TheOnlyGuyEver

I guess I've developed an interest in historical game packs like the SNK collection, since I picked up the Atari 50 collection.  This is an interesting contrast to the SNK collection because to be frank it's something that if you don't have a historical interest in Atari or the early days of video games, it's really not worth it.  Most of the SNK games still hold up so you get a solid collection of games, but many of the games in the Atari set are not things that most people would be interested in playing.  There are a few reasons for this:
 
Since we are literally at the dawn of video games (reports at the time called them part of the "pinball industry") some of the games are extremely primitive.  For example, "Touch Me" is basically just Simon (i.e. push a series of buttons in response to what blinked.)  Games like Breakout are certainly playable, but since they invented a genre later games innovated so much on the basic formula that going back to the original will feel lacking if you've seen anything from later on. Many of the games are two player only, like Pong, Combat and Air Sea Battle are meant to be played 2 player.  There is no AI at all, so no real game unless you have someone else playing.  These games actually do hold up if you are willing to look past their age... but since we are talking about local multiplayer with two controllers only, you will need to find someone to agree to play a mega-old game when you could easily be doing something else.  Not an easy sell. Many of the games are arcade games.  In a way this is nice, since they punched higher than the console games of the time.  But the downside is that sometimes they used special peripherals that you won't have on PC or modern consoles.  In particular, Missile Command, Centipede and Crystal Castles all used a trackball.  I guess there are trackballs you can use with PC, but who has one?  Missile Command and Centipede work pretty well with a mouse and Crystal Castles is at least playable with a joystick, but you are missing a key part of the experience.  Similarly there are some arcade racing games that are meant to be played with a steering wheel, some games meant to be played with a paddle (i.e. a rotational dial like what you use in Pong), etc. Some of the games are just not good.  Sometimes this is due to technical limitations, like what you have on Atari 2600.  Sometimes it's just because the library sucks, like what happened with the Jaguar (but at least you get a historical perspective of why the Jaguar failed.) Some of the actually fun and innovative games are so far back that you really have to stretch your modern imagination to get into them.  Adventure is an example of this; it's a pretty neat little top down action adventure game, but it's also a game where you are a dot carrying an arrow to fight ducks. The collection also suffers from the fact that this is Atari only.  In particular no Activision (made by disgruntled Atari ace employees) so no Pitfall, River Raid, Kaboom!, Keystone Kapers, etc. This is a shame, since those are some of the best games for the 2600.  No tie ins with other companies like Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Pole Position.  This in particular hurts the Jaguar, since you won't be getting games like Cannon Fodder, Aliens vs. Predator, Theme Park or Rayman, leaving Tempest 2000 as the only great game on the system.
 
With all that being said, there are many games you can have fun with here.  I think that Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest and Missile Command all hold up and help to see how people got obsessed with the arcades in the early 80's.  Cloak and Dagger, Warlords and especially Food Fight are some great arcade games from later.  (Crystal Castles would be perfect if I had a trackball.)  The consoles include a mix of mediocre (but high selling) stuff, experimental games like Club Drive, Ninja Golf, Basketbrawl, Haunted House and Solaris, and even some home brews and unreleased games.  I imagine that you will find at least a few games that you will legitimately enjoy (I recommend starting with Food Fight and Tempest 2000 since those are both pretty straightforward to understand and well done.)
 
There are a lot of repetitions through ports and the like.  For example, with Asteroids you have the original arcade game, the sequel Asteroids deluxe (really more of a remix of the game), ports for the 2600 and 7800 systems and a combined port of Asteroids and Missile Command for Lynx.  Similarly, there are 5 version of Missile Command.  Normally I would say that this is just padding, but there are 109 games in total if you include ports, and if you only include "original" games you still have 77 games.  But what makes this interesting is the historical perspective.  You can see what Asteroids was like in the arcades, then play the 2600 port to see what was available at home.  In some ways the games are very similar, but in other ways the home experience was obviously inferior.  Very unlike today when you can get everything you want on a PC or modern console.
 
