Have you played the second one? I begged my parents for weeks to rent it. Then I got it and… I can’t even describe it. At one point there’s a platformer puzzle room based on the Three Bears. I played it for a whole weekend because I couldn’t believe how awful it was.

Lawyers all dragging screenshots of excitebike into court and counting the wheels.

My cousin rented Megaman 2 and I spent at least an hour in awe of the fact that he could get hit more than twice because he had an energy bar. Then he switched weapons and threw a saw blade and I had to go sit down and think about it for a while.

Yeah, I bought one in my 20s.

Holy cow I thought I was the only person that played that. Excellent game.

In a similar vein, Ghost Master. Some of the levels are fiddly but it’s a ton of fun.

Yeah that’s actually funny. Calling it FRAGS is just the icing.

Now that it’s less broken, I’ve been playing Cyberpunk a lot and it feels like edgy shit done correctly. All the big tough guys are actually just weirdos enamored with the sound of their own voice, the ads are ludicrously over the top, it’s bloody, and everyone’s a human being. I haven’t felt gross with any of the content in it so far and it has at least as many strippers as Duke 3D had. I think the loud edgelords keep trying to paint it as free speech vs censorship but it’s really about not making players complicit in whatever infantile world view the director has.

Lol that’s awful. 2009?!

Nah this is still corpo bullshit. It’s also one of the tamer specimens of that era. The only difference is, the corpos in charge of advertising at that time were all sentient hardons who heard stories about how drugs are and peaked at 14. None of them lived in the real world and they just churned out knee-jerk sexist bullshit because they wanted to appeal to boys going through puberty and men that never left that headspace.

<rant> A lot of the ads from that era are uncomfortable. Hell, a lot of the games were. It was rare to see a female character that wasn’t ditzy and helpless, a thinly-veiled copy of the writer’s mom, or exactly like a dude but hot. Those were the options. I’m not saying I needed every game to be a work of great literature with complex and tormented characters and copious backstory; I just wanted female characters in games that didn’t like someone doing a ventriloquism act with their fleshlight.

I ended up chasing gameplay and trying to ignore how fucking awkward and immature most of the shooters were in that era and I don’t think I was alone. I think a lot of gamers grew up and drove the market in a slightly more mature direction. Some people blame woke bullshit, but for me it was just being utterly sick of how fucking juvenile everything was and voting with my money. There’s still a vocal minority out there that wants the good old days back, but I’d stop playing if the industry went back to exclusively 3xtr33m l33t 4ct10n d00d bullshit.

Sidenote: I played the demo for some Cliffy B game a decade ago on my XBox and hard-quit and deleted when the guy on my comms told me to “fire a rocket directly up the bad guy’s poop chute.” I was in my 30s and Cliff was probably pushing 40 at the time. What the hell? Are we nine years old again? Then again, he was the guy that threw his cat into his scanner and posted a picture of it every day until the internet told him to stop. Ugh. Let’s never go back there. </rant>

“I’m a specialized clerk interested in mathematics” if you don’t wanna get burned.

Yep! Harry Potter doesn’t teach you how to be a wizard, but Tiffany Aching teaches you how to be a witch.

Oh wow. The box is long gone and I’d rather keep it, but that’s awesome.

Yeah it’s ridiculous how many ranges of movement they fit in. And I have no idea how I got it. I’m guessing it was a drunken stumble to the mall.

Ninja 5-0 for the GBA. I got out my collection recently and had no idea I owned it. It’s Elevator Action, but you’re a ninja.

That’s the first game I bought for my GBC. I didn’t have enough money for a playstation and was jealous of all my friends playing MGS. It’s super well done. I just got an analog pocket and I think I’ll dig MGS out again after I finish my Castlevania games.

Yeah, they’re pipes / jars / whatever. You have to find a potion, throw it so the pipe is available when you go through the door, and then go down the pipe.

Yep, world 5-3. I dimly remember being able to Luigi superjump onto the birds in 7-1 and short-circuit a bunch of that level.

I went to the live riff and they just looked defeated at the end of it. This part was pretty good though.