The Randomizer - The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

The Randomizer is a D-Sub9 feature in which a randomly selected retro game is experienced for no more than twenty minutes. These are the stories.

Randomizer Selection #1295 - Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (Game Boy Color)

I was excited. Boyishly so. After two trials of meter, constitution, stamina and patience, the Randomizer had taken pity on me and given me the proverbial "bye" and bestowed upon me the task of journaling my frolic and sheer gleeful frivolity in one of Our National Pastime's (no, not that one) greatest franchises. What fun! What luck! What utter and complete fortuitousness! The bank has made an error in my favor and I wasn't going to jail for it! My head spun with wonderment and acute hyperventilation as I reached for my controller and-

Egg Timer: *beep*

Son of a bitch.

I Hate Super Metroid - Part 2: Sea Legs

I Hate Super Metroid is an ongoing series chronicling Ryan's attempts to beat a game he never enjoyed... but apparently should.

Playtime: 1 hour

Current Location: Norfair

Current status: Not Pissed

I'd like to start off by reminding everyone that I previously stated that the first couple of hours of Super Metroid don't count. So any actual enjoyment you may read into this is completely moot, irrelevant, and shut up RJ nobody's having any real fun over here so stop giggling to yourself like a cheerleader OD'ing on adderall.

The Randomizer - Fatal Rewind (Genesis)

 

 
The Randomizer is a D-Sub9 feature in which a randomly selected retro game is experienced for no more than twenty minutes. These are the stories.

Randomizer Selection #768 - Fatal Rewind (Genesis)

And now...

It's time...

FOR THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

At this point in the game's intro I expected some elephants and a lion tamer or two. But no, crushing disappointment and "too effing bad" is the soup du jour when it comes to Fatal Rewind by developer Raising Hell (now Bizarre Creations, the Geometry Wars guys).  I'm pretty sure it was published by Electronic Arts, although the port job was so spotty that Fatal Rewind was apparently presented by both EA and Psygnosis. At this point I needed to do some research because I was in way over my head on this one.

Fatal Rewind was previously titled The Killing Game Show and was released originally on the Amiga. It was ported with the more family friendly title to the Genesis, and was published by EA for that platform. For the life of me I can't figure out what the storyline is behind Fatal Killing Game Rewind Show, but from the various Amiga-version video caps out there, it looks like you're a bipedal dog-like robot that shoots things a great deal.

So far, so good.

I Hate Super Metroid - Part 1: The Challenge

Super Metroid/Metroid 3 has been a thorn in my retro side since the day I gave it a spin in the electronics department of the Framingham Lechmere, circa 1993. I was eight then, and yet twenty years later I still remember the pain from the crick in my neck and the persistent headache I got trying to wrap my head around what the magic was behind this title. For me, Super Metroid was a title that had accomplished so much, yet failed on the most essential level of conveyance and accessibility. It had always been just out of reach for me; tempting, yet never broaching that threshold of "hooked". Alas, I had never played Metroid 3 past two or three hours, and had never beaten it.

The Randomizer - Bubsy II (SNES)

The Randomizer is a D-Sub9 feature in which a randomly selected retro game is experienced for no more than twenty minutes. These are the stories.

Randomizer Selection #336 - Bubsy II (SNES)

Oh, damn it. This is not the game I was hoping to kick The Randomizer off with. Damn you, random number generator! I don't care who coded you, or what CPU instruction set inspired your malicious dictum of misery and woe, but I hate you forever and a day! I hope someone is overclocking your processor just so you can feel the heat of my fury!

Oh, right. Bubsy II...

SimCity - Yeah, we know. We're not helping.

Yeah, we know. We're not helping.

D-Sub9 Presents: Beergaming - Sunset Riders (Arcade)

It's time to cowboy up with Sunset Riders! Observe as Keith, Chris and Ryan battle bandits, cowboys, prostitution, cultural insensitivity and bad business planning!

Far Cringe 3 - Forced Cutscenes are AWESOME

Man, you can take quite a beating in Far Cry 3... because you have to.

Promurphy VS Dark Souls: Capra Demon

Keith takes on a capybara... or is it a chupacabra?

Promurphy: Let's Play Dark Souls! Volume 1: Intro

Keith's gone crazy and cast his mind (and patience) into the abyss! It's Dark Souls, Part 1!

 See more at Keith's YouTube channel!

D-Sub9 Presents: Beergaming - Pilotwings (Practice/Pilot Episode)

Oh hey, we posted something! A culmination of a few months of trial, error, frustration, tears, and alcohol!

