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Post by Xeogred on Feb 5, 2020 18:15:25 GMT -5
Resident Evil 2... the board game. Easy Allies checked it out:
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Post by anayo on Feb 5, 2020 18:18:48 GMT -5
anayo might like this one: I did really enjoy that. I always like random details about how old gaming computers worked.
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Post by Ex on Feb 12, 2020 21:22:53 GMT -5
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Post by toei on Feb 12, 2020 21:28:40 GMT -5
Oh yeah, this is the one about the guy trying to buy every NES game ever made, right? I watched it either last year or the one before. It's decent, I'm sure for a big NES fan it'll be even better.
If y'all are looking for other video game docs after this one, Atari: Game Over is great. It's both an history of Atari in their prime and of a guy's quest to find out whether it's true that all those copies of ET were buried in landfills by actually digging them up.
And of course there's King of Kong that's excellent, but I figure everyone's familiar with that one.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 12, 2020 21:35:13 GMT -5
I started watching it, but I think the thing that bothered me is that sometimes, I don't like to see someone find games in the wild that I'll never be able to find... Still, it's pretty cool that he went to those lengths to get that complete set.
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Post by Ex on Feb 12, 2020 21:56:04 GMT -5
I don't like to see someone find games in the wild that I'll never be able to find... Well, he went to extreme lengths to find some of these games. And things don't always go as he hoped either. Also the dude's gone through some bad stuff in his life, which you don't find out about until late in the film. I think if you watched the whole thing, you would come away enjoying it all. I personally have zero interest in collecting physical NES carts, but I still thought it was an entertaining (and educational at times) documentary. toeiI will check those out. One of the best gaming documentaries I've seen was Get Lamp.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 12, 2020 22:25:57 GMT -5
I might pick it up again, in that case.
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Post by toei on Feb 16, 2020 19:15:41 GMT -5
So, some context: in the early '90s, the main cable company in Quebec had a service called Videoway, which you could use to rent movies, watch special programming and play some basic videogames using the TV remote as a controller. As per wikipedia, it launched in 1989 and was the first "interactive TV" service in North America. Now, it was widely known at the time that the best game was the bowling game. It was pretty much all we ever used Videoway for, as we rented VHS tapes at the store like normal people did. Of course, Videoway was discontinued long ago and it's impossible to access those games anymore, but I found this episode of some 1992 kids show where you can see two teams competing at various Videoway games. I noticed that the first one they show in part 1 is either a port or a clone of Burger Time, which leads me to wonder whether the bowling game was an original as I always assumed or just a port as well. Anyone recognize it? Part 1
Part 2
EDIT - The Burger Time clone is called Mr. Chin, and it was originally a MSX game made by HAL Laboratory (there's also a homebrew Colecovision port made in 2008)... was the Videoway system running some variation of the MSX technology? The bowling game footage is giving me Colecovision vibes, and that's basically the same technology, IIRC, along with the SG-1000. So that would mean that Mr. Chin was the only official North American port of this obscure Japanese game. Pretty interesting.
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Post by Ex on Feb 16, 2020 21:38:24 GMT -5
toeiI'd personally never heard of that service. Did it download games to a set-top box, and you played them from resident RAM? Or was this some kind of real-time streaming game service?
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Post by toei on Feb 16, 2020 22:05:52 GMT -5
All I can say for sure is that it came with some kind of box which also worked as a decoder, and there was no dedicated storage accessible - you just picked options from a menu and waited. So I think it probably downloaded stuff to RAM. The menu. Looks like there were tons of options I never used, like email, lottery results, and even a dating service. -Oh actually, I found a forum post in French which discusses the technological aspect. It says the following about an adventure game called Temporel Inc., which was considered the most advanced game on the service: "As for seeing the game on DOS or Windows, forget about it. It was programmed in an obscure proprietary language belonging to Videotron and the game was downloaded from Unix servers every time you played it, which makes emulation impossible as we don't know anything about the machine's internal workings or about its signal, which can no longer travel through cable since TV went digital". The post is from 2005, and he goes on to talk about attempting to program a remake of the game. I don't know if it's from the same guy, but a Flash remake did come together later. It was apparently recreated from a videotape recording of the game being played, as the actual game is gone. I believe these screenshots are from the tape. This is from the remake, which can be found here. Oh, and here's the old playthrough tape of the original game. I don't know if it had any music, or if it's just the tape that doesn't. The title screen says it was developed by Loto-Quebec, which is the government-run lottery "company". No gambling here, though. EDIT - Interesting comment below that video: "Is it possible to create an English-language version? I played this game in South-East London in the United Kingdom in the 90s when Videotron were responsible for the local cable TV." So Videoway was distributed in the UK at some point? I didn't even know Vidéotron ever sold services there.
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