darkchylde28

Do you have any actual evidence of this, other than your own, strongly worded opinion? I'm not saying that you're absolutely in the wrong regarding people going along with what they ultimately want or don't want to do, but I've seen enough documentation and talked to enough people to believe absolutely otherwise in regard to your apparent stipulation that everybody is just "play acting" and going along with the hypnotist versus actually being talked into a slightly different state of consciousness (at which point suggestions tend to be reacted upon immediately by folks in that state versus cautiously considered and acted upon only if a person is openly willing to do so).

I don't think it's usually factory workers keeping uncut boxes, but moreso art and marketing people who have samples of the finished product to make sure everything came out as intended. I know that's the case with a lot of the Kenner Star Wars stuff that's emerged over the years and can easily imagine it being the same across the board for folks in these positions who don't hate their jobs, have some pride in their work, etc. There's probably a lot more of this type of stuff sitting around in somebody's dusty office or attic, forgotten for years and unlikely to be discovered with much gusto since it's generally a one in a million shot that something like this ends up as a big collectible.

I always try to, but find it hard these days to catch them when they're airing live on TV since I'm a cable cutter and very rarely take a peek at OTA programming these days. We managed to catch Frosty the Snowman and its sequel this year while visiting my grandmother over Thanksgiving, but think that we've probably missed Rudolph. Fortunately, as of a few years ago, we've got most of those on DVD (including more recent "traditional" watches such as A Garfield Christmas and Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, two my favorites as a kid), so we'll get to watch them, just not with quite as many feels as hurrying to make sure everybody is in front of the TV to catch them as they aired.

Honestly, as much as I love my OG Game Boy, I'd say that while it's still enjoyable and worthwhile to play original games on an original system, I'd recommend going with a Game Boy Pocket (or Light, if you have or can get one) for the best "OG" experience. The Game Boy Color isn't a bad system, but to me, it doesn't feel quite as good or comfortable in the hands as the pocket. The same goes for the GBA as well as the SP, although the SP is probably the next best thing for playing original games in a hand-held format. Past that, a Super Game Boy or even something like the Retron 5 is pretty great to play on, it just lacks some of the nostalgic feel that playing on original/period hardware provides.

Thanks, makes me feel a bit better of getting caught up in a bit of a rant. I kept getting grumpier and grumpier each time we got forced to drag my son, then my son and my daughter, away from their Christmas to wallow in everybody else's. Honestly, I nearly held my ground last year but gave in when my wife pushed and begged and started trying to get my son excited about seeing his cousins. Before I was born, my mom apparently planted that flag at our original house and told both sets of my grandparents (and, through them, the rest of the family) that she wouldn't tear her kids away from their toys on Christmas, she'd be happy to pack everybody up the day after, but that if anybody wanted to see any of us on Christmas they'd have to come knocking on our door. Glad that that's no longer a battle for me and can't wait to see what a full day of my kinds tearing into and playing with everything looks like.

Given how much trouble the buyer has caused? DEFIANTLY.

My gaming is to this day still very NES-centric, but here's my list. 1. Spy vs Spy 2. River City Ransom (followed closely by TMNT2: The Arcade Game) 3. Super Off Road 4. No "versus" ones, but probably either Minecraft or 7 Days to Die

For my family, it was always putting the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, which, given that this got later and later as I got older and had more obligations that day, grew to include watching Christmas Eve midnight mass at the Vatican while doing so, lol. For my wife's father's family, it's been watching A Christmas Story on repeat on TBS during the family get together on Christmas Eve to visit and exchange gifts. For my wife's mother's family, it's been to get up early and eat breakfast together, specifically my mother-in-law's "breakfast pizza" (surprisingly better than it sounds) plus a few odds and ends.

Not gaming related, but in a similar vein... One year while I was still a kid (I want to say 9, but definitely before 11) my aunt came down for Christmas. By that point I'd gotten most of my Christmas shopping done and figured that there would be time to finish up what odds and ends I had left. Cue Christmas Eve at around 5-6 PM and me sitting down to organize all the gifts I'd picked up (ie: I'd picked out and my parents had paid for) for everyone and wrap them, only to realize that somehow that nagging bit of Christmas shopping that nobody ever took me out to do included getting a gift for my mother. Horrified, I called every store in the area to see if any place was still open and couldn't get an answer, until Walmart. Only, it was the security staff who were on-hand to watch the place back before they had any 24/7 locations (in my area, at least), stayed open crazy hours during the holidays, etc. Totally out of luck, and most likely going to ruin Christmas by everyone figuring out that I'd forgotten my mom. I get everything wrapped fairly quickly and am in the process of getting things organized to be put out under the tree when we put it up and I hear a knock at my bedroom door. It's my aunt, coming to check on me as she hadn't seen me in a while and, seeing the pile of presents that I'm trying to get organized to be carryable later on, begins to confide in me what she got everybody else and how she thinks that'll go. Cue her getting to my mom's gift, which she's excited about, and proceeds to tell me that she's been shopping for her all year, picking up various mice ornaments (my mom had a thing for mice ornaments, figurines, etc.) and had a box bursting with them. Given her description, she'd been adding them to a big Avon shipping box all year as she got them and just threw the lid on when it finally got full and wrapped it. She then asked me about what I had gotten everybody and, being able to keep a secret or tell a bald-faced lie flawlessly, told her that it was a secret and everybody would love what they got and surely be surprised (which my mother definitely would be, if I didn't pull something out of my hat). She laughed, nodded, and left. Dinner came and went, and my dad, brother and I began the process of clearing the corner in the living room and preparing to put up the tree while my mom and her sister hung out in the kitchen and made various baked goods. We had the tree up fairly quickly, but everybody drug their feet about getting gifts out and under the tree. Finally everybody started bringing their gifts out and getting things arranged, much to my panic (still not having figured out what to do about Mom), but then hatched a plan the moment I got a glance at exactly how large the box of mice ornaments my aunt had brought really was. For the rest of the evening everyone mostly hung out in the living room, leaving me no window to do the deed that I'd quickly conceived of and only haphazardly planned. Finally, everyone wandered off to sleep, my aunt bedding down on the pullout bed contained within the couch in the living room. Approximately 3 feet from the Christmas tree. What followed a tense hour or two later (I don't remember how long it was--I just recall going "to bed" as everyone else did and waiting nervously, pretending to sleep, for my aunt to start snoring) prepared me for being the Santa I am today. After my aunt was snoring long and loud for at least a few minutes, I crept silently out of bed and into the living room. Despite our house being brand new when we moved in and probably only 4-5 years old by the time of this story, there were still quite a few creaks and squeaks to the floor. Calling back to all the times I'd snuck out of bed when much younger to secretly watch TV in the hallway and scamper off undetected whenever one of my parents got up for something, I managed to make it into the living room without making a sound. Only to find that my aunt was sleeping on her side, her face pointing straight at the Christmas tree, more or less right where my prize lay, at the bottom of a pile of gifts featuring the loudest, most crinkly wrapping paper ever. After what felt like half an hour of doing my best to silently relocate each gift, I managed to extricate the big one intended for my mother and begin my escape. In my rush, I managed to step right onto one of the squeaky boards as I was entering the hallway off the living room and heard my aunt's snoring immediately cease. My blood ran cold as I heard a groggy voice call out, "Whutyadoin?" With skill that I didn't know I had, that James Bond himself would be jealous of, and that I've never had to repeat since, I managed to slip the large box I had visually blocked by my body (and which was deep enough into the hall not to be seen) onto the handle of my father's coat closet and turn in such a manner that I was able to keep it balanced on that small edge and up against part of my body as I rotated. I let my eyes droop and face go slack as I turned, mumbling out something about wanting a drink and needing to go to the bathroom before slowly turning back around, feeling exactly how precarious the box was, getting a silent grip back on the box, then shambling into the bathroom, making bathroom sounds enough to be convincing (it's amazing how much a drizzle of shampoo can sound like peeing, lol), flushed, ran the sink, then shuffled back to my room, silently locking the door behind me. I waited until I heard the drone of snoring emanating once again from the living room before getting out of bed, stuffing my blanket along the bottom of the door to shut out the light, and flipped on the overhead to see what awaited me. Over the course of the next 10 minutes or so, I very carefully examined the package my aunt had carefully wrapped and flown down with, determining via couple of test tugs that there was no way I could pull the tape up without tearing the wrapping paper or its pattern. I managed to slit the edges of the tape right where the paper crossed over itself and get the package open without any visible damage to the wrapping. Upon opening the box, I did an inventory and, miracle of miracles, at some point my aunt had bought two of the same mouse! One at the very bottom of the box, and another up toward the top. I pulled out the one at the bottom to wrap up and claim as "my" gift for my mom, did some careful rearranging of the contents to allow everything to sit more or less where it had but not move around when shaken, despite the mouse army being one member down, and got everything back together and wrapped with only a doubling up of the tape (which one would never notice unless they were looking for it) as a sign that the package had ever been opened. I quickly wrapped "my" gift for my mom, got it situated in the stack of gifts that I had yet to distribute under the tree, got everything placed on my aunt's gift, then snuck back into the living room to complete my mission. I made it as far as getting everything set in the floor before the snoring behind me stopped again and my aunt muttered at me about what I was doing. I whispered back that I'd forgotten to put my gifts out before going to sleep and was taking care of it now so that nobody felt forgotten in the morning. I assume that she bought it, as I heard her proceed to roll over (finally away from the scene of the crime, lol) and begin snoring again within a few moments. Figuring I shouldn't press my luck any further, I shuffled the other gifts my aunt had brought up against the big one I'd just violated (making it appear that I'd moved them to put mine on top of hers) and more noisily made my way back to my room and finally to sleep. The following morning, I made sure that the first gift my mother opened was the one that I had purloined in the night, just to guarantee that she would be happy with "mine" and not disappointed that she had gotten a duplicate. To the best of my recollection, I don't know that I've told another soul about this while my mother was still living, lol. Even to this day, I'm still not entirely certain whether she'd laugh, smack the crap out of me, or both, if she'd ever found out.

