Messages

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Off Topic / Re: The best and worst concert you've ever attended?

« on: July 29, 2015, 09:03:30 am »

The best concert for me was probably the Barenaked Ladies on their Maroon tour. I was in high school, they were my favorite band, and the night was just amazing. They always talk on stage and do a little improv and you don't go "Oh my God, I just saw the Barenaked Ladies!" you go "Oh my God, that was a lot of fun!" and it's really refreshing.

It's a toss-up for worst concert though. Everclear was BAD. It was even the first night of the tour and they just had no energy at all. The other one was back when Nintendo did the Fusion tour and Hawthorne Heights was the headliner. A bunch of friends went with me because the lobby of the venue was going to have the Wii set up and playable, long before it launched. The demo units kept crashing and the only game any of them got to actually play was Excitetruck. I was actually there for the concert, but it was in a big high school auditorium and they had the speaker set-up for a stadium. Couldn't hear for days afterward. Hawthorne Heights and Reliant K were terrible live. The only highlight of the evening was the very first opening band. It was the Plain White T's and they started the night with "We're going to do a song we've just finished and never performed live: Hey There Delilah" and then it was fun to see how big that song got about a year after that when they hit it big.

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Off Topic / Re: Where I've Been...

« on: July 29, 2015, 08:53:50 am »

Follow-up: We closed on the house on Friday! The downstairs is going to be the retro game room. We've gotten it painted (every wall in the house was cream) and as soon as I get off work tonight we'll start assembling some massive new shelves. We started in that room but it'll be the last one we probably finish because the Xbox store display and the arcade cabinet are some of our heavier/bulkier items to move.

I'm hoping to get some pictures soon!

Woo! Congrats! Can't wait to see the collection room! Also, all the Harvest Moon plushies! Did you see the new sheep? The premium plushies are too cute.

Ronalopolis got me the set with the big dog, panda, chicken/chick, and cow at Christmas last year. I saw the sheep but haven't added that to the collection yet. I'm hoping to have one of the shelves we're working on be nothing but Harvest Moon games/plushies, but there is a limit to how much space we have, haha.

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Off Topic / Re: Where I've Been...

« on: July 27, 2015, 02:32:33 pm »

Follow-up: We closed on the house on Friday! The downstairs is going to be the retro game room. We've gotten it painted (every wall in the house was cream) and as soon as I get off work tonight we'll start assembling some massive new shelves. We started in that room but it'll be the last one we probably finish because the Xbox store display and the arcade cabinet are some of our heavier/bulkier items to move.

I'm hoping to get some pictures soon!

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General / Re: Top 10 Favorite Video Game Soundtracks

« on: July 06, 2015, 11:12:41 am »

gitaroo man had some great songs.
the one with the sax is my fave.

The one with Mojo King Bee? The Bee Jam Blues. If I wasn't at work, I'd YouTube link that one up. It is a really great one. I've always been a fan of Twisted Reality, myself, even if it is the first stage. I hear it and I immediately think "Aww man, I haven't played Gitaroo Man in forever!"

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General / Re: What Game Do You Think Is Most Deserving of a Sequel?

« on: June 26, 2015, 12:58:58 pm »

Hmmmm. Most of my favorite games did get at least one sequel, for better or worse.

Ghost Trick came to mind right away. Elite Beat Agents seems like a cop-out, because I imported the two Osu games. Solatorobo or The World Ends With You I guess. (Yes, I like DS games.)

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Off Topic / Re: Recently Added to Other Collections

« on: June 11, 2015, 10:14:19 am »

Jurassic park is my current book

If you haven't read Timeline yet, I'd keep an eye out for it. Definitely my favorite Michael Crichton book but one of the worst movie adaptions of a book ever.

His stuff is honestly mostly pretty good and holds up well.

Oh, and I saw Misery in one of your lists. That's one of my favorite Stephen King books. Enjoy!

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Off Topic / Re: Board Games!

« on: June 11, 2015, 09:59:34 am »

I tried to play Axis and Allies before.... So much set up and hard to understand.......

I would steer clear of one of my favorite games then: Twilight Imperium III. Just setting up is probably 2-3 hours, depending on how much you've forgotten from the last time you've played. We start after breakfast, set up until lunch, break for lunch, come back and start, break for dinner, come back and play, break for a late-night McDonald's run, more playing, and then sometimes finish it up the next day, unless someone runs away with the game early.

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Off Topic / Re: Graduaton Tonight

« on: June 05, 2015, 08:40:51 pm »

Congratulations!!

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Off Topic / Re: Where I've Been...

« on: June 05, 2015, 12:55:55 pm »

Yeah, the area we wanted to move to (about half an hour south of where we live) is a really fast-moving market right now. I didn't like seeing a house one day and putting the offer in the next, just to find out someone had beat me to it. It's already been a ridiculous time-consuming process and we're just getting started!