This is Beergaming, a new monthly (ha ha) feature we're going to try out here on D-Sub9 and the D-Sub9 Youtube Channel. Hopefully this will take off as well as Mike (holding SNES controller) can't!

Blizzard: Most people play Diablo 3 solo. Still doesn't reconsider offline play.

Maybe I'm just being touchy, but it truly irks me when a gaming company admits it was wrong all along about a particular decision, yet doesn't recant its proud proclamations that it'll keep doing that wrong thing as if everything was OK in the world. I believe that may be called hubris... or bullshit... or some other term directing my nerd rage directly at the heart of Blizzard-Activision.

Dan Stapleton over at GameSpy has a fantastic digest of the latest Diablo 3 blog post over at Blizzard. Specifically, Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng drops a little info-bomb on the fanbase:

"At the moment though playing solo is the clear choice, even for those who would prefer co-op with some of their friends."

OK, so all you gamers who proclaimed your love for single-player hacking 'n' slashing have been officially validated by the powers-that-be. That should mean that gameplay (and connectivity, dammit) should be re-addressed to cater to your needs. Say... offline play allowing on-demand soloing whether or not your Internet (or Blizzard's for that matter) is working properly? Well, Cheng mentions nothing about taking care of the demand of the fans, but Stapleton reminds us all of Blizzard's stance that online-only is the way the game is designed to play and you should go play something else if you don't like it... or can't play at all.

Well, at least this squelches the Blizzard apologists who shout that Diablo 3 is purely a multiplayer game and that's how the majority of gamers will play, right? Fat lot of good that will do.

Come on, Blizzard. You've clearly slain the piracy boogeyman while simultaneously invalidating your "Online-only is the most secure method" claims, reducing online-only to just another way to keep gamers from owning the games they bought. How about giving gamers a little latitude in playing your games the way they want to?

I guess not. That money isn't going to print itself, you know.

The Byte Cellar is the Coolest Retro PC Room in History

That's an incredible amount of radiation flowing through that tiny room.

Blake Patterson clearly has a taste for the old-school, as his museum of PC technology clearly shows. The man is a curator of everything from the Apple IIc to the Tandy 1000TL to the Compaq iPaq! There's so much nostalgia going on in that basement I'm not sure which game I want to spin up first. Rise of the Triad? No, Tandy Lemmings! No, wait... Castle Wolfenstein!

• The Byte Cellar
• As covered on Lifehacker

D-Sub9 Podcast #3

Download Podcast (34 minutes, MP3)

Oh hey it's another (late) episode of the D-Sub9 Podcast! Blame Ryan. That slacker.

The redoubtable trio of Bob, Keith and Ryan return to sing the tales of indie developer woe and hope with Microsoft's $40,000 bill on everything and the OUYA's marvelous escape plan. Also, robots... and zombies... and abortions. BE OFFENDED.

The D-Sub9 Podcast features adults using adult language.

Intro/Outro Music: Sonic Mayhem - Quad Machine 

Podcast index:

• Keith dooms himself to death by dysentery. (0:04)
• Fez and how Microsoft hates indie developers. (0:47)
• The OUYA (OH YEAH) makes Ryan all tingly (8:30)
• We're making our own Kickstarter! We know nothing about fraud law. (12:50)
• Heck, why not beat up on CERTAIN BASEBALL STARS while we're at it? (13:15)
• Bob on Alan Wake's American Nightmare (16:22)
• Keith bailed on Amnesia. Ryan accuses Keith of hereticism (18:15)
• ... and Keith calls Ryan out on being a gaming leper. (18:38)
• Keith is on the letter "A" in his Steam collection (20:15)
• Nobody likes Braid. Just throwing that out there. (24:10)
• Never trust Ryan in a survival situation. (26:28)
• But RETRO 16-BIT ROBOTS. Yeah, you're in Ryan's wheelhouse. (31:26)

On Being a Cheapskate, and Why the OUYA May Kill Me

In a certain previous podcast, I outed myself as a complete and total cheapskate. As a rule of thumb I've refused to purchase a video game more than forty dollars, with the rare exceptions rearing their glorious heads from time to time. I usually buy used instead of new. I pay nearly bottom-dollar for any Humble Bundle that rolls around. I ignore the other, lesser bundles that have mandatory minimum prices. Heck, I've resorted to the underworld of retro gaming by burning "backup" copies of Dreamcast titles and diving headlong into ROM sites for cartridge-based systems. If any game developer made a dollar off of me in recent memory, they should laminate it, frame it, and nail it to a wall in their lobby in veneration for all time because it's a rare thing to see from me.