One thing I've noticed is that with the right ad blocker in place, a lot of Captcha stuff either doesn't appear for me or just accepts that I'm human (presumably because bots aren't trying to block ads). Maybe that's why you're not running into the situation where others are? Could also potentially be browser credentials causing a similar situation (bots identify as x, y, and z, but never a so a gets a pass, etc.).

Looks like the Postal 2 deal ended sometime in the last 15 hours between your post and just now, as it's currently showing as $0.99 on GOG. Still not a bad deal by any means, but not free anymore. FYI.

Christmas of 1989, the year I finally got my own NES. I'd asked my parents for one each year since a friend had gotten a test market set, but up until that point, my parents either couldn't find one or couldn't afford it. A few weeks or months prior, my mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas and, when I again said an NES, instead of just nodding and asking "Anything else?", she asked what I would want to play on it if I actually got one, somewhat cluing me in to how things would likely go down. Christmas morning I woke up incredibly early, snuck into the living room, and saw a large shape that looked like it should be an NES sitting behind everything. Instead of pestering my parents to wake up and get the show on the road, I actually went back to my room and tried to get back to sleep, letting them wake up and get moving on their own time, both because I knew my wait was pretty much over and another couple of hours or so wouldn't matter as well as figuring that I'd be able to hog the TV for most, if not all, of the day if I let them sleep as long as they wanted and get up in a good mood. I didn't have too much longer to wait, maybe half an hour or an hour, before I heard my mom wake up, head to the bathroom, then putter into the kitchen to put on coffee. As soon as you could smell it through the house, she came into my room to gently shake me and tell me to get up and go wake everybody else up. I figured I would likely get the system but wasn't counting on anything else, although one of the two games I named when asked crossed my mind as a possibility. As it turned out, not only did my parents make sure I got the system I wanted as well as both games I'd asked for, they made sure to fill out the rest of the space under the tree, as they thought it wasn't right that I only get 2-3 things for Christmas, regardless of what they cost. At the moment I didn't really appreciate it, wondering why they bothered with things like a gumball machine, a bag of candy that I liked, etc., but as an adult, now with kids of my own, I tear up at the thoughtfulness of it as well as how much further it must have stretched them thin after shelling out $150 for my Action Set, plus at least $60 each for the two games I wanted (Mega Man 2 & Strider, for the curious). After getting through everybody unwrapping everything, I asked if I could connect my system up to the TV, got the ok, then surprised everyone by already knowing how to hook things up, having gotten very familiar with friends' systems for several years already. The first thing I did was throw in Mega Man 2 and play all the way through to the end before switching over to Strider. My mom was initially upset, thinking they'd done a bad job buying me what I'd asked for, since I flew through the game fairly quickly and let the credits roll while breaking my other game out of its packaging. It took a few minutes of reassuring her that I'd gotten exactly what I'd wanted and that while I hadn't beaten it while at friends' houses, I'd played quite a lot of it since it was a popular rental for us and just never got enough turns (or one timed correctly) to actually make it to and through the end of the game. From that point, with my parents sitting there watching me and shouting out, trying to help whenever they could, I played all the way through Strider, save for beating the next to last boss. Fun fact--it wasn't until a year or two ago that I actually beat that game, as I never could figure out how to actually hit Matic (or if I even was), and finally stumbled across a guide that spelled out the fact that you need to use the energy attack to disarm him and then wail on him before he picks his cipher back up. After getting stuck there, I threw in Mega Man 2 and beat it again before putting in SMB/Duck Hunt and ending up closing out the evening with my dad and I taking turns shooting ducks and clay pigeons. There were a couple more "Nintendo" Christmases after that (I ended up with a Game Boy and a game the next year and a system-only SNES set and a game the year after), but this was the most memorable.

I had a few of them, but absolutely none of them the year they were supposed to be the most popular. I love the Star Wars entry, as I called it that NOBODY had those in 1977, lol. Glad the video was well enough done that the guy acknowledged this! It really makes me feel that something else should have been given that slot and Star Wars should have been bumped to 1978, though.

I've had a whole lot of different experiences with this. With my family, we would do a lot of our activities on Christmas Eve (baking cookies, putting up and decorating the tree, etc.), then choose and open one gift each before heading to bed to wait for Santa to make his visit. When I started dating my wife and getting invited to (and expected to attend) all of her family's stuff, I ran into at least two additional, different traditions. Presumably because her father always had to work Christmas due to being a cop, her family, then later her grandmother and extended family did all of their Christmas stuff on Christmas Eve. This continues to this day, with most everybody showing up around 6-7 or so to eat shrimp and fingerfoods, visit, open presents, then head home (generally around 9 or so). Her mom, though, as a kid and then after the divorce, expected everybody to come over first thing on Christmas morning to have a big breakfast, open stockings, then do gifts. After that, it was off to do Christmas with the entire rest of her family. If things didn't go on too long, there might have even been enough time for us to go see my family while it was still Christmas. After my wife and I had kids, the expected tradition of showing up at her mom's house (or just spending the night on Christmas Eve) first thing in the morning continued. This moved a few years ago to my sister-in-law's house, which was extraordinarily convenient for her, but nobody (including my wife) seemed to understand why I got more and more bent out of shape over this as each year progressed. Everyone has been seemingly unable to comprehend why it was unfair that my kids should have to rush through their excitement of checking out, opening, and playing with whatever Santa and my wife and I had gotten them, only to abandon it all to go watch their cousins play with what they had just gotten (no sharing required when something is brand new!), get fussed at for not eating a breakfast they didn't want, then get rushed through opening what gifts they were getting from the family to be dragged over to my wife's larger family get together (grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.) to maybe get one or two small things that they finally get to spend some real time playing with before having to go home and get in bed. After being a complete grump ass last year and not being subtle about it, I finally won a fair compromise this year. Instead of doing an insane wakeup and rush because (and only because) both sister-in-laws have to work mid-day on Christmas, everyone finally agreed that every individual family would do Christmas at their house on Christmas and any group activities would be the next day. So, this year, my kids will get to wake up when they wake up, open their stuff as soon as they want to, and play with everything as much as they want to save for the obviously required bathroom and food breaks. Since we're actually getting time at home, to ourselves, I've invited my brother over this year to spend the whole day and eat with us that evening, versus him making loose plans to visit some of his friends or stay home alone until we'd have time to pop in and visit briefly and exchange gifts. (Both of our parents passed away several years ago, so we're the only close family he's got) Sorry if this brought anyone down, I started out sharing the different traditions I'd been part of and then partially sidetracked (somewhat cathartically) into fighting against my kids getting screwed over by the inlaws' preferences and finally obtaining a fair situation (where I'm not the reviled bad guy for refusing to take my kids out of the house on Christmas).

I always took Grant. He was fantastic to give the axe to and then have him hang out on a wall, generally out of reach of a lot of the bosses, cheesing the hell out of them, lol.

Well, I would put it as if you were in a Rad Racer speed run you would hopefully not be crashing. Anyone feel free to prove me wrong, but unlike a lot of games that I see as popularly being speedrun (SMB, Ninja Gaiden, etc.), I'm fairly certain that the "enemy" cars in Rad Racer are randomly generated, whereas in a lot of the other popular speed run games, most, if not all, of the initial enemy generation is static, so you can plan for where those are going to be and how you're going to react to get around them. When, in Rad Racer, one car shows up in the middle, then suddenly two appear in either side line when you move to pass, boxing you in, I've never seen that consistently happen in the exact same spot, with the exact same progression of cars, leaving it (in my eyes) as a much greater challenge (and requiring more luck) to speed run most efficiently/effectively.

I had to look that one up myself, as I wasn't familiar with the term. Apparently it's pausing and unpausing the game rapidly after you crash, which causes your car to land and be moved to the middle of the track much quicker than if you let it happen normally. In the video I watched, it looked like it only took 1-2 seconds off the clock for the player to land and be reset and ready to go again, whereas it should take frustratingly longer than that.

I know this doesn't add any specific help to this particular thread, but my bet is that it's just another random bit of promo material from the N64 era. I've got a slightly larger than normal fanny pack emblazoned with the official Nintendo N64 logo, but it's not shaped right to hold anything N64-specific, and definitely wouldn't hold a controller inside, even if you weren't wearing it. This is most likely a promo item given away at something like E3 (or maybe even E3 itself), in random promotions leading up to launch, etc. I don't have any backup on that guess at all other than there are a lot of instances of such "swag" cropping up through the years at such events made solely to get eyes on the product so that it can start to gather momentum toward launch.

These aren't bad, but they're topped by a choice that I haven't seen mentioned thus far, which is the Aldi "house" brand--Mama Cozzi's. They offer enough varieties that they're comparable to what Walmart (Sam's) and Digiorno offer. To my family and I, they taste a bit better than the Sam's Choice ones and at least equivalent, if not better than their Digiorno counterparts and are like half the price of Sam's and 1/3 to 1/4 the price of Digiorno (depending on whether you buy Digiorni individually or in a bulk "club" style pack). Infinitely better value if you like thicker crust pizza. With the odd exception here and there for nostalgia (Totino's party pizzas, whatever the thin, cheap garbage maybe-house-brand stuff that Kroger used to stock was), I'll vote against thin/"hard" pizza every time.

Honestly, if I hadn't been paying ~$70/mo to keep it in storage, I'd probably still have it, but it eventually got to the point where it was tougher and tougher to justify throwing money out at something that it was looking more and more like I was never going to get to do. At this point I've made my peace with it and given all the books, magazines, etc. that I'd accumulated for the project to family who have similar interests and projects. I think the only things I've got left laying around are the repro Shelby GT500 fender badges my aunt had bought me, the Shelby speedo and tach I managed to pick up separately, and the period correct, optional dash clock. With all but the badges, I honestly forgot to dig them out and put them in the car when I was getting rid of it and the guy who bought it never noticed or said a word, so I'm happy to sit on them until the right offer or project comes my way.

