Was it something aimed at kids, or did you go straight to a program for professionals? Was it on PC, or was it something you downloaded on mobile? I'm curious to hear!
My very first was Kid Pix, and I imagine a couple other people will have grown up with that too; it was really popular. Alongside that, I had Flying Colors, which I adored as kid. It was marketed around its outrageous color cycling effects, which pleasantly tickles a part of my brain in a way that I'm still susceptible to today. Oooh, shiny!
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I figure all that stuff is on tablet now, and it's probably a thousand times easier to use! I had one of those clunky drawing tablets that plugged into the TV, and it was kinda cool, but I would have been way happier with an iPad
Ooh, my partner has a bunch of minidisc stuff! He's done some videos, too; I should ask if he wants to sign up and show off his collection...
I wish minidisc had caught on here in the US! By the time NetMD came along, it would have been exactly what I was looking for. I never got an MP3 player because I couldn't really justify the expense, but MD seems like the perfect mix of affordability, form factor, and audio quality that I would have gone for. Instead I was just burning tons of single-write CD-Rs and throwing them in a binder...
Is there a good place to get them? Shall I search the depths of Ebay?
If you buy them from Yahoo Auctions Japan and use a proxy service (my partner uses Jauce), the prices are super affordable! Not so much on Ebay. There's that video Techmoan did where he's opening those big bags of loose, untested MD players he ordered from Japan... and then he shows he's got 3 more bags like it. There's just so many to go around if you look there
This isn't a particularly original take, but I haven't been able to get into MCU stuff at all. I think the issue isn't so much that the stuff I saw was bad, just that it was really forgetttable for me. That said, I think there's some Marvel franchises I'd enjoy in isolation-- X-Men is a really cool setting (and I guess the films aren't part of the MCU?), and some day I'd like to read the best arcs of the comic to see if it's something I like. But yeah, MCU and multiverse stuff just hasn't clicked with me.
That said, I think it's possible to eventually "come around" to franchises you don't like. I didn't watch Star Trek in earnest until my late 20s and I really enjoy it now! Initially I thought it was a dumb series for being "science in genre only"-- all the technobabble and sci-fi silliness turned me off. But now I understand that's not the point; the point is more that it's a platform for social commentary, and it wants to challenge our ideas about the doom and gloom we typically predict for the future. You know, showing us that humans are still flawed, but there's ways we can do better. Having a different perspective going back into the series made it way more enjoyable!
I'm really happy that FiveM exists-- there's a lot of cool servers that turn GTAO into the kind of "life sim" online roleplay experience that's way more appealing to me. I tried vanilla GTAO myself, and yeah, I got disinterested pretty quickly.
As for unpopular games I like, here's a Final Fantasy game nobody's heard of!
Mobius Final Fantasy was a PC/Mobile gacha that came and went. I played it for 2 years, and I think the servers were up for 4. I hate gachas, and pretty much totally ignore games in the mobile space. But man, Mobius had some brilliant turn-based combat, and it still shocks me to this day that Square wasted such fresh ideas on a mobile game. Now that Mobius is dead and buried, I don't want the game back, but I want that extremely engaging combat back, and I'm hoping someone makes an indie game some day that just steals all its ideas. Hell, the game mechanics and formulas were totally datamined, so you could make a 1:1 recreation if you really wanted to.
Been playing Devil's Crush a lot for destress during some job interview prep. Its a lot of fun! A great little pinball game.
Devil's Crush rules! I grew up with Alien Crush, and it was soooo cool when I finally got to play Devil's Crush via emulation. The music in that is bonkers, some of the best on the system!
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Let me know if anyone has any PC Engine releases that they love! Want to get more into that as of late.
Ooh, there's a lot! Bonk 1 and 2 are pretty obvious, but they're all-time classics. Neutopia is solid if you're looking for "Zelda 1, but more of it." I really like Parasol Stars; if you like those Bubble Bobble style single-screen arcade games, it's a treat. And I'm not a big shmup fan, but Magical Chase is too dang charming to pass up.
Since it doesn't (yet) exist, is there a way to connect a real rotary phone to my mobile?
