Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, Big Ben’s concussion saga, trying out for the New Jersey Nets, or walking four blocks when you really shouldn’t, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Thanksgiving is a special time for many of us. Getting together with friends and family, eating lots of turkey and trimmings, and watching football is what the holiday is all about for millions of Americans. For me, Thanksgiving was always a special gaming holiday. You see, I used to rent games at the local video store when I was a kid. The store didn’t charge for the holiday, so it was like getting an extra day for free (actually, it was totally like that)!
One of my favorite Thanksgivings of all time was spent (a little bit) with my wonderful family and (a lot) with The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. I played the hell out of that game from Wedensday through Friday. I’m pretty sure that’s when I developed the habit of playing games until I pass out with the controller. I had several Thanksgiving marathon sessions like that when I was in grade school and I remember them fondly.
Did any of you do the same thing? Was Thanksgiving designated as a national videogame holiday for you? I’d love to hear about your epic Turkey Day gaming sessions.
When I was a young kid I too had the same gaming marathons for thanksgiving. The free day of rental was just an added bonus! My fondest memory from Thanksgiving was playing Mortal Kombat at home. Fun times.
Then I got a bit older, and I liked to get rip roaring drunk.
Now I'm a bit older….I want nothing more than to sit in my man-cave and play games while viewing the football games on the other tv in the cave. Life is sweet.
My turkey day gaming memories never envolved letting me sit in my room playing games alone like I'd planned lol. I'd always have to help babysit my cousins. So we'd usually end up playing things like Battletoads vs Double Dragon, or TMNT Turtles in Time, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct and Street Fighter.
Now after the holidays I ban my husband from the living room so I can game. And vice versa, only he adds his football to the mix lol.
god damn i loved zelda 2
the other day when we were discussing great nes games i forgot like 20 at least that i loved, and i thought to myself "whats my favorite NES game?"
it might have actually been duck tales…but zelda 2 was WAY up there.
i remember in zelda 2 in the last castle, on one of the bridges, a giant blue blob fell off the top of the screen and scared the living hell out of me. I could never beat the evil shadow link though, until i discovered emulators
No one lets me game during Thanksgiving. It would be nice if I could though.
@thundercracker – you said duck tales, but for some reason darkwing duck came to mind lol.
Man if I had to think about what NES games that were my favorite…Solstice, Castlevania (any of them), and Maniac Mansion. LOL.
@Thunder – I don't know how many times I played through Ducktales! I knew where all the super diamonds were, and I had everything down to a science… I could go through the entire game in less then 30 mins. In fact, I was so quick at the last little climbing/jumping/race boss fight that I often stopped and waited for the Scottish Duck to catch up before I grabbed the treasure. I loved using the cane bounce constantly.
@Topic – I really don't remember much gaming specific to Thanksgiving. I know I spent an awful lot of time in my formative years playing the early FFs – so I am sure that more then one Thanksgiving was spent with FFIV and FFVI (in fact, before I was able to purchase FFIV, I ended up renting it from Blockbuster over the course of a year to beat it. Hoping beyond hope that my save file was still around was really tense).
@scottish duck
flintheart glomgold…the SECOND richest duck in duckberg :)
Thanksgiving at my house growing up was always spent playing video games. The first day we had out of school we went and rented 3 or 4 games just to get the free day. It was never any game in particular.
Also now that I am older I hate it when holidays come up and kids go out and rent all the damned games. There are hardly any games on the shelf at the video store. Our Hastings never gets more than 2-3 copies of a game for rent and usually they come out for rent a week after release. Went in yesterday and there were 8 copies of AC2 on each console GONE and 6-7 copies of MW2 all gone. Damned kids. Damned schools for letting them out for the entire week.
get off my lawn, you damned kids
i had my first thanksgiving dinner here in america on 2008. we cook turkey, but we forget about it because of the huge lechon right beside it. my gaming thanksgiving memory was finishing dead space in one sitting.
@rbee
don't forget to bring YAH ROCKIT LAUNCHA!
@smartguy
haha. im using one right now to pwn some dinosaurs in dino crisis. i was about to cry tears of joy when i saw it yesterday in the ps store.
I'm rereading the first three book of Love Hina this year. Maybe they will catch a hint at what they should buy me for Christmas?
LOVE HINA FTW!!!
I grew up in rural Ct. And every year my mother's aunt would have the entire extended family over for Thanksgiving. They'd basically convert their house into rows and rows of cafeteria tables. It made their living room seem like a VWF lodge. But we would see many of our extended family members just this once every year. And usually all of my cousins, second cousins, uncles and such would go out back to the old farm fields and play football for hours on end. I recall one year I ripped my jeans on an old tractor that was still sitting on the side of the field for one reason and ended playing the rest of the game with my backside hanging in the breeze. I was probably lucky that I wasn't hurt, but it's a humorous and self deprecating memory that always gets brought up whenever my family gathers in large groups.
One of my second cousins, who I'd only see that one time every year and didn't really know all that well, was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. It's kinda weird because I've never really known how to feel about that. I didn't know her very well, so it's hard for me to be justifiably "more"" angry than someone who didn't lose a family member n 9/11. But it still gets me pretty pissed off. I think that's why I look at the MW2 "No Russian" level as pretty much unacceptable, as I take it somewhat personally.
That was deeper than I was intending to go this morning. Anyway…..on to our regularly scheduled fart jokes and such.
@Nightshade386
Did it at least make you want to kill that guy even more? (MW2)
@Sandrock: I haven't played it yet. I have seen the video though. My initial thought was, "That's too far. This should be a cut scene or something."
But I had Dragon Age and AC2 reviews to do, and now I've gotta do the L4D2 review as well because we had an editor back out at the last minute. So I probably won't even get to play it until sometime in December.
Man, I feel like I walked into the room, dropped a downer on everyone and killed the conversation. Great. Ray, feel free to blame me if traffic drops like a rock today since everyone seems to have cleared out since I arrived.
@Nightshade386
You don't have to shoot the civilians. The four other members will kill everyone on their own. They also slow your characters movements which help give it more of a cutscene feel than a playable section. My only complaint is when SWAT show up, you HAVE TO fight them or the terrorist will attack you for not fighting.
SPOILER!!!1!!1111!ONE!
Which is redundant since they kill you, the CIA agent, anyway.
@RPAD
we should talk about everyone's GOTY on the next coffee talk.
@Sandrock: Yeah I know. I still think the whole thing was a case of poor taste.
@nightshade
How is a bunch of Russians with machine guns shooting Russians in an airport correlating to your unfortunate situation? I don't mean to be blunt, but you aren't driving a plane into anything.
I'm not trying to step on toes or pick a fight. Very sorry for your loss.
@Smartguy. It's giving the players the option of participating in an act of terrorism, however it's done, that crosses the line IMO. I know what they were trying to accomplish with the scene. I still think it was a bad idea.
@Nightshade – I think it's probably one of the more poignent scenes in gaming so far. What makes one act of "terroism" different then one act of "war"? Have we as a people become so blinded by these labels of "good" and "bad" that we ascribe to everything that acts of horrible violence are acceptable as long as we can justify the ends they achieve. Always remember, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Case in point – Ezio Auditore di Firenze is a terrorist.
@Larcenous: Ezio isn't tasked with killing as many civilians as he can. It's not really a fair comparison.
The US military consider civilian deaths as collateral. If a high enough "target" is found, they would bomb a mall full collateral as long as they can claim the "target" was worth it. There are no innocent in war because people can't live with themselves if they realized every life is innocent in war.
How come this is different that something like GTA or Saints Row. I go out of my way to kill civilians and cops. I guess its okay though because we are all from the same country? Seems a bit worse to me. People continue to ask for more freedom and realism, then bitch when something is too risque.
I am not point fingers, just talking in general.
@SlickyFats
I have issues with the No Russian scene that pertain to the story itself, but having to watch it and reluctantly fighting the SWAT was not one of them. The only difference between GTA and No Russian is that in GTA, you don't portray yourself as a terrorist like in No Russian. The distinction seems to have to be made buy the devs and not the people that are playing the game as well. (That and money, if you give the character money then it isn't terrorism anymore. It's capitalism.)
@Nightshade – It's an unfair comparison based on your point of view. Surely, from the eyes of Marco Barbargio, screaming as the assassin he has come to fear races through his palazzo, killing his guards, hidden blade aimed for his heart, Ezio is a terrorist. He seeks to bring down the regime and put another in it's place, one that he finds acceptable. His overall purpose maybe revenge, but does purpose make his actions anything other then reprehensible. He may not be aiming for them, but good people have died as he has sought his target.
In the end, Soldiers, civilians, targets, guards, blacks, whites, gays or straights, labels are labels. It's all the same level of wrong. To blindly accept the death of one while being offended by the deaths of another is the backbone across which that scene was built. Whether intended or not, the purpose of No Russian in implicitly clear in my mind. Making it into a cut scene, would have comepletely destroyed that purpose.
how about that guy that shot 40 plus people at fort hood? he was a major, an army psychiatrist. he even yelled "GOD IS GREAT!!!" before he pulled out his rifle. should the government be concerned more on domestic terrorism? or international terrorism?
@Rbee
thought he praised Allah or Muhammad.
My most prominent Thanksgiving memory is when Jerome Bettis called "Tails" for the overtime coin toss, the coin landed on tails, and the ref still gave the ball to the Lions.
My whole family as well as the whole city of Pittsburgh was pissed off. However, we weren't pissed off at each other. It actually made for quite the bonding experience.
@smartguy
well, allah is translated as God in the muslim world.
Obviously my opinion is somewhat slanted by the personal nature of my connection to the issue.
Moving on….
So I got this month's Game Informer, and I noticed a few things.
1) They did a Top 200 Games of All Time article that is pretty outrageous The first 4 games all came out on the NES. You mean to tell me that the best games ever made, were all made 20 years ago? Seriously?
2) Everything got a 9 or higher this month. Well not everything, but almost everything. That seems a little slanted to me. Sure there are a lot of good games out right now. But to say that something like 10 games all came out in one month and were worthy of a 9 or higher is like saying "this was the best month in video game history." Yet none of these games made the Top 200 list I just mentioned. Makes me wonder if I should go back and check last month's issue to see which of the games reviewed this month had full page ads last month. Just sayin' is all……