In looking for who-knows-what on the internet recently, I stumbled across, from Hudson Valley (NY) radio station 101.5 WPDH and host Andrew Boris, a collection of vintage photos of the Poughkeepsie Galleria:
This was my mall. I so loved going there in the mid-'80s to early '90s, the great heyday of malls. Seeing this collection of photos was like revisiting one of my favorite childhood places - not even visiting what was left of the place last year could rival it. I now have to tell you about the stores in my mall.
Seaman was a perpetual "what the hell was that?" butt of jokes at Giant Bomb, but Dan Ryckert recently got the gumption actually to go through it, streaming it every day to its end. (Dan gets a lot of guff for the gaps in his education, but he has a genuine open-mindedness and curiosity about the world and his areas of interest that many of his critics lack.) You might have to skip/put up with some streaming carnival activities like eating gross jellybeans for donations and audience members playing rude SFX (some are pretty well-timed and genuinely enhance the experience, but this inspires lesser comedic efforts later on). The game, though, is genuinely off-the-wall, ahead of its time, and of its era all at once. Bonus: recognizing Jeff Kramer as the voice of Seaman before he would go on to play Francis York Morgan; he has a knack for offbeat, rambling characters. I hope Dan assembles his efforts into one supercut for historical preservation, but the VODs are as of this writing up on his Twitch channel. (A Seaman segment opens nearly every video starting with "Getting the Rust out" and ending with "I HOPE SEAMAN SHUTS UP OR ESCAPES".)
ETA: Now conveniently compiled and archived on YouTube, for the edification of us all!
I cannot make mention of Seaman without bringing up Japanese-PM assassination thriller Remote Control, where Seaman plays a crucial role in breaking up the protagonist's relationship:
“You know, I’ve been playing that game again,” she said, glancing over at the aging computer in the corner of the room. She had hauled it out of the closet not too long ago and taken to playing a game she had loved in college.
Aoyagi nodded. “Feeding that creepy fish.” The peculiar game involved nothing more than looking after a thoroughly unlovable talking fish.
“Well, the fish said something that hit the mark.”
“It doesn’t even look like a fish.”
“I know, but it said something after I fed it. It said, ‘Don’t settle for too little.’” Aoyagi couldn’t tell whether he was expected to laugh or cry. “And it hit me - it was talking about us, about you and me.”
“I’m not sure I like having my future decided by a talking fish.”
**********
Six months later, he went to a shop that dealt in secondhand computer games and on a whim bought the one with the creepy fish. Perhaps it was a form of rehabilitation, a way of testing how much of the hole he’d been able to fill.
At first, he was just going through the motions, tending the computer aquarium according to the instructions; but gradually he grew more intent on the game until, to his complete amazement, he was stopping people at work to tell them about the condition of his virtual fish. One evening at the end of the second week, the fish suddenly turned to look out at him.
“Don’t settle for too little,” it gurgled.
“You shit!” said Aoyagi, stabbing his finger at the screen. “That’s what you told her. That’s what fucked everything up.” The fish ignored him and swam calmly away through glowing blue pixels. “But you know,” Aoyagi muttered at its receding tail, “if I’d given her the smaller half [of the chocolate bar] that day, she’d have been mad about that instead.”
The fish ignored him, but finally turned back with a withering look. “Did you say something?”
I got thinking about Twelve Minutes - how did this get financed with the story it ends up having - and I suddenly remembered a highly-acclaimed book I'd attempted to read last year, The Shadow of the Wind, that ended up having the same twist. In turning over that strange coincidence (or is it??) in my mind, I think I've arrived at a potential answer to the big question - but I have to talk about the nature of the twist to discuss it all, so SPOILERS below.
Genesis: Phantasy Star II, full-stop. I pored over Game Players' coverage over and over. Look at that spread! Your first party member is a product of bioengineering! Man, I read that article so many times when I was a kid, and now I want to read it again.
Sega CD: The Lunars. I think I've told this story, but I was introduced to Lunar by a penpal who sent be a VHS tape he'd made of all the animated cutscenes. (He also started off the correspondence by sending me a FF3 cartridge right out of the blue.) He was the first person to whom I could talk about my love of RPGs, and we exchanged very long letters about all the 16-bit titles. I hope he's in a good place.
