I had written this shortly after I finished the main campaign of Red Dead Redemption in mid-2011. I was intending to post it as a community blog on Destructoid, but I didn’t get around to it for whatever reason. As I was sifting through my past writings, I found this one and decide to post it here. I only changed minor grammar and spelling errors, and changed the formatted BBCode back to HTML.
So, I wrote a blog back in January on how I’ve always been behind on video games. Thankfully, I’ve gotten better this year at trying to keep up, but I can’t afford every single game at launch. Because of this, I end up getting games long after their release date, sometimes end up playing them much later after that. Since L.A. Noire just came out a week ago, I think it’s topical that I write about another Rockstar-published game that came out last year. This, my friends, is me being late to the party on Red Dead Redemption.
Shout out to whoever made the cover. It’s rather stark. If only the rest of the game looked like this.
Red Dead Redemption
Played on 360
Released on May 18, 2010
Started January 18, 2011, Finished May 14, 2011 (Finished in this case means “Finished last story mission, roll credits.” Since it’s a free-roaming action game and all.)
My dad was the one who got me to notice this game. He’s not a gamer, he just pays attention to TV ads and asks if I’m familiar with certain games. This, coupled with the Man from Blackwater Machinima that aired on FOX shortly after the game’s release, made me mildly interested in it. I asked for it as a Christmas gift, and started by dabbling with multiplayer in early January. (First achievement I got? “Red Dead Rockstar.” The viral achievement.) After a while, I started playing the single player on and off, playing it around the same time as other games like Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Saints Row 2.
Now, I hadn’t played a recent Rockstar game. The last Grand Theft Auto game I’ve played was GTA: San Andreas, so I can’t make any comparisons from RDR to GTA4 as I haven’t played it. I also never played the spiritual predecessor, Red Dead Revolver. That game was released back in a time where I didn’t have a large Xbox/PS2/Gamecube collection. I was essentially going into this with little expectations other than who published it — Rockstar, known for high quality and critically acclaimed games — and who developed it — Rockstar San Diego, the guys who brought us Smuggler’s Run back in the PS2/GC days, as well as the Midnight Club games.
For 2010, this looks rather alright.
I’ll refrain from spoiling large chunks of the story, as it’s a decent story for a Western-style game. When I started the game, I just assumed that John Marston’s role is similar to The Man with No Name’s from the famous Dollars trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns.
One thing I’ve been trying to do this year is to tackle my long, burgeoning backlog. I’m limiting this to mostly current generation stuff like the 360, PS3, PC and Wii. But only because I wasn’t really up to digging out my Xbox to play Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and or play through the gauntlet that is Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. If I tried to finish everything I owned, I’d be left with a task that would be impossible to finish in my lifetime.
I’ve been making a slight dent at that backlog in recent months, tackling Borderlands and all its DLC, Saints Row: The Third (which is good timing considering Saints Row IV hits later this year), F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Lots of shootybangs, basically.
BADASS SPACE MARINE COVER
So it makes sense my most recent completion was this little-known budget FPS called Chaser. A first-person shooter that was developed by Slovakian developer Cauldron and published by JoWood Productions in 2004. I had heard of the game in the past thanks to owning a PC Gamer demo disc that had a demo of the game’s multiplayer. While the demo wasn’t amazing by any stretch, it did seem like an interesting shooter that I might play someday.
Fast forward to 2012, when I see the game on a Steam daily deal for $2.50, which got reduced even further to $1.24. I have a soft spot for bargains, and when a game hits that “$2 or less” threshold, it’s an instant impulse purchase. Then it sat on my Steam backlog until very recently, when I had decided to try it shortly after beating Redneck Rampage, wanting an “old-school” FPS fix of a different kind.
Douglas Quaid John Chaser in an unusual predicament.
You play as John Chaser, an amnesiac stuck on a spaceship being hunted down, with no memories of what happened prior. You eventually make it to Earth and become acquaintances with members of “The Family,” as you try to do missions to find out who you are and what happened. Eventually you find the truth, befriend a few people along the way, and find out you were doing a mission on Mars. So you get your ass to Mars, go to the Hilton and flash the Brubaker ID at the desk.
Obligatory sewer level screenshot.
