I'm curious how many people have actually bought a current generation console, because things definitely seem off with the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Most games right now are still playable on last-gen consoles, and besides RTX the graphical leap doesn't seem worth the upgrade this time around.

There have also been all of the manufacturing and shipping issues caused by the chip shortages and pandemic which have made the new consoles harder to come by, and yet according to Sony and Microsoft they're still apparently selling as good as or better than the last generation at the same point in their life cycle which seems strange to me.

Sony is definitely pushing more PS5 exclusives now, possibly because supply is starting to increase to meet demand, but the only game that interests me is the Demon's Souls remake so I still don't have much of a reason to buy a PS5. Especially not after they just announced a price increase. Their excuse is inflation, but to have a console go up in price after so many years instead of down is just absurd.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing more cross-platform and cross-generation games. I can't think of a single Xbox game that isn't playable on both Xbox One and Series X/S. Maybe a few third-party games, but certainly nothing that's piqued my interest. It's great for players, which I'm all for, but has definitely reduced the need to invest in a new system so I wonder if it's hurting Microsoft or if the software sales make up for any decrease in hardware.

I don't know. I think this whole generation seems like a wash. But maybe that's just because I'm getting older and most games don't interest me anymore. The best new game that I've played in a long time is Inscryption, and that's a quirky card battling game with PS1-era graphics.

This was inspired by Neonriser's "If you had a Pokemon type..." topic. If pokemon were real and you could choose any one to be your "main" partner (ala Pikachu in the anime), which would it be?

I haven't been into pokemon for a long time. I played Red and watched the first few seasons of the anime as a kid, but that was where my interest peaked. I was pretty obsessed with it at the time, though. At a store, they were selling pokeballs with a pokemon keychain inside. All of the more popular ones were sold out, but I chose the Poliwhirl one. Ever since then, for whatever reason, he has been my favourite and would definitely be my best bud to go on adventures with.

In fact, a google search later and I think this is the exact same product.

I wasn't sure if this belonged in the General or the Movies/TV section since I'm mostly talking about the weird videos you stumble across on YouTube, but there are probably lots of examples from traditional media as well.

My go-to favourite is the "Our House" video edited by Game Grumps. Most people I send it to turn it off after the first few seconds, so they miss all of the subtle changes that happen over time. I actually like to put it on while I'm working because the audio is so monotonous I can just zone out to it.

My second favourite is this creepy clip from The Adventures of Mark Twain.

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion, but I'm sick of every game series going "open world" lately. It's to the point where announcing a new game is open world will actually kill any interest I have in it.

I understand the notion that a large sandbox can give you more to do, encourages emergent gameplay and therefore increases the amount of time and (supposedly) value you get out of a game. But more often than not the extra stuff to do is just copy/pasted objectives and missions scattered around the map, and I always get bored of playing around with the game mechanics and physics before I even finish the main story. It's directionless, with too many distractions and not enough pushing you forward.

Game series that I used to love, like Metal Gear Solid and Zelda, were way better in my opinion before they went open world. It's not like Zelda was ever linear to begin with, but the open areas like Hyrule Field and the Great Sea were the spaces between more traditionally designed levels. Those sort of classic overworlds helped make the game's world feel bigger and more real, but most of the actual gameplay took place in heavily choreographed locations that felt unique and hand-crafted. BotW did have more traditional dungeons as well, but the architecture of all of them looked exactly the same other than being arranged in a different configuration for whatever puzzle you had to solve.

I really like Elden Ring and have managed to complete the story four times, but I think it's great in spite of being open world rather than because of it. I know that if it were designed more linearly like Dark Souls I would have enjoyed it even more. There is just so much space that is totally pointless. In Dark Souls, if there's a path you can take you're almost guaranteed to be rewarded for your exploration with an item, but in Elden Ring there's usually nothing. It's bigger, but why?

I can't think of a single example of an open world game where all of that space was actually utilized in an interesting way. It's always filled with repeating assets with nothing to do but move through it to the next objective and maybe fight a respawning mob of enemies that you could just as easily rush past. And when you reach your destination, it's almost always an outpost that looks just like every other outpost, complete with the same objectives.