By all respects, I'm a horrible gamer, and should be ashamed of myself for not giving into the worship of the white elephant that is video games.

This is why I have such high hopes for - and an utter fear of - the OUYA.

D-Sub9 Podcast #2

Download Podcast (50 minutes, MP3)

Keith, Bob and Ryan are cheap gamers who wouldn't know a good game if it slapped them in the face... or a good thousand games as Keith would have you believe.

The D-Sub9 Podcast features adults using adult language.

Intro/Outro Music: Ducktales - The Moon, by Year 200X

Podcast index:

• Keith demonstrates his Model-M keyboard. (0:04)
• Free-to-Play vs. Pay-to-Play (1:00)
• The Secret World, and why we won't try it. We're cheap. (1:40)
• Free-to-Play is the new Shareware (3:15)
• The only way WoW clones can compete (5:00)
• Oh crap, they let Ryan talk about World of Tanks... (9:05)
• Game enhancing Pay-to-Play (Super Monday Night Combat) (16:15)
• Great, now Ryan's breaking NDAs and he still won't shut up (Mechwarrior Online) (20:43)
• Bob receives a call... of nature... (22:25)
• Runes of Magic and Allods Online (23:28)
• Bob talks about Prototype and softly weeps into his beer (25:15)
• NICE WORK, AGENT (29:43)
• The art of Craigslist negotiations (33:26)
• Ryan embarks on his retro collection project (35:03)
• Haha Game Gear battery jokes (42:00)
• What are we playing this week? (43:55)
• Keith has a feast of games... yet he starves. Pity him. (45:30)

Box Art is Horrible: The Atari 2600

Gaming historians everywhere believed that people who played games before the mighty 8-Bit era were accustomed to utilizing a truckload of imagination to maintain their suspension of disbelief upon the great pillars of entertainment emanating from the venerable (and wood-laminated) Atari 2600. These video game warriors of yore allowed their minds to be churned into a pasty adhesive that attached the moving squares and balls on screen with the clearly-unrelated-to-actual-game artwork that was plastered on the boxes and cartridges. Sometimes, this effort in marketing actually worked.

Sometimes, it didn't.

Join RJ and Ryan as they survey a generation of gaming that they probably don't ever want to visit again.

D-Sub9 Podcast #1

Download Podcast

Behold as Ryan, Keith and Bob ramble incessantly about things... things with D-Pads and control mechanisms that are almost analog in nature.

Things we talk about (so you can follow along... like one of those choose your adventure novels that I never once cheated on):

Intro/Outro Music: StarTropics II: Zoda's Revenge - Main Dungeon Theme

• Reggie Fils-Aime complains about insatiable gamers (1:00)
• Syndicate Developer Head: We were screwed no matter what. Thanks, fans. (4:20)
• Tekken Producer to Fans: Stop Whining (7:37)
• Lack of gaming activism, Diablo 3, Ryan feels justified (and nobody cares) (10:00)
• Bob and Ryan love Michael Ironside with many <3s PS don't buy the new Splinter Cell (11:52)
• Bob waxes poetic (or is it nostalgic?) on the PSP (14:34)
• Keith talks about Wreck It Ralph, is a better critic than Ebert (18:00)
• We talk about video game rehab (20:20)
• The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise gives Keith gas and other low-hanging fruit (22:27)
• Jet Set Radio - Nobody likes it but Ryan (24:23)
• Box Art - The only part you want to hear about (25:40)
• Keith talks about the day he almost wasn't a gamer and stayed a redneck (26:20)
• The new Mass Effect 3 endings came out (and we never played it because bleh) (29:00)

Box Art is Horrible: The NES

It's always important to remember our roots in gaming. Remember that the 1080p multi-gigabyte AAA titles of today were the 10x10 pixelated sprites of 1985... and marketing wasn't quite as easy then. So difficult, in fact, that artists had to take a few liberties with the source material to get our greedy little eyes fixed on the packaging of an otherwise completely unrelated product.

These are the lower echelons of box art. Let Ryan and RJ guide you on this safari of insanity...

Gamestop Needs to Be Useful and Go Retro

With rumors rampant that the latest and greatest from Sony & Microsoft won't support GameStop's cash cow that is used games, it isn't hard to fathom that the $2.5 billion (with a b) company isn't utterly shaking in its boots about the future. There is hope for GameStop, however. It just needs to do two things: sell themselves as a service, and (oh please, oh please) leverage their retail locations and store-to-store distribution network to bring out-of-circulation "retro" gaming back to the masses.