A car, lol. Looks like I win, for the moment. It was a shell-only 1967 Mustang fastback with original glass and chrome, deluxe seats, even the fold down back seat and inner trunk hatch, but absolutely no floors (hump was there, and a little of the rear floor but nothing forward to the firewall) and a front end that had been poorly repaired/rebuilt out of a couple of smaller I-bars. Hung onto it hoping to resto-mod it for 10-15 years before I finally gave up on the dream and gave in to the guy who'd been hassling me for the better part of me owning it and sold it to pay off a bunch of bills. Made him take the bulky stuff I had for it to clear out all of the space, so he ended up with the 428 truck motor I'd picked up at a junkyard and the 428 Cobra Jet block I'd picked up at a car show to build for it. Still a little sad that I don't have it anymore, but am now wise enough to realize that it's probably in better hands now and would have likely entirely turned to rust before I had the time and money to put into it to get it up and going again properly.

Well, I loved that game when it came out and still do to this day. If you know anything about the game, this will make quite an impact, but I'll try to explain a bit in case you don't. I bought it when it first came out and started playing immediately. I didn't play it all the time, but would pick it up regularly and for days at a time, at least, when I did. I bought the Legendary Edition and its guidebook when they came out a couple of years after launch. It wasn't until well after the Special Edition was released that I finally took the trek up into the mountains to first speak to the Greybeards on top of the Throat of the World. Never once got bored with the game, would just get occasionally distracted by life, set it down, then get back to it later on. I started a ton of miscellaneous missions and finished a fair amount, but usually would end up getting distracted doing my own thing. Most often, I would be headed somewhere to definitely, for certain this time, actually work through a mission, see a big deer and take it out with my bow, then see another, and another, and suddenly it was 3-4 hours later, my character's back was breaking under the load of hides, pelts, etc. that I was dragging back to my house, and I was then more concerned with getting everything tanned, making up a bunch of armor to buff my blacksmithing skill, selling everything off, then going out to have the situation repeat itself. Edit: Forgot to add the explanation. Basically, going to see the Greybeards the first time is something you're supposed to accomplish in roughly the first 30-60 minutes that you're with the game. The moment you're past the first little hamlet that you get to after the intro sequence and you come to the next town and get more info about you being "dragonborn," one of their guys shows up and tells you to get your butt up the mountain. I avoided that without really meaning to for 5-6 years after release. I don't know that everyone had that same experience, but a lot of the folks I know who have stuck with the game over time have had similar experiences, each finding their own ways to play and activities within the open world they enjoy. I want to say that I finally got around to finishing the actual story sometime in the last 2-3 years, but my gameplay is largely unchanged even to this day whenever I pick it up again. The story isn't bad, the acting isn't terrible, the missions aren't terrible. To me, the world is so relatively well and beautifully constructed that I, personally, find it more interesting to interact in whatever ways I want to at a given time versus necessarily following the various storylines excessively. I know some will find that as a flaw or weakness, but honestly, I find it exactly the opposite, endearing the game to me all the more.

I thought I remembered people saying they specifically were archived (before the individual URLs stopped working), but with their threads and everything woefully and confusingly mixed directly in with the NA stuff? I seem to recall when looking at the NA archive stuff there being duplicate forum names and such, which NA itself didn't have. So, perhaps good news that it's possibly there but bad news that you'll have a heck of a time sifting that stuff out?

I agree, but it technically doesn't qualify, as it was released in 2009, at least originally. That hasn't kept people from playing it, but if we're going to allow games in that people just kept playing into the timeframe specified, doesn't that open the gates to literally any game that people still play to this day?

That might work, but thinking about some of the stuff I've seen the 8-Bit Guy doing with his, I'd have concerns with anything touching the top/visible surface of what's being brightened, as it's been shown that with other methods (using the cream and wrapped in plastic wrap to try to keep it from drying out) can, and frequently will, cause streaking.