Retro Game Challenge: Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Over the Thanksgiving holiday Fred and his brother-in-law Brian sat down and played/streamed 14 glorious hours of the N64 classic Conker’s Bad Fur Day. It was a grueling battle and the boys vowed to use no faqs/walkthroughs/guides, which accounts for the long play time. Well now that all is said and done, this is the outcome: a 3 hour video filled with snarky remarks, alcohol use (in game and by the duo players), and some of the most outrageous moments in gaming. Enjoy!
Podcast: U R Not [RED] e
This week Fred and Jam are joined by Andy from 42 Level One to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Sony Playstation. This CD based console is responsible for so much ushering into the next iteration of game development, hardware, media, and game libraries. It touched each host in his own way and deserves to be celebrated on its second decade of existence.
Sound’s Good: Your Video Game Audio Buying Guide
This week I decided to take on another technical escapade and look into the sound options for video games. This requires you to know quite a bit about the concept of analog sound vs digital sound, then compressed audio vs. uncompressed, stereo vs. surround, and all the wonderful tidbits mixed in-between. Just to make things more complicated, the Internet forums are chock full of people who have no idea what they are talking about and will pollute decent message boards with misinformation only to be ignored by the elite knowledgeable on that board, thus making anyone who does a search end up on a page where the misinformation is the only answer in town. Additionally companies like Dolby, DTS, and a whole group of fun little logos that can appear as stickers on your receiver’s box, case, or display fill you with the joy and satisfaction that what you see is what you are hearing and that it’s better. Well guess what, it’s not. In fact, probably the best surround sound you can possibly get is LPCM (or Linear PCM), which is uncompressed audio that has been around since before CDs and still stands as the best surround sound format – albeit at the cost of TONS of storage space that most consumer products refuse to utilize (remember that TitanFall’s uncompressed audio weighed in around 40 GBs). With all the mess and bull that exists, I figured why not enlighten my fine readers with a lesson and best practices so that you can easily determine the sound options for your consoles and get them up and running and sounding great.
Please Note: As previously mentioned, there’s tons of misinformation on the web about sound profiles. For that reason I may be more restrictive about comments that I know are incorrect and whether you choose to disregard this post for that reason is up to you. Additionally sound, like visuals, is a subjective medium and therefore it won’t be the same for everyone. Some swear 1080i looks better than 720p and visa versa, the same can be said for compressed DTS 5.1 and uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio. Despite the research and blatant facts suggesting otherwise, pick what helps you sleep at night, this is merely a guide of options.
Resident Evil HD Remaster First Look
Sorry this is going up on Sunday night. Normally Retro Game Night is recorded on Friday and goes up Saturday morning, but we had to delay recording a day and these HD videos take a lot longer to render and post to YouTube. Either way, the video speaks for itself, but Fred got a retail copy of Resident Evil HD Remaster on PS3 that will be coming to the US in “early” 2015 (according to Capcom). Well since there was another option, we grabbed it early. Enjoy!
Podcast: Top Scores, Volume 2
Video game soundtracks are as varied and nostalgic as the games themselves. Sometimes just hearing a few bars from a classic tune brings the memories of playing that game rushing back. Thanks to the community and a handful of personal selections, Fred and Jam present a collection of nostalgic favorites.
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Upcoming Retro game Challenge: Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Greetings All:
As you’ve probably heard by now we are going to be playing through the entire campaign of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, live streamed on Twitch. Later on I’ll edit it together into a fun little highlight video that’s only about an hour long, but the entire 10-12 hour campaign will be streamed with sarcastic commentary. Here’s the schedule:
- 11pm – 3am Sunday, November 23rd
- 9am – 5pm Monday, November 24th
And if Fred doesn’t see the credits by then we will come back Monday night sometime (he has another podcast tomorrow night) and wrap it up. Stay tuned here for all the info. You can check out our twitch channel at twitch.tv/gh101.
Please Note: Due to the nature of the content in Conker’s Bad Fur Day and the language potentially used in commentary, you will be required to accept a mature content gate to access the stream. This is purely to prevent visitors from unwanted vulgarity. Thank you.
Retro Game Night: Contra 3, Contra Hard Corps, and Contra Rebirth
This week Fred goes 16-bit and beyond with his Contra. Having spent literally decades conquering the first two, it appears he doesn’t fair so well into the next generation.