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Off Topic / Where I've Been...

« on: June 05, 2015, 09:37:21 am »

Hi everybody! I swear I've been lurking a bit and not posting, but I haven't been around the last month very much.

Well, today I'm having one of those "OMG, I need to tell SOMEONE" days. So here we go...Ronalopolis and I put in an offer (that was accepted) on a house!

We've always had the majority of our games in a storage room because we've never had the room to put them out. The new place isn't too much bigger than the townhouse we've lived in for the last 7 years, but it does have a downstairs room that is about double the size of the basement we have now. AND the one we have now is also the computer room, which will have a dedicated room in the new place. So basically, we're going to have FOUR TIMES the space to put out all of our retro games!

We've still got lots to do before we can call the house ours, but the waiting without telling people (because we don't want to post it all over Facebook and then have something go wrong before closing) is killing me. Also, trying to figure out what games are going where and what kind of shelves we need and how we want to organize everything...I can't wait to take a measuring tape and the IKEA catalog to the new place and have a few hours to plan.

Unless something goes wrong, I'd like to post pictures of the transformation from what we have now and the boring room we're moving it all into, so people can see what all goes in to making it awesome.

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General / Re: Top 10 Favorite Video Game Soundtracks

« on: June 05, 2015, 09:24:43 am »

• Persona 3
• Persona 4
• Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Sonic Adventure 2
• Chrono Trigger
• Kingdom Hearts
• Little Big Planet
• Katamari Damacy
• Gitaroo Man
• Soul Calibur II

I'm sure I'll think of others, but this is what popped into my head.

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General / Re: Dealing with spouses. Wait, it's not what you think!

« on: June 05, 2015, 09:14:56 am »

Ours is one big collection, mostly because I can't trust Ronalopolis to even come back and say hi to all of you, let alone keep tabs on what we have. I use VG Collect mostly for making sure I'm not buying a double of something when I'm out at the thrift shops and flea markets, and checking two databases would be even more unwieldy than the one we have now.

It's funny though. We are both video gamers but the games we play are so different that it's almost like two different hobbies. We rarely game together. Instead, a lot of nights are spent with him playing the latest shooter on the TV and me pausing some RPG on the DS when his cutscenes come up, watching them almost like a movie in between my game. So if we ever had to divide our collection for any reason, there would be very few arguments about which games went with who. Those games we can play together seem to be among our favorites though, because we can enjoy them together.

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General / Re: BEST Video Game movie?

« on: April 23, 2015, 03:58:38 pm »

As far as the documentaries go, I'd like to put a vote in for Get Lamp. I love text adventures and enjoyed that one.

As far as the movies go, I'd have to vote for Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva.

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General / Re: Collection Plateau...anybody experience this?

« on: April 20, 2015, 10:42:20 am »

I'm doing something similar to @tpugmire, but I'm not quite as drastic. I promised myself I would finish more games than I buy in 2015. I did it as a New Year's Resolution and started keeping track on January 1st.

To date, I have purchased 11 games this year and I have finished 13. That may be more games than I finished all last year and it's only April. The only drawback I've found to this is that I don't play as much of my games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon because they really don't end. I need to come up with a way of considering them "complete" to be able to add them to my lists as well, so I don't feel guilty playing them rather than games with a set beginning and end.

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Off Topic / Re: Nasty/Weird/Crazy Stuff You Have Seen As An Employee

« on: April 07, 2015, 01:55:13 pm »

I was the IT administrator for a small, rural, high-poverty school district for several years. I have tons of stories of weird IT things if anyone wants to hear them, but I thought I'd go with just a crazy and a nasty, only one of which relates to IT.

The crazy: I had just started my job and they'd never had a full-time tech person before. The high school secretary had some favorite teachers and if one of those needed me for the most trivial of things, she'd have me paged on the PA to the teacher's classroom. About two weeks of this (I was K-12 and couldn't just be on call for the high school), and I'd had it. I barged into the secretary's office and said something like "Listen, I've got a server that I'm working on upstairs and if it goes down, we all go down. Don't page me unless something is on fire!" and headed up the stairs.

About two hours later, I hear the page: "Amauriel, please report to Mr. So-and-so's room. His computer is on fire." Sure enough, when I walked in the room, there was a billow of black smoke rising from his monitor. I ran over and found that he hadn't even unplugged it before calling the office. It hadn't actually caught fire, but of course I had to tear the monitor open to see why it was smoking. Come to find out, he had the computer sitting below his chalkboard for so many years that the miniscule amount of graphite in the chalk had connected two circuits and made it short out.

The nasty: I had the office beside the part-time school psychologist. She was the one who had to sign off on any requests to contact Child Services for a student. We once had a child sent to the office because he'd had bugs all over him. Come to find out, the child's living conditions were so bad that a cockroach had laid eggs inside his ear canal and they were beginning to hatch. That's the only time I remember a child actually being completely removed from their home situation.