Saturn: I asked for one in anticipation of the 32-bit version of Lunar. Of course, a Saturn version of that game famously never came out in the West, so my Saturn became the machine on which I played Myst (and Resident Evil, though that didn't happen in earnest until many years later). I should apologize to my father for asking for it. $399 is no small amount today and was even less so back in the '90s; I think he bought it only because he was stuck for anything else to get me that year. My father also railed against my plan to buy PS3 for $80 or whatever back on release - "you could buy an entire accounting program for that!" - and while screenshots of the game's olive world eventually dissuaded me from that course of action, perhaps I should have learned to trust his judgment on Sega misfires.
N64: I got this but never used it. I wanted to play the Resident Evil games - 2, at least, though I had no particular affinity for 2. I had just heard that they had toned down the gore for the N64 release, which was a sticking point for me in the old days when it came to survival horror. (I went through Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare without hitting a single dog enemy.) That reticence eventually faded, of course, for better or worse. I can't quite reconcile this with my acquisition of the Saturn Resident Evil - perhaps I was trying to minimize the violence whenever possible. In any case, I never got that N64 copy of RE2 and didn't play the game until decades later on the PSP. The N64 is packed away somewhere, not having hosted a single game since its second-hand pawn-shop acquisition by me, unfortunately.
DS: Lunar: Dragon Song. (Or Genesis, since I got the Japanese version.) It was indeed bad, but I don't have the raging hate for this game that some fans do. It's too inconsequential, for one thing. There were umpteen Lunar continuities by this point (TSS, SSS, GBA, the novels, possibly the audio dramas), and this game didn't fit in any of them.
PSP: Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star. I've actually gotten way more use out of my PSP than I thought I would. I thought it would be Lunar and out, but I've used it to play numerous PS1 games I missed - Resident Evil 2 and 3, FF7, a number of Square's more questionable titles like Chrono Cross and Legend of Mana - plus otome games, retro compilations, puzzle titles... It's been a great little buddy throughout the years.
PS2: Silent Hill 2 (and 3 and 4). Probably the most prestige choice on this list. Unfortunately, the PS2 proved to be the most fragile of my consoles: I had to get it secondhand, as it was well into the PS3 generation that I got into Silent Hill. My initial purchase died prematurely and had to be exchanged, and though the replacement served me faithfully through many titles, the laser, or something, on it is now dead and has defied repair, with several major titles in my collection unplayed. I should just emulate, but it seems a waste to have the discs for so many games and not use them.
Gaming PC: OK, obviously, I had a PC before this game, but I did for the first time buy a gaming-spec laptop in anticipation of...NightCry. It didn't have top-of-the-line specs, and I needed a new machine at the time, but I did make a point of getting a mid-range gaming model and not just something built to handle a word-processing program so that the towering tech demo that is NightCry, which I Kickstarted, could be handled. NightCry had major problems, but I wasn't sorry we got that game. I got enough out of it to make it worthwhile.
PS4: Mass Effect: Andromeda. I saw the combat and thought it looked really fun. And it was really fun! I liked this game, despite the uproar. I know many say the choices weren't as impactful as the unplayed-to-me originals, and even without a point of comparison, I can see cause for , but I enjoyed the gameplay and the scenario and Planet Blood Dragon. It was a solid 7/10 for me.
Vita, kind of, in PSTV: Neo Angelique: Tears of an Angel, whose surface, despite my interest, I have barely scratched. I wanted to catalog my play experience (the bane of my forays into Angelique games), and I lost the text for my second post. I found the image files, and I want to get back into the game, even if it's with a replacement script for that second post, but another Angelique title (previously, the translation project for the SFC original; currently, Luminarise) is always beckoning. Mathias, man, I'll come to see you someday. Bring your dagger. It'll be happy stabs for everybody.
Switch: Deadly Premonition 2. *Sigh.* What story choices that game made. When it was over (or nearly over - I refused to go through with that choice at the climax and simply turned the game off, never to be played again), I sold it immediately. I just wanted it out of the house.
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