Review: Alan Wake (and American Nightmare)
Platform: Xbox 360, PC (Windows only)
Released: 2010 (360), 2012 (PC)
Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: Microsoft
Digital Release? Yes, this game is available on all released platforms digitally
Price: $8.55 (disc only), $10.00 (complete) per Price Charting
The wind howled violently outside, coupling with the darkness to generate an atmosphere of dread. Had it been raining the scene would be complete. On the other side of the window, a reviewer sat down and began to play a new video game in the dark. While the gentle glow of the television provided just enough light to see around him, it was as if he were transferred to the fictional location of Bright Falls along with the game’s protagonist Alan Wake. What unfolded over the next dozen or so hours was impressive. This game was not unlike others he had experienced in terms of what to do or how it looked and felt, however thanks to thoughtful plot progression and deep character development the reviewer was able to let other faults go. He was repeating the same steps over and over again, the algorithmic nature of the confrontations were drowned out by the need to proceed forward and see where the story went. He wasn’t even sure what was going on anymore because, in truth, the plot was convoluted. It didn’t matter, the experience was begging him to move forward. He hoped it would not end. This was Alan Wake.
Podcast: Releasing Vaporware
This week Fred and Jam chit chat about vaporware (ie: games stuck in development hell) that actually came out. The most obvious example is Duke Nukem Forever, but as the guys prove there are no lack of “is it coming out?” games, some of which are still in the void today.
What’s Old Is New
I’m just a curious soul when it comes to software or electronics, and I’ve always been that way. Now ask me to turn off the water in my house, change a window screen, or heaven forbid lay tile and I’m out. For some reason those decisions and actions, while much more predictable than electronics and software, have permanent consequences and thus I leave them to professionals. On the tech front it’s mostly just money, and I’ve wasted plenty of that to go into most projects all “gung-ho!” On the flip side I try to capture my memories/nostalgia when it comes to gaming so I’ve done such insane things as bring a Pit Fighter cabinet into my house to play MAME (arcade) titles on, lugged a 300 lb 38″ RCA HD picture tube display for classic consoles and light gun games (a personal favorite), and I have a machine that literally boots into DOSbox and then Windows ’95 (it’s an old XP machine) just to enjoy a handful of games like Jurassic Park: Tresspasser and hopefully soon Ripper. I think that’s why capturing gameplay and making more entertaining videos is so fascinating but also a challenge to me. Last week I discussed how to upgrade your visuals for YouTube export but the clear omission was how to do it without losing that classic feel. I don’t want to play my NES on my LED display, I want it on the old tube with composite video because it looks and acts like I remember, but I also don’t want it to look like the color bleeding blurry mess I see when I export it to YouTube either. So now I’m trying to do the opposite of what I used to: get all of my consoles to export video – both for capture and gameplay – in the best resolution possible without buying the $500 framemeister (that was in last week’s post linked above). This does mean that certain consoles, namely the PS2, Xbox, and Wii (yes, it was pretty much that same gen in terms of visual and output), are un-tethered from my big old tube TV and migrated into the main room for the LED television on account of their 480p/720p capabilities. Along with that came the hunting of component cables, HD AV packs (shame on you Microsoft, the Xbox could output 720p and play DVDs natively but you chose to charge accessories piece meal…just like today), and even a HDMI conversion dongle for the Wii! It wasn’t all that cheap, probably $60 in total for all the pieces, but the results are quite impressive. I had no idea that X-Men Legends or Hulk: Ultimate Destruction could look so good in 720p on the Xbox or that Gradius V really does look much sharper in component even if it’s still a 480i signal on PS2, and I cannot get over how Super Mario Galaxy 2 dazzles on Wii via 720p HDMI upscaler dongle (despite me having still not played that game even though I’ve booted it up dozens of times for visual comparisons). I’m also upgrading my SNES, N64, Saturn, and PS1 for S-Video output to get slightly better captures in 480p on my SD captures, which was like $20 on Amazon for random third-party cables (not as necessary to get high-end when not passing HD through an analog source like component cables on the PS3, for example). This is probably nothing new to many of you out there, but HDTVs were not cheap and these consoles were just dipping their toes into the water when I was a new graduate and didn’t have time or money to figure out how to make an Xbox look fancy. I always knew the option existed, but I was more interested in surround sound back in the early 2000s and never much into graphics. Oh and before you mention it, I’ve had a VGA box for my Dreamcast almost a decade, but stupidly didn’t capture in anything but composite as of late so I’ve truly been cheating myself.
Gaming History 101 