Castle Magus

Several things...

• "bRaVe FeNcEr Is At LeAsT bEtTeR tHaN zElDa 64." Yep, this is exactly what it was like back in the Console Wars™. Personally, I thought the whole thing was immensely stupid, even as a kid, because for the longest time all I had was the original gray brick Game Boy that I bought "myself" (with allowance money). I never had a NES or anything Atari or whatever. I absolutely knew what I was missing. And I didn't go around trying to claim that the fucking Game Boy was better than the Sega Game Gear or whatever. Even when I did finally get a SNES, years later, I was always trading it back and forth with my best friend in middle/high school, who had a Sega CDX. They were all cool. It mostly depended on what games you wanted to play, anyway. Just for RPGs alone, if you wanted to play Earthbound or Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or Super Mario RPG or Secret of Mana or whatever, you needed Nintendo. If you wanted to play Vay (first RPG of any kind that I ever played) or Lunar or Shining Force or Phantasy Star or whatever, you needed Sega.
• Reggie claims that ZSNES is "the goat," but it was either ZSNES or SNES9x, depending on the game. Some SNES games just played better (or at all) in one or the other. I mostly just use RetroArch these days, though, as it basically combines just about all the old and newer emulators (among other things) into one client.
• I'm kinda feeling called out with that "Magus" bit. >_>; I still go by that shit now, let alone way back then. And, hey, at least I combined mine with another 90s edgelord character, and didn't just call myself "Dark Magus" or whatever. ¬_¬ Though my AFK nick in ye olde IRC dayes (i.e. the nick I would switch to when I wasn't actually paying attention to IRC all that much) used to be "Kage_Magus" (basically "Shadow Magus"), which was pretty damn close to that, admittedly.
• The fact that Woolie doesn't know what The Elder Scrolls: Redguard is should already tell him pretty much everything he needs to know about The Elder Scrolls: Redguard. *nods sagely*
• That one guy, keeping it fucking real. (Not the ALL CAPS masturbation guy, but the very last one, Ted, who they brought in on top of his shit.)

"Cinemassacre, this channel, is ultimately about nostalgia. Movies, games, retro topics, sometimes music. Everything I've loved in my early years, to the point of building little museums of nostalgia such as the Nerd room and the fake VHS 'rental store'. But today I wanted to dive into different memories. VHS ones. Filming things off TV, my favorite VHS tapes, all that sort of stuff. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while now."

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I somehow managed to miss this one when getting caught up on recent Cinemassacre videos that I hadn't watched until now, despite this being one of the ones explicitly mentioned in that top 10 thing that was what kicked all of this off.

Just as well it turned out that way, because I think this one deserves its own post.

James and his Universal monster movie purchases... He talks about getting an allowance and saving money to buy them. For me, the equivalent to his Universal movies was my old Game Boy collection. The difference is that whereas James still owns all of his old movies, I sold those Game Boy games to a mom-and-pop used games store, for pennies on the dollar, at some nebulous point between two and three decades ago. Probably closer to three. I don't even remember why, exactly. Probably to buy more SNES games instead. Either that or Playstation games. Several of which I later sold in order to buy a Dreamcast and games. Not that any of that really matters now, because even if I hadn't sold all that stuff way back then, they all would have been sold more recently, when I got rid of basically everything. (I say "more recently," but even that was already almost a decade ago, now, which is rather weird and a wee bit harrowing to actually think about. And, yeah, this is pretty much the first time since writing that post that I've even touched that old Backloggery page, too. [I was tempted to log in again and fix the error that, for some reason, Clock Tower 3 ended up in the PS1 section, rather than the PS2 section where it belongs, which I only just now noticed, but... nah, it's been that way for over 8 years at this point, so fuck it, I don't actually care.])

As of today, I no longer own any video game consoles or associated games. I sold all of that stuff to Lost Ark Video Games in Greensboro, NC. Well, actually, I do still own a Xbox 360, because Lost Ark wouldn't buy the old fat model, a Playstation 2, which I didn't even take out there to bother to try to sell because it was already on its last legs, and an old, modded Playstation 1 that I didn't even take with me to Washington when I moved out there in 2004, let alone to Lost Ark to try to sell. (EDIT) Oh, and I still have a Wii Fit board, even though I no longer have a Wii to connect it to, because I forgot to bring the stupid thing with me when I sold all the other crap. (/EDIT) Everything else is gone, though, including the handheld stuff. And, weirdly, I don't feel too awfully bad about it. I thought it would probably feel like the rough equivalent of selling one's children to do it or some such, but no... nothing all dramatic like that. (EDIT 2) I have to say that going into my Backloggery and tagging all those games with the little "Formerly Owned" ghost was somewhat sad, though. Some of them I had to actually (stealth) add as new games, since they weren't previously even in the list given that I hadn't bothered to update my Backloggery page in forever, only to then mark them as "Formerly Owned." >_> (EDIT 3) And... that was probably very close to the last time I ever even bothered to keep up with my Backloggery page, so... yeah. (/EDIT 3) (/EDIT 2)

Now, though, I still have a ton of old PC games, which Lost Ark also wouldn't buy, that I need to do something with. I'll probably end up selling those individually on eBay or Amazon Marketplace or something. I actually could have done the same for the consoles and console games as well, and probably would have gotten more money out of them in the long run if I'd done so, but I just wanted to unload them somewhere relatively convenient, so that's what I did.

