I like the small discussions between party members. Even if I don't get any points out of it, I think it's a nice piece of character work/role-playing.

…yeah, I agree, that's confusing. I think it's a leftover from the super olden days when people had to make distinctions between computer and pen & paper, not computer & console.

Thanks for the advice! I've always been fighting over whether to give DA:O a shot or not, given my rocky relationship with Mass Effect. Damn near borrowed a phyical copy of the PC version (!) a month ago or so, but ended up with going with Dragon's Dogma instead.

I'm in a bit of a PC mood recently. I tried Divinity: Original Sin via family sharing, which is… okay? CRPGs aren't my genre, so it was fun diving into something different for a change. Overall it's nice, but I think it also has too many issues for me to go the distance (which howlongtobeat says is 80 hours). They're…

Oh God. Dude, I never noticed it but how is this not a Scott Storch track? Now I'll forever expect Fat Joe to shout "Cook coke crack!!" all over it. Great.

The visuals and soundtrack still hold up, but it feels like a classic case of seeing a C64 game on Youtube and thinking "Huh, that doesn't look half as hard as I remember it" and then remembering one button cuntrols.

I'm gonna go with Hitoshi Sakimoto - Restaurant (from Odin Sphere). It's fun on its own and a perfect fit for the whimsical and wonderful nature of the restaurant. If that doesn't count I'm going with Michael Land's equally aptly named Chapter Screen from Monkey Island.

That's a cool collection, but don't be fooled. http://www.mrbongo.com/prod… is the release I have and it's from 1998. Heck, the 25th anniversary edition of the soundtrack — the one you can also find on streaming services — has them all, too.

Has there ever been a line that's blown up in a rapper's face as spectacularly as "99% of your fans wear high heels"? Probably not.

Ah, thanks. Interesting, there's some stuff I hadn't heard. Still, I'd argue there's a lot of aspects that seem obvious now, but probably weren't back then, notably the NES rejection. The C64 had demonstrated that there was huge demand for cheaper computers and the reception the Amiga demos got at trade shows…

I must have read different accounts there. Tramiel built Commodore and, after a board room dispute, left it before even the Amiga 1000 came out. Following the '83 crash, Atari was already worthless when Tramiel stepped in and granted it a measure of relevance for a couple of years with the Atari ST.

Exactly. If there were more prominent retrospectives in that space, you'd find the games without knowing their names. The information itself is definitely out there; I found working disk images of lots of text or edutainment adventures I used to play when I was home sick that were distributed solely through late '80s…

I think part of that is because American video games writing about the '80s is heavily biased towards consoles, so home computer classics and obscurities aren't dug up and reevaluated all the time (which is sad because Frankie Goes To Hollywood alone deserves a hundred writeups). You'd probably be pleasantly surprised…

Harsh! That was somehow, ehm, missing from my copy. But yeah, the game was awesome. It helped that I was totally into books about the wonders of the world and travel shows and such as a child. I also liked that it had knockoff Keystone Cops (which to me were actually "those old guys from the flashback segments in Cool…

Crazysexycool came out in '94. That alone excuses a lot of dross.

Well, that would be a shame if the end of your summer vacation drawing near didn't make you at least wistful. You don't really have to worry about it, though, because there's nothing to win in the game. It's not gonna call you a loser for missing the conclusion of a storyline or not collecting every last crown cap.…

That's a good thing!

In other digital TCG news, I tried WWE Supercards. It's… not very good. The presentation is kind of cute — the individual cards duke it out inside the squared circle — but it's just Top Trumps with insane IAPs. How insane? 25$ for a random legendary insane. I sure wish I liked WoW as much as WWE.

No more breathless waiting for my Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 update! …I screwed up. No, I didn't unleash an ancient evil, but apparently I messed up watering the morning glory climbing the side of my uncle's bed & breakfast. It withered. My aunt's friend came to visit. She's the estranged mother of Yasuko and second wife…

Oh, man, I know the F40 is a dream car, but be careful with this one. In GT5 it took really poorly to motor tuning. I remember bringing an F40 with all the bells and whistles to Nürnburgring and trust me, that machine really earned the stallion on its logo.