I like to compare this to metroidvania games, because they also have large worlds with multiple paths to take, but each path is more narrow and purposefully designed. If there are enemies in the area, they're typically placed in a way that takes advantage of the terrain, which makes the level design even more meaningful. It's a part of the gameplay rather than just a space for the gameplay to take place in.

Another good contrast would be the original Resident Evil. The gameplay area is small, but the world feels fully realized despite getting such a small glimpse into it. There's nothing in the mansion that looks like it's there just to fill up space and you form an attachment to the setting because the game is designed around revisiting rooms and finding something new each time while the story gradually pushes you deeper into new, unexplored locations.

So that's my rant. I don't expect people to feel the same way, but hopefully I articulated myself in a way that you can at least sympathize with.

Does anyone here have a home arcade?

I don't have much, and no fancy setup to show off, but I do have an AtGames Legends Ultimate arcade cabinet that I've added a few dozen ROMs to, the Arcade1Up Marvel pinball table, a STIGA table hockey game and one of those basketball shootout games.

I considered getting an Arcade1Up arcade cabinet and modding it to play more games instead of the Legends Ultimate because of the price difference and I like how they replicate the look of actual classic cabinets. But the Legends Ultimate can add your own ROMs out of the box with a USB stick and neither has great support for SNES games due to being one button short. Also, after trying an Arcade1Up demo unit in a store I realized how tiny they actually are. Their pinball tables are 3/4 scale, but still a decent size and come with about a dozen of the Zen pinball tables which I think are generally pretty great.

Now that the first season is done, what did you think of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?

I can't describe how I feel without first talking about the other Nu-Trek series. After Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks, I felt like Star Trek wasn't for me anymore. I hated all of the changes they made to "update" the series. It's like they were embarrassed to be part of the same continuity as the previous series.

The two worst changes, for me, were redesigning the Klingons and the overall shift toward a dystopic future. I stopped watching each series after being appalled by the first few episodes. I did go back and try to give them each a second chance, but aside from one episode of the third season of Discovery, I still wasn't happy with them.

But then along comes Strange New Worlds and I'm absolutely in love with it. The episodic storytelling, the optimistic outlook on the future, and updating the design and technology while still being true to the original series are exactly what I've been hoping for. The Enterprise is more modern, but it's still unmistakably THE Enterprise. The same goes for the classic uniforms, too.

The one thing I'm still hoping for is that they undo the changes to the Klingons, or at least give an explanation for the altered look that allows it to coexist with the other two appearances.

I wonder if I'm the only one who does this. Ever since I was a kid, I would listen to one song over and over again on repeat. I think it's because back then it took so many hours to download a single song, I had to make do with what few songs I had. But even when we got high speed internet in high school, I maintained the habit to the point where friends would make fun of me for it. I still do it to this day, though.

So does anyone else find themselves listening to the same track over and over again? And, if so, what's your current obsession?

Right now I've been listening to "Stellar" by Incubus for days. Before that was "6 Underground" by Sneaker Pimps.

Just as the title says, what covers/remixes have you listened to that are better than the original in your opinion.

The one I always go back to is the Flume remix of "Tennis Court" by Lorde.

Out of all the consoles, handhelds and PC, what have you enjoyed playing on the most?

For me, it's the GameCube. It was the first console my family owned that I could afford my own games for. Before that we had a Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64, but whatever games we had were what my parents bought for us or we could find at the local video rental place.

With the GameCube, I was finally old enough and had my own agency to buy the games I wanted. So games like Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, Resident Evil 4, PN03 and the Resident Evil remake all hold an extra special place for me.

My second choice is actually the Xbox One. It performed terribly, got a lot of bad press because of its abysmal announcement where Microsoft tried to advertise Everything You Hate™ as a feature, and it ended up a distant second to Sony's PS4. But the reason I like it so much is how it acts as an entertainment hub instead of just a games console. Not only can I play games and watch streaming services through the apps, but I can actually watch TV and listen to music through it too.

I did eventually end up buying a PS4 as well, but mostly because that's what my friends owned so if I wanted to play multiplayer Dark Souls and Bloodborne, I needed to have one.

I didn't see this topic already, and it's one I've been thinking of so I thought I'd ask.

What old sites that are now offline do you remember fondly? If they're on Archive.org, can you provide a link?

Here are a few of mine to get the ball rolling.


ForceAcademy.com (https://web.archive.org/web/19991012180951/http://forceacademy.com/) - A Star Wars fan site that took the Force semi-seriously, mixing it with new age philosophy and spiritualism to create a community of "Jedi". Edit: I just remembered that I was actually in charge of the fan fiction section for a while.


PlanetNamek.com (https://web.archive.org/web/20020121172634/http://planetnamek.com/) - The first DBZ fan site I ever found. It had a huge encyclopedia of characters, episodes and everything else. I read about characters and plotlines that I wouldn't see on TV until years later when Funimation got around to dubbing the episodes.


AfterEarth.com - Not the Will Smith movie, but Titan A.E. This was a promotional site but also an online game. I don't remember all the details, but you'd basically create or join a ship and there was some ranking based on largest crew or something. The site is on Archive.org, but requires Flash and Shockwave so may as well not be.


TBSSuperStation.com/mortalkombat (https://web.archive.org/web/20001109180300/http://tbssuperstation.com/mortalkombat/) - This site was to promote the network TV premiere of the first Mortal Kombat movie. Most of the archived site looks broken, but you can still sorta access Cage's Challenge which was a Mad Lib-style game that I spent too much time playing as a kid.

I want to start by saying I can't believe how active this forum is. I used to live on forums. It's what I miss most about the Old Web. I have been searching for literal years for a modern, active forum to join but every one I've found until now hasn't had a post in months or years. In desperation I tried Reddit for a while, but it doesn't fill the same hole. It's a totally different experience and not one that I care for. Very little conversation seems to happen. Topics are ephemeral and people are just shouting over each other to get noticed.

As for my personal history, I've been making websites since I was in grade six. I started on Expage--if anyone else remembers it, I'll give you a cookie; but basically it was a free service that let you create websites without any HTML. You could only use images from their gallery, and it had its own markup language to insert images and links into your pages. One of the biggest sites I made back then was called "Oodles of Wills and Howdowns" (I was told I misspelled "hoedown" after it was too late). It started out as my friend Will cloning himself so he could have a hoedown, and it turned into a huge battle between an army of William Shatners vs Leonard Nimoys. They didn't have images of either actor, so the parts of Shatner and Nimoy were respectively played by clipart of a leprechaun and a blonde surfer dude.

After that I moved onto Angelfire and Geocities and started to learn HTML. I mostly made fan sites for whatever my obsession at the time was, like Mortal Kombat, Star Wars or DBZ.

I took New Media Production and Design in college, which is where I learned PHP and finally got my own server space. That's when I started my own geek culture site. I wanted it to be similar to X-Entertainment/Dinosaur Dracula or i-Mockery, but it kinda turned into it's own thing. It was never popular, but it gave me a lot of experience in coding and design.

I'm now 35 and working as a web software developer using Angular and NodeJs. It's great work, but lately it has been feeling really empty. I write HTML and Javascript every day, and occasionally get to flex my design muscles when we start a new project. But I've been missing the old web more and more.

I knew about Neocities for quite a while. I saw a news article about it years ago and thought it was really cool, but never actually started browsing it until about a month ago. After browsing the "nostalgia", "retro", and "90s" tags for a while, I eventually followed a chain of links that lead me to sites like Sadgirl, Yesterweb and MelonKing.

I'd love to contribute to the Old Web revival, so I'm trying to figure out how to bring back one of my old sites or create something new using Neocities or Blogspot. So far I don't have any concrete plans, but I do have an old unused design that I've been wanting to find an excuse to finally use.

As for my other interests, I like sci fi, games, and anything Jim Henson-adjacent. Farscape occupies a much-too-large portion of my brain.

That covers every remarkable event in my life, so I'll end this here.