Holly and Colt, represent!
My first monster was a stupid Plant that I generated with The Craft soundtrack.
Also, I think UPN also aired it in the afternoon, I think at like, 2PM. I would watch a bunch of court shows, then Living Single, then some motherfucking Monster Rancher. U-U-U-UNLOCK YOUR DISC.
Let me tell you how good Monster Rancher was at working the brain of a child: You only got monsters from putting in a CD or another videogame you owned. On the PS2 movies also worked.
The thing is at the start of the game it’s guaranteed that the most popular games and the most popular movies/CD’s usually only give out absolutely dog shit monsters. You owned all of the Gin Blossoms CD’s in middle school because you had rich parents: fuck you you got six different forms of Suezo you miserable asshole.
Monster Rancher told you if you had Taste that you were automatically better off in life. It was always the weirdest albums and movies that gave you the best monsters. Sometimes a Samurai movie would give you a Samurai Monster. It was weird fuckin occult magic.
Here’s the other thing: Monster Rancher guaranteed at least fifty hours or so of commitment from children. A child left alone with a copy of Monster Rancher on the PS1 and a healthy buttload of CD’s and games as a child that would know only despair.
Cuz sooner or later you would get desperate enough to put in the soundtrack for M.I.B. MEN IN BLACK featuring several Will Smith Jams that people in the 90’s intentionally listened to. And you know what you’d get: A big FUCK YOU. The game would literally spin up your Occult Stone Disk and tell you you’re not good enough to get the monster out of the CD that you already own. You had to raise all of the fucking Mochi and Golems that you got from trying all five Beastie Boys albums that were released between the early 1980’s and 1998.
There was no Rhyme or Reason to the game what so ever.
Monster Rancher was the promise that there were secrets locked away in objects that you already had known and kept in your house and explored.
Monster Rancher is why I mourn the death of optical media.
they could do something like it where you take a photo an it does something with the pixels in the photo to make your monster but then internet nerds would tell you what colours you needed and they’re make specific pieces of abstract art to print out and take a close up photo of to get the monster you want every time
There’s a specific feeling that comes from taking an object you know and puzzling some occult secret out of it. A photo would be cool but taking objects you may have an already attachment to is the greatest thing ever. Monster Rancher promised us something videogames could never deliver
I think that’s what they did with the cell phone game? But using CDs kind of taps into that portion of your brain that lights up when you collect shit. The GBA game had you enter words, and the DS version had you draw stuff, but it wasn’t the same.
did I ever tell y’all about how as a kid I used the not-to-be-unsealed tribute CD for the late Princess Diana in MR2(?) and got an Angel
that angel kept me from getting in trouble with my parents. thank u, princess diana
I have never beaten any Digimon World game despite playing them all to actual cd death. Ask me anything
do you feel the weight of your sins
every time i look at the aftermarket prices on ebay
In the grim future of 20XX, desperate archivists have recovered the last copy of Princess Diana’s tribute CD by reverse-engineering it from the save data of a Monster Rancher game.
"This angel… She contains the key !!
I remember playing Digimon World, and my friend’s younger brother popping up outside my window and telling me to come out, and me saying, “I’m playing Digimon World,” and him responding, “Digimon’s gay.” Prior to that, after Pokemon Gold came out, he repeated the same thing.
But that kid was a fucking idiot, because both games were radical. I wasn’t so impressed with Digimon World 2 when it came out because it didn’t feel as expansive as Digimon World 1’s, uh, Digimon world. But I enjoy Japanese roguelites a bit more now, so, I can appreciate it a bit. I really want to check out the PS4 and the Vita Digimon games. And that new(ish?) Digimon 02 revival.
cyber sleuth is gr8
I love this so much
what’s up with yokai watch
Did anyone have Skannerz? They were like tamagotchis/digimon except you got your monsters from scanning barcodes. They were aggressively ugly. I vaguely remember a few ppl at my school bringing chocolate bar wrappers and stuff to give the good monster they got from them to their friends…
oh man, these skannerz monsters are 10000% the bestiary to a dungeon crawler you didn’t hear about until two decades after it was released
the franchise also had a tv plug and play system where you can fight the monsters you scan in an archon clone! crazy.
skannerz wikia thankfully has a full bestiary:
TRIBE ONE: ZENDRA
TRIBE TWO: PATAAK
TRIBE THREE: UJALU
here’s some neat skannerz factoids i just picked up:
-the armour dude monster on the packaging for the UJALU ver isnt actually in the game?
-in SKANNERZ RACERS, which was abt building and racing cars (seen here at INTERNET GAME CARS DATABASE DOT NET], “Sometimes scanning the same barcode that previously got a ride or part would instead give some sort of bad luck such as having a car impounded and no longer avaliable or getting in a wreck and losing a part.”
i gotta track down one of these and a complete barcode battler so i can use the prepackaged barcode battler cards in the skannerz plug n play.
i recently got an issue of gamest from yaj and there were screenshots of an unreleased barcode battler arcade game in there
