Algus

Oh I was just going on about the merits of 3 in that comfort food thread. I absolutely love the atmospheric music. The opening melody is haunting and memorable. The plot, which yeah is mostly told through the manual, is pretty great and I love the stuff they do with Protoman. It is a very long game and the idea of revisiting the stages after you beat them and seeing everything smashed up and destroyed is absolutely awesome. The ending has quite a bit of finality to it. I've never looked into it but was this game meant to be the last one of the series before 4 came along?

I like the NES Max a lot. I know people complain about the D-Pad/Disc thing but I didn't find it to terrible to get used to and the grips make the controller a lot more comfortable. It is a very good controller. Not much to say about the regular pad. It is servicable but boxy and a bit uncomfortable. It was fine when I was a kid and my hands were smaller.

3 is worth a play sometime. It's very atmospheric and ~long~ maybe the longest Mega Man game. Not the hardest though. I'd expect a guy who plays Batman NES to "relax" would have no trouble with this game LOL I love the basic premise of Mega Man but with 10 entries in the main series alone, it definitely starts to feel like a rehash at some point. I only ever bought Mega Man 3 because I didn't see the point in owning all of them. I do own the entire X Series but I only really care for the SNES games. That RPG wasn't to bad though.

When we were kids, my buddies and I were huge fans of Mega Man 3. It came out right when we were really old enough to be able to play and do well at it. MM4 was a pretty big deal for us and we played it a lot when it first hit. Skull Man was the only stage I could beat easily but I had a lot of trouble taking on Skull Man himself. I remember stubbornly going at him again and again. The guides all said start with Dust Man but for the life of me, I couldn't clear his stage. Good times.

In the mid 80s when FR started coming out a lot Faerun hadn't been heavily developed yet beyond vague map points. The gold box games created the lore for a lot of these areas and honestly the manuals are still some of the best sources for background on the stuff. I get very nostalgic reading this old material. I can't say whether it is better than Wizards take on the Realms but some of the stuff they've done with the setting I haven't cared for. When I DM, I usually set my games very early in the (print) timeline, usually before The Time of Troubles although I prefer 2E ruleset to 1E so I have to fudge some of the stuff. Definitely sounds like you've got some kind of bug there with the saving. It's probably worth the time to file a ticket with GOG since the games did just get released.

Dungeons & Dragons: Stronghold Sadly not one of the games GOG released It is a City Building game with a 2D perspective. You navigate your city by moving squares and each square shows the city on a 2D plain. You start by creating your Lord and can add up to four other city leaders. Each character provides buildings and attracts followers based on their class (so fighters attract fighters, elves attract elves, etc.) You can't directly control your fighting forces (which you need to clear monsters...who have their own strongholds and leaders) but you can set certain tiles to "attract" your forces who aren't currently tied up guarding your town. In long games you can eventually build Outposts that attract your units to locations far from your city. It is a great game and very complex for an early 90s computer game. I usually create a dwarf as my lord and set the core of my city in the mountains. Dwarves are good miners and the mines in the mountains are better and last longer.

For Dungeon Hack, hit ESC to open menu, click save game, click one of the save slots, type in a name for the save, hit enter. I've logged so many hours in this game, it was my first true roguelike. Highly recommend you bring a Cleric. Clerics can't identify stuff (unless you multiclass) but they have Create Food and Water, which is ~vital~ on harder difficulties. If you don't have wizard spells to cast identify with, lookout for mirrors. They are used for scrying but only have a few charges. If it doesn't work like that it has glitched out on you. I had to look up the controls for Pools too, I forgot as well >.> The Quick Start card that GOG scanned and offers as a download has all the keyboard controls.

Oh I misread that, I thought your listing was for a top loader. Yeah, don't pay $100+ for a toaster lol

Oh I grabbed the whole set too. It's all the stuff that was in the Forgotten Realms Archive that Interplay did (except I believe UA was not...I had that from a separate 5 disc pack anyway). The best part is that they're all OS X/Linux compatible. I absolutely love GOG. Dungeon Hack runs great, first time in years I've got a good run on it without having to fight with compatibility. Pool of Radiance I was having keyboard issues. I switched to my Windows keyboard but the game still glitched out on me at character creation. I love all the options in Pools but I forgot how tedious it was to cycle through everything with the keyboard. I guess you gotta give 'em credit, character creation in Pools is about as long as character creation in actual D&D! I think I'm gonna load the manuals onto my iPad and keep it with me just like having the Forgotten Realms Archive manual when I was a kid (I think I still have that manual somewhere...I used to keep it with my game books because it had some useful reference stuff for playing tabletop!) Looks like they got ALL the Forgotten Realms stuff which is great but I hope they get the two strategy games: Stronghold and Fantasy Empires. Both of those games used classic ruleset and were set in Mystara. Mystara's my preferred campaign setting and both those games were real special to me.

Look at all those MECC titles! I have very fond memories of these games. We still had an Apple II that ran many of them in my 5th grade class (circa 1995 or so). The school didn't get a new lab until I was in 7th grade or so and they put in Mac OS 8.

