Castle Magus

"This is episode 206 of the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN)! In this episode of AVGN, the Nerd talks about everyone's favorite Lasagna Eating Orange Cat, Garfield. From Atari to Sega Genesis, The Nerd will dig into a big pile of Cat Crap!"

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"I didn't know Garfield had such deep lore..."

I thought for sure when he said this, especially on the heels of talking about all the crazy and dark Lyman fan theories stuff, that the Nerd was about to bring up the infamous and very weird 1989 story, "Garfield Alone," but... then he didn't.

However, this video is so much more than just Garfield. Well, no, mostly it's Garfield, but I knew when he showed that Game Boy game near the end, things were about to get weird. I used to own the US version of that game, which was, as the video points out, decidedly not a Garfield game. (Though, to be fair, it really wasn't much of a Ghostbusters game, either. ¬_¬) I didn't have the slightest clue about all that other weird shit, though, like how the Bugs Bunny games in the US were Mickey Mouse games in Japan, and the like.

Speaking of Bugs Bunny, it was nice to have Mike back again, even if this was probably just a one-off thing. Maybe not so nice to hear him, though... Nyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh... (I'll admit, I did chuckle a bit the longer it went on.)

As a kid, I was more of a Heathcliff guy, though even with that, I preferred the bits with Riff Raff and the Catillac Cats, rather than the actual Heathcliff stuff. The Heathcliff comics stuff... not so much. Also, this.

"What are the best Sega Genesis games? Ian runs down his list of favorites!"

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Hmm... I'm trying to recall what all Sega Genesis games I've played (not necessarily on original hardware). A lot of it is getting mixed in with Sega CD games, which I'm not sure count...

Of the ones mentioned in this video and others that I'm looking up on Google, in no particular order, I've played:

• Sonic the Hedgehog (at my high school best friend's house, where we beat it)
• Sonic 2 (at my HS best friend's house, where we beat it)
• Shining Force (pretty sure this was on an emulator, and I'm pretty sure I beat it)
• Shining Force II (emulator, though I don't think I ever finished this one)
• Beyond Oasis (pretty sure emulator, might have been via Wii Virtual Console, honestly... didn't get very far in it)
• Castlevania: Bloodlines (definitely emulator, definitely beat it)
• Phantasy Star IV (at my HS best friend's house... I think we eventually completed it?)
• Streets of Rage (at my HS best friend's house... pretty sure we beat it)
• Comix Zone (on a PC emulator and also on Wii VC, but never got very far as I didn't really care for it all that much)
• Altered Beast (emulator, maybe a rental at my HS best friend's house, much preferred the original arcade version)
• Golden Axe (at HS best friend's house, emulator, Wii VC... I think I've beaten it? Preferred arcade.)
• Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (emulator, didn't get too far into it, played it mostly for the basic novelty of it at the time, also preferred the [emulated] arcade version, but never got too far into that either)
• The Lion King (at HS best friend's house, got pretty far, but the platforming was too difficult to beat it, the music was great though)
• Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time (played these on emulator and Wii VC years later and never finished them, the only one I ever actually legit beat on original hardware was Ecco CD at my HS best friend's house)
• Jurassic Park (never got far, mostly played it when my HS best friend rented it, due to the novelty of it being different from the SNES version [which I actually owned for SNES and did beat])
• Some of the Shinobi games, though I don't recall which ones, off hand... the one with Spider-Man, maybe? I do recall playing a lot of the arcade Shinobi, though.

There were probably others that I played, but they weren't memorable enough for me to list them here. And again, these are ones I've played, not necessarily ones I think are actually good, though I'd say most on that list are fairly decent, at least. Aside from the ones listed above, I haven't played or even heard of most of the ones Ian mentioned.

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So, as of this video here, this is the first time I've heard of the fan-game Sonic Smackdown. Haven't tried it yet, and I'm not sure I'm going to bother, because I'm just not really into fighting games all that much anymore, but it's still nice to hear that Sega is supportive of fan-projects, rather than being all Nintendo or Square-Enix or whoever about it.

Not so nice that they're trying to nickel-and-dime buyers for a collection of decades old games with their own shit, though.

Also, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was released on September 25, 2008, which was a few days shy of one full year after BioWare was bought by Electronic Arts. So no, Pat, it was most assuredly not "BioWare during its good years when it was to be trusted." Those years immediately and forever died on October 11, 2007.

Holy fucking shit. After all the decades I've been using Winamp, I had no fucking clue until now that you could simply change its output via the "Nullsoft Disk Writer" plugin to write to a file instead of playing to speaker as normal. At first, I only had .wav available for output, which still would have been okay, since I could have manually converted them to .mp3 with Audacity, but then I found that it was an ludicrously simple thing to install the proper LAME codec so that Winamp would output them as .mp3 files directly, instead of just .wav files. Apparently, it will do the same with .flac or whatever as well, if that's more your cup of tea these days and you have the proper codec and all. I'm more old school and prefer .mp3, myself.

Anyway, the upshot to all of this is that I can now simply load all those video game files (e.g. .spc files for SNES music) and convert them to mp3 soundtracks super easy now (and, as a result, listen to said soundtracks a lot more frequently than I have in the past). Granted, you need to already have the proper plugins and dll files and shit to let Winamp play those kind of things in the first place, but I've had that shit for years. I'd done some spc->mp3 conversions and such in the past, but it was always kind of like pulling teeth, as I'd had to jump through esoteric hoops to do it in a more manual, hands-on kind of way. No longer.

It took maybe 10-15 minutes (if even that much, since I wasn't really keeping a close eye on the time) for Winamp to convert the entire three and half hour long EarthBound .spc gamerip soundtrack into .mp3 files (189 files total, a lot of which are just sound effect shit that I'll probably delete... though I may find some use for some of those as alert noises on my new phone, maybe). That would have likely taken multiple hours if I'd done it the more manual way I used to do it. Fucking hell, I wish I'd known about this years ago. -_-;

Well then, in any case, I know what I'm probably going to be doing for the next day or so now. TomorrowLater today, though, as it's already well after 3:00am as I type this.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Castlevania series. Here is 1up's retrospective of the series as a whole. They were quite a bit more negative in the middle part than I would have been, and the best/worst bit on the third page was kind of silly and very subjective, as such things usually are (and, worse, they blatantly spoil several key plot points of some of the later games, so be forewarned), but on the whole I think it was a pretty fair look at the series.

It doesn't sound nearly as crappy as I was initially expecting it would. Still not as good as the SNES version, but not bad, not bad. Quite good, actually. I'd totally play Super Metroid on a Sega Genesis with this music. (Though, it did kind of lose it toward the end there with the credits theme...)

Don't know why they didn't do the Norfair theme.

(EDIT)

Because the above video has been set to private, for some inexplicable reason, here's a link to Super Metroid Genesis on Youtube, because I don't have the wherewithal at the moment to go to the trouble to embed a bunch of individual videos now.

(/EDIT)