That’s me…I got the FOMO…
Well, sorta. Getting better about letting that shit slip by me. Ya gotta, at some point.
As for a game thing I think about: so what’s going on there, at the start of Ghosts N Goblins. What were they up to.
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That Gearbox software head Randy Pitchford is a failed stage magician that owns the HQ of the real life version of the magician society from Arrested Development, which is why Gearbox made a Pen & Teller VR game you’ve never heard of, and he makes his employees go to the magic shows in the entire theater that’s built into his mansion to watch his magic act.
Like this might have overtaken the medieval times confidential documents and porn USB incident in my head when I think of fucking Gearbox.
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Typing « Dante’s Inferno » or « Pascal´s Wager » or obviously « The Binding of Isaac » into Google leads to Videogames Videogames Videogames for the first X results and you have to scroll a bit to get to the wikipedia article
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Sad we didn’t get El Shaddai
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Irem originally stood for “International Rental Electronics Machines”, however in the mid-1980s they changed the abbreviation to mean: “Innovations in Recreational Electronic Media”
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Used to watch this trailer a lot because it was on some Mac demo disc my dad had. FREEZE!
Never actually played the game of course
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the game is relatively interesting; however, this is a demo for the original version which was allegedly so slow as to be unplayable on most Macs at the time, prompting them to re-release the game with a “Turbo!” subtitle and major optimizations
This is something special: The Journeyman Project… that’s it. No Turbo.
If you aren’t aware, The Journeyman Project was a “mystlike” which actually predated Myst. It came out in January 1993, and (by some measures) was far more sophisticated than Myst… and also totally unplayable.
The original release was impossibly slow. On some hardware the game literally could not be completed, because it contained timed sections that could not be beat due to the low framerate. Left as-is, the game would have been a total failure.
However, Presto Studios rewrote the entire engine from scratch, massively optimizing it until it could be played on common hardware, then rereleased it as “The Journeyman Project - Turbo!” Unfortunately, it didn’t come out until a year later, and even if the public might have found it as compelling as Myst, that particular mania was already in full swing, and I suspect TJP simply got buried under the hype.
In this archivist’s experience, Turbo! constitutes nearly the entire corpus of available Journeyman Project media. I have never seen a box or a disc until I found one on eBay recently. I ripped it and tested the image on a Mac emulator (Basilisk II) where I found it ran fine, presumably due to the unrealistically high speed of the emulated machine.
So, you can now enjoy this “mystlike” in it’s original form - and if you play it on an emulator or a high end machine, you might even be able to beat it, although you really might as well play the later version at that point. To the best of my knowledge there was no content removed from Turbo!; for all I know, they may even have added things.
I don’t think there’s any particular reason to play this version, but if you have e.g. a Macintosh Performa 5200 sitting around, you could experience one of the deeper frustrations possible for a 90s computer gamer.
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ah… i thought the company was named after the lost city
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Playing Red Dead Redemption now, some 14 years from when I initially played it (and with a couple of other Rockstar games under my belt) and - why is being a violent dick even an option?
Nevermind that the whole “let’s just kill people til we get to a 5 star wanted level hooray” thing is incredibly boring, no matter which game it is - why would you do it? I don’t think there’s any payoff to it (you’ll probably get blown up sooner than later trying to clear your wanted level), and narratively it makes no sense. Maybe for a guy like Trevor, sure, but Niko? John Marston? Nah.
Just feels like some sort of open world game obligation, to let you do it just because you can. I guess the alternative would be to take the Assassin’s Creed tack, and incur a sort of game over for taking out too many civilians.
(The real answer I know in my heart is that it’s probably to sate edgelords and generate a little Bad Publicity to fuel sales)
(Weirdly enough this whole thing doesn’t bother me as much in the Saints Row games, maybe because they’re much cartoonier looking, maybe because your character is an asshole anyway, I dunno!)
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Now i want to fire up Saints Row 3 or 4 again
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I actually always thought RDR1 was remarkable for being well written enough that Marston was a totally distinct character but still absolutely capable of being convincing as a murderous robbing bastard (though truly random ultraviolence is outside his scope, sure) or as a more noble heart of gold type, however you play him on that scale. Actually playing him too honorable nearly stretches credulity as well…
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Years before starring in the 1983 game Mappy, Mappy the Mouse and Goro the Cat were maze-solving robots.
– Goro Robot | Mappy Wiki | Fandom
– http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/mappy-misc/
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I loved this series
Whoaaa wow. Did it find its way out of any mazes?
I got to wondering why Namco named its home division thing “Namcot” exactly–like, what was that supposed to mean?
The only Google hit that attempted to answer this was a shmups forum thread started in 2005, where an answer came up–possibly joking, I thought at first, but later seemed to be said to have been heard elsewhere by another person–that the T came from Namco Home EntertainmenT.
That was a bit weak maybe, but there was a better one. Poster CIT necroed the thread 11 years later and posted this:
I recently met Masanobu Endo (the Xevious and Druaga guy) and had a chance to ask him about the meaning of “Namcot”.
Apparently the name was chosen by Toru Iwatani and comes from “pet” and “mascot”, giving the impression of something small you can keep at home (as opposed to the “big” arcade games).
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Never actually used it. It was on ebay, listed by someone who wasn’t familiar with Mappy. So they listed it as Micropolice and it went unsold. Friend (who’s the current owner) it and suggested I make an offer, so I did and it was accepted. Think it belonged to a college professor who had passed.
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Oh and “Namco” comes from “Nakamura Manufacturing Company.”
(And “wanpaku,” from Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, the Namcot game I just played through, means “naughty” in Japanese, apparently. I wonder if it was also chosen because it sounds kind of like Pac-Man (“pakku man”)?)
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