these girls looked WAAAAY too young, like they were maybe 14-15, and wondering if they had any idea the people recording them intended to drop the video into a Saturn game, or if they were told they were going to be movie stars.

Either way... *shudder*

I wound up not writing about them, and don't regret that decision in the slightest.

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Areala

1 hour ago, kitsunebi77 said:

To put the Japanese gaming scene in perspective, there's an article in this issue comparing the strategy sections in seven different monthly magazines that exclusively cover adult PC games.  Meanwhile, at the time the mag was published, there was only one mag that covered non-adult PC games (which has since been canceled, leaving a grand total of zero non-adult computer gaming mags.)

This also helps to explain why systems such as PC Engine/TurboGrafx16 and Sega Saturn were so successful in Japan despite failing in the US, since they were the ones that published lots of erotic games and dating sims.

I don't know too much about the PC Engine side of things, but weren't Sega and Sony still prudish in their tolerance for erotic content on their consoles, even in Japan? I've seen games like Eve Burst Error and Desire on the Saturn which stripped the nudity present in the PC versions, and the same goes for some PS1 and PS2 titles as well. Did they sell well just because they were Visual Novels then? Or were there some console releases that were uncensored over there?

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Areala

On 3/11/2017 at 1:30 PM, Sky10w10w said:

Ha ha. I'm sure the people who played that game often in arcades did so because they were super hardcore, had no other games to choose from in their local arcade, or had a lot of money that was burning holes in their pockets.

Personal anecdote, but I've seen "Ghosts 'n Goblins" cabinets in FAR more places where alcohol was served than in regular arcades. If this was deliberate strategy on Capcom's part, commend their genius.

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Areala

You take care too, Matt. Remember you're always welcome here, whether you play games or not. I'll miss you. 

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Areala

https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding-books/

Usborne has been putting out computer books to help kids learn about computers and programming since the 1980s, but to commemorate the release of their new "Coding For Beginners Using Python" book, they've made twenty older titles available as free PDF downloads on their website. How fun!

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Areala

Quit breeding Orcs over there, you dick!

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Areala