You can! I only learned about it recently in that LGR answering machine video. There's a little gadget called the Xlink Gateway that you can plug a landline phone into, and then it connects to your phone via bluetooth. It's a little expensive, but there's videos on youtube of people using rotary phones with it, so I guess it works!
I love old anti-piracy stuff. The ones that don't tell the player that they've tripped the copy protection are my favorite. I'm a big fan of Earthbound, and it's got some pretty mean copy protection. It's got the standard region/sram checks, and you can bypass those pretty easily. And if you do, the game will let you play, but makes the enemy encounters way, way higher to make the game super frustrating. And the best part: if you actually make it all the way to the final boss, the game freezes... and it deletes all your saves.
This one is thankfully not nearly as popular as it used to be, but anytime people use right-click disable scripts or put rants in their pages about not right-clicking things. It doesn't prevent bad actors from taking things, it just makes things difficult for everyone else!!!!
Oh man, I forgot all about that! I remember the trick I learned as a kid was "press enter on the keyboard while still holding down the right mouse button" to be a HACKERMAN and get the context menu to appear. It didn't stop us even as tiny tots! And I just remember wanting to, like, save cool pokemon gifs and stuff, it wasn't for use on my own website or anything. How silly that it became so prevalent!
It's really interesting to hear that other people have school dreams as adults! I know there's the classic trope of "realizing you showed up for class naked" and stuff, but I didn't realize it was a real thing for other people. I do have school dreams a lot (not the naked one!), but they're never at anything resembling my real schools, just weird imaginary places. I always imagine myself in the dream as I am now (instead of being a kid), and they're almost always anxiety about schoolwork. Typically it's a scenario like:
I suddenly show up back in class, and realize I should have been attending class this whole time because High School never stopped. Now I'm in 22nd grade or something, and I have no idea what's going on because I missed a decade of classes Or a variant of the same thing, where I've been on vacation this whole time, and now school is starting again, but we have a project due that we should have been working on for the past 10 years and I just neglected it
Arrrgh, it's so stressful! It's just that total dread about showing up for class unprepared, and it is such a huge relief when I wake up and realize I actually did graduate and don't have to rush to class in the morning.
Man, that's a ridiculously comprehensive site. And those blu-ray shots look so good... I'm so used to seeing the show in SD I forget what a difference it is
I get that; the individual episodes are REALLY hit or miss. Different writers on most episodes, and yeah, that first season has some real stinkers. You can use a guide and skip the non-essential ("monster-of-the-week":wink: episodes if you want, or watch only the best ones out of the bunch. Overall, it's a good show! But I'd say it's sorta like watching a Star Trek series, where there's a whole lot of it, and it helps to have someone tell you what episodes are really good and which ones to skip.
Oh hey, those Aztech shareware CDs were some of my earliest games too! I had the Mac version, not the DOS version, but still! It's neat to see a mention of it pop up here
Nexuiz slipped me by; I would have loved it because I'm such a big Quake fan. It came out around the time Half-Life 2 did, and I know at the time I was busy playing tons of Source mods. And then TF2 hit...
It's definitely a game that could see a resurgence with the right push. That Quake re-release that came out last year got tons of people online again, so who knows?
Oh MAN I played a lot of GunZ. I actually did learn how to kstyle half decently, and the game gets really boring when you do; everyone is invincible most of the time from the block they get during butterfly, and the only loadout you see is dual shotgun. It's basically a game of tag where everyone is zipping around trying to shotgun each other in the back and kills hardly ever happen. I would regularly make new accounts and level back up from 1 just so I could play against people that were using different loadouts :omg:k:
Movement tech is definitely a fun feature in competitive games even when it's unintended, like wavedashing in Melee and bunny hopping in Quake. It's just so funny to me that GunZ caught on because it launched so massively broken and exploitable that the skill ceiling ended up being huge. It was like a contest to see who could out-exploit their opponents. It's the kind of thing I can't really picture happening again, but it was a ton of fun in its heyday.
Ooh, I didn't know about ProtonDB! I'm kinda watching and waiting to see if the Steam Deck is worth it after the dust settles, and while I've heard Valve's "deck verified" isn't worth much, I'm super happy to see there's a community effort to make a compatibility catalog! That'll definitely influence my buying decision down the line 👀
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