So, I just realized that I haven't played this game yet. I usually get the new Silent Hill games at least shortly after release, but this one just kind of fell off of my radar entirely somehow. Before I look into getting it, however, I'd like to know... is it really as bad as all that? Granted, I'm still probably going to end up getting it eventually, regardless, but I'd like to know what I'm going into.

For reference, the only Silent Hill game I never finished because I thought it was really crappy was Silent Hill: Origins (the PS2 port from the PSP). I actually even kinda liked The Room and Homecoming. Downpour has to at least be better than Origins, right? (EDIT, after having actually played Downpour) Yeah, it's better than Origins. (/EDIT)

I was playing Metroid Prime the other day, and I was going through the crashed frigate, most of which is underwater. After the third or fourth trip back through this level, I was thinking something along the lines of "Man, the only thing I like about this level is the music." That's when the lightbulb for the idea of this post appeared over my head.

I'm just going to post a bunch of music from various underwater levels in games I've played. (I thought about including ice levels as well, but that would have doubled the size of this post. Besides, that means I can now do a "Ice Edition" or something later.) I know I'm leaving out a lot of stuff, and I might come back later and add more if I have a "I can't believe I forgot that!" moment. But for now, this is just whatever I thought of off the top of my head. (If you feel like posting your own "I can't believe you left out this!" comments, please do.)

( Youtube videos behind cut )

That's it. For now, at least.

I got back into Persona 4 recently and have been playing that quite a bit. Last night I had a rather unusual dream related to it.

It started off with me (as the player character, I guess) and Yosuke standing on this slippery metallic platform thing, and we're using our Personas (as some sort of indistinct elemental force, as opposed to how they're actually used in the game) to try to push the other one off. The first one to fall off is the loser. It's apparently some sort of weird test that Yosuke came up with. I lost the first round and Yosuke lost the second one and third one.

After this, we were sitting down next to the platform and Yosuke whipped out a cigarette and started puffing away. (Strange, because he doesn't smoke in the game.) This irked me, so my response was to use my Persona to destroy the entire city so that Yosuke would "have something to keep him occupied" by rebuilding the city. o_O

At this point, the dream kind of switched to or merged with Dwarf Fortress, in that we're now rebuilding the city in a manner reminiscent of that, except in "realistic 3D". It was pretty weird. Near the end, I told Yosuke that all he needed now were a couple of cats to help keep the vermin down. A short time later, we were flooding the entire city with lava for some reason, which may or may not be related to the cats, given that I don't remember actually seeing any cats anywhere. I honestly don't recall why we unleashed the lava. Maybe we did it just because we thought it would be cool. *shrug* The last thing I remember doing was trying to make it to the top of a hill while jumping, Mario-like, over small streams of lava.

And that was when I woke up.

A few months ago, I ordered Shadow Hearts: Covenant and Shadow Hearts: From the New World. I already had the first Shadow Hearts, from a few years ago. A few days ago, I decided I finally wanted to get around to playing through the whole series, except... that isn't the whole series. So, after an initial failure with one seller on Amazon Marketplace (it never arrived, they claimed the post office damaged it, and gave me a refund), I have received today, from a different seller, a copy of Koudelka. It was just the four discs, jammed into a single paper sleeve thing, no case, no instructions, but this was mostly as advertised and the shipping time for this try at getting it was really speedy, so I'm not complaining much.

I've only just started, and have just beaten the first boss and gotten the third character in my party. So far, what little I've played of it has been pretty cool. It seems to be a bit on the easy side so far, but then most initial enemies in games like this tend to be. It's got kind of a Parasite Eve feel to it, what with it being a RPG/survival horror-ish hybrid thing.

I just hope I don't get really far into it and then find out I have a bad disc 3 or 4 or something. >_>

Persona 4, for the Playstation 2. I am not displeased by this news.

My copy of Persona 3 finally arrived today. I shall now return to relative radio silence (or the Internet equivalent thereof). That is all.

The game is (or at least was, but probably still is) out there, apparently.

My intial and current reaction to this news: This sucks. I'll be waiting for retail, myself.

...

On a totally unrelated note. I finally finished my MAT300 project earlier today. I was cursing this thing for the past few days, but now that it's finished, I think it's pretty sweet actually.