River City Ransom The Legend of Zelda Super Mario Bros 2 Final Fantasy Mega Man X I also play The Sims 2 a lot when I just want to turn my brain off and not think to much. I'm in retail management so I can play Open For Business and dick with all of the Sims at my in-game store and do the things that would get me fired IRL

Fun talking about this. I remember when I was a kid and the top loader came out I was like "LOL what they think they will trick people into thinking that old thing is a SNES?!" but then I just kept playing my NES because I still had favorites. I wish I had thought to save for one of the top loaders when I was a kid. They were in the stores EVERYWHERE when I was about 8 or 9. If you don't mind spending the extra money they ARE pretty reliable. $100 is about right, $120 on a BIN. The extra goodies on that Amazon listing sound worthwhile. There's to many sellers these days pushing the console barebones.

I haven't actually played Battlespire and Redguard. This is tempting as heck. I've not bothered to reload my Windows partition since I upgraded the drive in my computer though. I suppose I'll have to get on that.

Wow! Those specs with a celeron as the brain?! 900p back in 2007-2008 or so was glorious

The nice part about having to sell is that we're at the point where everything up to the early 2000s runs quite well in emulation so outside of obscure hardware stuff we can run just about anything we might want to. A lot of my original stuff from when I was a kid has a ton of nostalgia and sentimental value to me that could never be replaced, even if I bought the exact same game. My Zelda 1 cart for instance the case by the contacts is busted and a portion of the contact is exposed. This is from a friend of mine I haven't seen in 20 years accidentally stepping on it. I think about the dude all the time because of that. That's the kind of stuff I would regret giving up if (when?) I ever downsized my collection.

I've seen a lot of people say the Chinese 72-pins you can buy on eBay are no good. I suppose I've had luck or maybe it is just some vendors are no good. For me I would buy the NES and order a 72-pin with it. Replacing the pin is 5 minutes of work like I said in my last post (no sweat, you unscrew and rescrew). Fix your original NES 72-pin when you have time and feel like playing with it but again it is not much more work either. A Game Genie can bend the pins. A lot of people use them because as the pins get dirty it helps make a more solid connection but it is a bit more of a pain in the ass to fix after you've used the Genie (still doable though). For most 72-pins boiling in water to clear the dirt and grime off the contacts is literally all the further you need to go. If you play your NES heavily (as heavily as we did when we were kids) you'll probably want to do this every 18-24 months to keep everything working solid. I've run off the same NES I've had since I was 5 in 1990 and still cycle in its original 72 pin along with a pair I've picked up over the years. It is very easy to maintain a toaster. I'd rather deal with this than retrobriting a yellowed SNES.

The originals are cheaper than the top loaders and have better audio. Game Genie can damage the 72-pin (not a big deal really, they are easy to replace and not very expensive). By the by keep the old 72-pin if you replace. It can be boiled in water to clean and then the contacts can rather easily be realigned. Swapping a 72-pin is about 5 minutes of work and they last years. The clones are all about the same. If you get something like the RetroN it has something like 99% compatibility but various games including some well-known (and worth owning) titles like Castlevania III are incompatible. Current clones usually include ports for multiple game systems so they can be good space savers since you only need one machine plugged in.

Oh man, Hexen! I actually didn't play that one to much on PC. My friends and I were completely addicted to the N64 port though. Four player split screen on that game was a blast! We tried playing it again a few years ago and it is one that has not aged well. I imagine the PC version is better with decent keyboard controls and better options on the visuals.

Menzoberranzan is so easy though. Drizzt just carries you Still a fun game. They made a Ravenloft game just like it. Hoping GoG can get that one, along with the Dark Sun games. Playable Mantis people was awesome.

I haven't let go of anything in my collection yet but I stopped adding to it a few year ago. I've moved to pure emulation for everything too. In particular all of my retro Apple computing is done on my Macbook Pro. Having the money is nice but the space is an issue too. I just didn't have room to have all of these old computers, game systems, etc. hooked up. With how I've streamlined things, all I've got is my desktop computer and my laptop so everything is much more portable and easy to move. I don't think I'll get rid of my 800 XL. It is boxed (bought from an AA user a few years ago) and mostly just a display piece now. I don't even really have a proper monitor for it anymore. I think I've kind of dashed my dreams of having a big 8-bit collection though.

Tell her if she does it again, you're both moving to America

You don't want to get to rough with them sure but there's a reason for the tilt. Proper bumping is essential, which is why any decent pinball video game is going to include it as an option. I'm not to good at it on real machines but I've seen guys do it just perfectly where they give a little tap and save their ball, not to mention having a good eye for where to let the ball roll on the flipper before hitting it.

The PS2 library is shockingly massive. Its easy to name duds for it but it has more good to great games than most systems have total libraries. To me it is one of the best systems ever made and in the coming years I have no doubt it'll be a major focus of collectors.

The beauty of pinball is that is is part luck and part skill. Some tables are easy to get good at and some are bullshit. A real pinball guru can easily eliminate the luck factor. Being a quick study of a new table helps too. I'm not a particularly good pinball player but it is a game I greatly enjoy and respect. There have been some amazing tables made over the years.

I'd put in the original Castlevania over Castlevania III. Dracula's Curse is a great game but it is absolutely brutal and not for the casual fan. Super Dodge Ball is a ton of fun (same series as River City Ransom!) but isn't it fairly rare?