Xsjadoblayde said:
Dick Tracy? That is a dark past you harbour there, it must be scrubbed from memory with intensive NLP sessions! Or keep it as a character building milestone, whichever bears more tasty fruit cocktails.
Unfortunately, the 80s and 90s were a dark time for games journalism. Video games publications were either released by the companies themselves, or heavily funded by the companies through adverts. Either way, games journalism was largely PR and puff pieces that would say basically whatever the publisher wanted said about as game.
Unlike today, where most games journalism consists of...repeating press releases from big companies about the most popular and best-funded games, and serving as the marketing arm of the games industry. My...how times have changed.
But at least now there's YouTube for gameplay vids and the like. Had we known how shitty games like Dick Tracy were, or how broken games like Battletoads were (A game I specifically bought for co-op, but the US version is unbeatable that way), we might have bought different games. As it was, if you weren't well off, you were kind of stuck with the games you chose. Fortunately, it's not like my entire library sucked. I did have a lot of the NES games you might see on Angry Video Game Nerd, but I had some classics, and some "good at the time" games.
I'd call the early Mega Man games the latter. I don't think they age well, and while MM 1-3 trip a particular nostalgia sweet spot, I couldn't get into the game mechanics in 8 and 9 or whichever were the new ones. There are better games out there for your nostalgia sweet tooth, games that can capture the feel without the bull. I like Super Meat Boy, for example, because almost 100% of the time when I fail, it's because I screwed up. Not because the controls are laggy or the game threw something unfair at me or it relied in cheap 80s tactics or even that the game is deliberately obtuse.
But yeah, I suppose there is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that goes with being a lower-class 80s kid if you liked video games.
Perhaps videogame arcade experiences are more a US culture thing, as in the UK, it only seems limited to House of the dead style shoot-em-ups, racing wheel games and maybe the odd fighter/brawler. The rest are various forms of casual gambling, air hockey and self-harm-yourself-with-electricity cabinets. Paying more money to something that is causing anger is something that can only end in disappointment, surely? When you run out of change and the game over screen is taunting your newfound poverty. Maybe that is a sneaky bit of mind bait, like the drunken aggressor saying all that stuff about "yo mom" in an attempt to rile you up into a violent frenzy in the vain hope they can claim off the medical insurance.
Could be. Even in a small town like this, there were arcades everywhere. This could also be a fluke, as we're a town which is (like many Vermont towns) built around catering to people from New York City four months a year while they get their ski on and don't tip. So it could be this idea that New Yorkers like arcades that caused it to be such a phenomenon around here. I don't know. But arcade machines were common, so we could play games like the TMNT and X-Men arcade games, we had Double Dragon, Rolling Thunder, Street Fighter 2/CE or whatever the arcade version was called...even the nearby Wal-Mart used to have a rotation of like, 4-5 arcade cabinets. Hell, at one point we had Time Killers. In a family eatery. It was funny.
Anger does seem to work on people. It's why outrage fodder works on YouTube. I mean, I'm sure a lot of it is orchestrated, but it didn't start that way. People getting pissed at games is apparently an effective motivator to keep them playing. Me? I tend to stop when I'm not having fun. I don't know if it's the best model, but there seems to be a psychological component to it that they're well aware of.
It's never come onto me yet. *Sigh* One day maybe, if I wear some revealing dresses and electro-pheromones. Maybe...
If that fails, you can go all Jim Kirk and hack the system.