In terms of emulation, it has what you would want.  You can mess with filter and border options depending on whether you want a clear view or a simulation of what it would like at the arcade.  Arcade games have DIP switch options to let you change starting lives, freeplay options, etc.  The games for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 systems let you control the difficulty switches on the console for similar results and you can mess with the controls.  My only real complaint there is that you can't remap controls for multiple players to a single keyboard; you need a controller for everyone which can get annoying on the 4 player games since I generally don't have 4 controllers connected.  Having two people on controller and two people on opposite sides of the keyboard would work fine.  But let's be honest, I'm never going to get 4 people to agree to play these games so this is a rather minor complaint.

Where the collection shines is in the historical aspect.  You get a good feel for that from the games themselves, but the collection has a timeline mode that is loaded with features.  Digital Eclipse did something similar for the SNK collection, but there it was really just a brief description of various games with some idea of the context, some screen shots, and maybe some promotional art or manual pages.  The Atari collection has that too, but also includes a wealth of video footage including historical interviews, retrospective interviews done for the collection, historical news footage, etc.  They go into a lot more detail on important games that were not included in the collection to give a real feel for how Atari was doing on a year by year basis.  This is particularly the case with Atari's ill-fated Pinball games (the only pinball game in the collection is a virtual table for the Jaguar.)  I like that they aren't shy of saying where there were flops and where there were successes.
 
Like I said with the SNK collection, you can emulate this stuff rather easily, but the historical presentation of the collection really adds to the experience.  Digital Eclipse has found a niche and is doing their best, when they could have easily just slapped a bunch of roms together in a cash grab.  I'll probably pick up their Jeff Minter game collection if it goes on a good sale.  They also have a "Making of Kareteka" collection, but that might be too niche for even me since it focuses entirely on one game (and its many, many, ports.)

A BETTER attempt at coloring and shading.
 
 

A few weeks ago I was healing someone named "Bogus" on a server. And as I Übered them I said "Release the Bogus!" in reference to Super Macho Man from Super Punch Out on the Wii (a game I have only seen, not played).
 
After the Ûber they said "wow I've had my name as this for almost a year and you're the first person to get what I was referencing". Someone else chimed in saying they liked Super Macho Man.
 
I may not be a punch out fan, but I am glad I could make someone's day.

Lol, the buttons are such a crucial point to me for the exact opposite reason. My setup is pretty crummy, and I have to lay the tablet directly on my laptop's keyboard as the only surface available, so I can only access maybe a third of the keys (which fortunately included CTRL, Shift, and Z, as the H610 Pro has an undo button but no redo button).
 
Lore:
 
It would probably be nice to use a setup like yours, and might be a little faster for certain things too, but it would also kinda require me to get a whole new desk, and a whole desktop PC (or at least a USB keyboard to plug into my laptop, which already has its own keyboard), so what I have going just kind of works best for my situation.

Man my tablet has all these programmable buttons and a scroller similar to your new one but due to my desk setup I usually draw with my right hand and have my left hand on my keyboard (which is in a keyboard tray right under my tablet) anyway so I never established any of the muscle memory to use the programmable buttons. Which feels a little like a waste, but I guess my current setup works for me enough that I never felt like doing it.
 
Also 
it really is a game changer, I know exactly how that feels. I had a little bit where I drew on a different hardware setup a while ago for just a little bit and tilting the canvas was difficult and I did not understand how often I tilted it until the ability to do so easily was taken away from me

Was bored. Decided to mess around with AI. Asked to create an ASCII art, but it got it wrong every time.
With each attempt, it got more and more disturbing.
 
 
I believe a curse has been placed upon my crops.

I mean, it's pretty clear what happened. Your package got caught in a tornado and blown all the way to Kansas. They've gotta travel to the middle of Nowhere to get it back.

deadlock is ruining my social time with non-deadlockers

Was reading the newspaper (), when my eyes stumbled on this particular picture.
 

 
I never watched the videos, but I gotta say I feel really bad for Gooseworx.

Existentia, the concept of creation, counterpart to Void (the black flame dude)
 
 

Lisa reference pose
 
 

There are so many layers to this video I've watched it 12 times and I'm still noticing things

i seriously don't understand spy sometimes

Red Sky of Scorched Earth:

 
This was pretty fun to paint and honestly I surprised myself with how it turned out, I was a lot more satisfied with it than I thought I'd be.

Red Sky of Scorched Earth:

 
This was pretty fun to paint and honestly I surprised myself with how it turned out, I was a lot more satisfied with it than I thought I'd be.