Okay, I know a Total Recall reference sounds dumb here, but Cauldron clearly was looking at the Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic for inspiration: From the amnesiac main character, to befriending people who would later be enemies, being chased through a spaceport, even having to go through murky Mars caves to find the truth. This is the closest we’ll get to a “Total Recall: The Video Game” that isn’t that terrible NES game from many years ago.
Let’s be honest here, shooting a bunch of dudes is better than punching similar-looking monsters and dodging glory holes.
The game is not perfect, though. Being made by a game studio where English is not their primary language, there’s that weird case of “eurojank” to Chaser‘s design. Voice acting is a very mixed bag, leading to awkward line deliveries and unusual word usage. Subtitles don’t always match what’s spoken. Jumping physics seemed a bit off, where I was more likely to miss a platform than land on it. There are many points where it wasn’t clear where I needed to go next, which lead me to walking around a lot and frequently backtracking, among other problems that are common to unpolished shooters.
Cauldron’s CloakNT Engine makes for large, expansive levels. Impressive for a game released in 2004, however it makes later stages like the last few levels drag on considerably.
Chaser is not just a rough unpolished game, it’s also very difficult. On Normal difficulty, it didn’t take much for the bad guys to whittle my full health and armor down to zero pretty quick. Enemies occasionally drop medkits and armor, but I ended up losing that as quickly as I got it. This even applies to fall damage — later stages have you dropping down on pipes, taking off small bits of your health as you descend, making it pretty easy to miss a jump and easily crater, forcing you to quick save repeatedly.
This is cruel irony.
Lately I’ve been trying to avoid playing games on harder difficulties, but Chaser was incredibly difficult to play on Normal, leaving me to go through the remaining 2/3s of the game on Easy just to get through it. Even on Easy difficulty, some of the later stages still kicked my ass, with enemies having grenade launchers that one shot me even with near-full health and armor. The quick save key became my best friend.
Even the game’s ending is especially bleak. I won’t spoil it, but I was honestly expecting a much different outcome, and playing a shooter with a downer ending, especially the long journey it took me to get there, is disappointing. I would preferred a choice, like in Singularity, another game I played fairly recently.
That isn’t to say this game is bad per se, it’s just difficult because it was clearly made in a different mindset than most first-person shooters today. Chaser hearkens back to the late ’90s-early 2000s era of first-person shooter design: reflexes, speed, exploration, backtracking, rationing items, and quick saving often to make progress. The average player today would likely have a very difficult time playing through Chaser if they’re used to the Call of Duty style of game play.
Despite that challenge, I enjoyed the varied level design — from space stations, to cities, to the Russian tundra, even the redness of Mars looked pretty neat. The soundtrack was good, reminding of MOD tracker music that was popular in Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex. There’s a bit of charm to Chaser that I had a soft spot for, despite it’s ridiculous length and punishing difficulty.
It’s on Steam at an affordable price of $5, though it does go on sale occasionally. It’s worth checking out if you want some early 2000s eurojank in your life. Just remember that it’s gonna kick your ass, but stick with it. Despite that eurojank, it’s not a bad shooter. I’ve played worse shooters out there. Much worse.
Some screenshots taken from the Steam store page and Mobygames.
(Update 8/20/2019: Updated the post with a few changes here and there.)
I have a very stream-of-conscious sort of thinking. I’ll be in the middle of something like watching a video, listening to music, playing a game, then suddenly think about something related to what I’m doing right now, like information on a movie or song. It happens to me very often, leading to me going on weird tangents about silly stuff. In some cases, it can lead me down a rabbit hole I wasn’t expecting, such as how a jingoistic military FPS lead me down to a pirate mod.
I wonder where he got the background from.
Plunder & Pillage is a standalone modification for the Build engine where, naturally, you play as a pirate sailing the high seas. From creator Jesse Petrilla, he seemed to be a bit interested in modifying the old Build engine long after engines like Unreal Engine and id Tech 3 were available.
I could give you the plot summary, but I’ll just quote the modification’s readme file:
You are Capt. Jess Murdock, a renegade pirate who has lost everything in a shipwreck on the high seas. You wash up on the shore of an island inhabited by pirates of other gangs, you must fight your way through the island, and plunder and pillage all that you can in an attempt to regain what was lost and make a name for yourself as the most feared pirate on the high seas.
This isn’t Blood caliber level design, but it’s probably better than most fanmade levels.
Yeah, it’s a simple game, this isn’t Secret of Monkey Island levels of story complexity, it’s a by-the-numbers first person shooter. There isn’t anything wrong with that.
After I downloaded Plunder & Pillage and gave it the proper tweaks for it to work in DOSBox — as of this writing, no Build engine source port supports this abandonware — I stepped into the boots of Jess Murdock, “arrrrrr”ing like the rest of them.
The “quick kick” function from Duke Nukem 3D is also here, which in this mod is his cutlass sword. Thus you can pretend you’re the kraken and have multiple arms.
Plunder & Pillage shows three episodes, but in reality there’s only one episode with three short, quick levels. In the first level, Murdock kills some pirates to get a new ship. The second level involves him going through Parrot Island and… plundering the place? I guess that does fall right into the game’s title.
Unfortunately this has all the hallmarks of a Duke Nukem 3D total conversion, and not done very well. Enemies will do devastating damage even at range, and a lot of the items and weapons are just identical to the base game. Murdock starts out with a flintlock pistol and can get more weapons like a blunderbuss that works like a shotgun, and an explosive crossbow, which acts like the game’s rocket launcher. Even the setup menu references stuff like the Holoduke and Jetpack, something our Cap’n doesn’t get the opportunity to use.
I’m pretty sure that villager sprite is stolen straight from Strife. How unprofessional.
At one point, finishing the second “episode” lead to a cutscene from Duke Nukem 3D plays, the one where Duke Nukem kills the Overlord boss. I’m genuinely surprised 3DRealms didn’t get on his ass. Guess they were too busy “developing” Duke Nukem Forever to care.
Plunder & Pillage is surprisingly short. There’s only three playable levels, and as far as I know the only version available is this three level demo. It would’ve been nice to see some more levels with interesting designs, but I think Jesse Petrilla should’ve gotten some level designers, because all three levels here are unremarkable and rather straightforward.
You think that would be the end of this saga, which would make for a fairly short article. But now here comes the twist, and it’s gonna go in a way that you don’t expect.
After the tragic events on September 11, 2001, Plunder & Pillage designer Jesse Petrilla completely switched gears and was hard at work on a new game. Sticking with the aging Build engine, he changed the premise: going from fighting pirates to fighting… the War on Terror.
I’m one of many ideas. Long ago, back when I was an aspiring YouTube guy, I had this idea for an internet show where I would review a TV show that depicted the world of video games in a hilariously bad light. This was back when The Nostalgia Critic was a big thing. Unfortunately, the issue of using clips from a TV show for mockery purposes could get me in legal trouble, so that idea got canned. But hey, it’s 2013, and I’m in the mood to revisit old ideas, this time in written form. Least they can’t sue me for copyright on a blog post.
I wanted to look at TV shows – sitcoms, dramas, news reports, stuff like that – and how they inaccurately depict video games. Some will be funny. Others will be tragic. Hopefully you’ll be entertained along with me.
Yeah, it looks like crap. I’m a writer, not a graphic designer.
The show I decided to write about first is CSI: Miami. The first spinoff of the long-running CSI TV series, it starred David Caruso as Horatio Caine, where he head-tilted and mumbled his way through ten seasons of the iconic police procedural.
I’m not a fan of CSI: Miami – hell, I am not a big fan of CSI or these kind of criminal investigation shows in general. I didn’t mind the original series until William Petersen was replaced with Morpheus. Things just weren’t the same in Vegas after that. Heard they replaced Morpheus with Sam Malone now, which is an even weirder casting decision.
During CSI: Miami‘s fourth season, they decided to tie video games into a crime, hot off the heels of the various Grand Theft Auto controversies throughout the 2000s. The result was “Urban Hellraisers,” an episode full of hilarious and inaccurate video game references mixed in with terrible acting and writing. At one point, they added a subplot involving a minor character and Emily Procter’s character just because the plot was so paper-thin that they couldn’t fill it into a 45-minute episode.
I’ll avoid giving an in-depth recap, this is not a CSI: Miami fan site after all. Instead, I’ll just give a rough summary of the events of the whole episode.
Let’s talk about Monopoly, the classic property building board game. Also known as “that one game that goes on forever because dummies add house rules that make a two hour game go on longer than it should.” No, you don’t get money on Free Parking, you must auction a property if you don’t buy it, and you get $200 if you land on GO, not $400. At least it’s a better board game than Risk, now that one’s a pain to play.
Over the years, I have somehow amassed a large Monopoly collection, from Disney-themed Monopoly to Monopoly featuring the Seattle Mariners baseball team, to even one of those bootleg “Build Your Own” Monopoly clones made for Windows 3.1. Though, much like everything in life, I took it to excess and got sick of collecting them, shoving all the various Monopoly games I got in my garage, some of which have never been opened. However, buried between Deluxe Edition Monopoly and Michael Graves Monopoly, there was this special edition:
Just like the post I made about the Nintendo Power catalog, it’s “Pikachu and a bunch of other characters you *might* care about!”
Yeah, they made a Pokemon Monopoly game. Gotta catch em all, I guess. This edition was made back in 1999. Pokemon fever was in full swing, and naturally there was gonna be a crossover with the famous board game. Interestingly, this was before Hasbro licensed Monopoly to USAopoly to do their cross-brand spinoffs like The Beatles Monopoly and Rolling Stones Trivial Pursuit. I don’t remember how I got this, but I think I might’ve “borrowed” this from my grandma and never gave it back, I can’t be certain. Regardless, it’s in my Monopoly collection, and I’m now gonna go look into this version.
I’m going to assume you all know the rules of Monopoly, so instead I’ll just cover the noticeable differences between this and the original you know and hate love.
I used the plastic container that holds the Pokemon tokens for Houses and Hotels. Or as they’re called in this case, Pokemarts and Pokecenters. It’s rather handy.
Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve done a blog entry on game finds. I found a bunch of stuff, and decided to get with the times and actually make a video out of it.
I decided to get back into the groove of making YouTube videos. I used to make videos from around 2007-2010, but lost interest for reasons I can’t explain. Realizing that YouTube is a thing I shouldn’t ignore in 2013, I started a new YouTube channel dedicated to this blog. I’ll likely be making videos from time to time, including making the game finds entries more video-focused.
For those who can’t view YouTube,
(2019 edit: Oh hey. Around this time, I had the wise idea to do video blogs about the stuff I did. However, lack of motivation and frustration around making consistent video content caused me to give up on this plan a few months later.
I’m a much different person now than I was then, and I’m not really proud of myself in these videos. Thus to minimize my own embarrassment, the video’s gone. The YouTube channel’s still there, just “cleaned up” with some videos removed. I’m not gonna remove this post, though. Instead, I’m replacing this with a picture taken in 2019.)
Here’s a quick summary of what I got over the course of January:
Largo Winch.// Commando SAR (PS1)
Wipeout XL/2097 soundtrack
Sonic Mega Collection Plus (Xbox)
DJ Hero 2 (360)
American McGee’s Alice (PC) with Prima strategy guide
Largo Winch is a budget title by Ubisoft based on a French TV series, which in itself is based on a Belgian comic book. They’d keep up this trend by later taking the French XIII comic and making a mediocre cel-shaded first-person shooter that had some baffling design decisions. Such as casting Adam West in a serious role after he’s been Mayor West on Family Guy for years at that point.
Anyway. We never got Largo Winch in any form here in the States, so I figure this was a cheapo release in the same vein as VIP where they got the license for cheap and made the game for peanuts to be shoved in the bargain bins at Wal-Mart. I tried playing this, and it was a frustrating stealth-action game made before Splinter Cell, a more well-known and popular franchise by the same publisher.
Ubisoft would go to make one more Largo Winch game, though I bet it was exclusive to Europe as I’ve never seen it here. If there’s anything that needs to make a comeback, it’s Ubisoft making games based on obscure properties no one’s heard of outside of France.
Wipeout XL (known as Wipeout 2097 outside the US) got a soundtrack featuring some of the artists who contributed tracks to the game, with a bunch of other electronic artists thrown in for good measure. There’s some pretty decent cuts in here: Pre-Homework Daft Punk, some Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy in there for good measure. A fair share of this stuff seems to be more like a Big Beat/Techno sampler more than a soundtrack. Makes sense, considering Wipeout XL/2097 is one of the few games that supports Red Book CD Audio.
When I finished the video originally, I stupidly dropped the CD, shattering parts of the case. CD still works fine, though. I need to find a clear plastic jewel case to replace it.
Sonic Mega Collection Plus is More Sonic Mega Collection. A simple compilation that added a few games not in the original. Better than the original Mega Collection since you don’t need to play Sonic 3 500 times to unlock Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Kinda redundant now considering I own the original games on the Genesis as well as this appearing in a litany of other re-releases over the years, but it’s a nice novelty.
Continuing the past trend of finding fairly recent games like Singularity and Blur at a Goodwill, I snagged DJ Hero 2, also in the shrinkwrap. When I grabbed this, there were dozens of copies in one Goodwill. Clearly these were being cleared out from a Target or some other store. While I was more into the drums and guitar of the music game boom, DJ Hero was still pretty cool, and I heard the sequel’s much better. I should give it a try sometime.
Finally, American McGee’s Alice. This one was found at a different Goodwill, the one with those infamous junk bins. Thankfully, this was locked away in a case, so I didn’t contaminate my hands with whatever strange gunk that might be left in the bins. The game was not preserved well though: the box is mostly crushed, as somehow the cardboard liner that usually keeps the boxes firm was straight up gone.
There are some other cool things about this in spite of the crushed box. It’s the first pressing where Alice is holding a knife — later pressings would have her hold cards or an ice sword instead. Somebody paid $50 at launch at a Fry’s Electronics at launch, which is pretty neat to track where this game was bought originally. Finally, and I didn’t know this: It comes with the Prima Strategy Guide. I’ve been using that to keep the box from being completely crushed as a result, and it works pretty well.
I’ll likely be making more video content in the coming weeks. I forgot how fun it is to make videos sometimes.
(One more note from 2019 me: Yeah, on second thought, let’s not.)
I’ve been in a funk lately. I’ve had no drive to write any new entries or make new videos. Since I come from a packrat family, There’s bound to be something in my room that’s worth talking about.
While combing through my magazines, I had stumbled upon this catalog that had been buried among the stack, and I think it’s an interesting time capsule: Nintendo Power’s Super Power Supplies catalog. From 1999! Everybody loves old catalogs, right? Well, at least I do.
Pokemon! Donkey Kong! Yoshis! A combination only Nintendo could give you.
I honestly don’t know how I got this, but judging how it’s from Nintendo Power, I likely got it when I had a subscription to the magazine from 1998-2000. That was an interesting time: Pokemon was becoming a big thing, the Nintendo 64 was winding down, the Game Boy Color was a new and colorful way to play handheld games, and there were magazine covers dedicated to stuff like Tonic Trouble. This makes me realize we’ll never see anything cool like this again, now that Nintendo Power’s gone.
By this time in my gaming career, I was still a hardcore Nintendo nut, but my interest in the Big N started to fade, looking at the cool Sega Dreamcast, and later, the PlayStation 2. I still respect Nintendo, they make good stuff on occasion, even if my mom used the Wii more than I do. But enough waxing nostalgic about Nintendo, let’s crack open this catalog.
Pokemon: Starring a bunch of characters you don’t care about, and PIKACHU!
The catalog was released during the height of Pokemon fever. I played Pokemon Red in its heyday, but I later traded it with a classmate for The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which was a better decision, especially after my friend borrowed my copy of Red and finished the game with my save, giving me less interest in playing it.
By the time this catalog was released, Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition just hit the US, so Pikachu is featured prominently on a lot of the merchandise, such as the sweatshirt shown above. I like how it’s some of the well-known Pokemon like Charizard, Snorlax, Eevee, and Meowth in a group shot, but Pikachu’s in the corner, as if they’re saying “You don’t give a fuck about the rest of these guys, only Pikachu.” I was more into Charmander myself, but I guess with the popularity of the anime that they decided to capitalize on making Pikachu the face of Pokemon.
I wonder if someone who served in the military had Meowth dog tags in addition to their name and rank.
When I said there’s a lot of Pokemon stuff in the catalog, I wasn’t exaggerating. You could have such wonder Pokemon products like Pokemon hats! Pokemon watches! Pokemon card game holders! VHS tapes of the Pokemon anime! You could get freakin’ PokemonDOG TAGS! I could understand T-shirts and hats, but dog tags? Really? I guess if you wanted to show off how much you love Blastoise, then I guess the dog tags would be cool.
This is the 1999 version of the controller condom. It’s like Nintendo never forgets their past!
The catalog does feature stuff besides Pokemon. One other hot ticket item in 1999 was Nintendo’s other big release that year: Donkey Kong 64. Featured are Donkey Kong 64 hats, T-shirts, wallets, plush toys, even Nintendo 64 controller gloves. If you wanna protect your controller from getting nasty germs or other things on them, I guess those would be an interesting purchase.
I’m surprised they didn’t sell actual gloves for your hands, considering Mario Party came out around this time and was causing issue with people’s hands due to people palming the analog stick on the more intense minigames. Pair them with the controller gloves for maximum protection.
If I had a Nintendo 64 carrying case, I could’ve been the cool kid on the block.
As I dip further into the catalog, I find some more cool accessories that I would want even now: Protective plastic cases for loose Nintendo 64 carts, or carrying cases for your game systems. I always found those pretty cool, because you could stash your system in a bag and take it with you to Grandma’s house.
I wish I ordered the magazine holders, it probably would’ve been a tidier way to stack my game magazines. At least I finally bothered to get plastic magazine sleeves to preserve some of those older Nintendo Power issues.
You better buy these Player’s Guides, otherwise you’ll be the most uncool kid on the block.
Nintendo: One of the few companies to actually acknowledge releasing video game OSTs in the USA.
Of course, if you’re buying the games, you might want the strategy guides too, right? I still have a bunch of these “Player’s Guides,” and they’re nice when you wanted some game hints before everybody had the internet at their fingertips. Fun fact: That Donkey Kong 64 Player’s Guide cover got changed to one featuring the ensemble cast. I should know, I own two of them.
Nintendo Power was also selling the game soundtracks if you wanted to listen to those kickass tunes in the car, which was still sort of a novelty back then. Though, that Diddy Kong Racing soundtrack disc looks pretty creepy. Plus it’s not round, how the heck would it play in a CD player without shattering in the drive? I will have to find that soundtrack some day so I can find out how that magic works, as I usually don’t see very many non-round CDs.
This is an interesting little item for me to stumble upon. These are great time capsules, as they give me an outlook on some of the silly swag that Nintendo was selling even during that period where Sony was gaining dominance in the video game landscape.
Alas, I don’t have any more of these “Super Power Supplies” catalogs, so this will be it for now. However, I do have some old Nintendo and Sony catalogs, including a Nintendo DS catalog from 2005 which has a few unique things about it. I wonder if anyone has talked about those…
(Thanks to user fauwf of The Internet Archive for a clearer scan of these pages, which I used when updating this article.)
Half-Life is one of my most favorite games of all time. It blended action, platforming and story perfectly to be one of the awesome shooters of 1998. But it wasn’t always that way.
Valve, back then a small development studio, made a press demo version of Half-Life that showed a drastically different version of the game: While the story and certain game elements was similar, almost all the levels and designs were different from what we got. In a sense, it felt a bit more like in line with Quake than the Half-Life we know and love.
I always liked Half-Life’s dithering effects in the software render. Can’t really explain why.
This version was originally slated for November 1997, but it missed the release date, causing Valve to delay the game and release it a year later with many significant changes to the final product, all for the better.
Getting a chance to play the Half-Life that never was is really a treat, which has many unfinished levels — some early versions of levels in the final game — as well as tech demos such as skeletal animation. You can shoot a robot and make it do that dancing baby animation that was popular in the late ’90s! Not only that, it has documentation about the game and Valve itself, a walkthrough of all the levels, even copies of Paint Shop Pro and WinZip for some reason…
Here’s me playing through one of the levels, The Security Complex. It’s one of the more complete levels of the game. I go through the stage area at least once, then show the solution as given in the walkthrough.
Thanks to reddit user jackaljayzer for uncovering this gem, who got it from a friend in Bellevue, Washington; and to Valve Time (now defunct) for revealing the leak. Further information about this prototype build can be found on The Cutting Room Floor, and it’s a nice amount of stuff there that compares this prototype to the final released game.
If somehow you are one of the few who have never played Half-Life, go buy the game on Steam already. There’s a reason I say it’s the best game of all time.
Happy Holidays, everyone. Hope your Christmas was full of joy in some form, and that you got whatever you wanted for Christmas. For me, that was a new desk chair, an ION Drum Rocker for Rock Band, and a bunch of games varying from Assassin’s Creed II to Dishonored to Homefront. Oh well, not everything’s a winner. A few of these things I got will come useful in the New Year, I hope.
After posting the Spike TV Video Game Awards article, I really didn’t have much planned for the rest of the year. The Atari Hot Wheels article was a spur-of-the-moment thing I found out from a friend, and I was out yesterday hoping to find some gaming stuff. I found some at an antique shop, but it was pretty overpriced — Super Mario Bros. 3 for $12.50, a complete in box model 2 Sega Genesis for $65, etc — and the thrift stores had nothing that appealed to me that much.
On a bus ride back, I noticed there was an arcade in Milwaukie, not too far from the main offices of Dark Horse Comics that I mentioned in a previous post about video game comic books. So I thought, hey, let’s have a little fun today.
It looks bland outside, but it’s pretty cool inside.
Arcades in the United States are a sad state of affairs these days. Most of the arcades here are more ticket redemption arcades where you push coins down a slot and hope a bunch of coins fall and get loads of tickets. This one here was no exception, I’d say this arcade was 80% coin prizes, 15% arcade stuff imported from Japan and 5% skee-ball. Honestly, I’m not expecting much, this arcade’s been here a long, long time and I’m amazed it’s still around, really. Plus if I really wanted a pure arcade experience with pinball as a bonus, I could just head to Ground Kontrol in downtown Portland, so you take what you get.
My apologies for some of the blurry images here, my phone is not the best quality, that combined with a dimly-lit arcade exacerbates it considerably.
There was a good selection of imported games, which surprised me. No Dance Dance Revolution I’m afraid, but they did have stuff like SEGA Golden Gun.
The name holds true: Your lightgun is a tacky golden pistol. It really sells the game.
This game was nuts, it’s a campy light gun game involving zombies, ballerina monsters, and zombie ninjas. It’s like a successor to House of the Dead, and it was amazing for the small time I played it.
My god, it’s been over two months since I’ve written one of these. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t feeling up to doing my usual thrift store trips. Then the bug, the urge to go thrifting hit me a few days ago, and thankfully I lucked out. It’s gonna be a bit short, but I snagged the following items over the course of yesterday and today:
ABC Sports Presents: The Palm Springs Open (CD-i, $1.99)
Parasite Eve (PS1, $2)
El Matador (PC, 75¢)
Play TV Legends: Sega Genesis Volume 1 (Plug and play console, $4.99)
First, I never thought I would ever find a CD-i game in the wild. At a Goodwill, no less!
The CD-i was Philips’ attempt to make a CD-based game system. It didn’t do so well, even with amazing infomercials like “A Day with Sid, Ed and the CD-i.” Seriously, watch that infomercial if you get a chance, it’s incredibly corny.
The most notable things it’s known for are the weird interactive CDs, game show adaptions like Jeopardy! and Name That Tune, and of course, those Nintendo-licensed games that have been talked about to death like Hotel Mario and Link: The Faces of Evil.
For a long while the system wasn’t much of a big seller, but increased exposure to the FMVs in the Nintendo CD-i games alongside certain Angry Gaming YouTubers caused the prices of the system to jump exponentially, from sub-$100 to nearly $500 in some cases. It’s ridiculous.
The Palm Springs Open has never been opened. Which doesn’t mean much, really, but you don’t see find unopened games often. I should probably give this to someone who’s more into golf games than me, but with the ridiculous prices of the CD-i, I’d probably be better off keeping it.