Another paint study, this time from Peripeteia:

 

 
I feel like accurately capturing the shadows was a bit out of my grasp, but I still think it turned out alright overall.

Another paint study, this time from Peripeteia:

 

 
I feel like accurately capturing the shadows was a bit out of my grasp, but I still think it turned out alright overall.

Its a meme, you dip.
 

Made me think of you:

Made me think of you:

This is the only Disney Movie I own.  Because it's Don Bluth's first animation credit, see, and I have stuff from throughout his career.  Definitely not for any other reason.
 
I guess on that topic if you want to watch actual Don Bluth movies, the ones that hold up the best are Secret of NIMH, The Land Before Time and Anastasia.  An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven are enjoyable but definitely a step down.  Titan AE would be top tier if all the dialogue wasn't generic Joss Whedonisms.
 
But the real thing I wanted to talk about was this scene from Fargo:
 
 
 
Most of the "Minnesotan accents" in this movie are somewhat based in reality, but taken to an absurd level.  Kind of like saying "I've got a real Southern accent" and then sounding like Foghorn Leghorn.  But the guy this cop talks to is 100% legit.  There were many people in my grandfather's generation who talked and acted exactly like that, and you still run into people like that in rural areas.
 
To get things out of the way, yeah, they are wearing way too much for what is obviously a mild winter day.  But you can't control the weather when shooting a movie.  This was done by a second unit in a warm spell, and the rest of the movie was supposed to be very cold, so they made do.
 
What makes this great? First of all the accent is dead on.  Kinda singsong-y but not absurdly so.  The "th" sound reliably changed into "d."  Perhaps the only natural "ja" in the whole movie.  And listen to how he says "Moose."
 
In terms of phrasing we have the "so I says", "so he says" way of quickly talking about a previous conversation.  About half of my Grandpa's anecdotes went that way.  There's an improper use of verb conjugation vs. the subject (ex. "so I says" instead of "so I say",  "that don't sound..." instead of "that doesn't sound...", "he don't use" instead of "he doesn't use") I don't know the exact rule for how this works, since it's not like rural Minnesotans don't conjugate things incorrectly every time, but those specific examples are common.
 
Lack of profanity even though Steve Buscemi's character obviously swore.  Profanity is pretty common now in Minnesota, but in that generation people did avoid it.  Note too the way that he treats the situation.  It's not like he's offended or is bewildered by the thought of profanity.  If anything he's kind of acting like it's funny that anyone would talk like that.
 
"So I called it in" long pause "end of story."  One thing that this hints at is the long pauses common to Minnesotan conversation.  In "How to Talk Minnesotan" Howard Mohr suggests that most Minnesotan phone conversations consist of as much silence as speech, and even today I would believe it.  Now for such an incidental conversation in the movie they couldn't stretch this scene into five minutes, but I do like this hint at the end.
 
"He says... the last guy who thought he's a jerk is dead now... what do you think about that? I says, well that don't sound like too good of deal for him then."  The end of this phrase is perhaps the most Minnesotan response ever.  To begin with it's understated and mildly passive aggressive.  It's a negation rather than affirming something directly.  A true Minnesotan will never say "that sounds good" when he can instead say "that doesn't sound too bad."  He talks about it in terms of "deals."  This too is a common Minnesota phrasing, with phrases like "no big deal", "not too bad of a deal", "heck of a deal" all being common.
 
The sudden shift from talking about police business to the weather with no hesitation might seem like a movie contrivance, but no that's also accurate.  This is known as the "Minnesotan Non-Sequitur" and it happens when a conversation suddenly changes topic (often to something about the weather, food or cars.)  Having a non-sequitur right before the end of the conversation is common when the people involved are not related or close friends.  (If they were, the conversation would have had 15 minutes of small talk before it could end.)  Note too how they don't say goodbye.  They just make an observation and mutually decide to walk away from each other.  This too, is accurate.

Sisterly bickering
 

Currently super sick so I played some Mario Golf. It's a pretty pretty game so I thought it might be nice for a study:

 

Damn I love that one! great work

Currently super sick so I played some Mario Golf. It's a pretty pretty game so I thought it might be nice for a study: