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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on Feb 14, 2016 4:24:56 GMT -5
OPCFG for me too and I think that's how I found this site though I could be remembering it wrong.
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Post by Bumpyroad on Feb 2, 2017 10:57:31 GMT -5
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Post by spanky on Feb 2, 2017 11:35:00 GMT -5
The author has managed a few personal blogs since then. His last one, Magweasel, hasn't been updated for a few years. I seriously think this guy had a huge impact on the NES collector's market and the 8-bit nostalgia boom. His site and others like it are what made me start collecting NES games in the late 90s-early 2000s. I imagine a whole lot of other people were inspired in the same way. I used to really enjoy a website whose owner personified himself using the hippie sprite from Mother 1 and had a running comic series using NES sprites. I really wish I could remember the name and find it, but I think his name was something really generic like NESGuy or something. I remember a long-ass time ago that the 8-Bit Theater guy posted a link to a website called colond.net (ColonD, as in ) that was basically just a guy's personal blog that was plain black text on a white background with no formatting and for some reason I found it really entertaining. He wrote a piece on Hydlide that got me interested in bad NES games. This was in 2000-2001 or so, so the NES had only been out of commission for 7-8 years at the time. For comparison, the Wii came out in 2004, I think? But it got a lot of enthusiast love at the very dawnings of widespread internet use which I think did a lot to perpetuate its place in culture. The site and guy you're thinking of is the Old-School Gamer or more commonly, just OSG. His site is archived here if you wanted to check it out. Back in the day('99 to '01 or so) I was pretty involved in what was called the NES Scene - probably the first wave of NES Collectors and enthusiasts. It was the first internet community that I was ever a part of and the one I was the most heavily involved in(being a friendless teenager helped a lot). I have fond memories of cheap Geocities sites that would spring up for a couple months then never get updated again. It really was a great time to be a collector - games were cheap and plentiful. OSG's page was definitely in the upper echelon of these NES sites. In particular, it was funny as hell - most NES humor sites before then were just lazy sprite comics or pointing out the bad translations in Metal Gear. The community really died out in the early 2000's. I forget exactly what killed it. I remember we had a real insular "you had to be there" mentality with our NES enthusiasm - as a result we were pretty hostile to anyone we considered too young or too old. There were lots of flame wars and forum hackings, stuff like that. I think we were just bored guys in our teens and early twenties with lots of pent up aggression. We eventually all grew up and moved on. I realized I wasn't ever going to get a girlfriend by idling in an IRC chat until 3 AM on a Saturday and quietly left. Our old message board is still up but most of the posts are along the "wow this place is still here?" variety. I miss how personal a lot of these old pages felt - you really got a sense of the owner's personality with the design of the site, what auto-loading midis they chose to play etc. Like someone else in thread said, it's great that a few of the old game blogs, like Kid Fenris are still around.
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Post by kingmike on Feb 2, 2017 15:33:23 GMT -5
The community really died out in the early 2000's. I forget exactly what killed it. I remember we had a real insular "you had to be there" mentality with our NES enthusiasm - as a result we were pretty hostile to anyone we considered too young or too old. I can remember joking about the "Atari Fatties" and the "PlayStation kiddies" in my circle. I guess we just got older and more mature, and realized it's better to include all generations of gaming in discussion. Us in the group of 8/16-bit Sega and Nintendo consoles were probably also getting older, and less active and less metabolism have probably started getting a bit chubby ourselves.
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Post by Resident Tsundere on Feb 4, 2017 23:08:41 GMT -5
Audio Atrocities hasn't updated in a few years.
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Post by GamerL on Feb 4, 2017 23:24:16 GMT -5
I miss the old IGN, back when it was actually focused on video games instead of the all purpose "media" website it seems to be today.
I also miss the old Destructoid, back when it was a more insular, tighter knit community.
Neither of these websites are technically "defunct" though.
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Post by nerdybat on Feb 5, 2017 4:26:26 GMT -5
On something more international, my favorite is AG.ru. One of the first Russian gaming websites, which had massive database, lots of [not so] charismatic reviewers (one of them, Nomad, became something of a meme on Russian imageboards) and a very tight and proactive (if a bit vitriolic) community. I don't remember exactly why that happened, but if speaking shortly, AG.ru had a fallout with Rambler, the company that supported and owned the site, and everybody from the team just suddenly abandoned it after writing a short "goodbye" open letter. Rambler tried to hire a new team, but they lacked the same charisma behind them, and it never caught on with the public again - everybody went away, just like the initial team. The site still exists, mostly untouched, but for the most part it runs "on autopilot", with some rare updates in form o copypasted news, and no new reviews since 2015. Lurking around it is kind of fascinating, gives me that "ghost town" vibe.
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cm30
New Member
Just working on articles and Mario fan games...
Posts: 49
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Post by cm30 on Feb 5, 2017 13:33:09 GMT -5
For me, three sites I used to really like before they went defunct are Waluigious, Detstar and Kitchen Island.
The first because it was one of the few blogs that tried to really talk about the universe of the Mario series and the characters that lived there. You'd see posts about the history of the Mushroom Kingdom, of why Peach is the only human in a kingdom of Toads, about how the Banjo-Kazooie and Conker franchises connect to the Mario one, as well as all kinds of miscellaneous roundups of fan art and obscure music from the series.
Heck, I was even a writer there once! Made me pretty damn proud at the time, since I went from being a random reader to perhaps the most active member of staff on the whole site.
Unfortunately, it closed down when the site creator found a love interest and decided he was more interested in writing alongside her than against the people he used to talk to online. Apparently his 'gimmick' was appearing as a 'nerd' and he thought being in a relationship made it impossible to continue with it.
So yeah, that's one of them. Supper Mario Broth was their next project, until it got sold off to someone else a while back.
Another favourite I had was Detstar, which used to provide a ton of useful information about GoldenEye 007, Super Smash Bros Melee and Mario Kart Double Dash. Sadly, it seems operational costs got too high for the webmaster, and so he eventually decide to close the site and focus on his comics instead.
Finally, Kitchen Island was basically the single website in existence dedicated specifically to the Wario series. You'd have information on Wario Land and WarioWare, some forums to discuss the games with other fans and sections for things like fan art and fiction on top of that. For a Wario fan, it was great knowing this site existed!
Then it just vanished. Why?
I honestly don't know. The creator of the site has pretty much completely left the internet for unknown reasons, there was no closing down message on the site or any forums to explain it, and the site's activity was actually pretty decent in the olden days. It just shut down without a trace never to be seen again.
Still, it did at least encourage me to set up Wario Forums, and that site has now done significantly on the activity front than Kitchen Island ever did. So I guess it proved there was actually a demand for a community based on the Wario series.
It's just I wish I could be working alongside the owner of the existing site instead, with both sites merged into a much better, definitive one.
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Post by toei on Feb 5, 2017 13:52:13 GMT -5
Naflign's Ego, a site that dealt mostly with the Phantasy Star series way back when. It was where I learned about the then super-obscure, inaccessible Phantasy Star Gaiden & Phantasy Star Adventure for the Japanese Game Gear. He was working on retranslating Phantasy Star 2 as well, if I remember. Vanished off the Internet long, long ago.
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Post by Snake on Feb 6, 2017 11:40:43 GMT -5
Enix forums. It existed before Enix merged with Squaresoft. The moderator on the site was also a translator for Enix games. I believe he was Japanese, but had Canadian citizenship. Very cool guy, he once shipped me a statue of Dio Brando; someone gifted it to him. He was not a Jojo fan, he though I would appreciate it more.
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Post by Bumpyroad on Sept 6, 2017 2:19:23 GMT -5
Insert Credit - it used to be a fun place for all sorts of video game related news, articles, jokes, conversations, interviews etc. while it still had color in its cheeks. Nowdays, apart from some occasional podcasts, is pretty much dead, with tumbleweeds blowing through the pages.
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Post by GamerL on Sept 6, 2017 3:48:32 GMT -5
I can't believe, I mean I am utterly flabbergasted that I forgot to mention The AV Club spin off site "The Gameological Society"
It was absolutely fantastic, some of the best writing on video games I've literally ever seen, website or magazine, but it was so short-lived, only lasting a little over a year, that I often forget about it.
Not only were the reviews excellent, but there was also these cool retrospective articles on things like Guitar Hero (I never even played Guitar Hero and still loved the article) and the British children's game show Knightmare.
It was so good, so of course it had to end and gaming journalism has pretty much been a cesspit ever since.
I believe the site itself is still up and it's worth going back and reading of the feature articles.
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Napoli
Junior Member
Posts: 71
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Post by Napoli on Sept 6, 2017 5:14:59 GMT -5
Way of the Rodent was a British gaming site that I really enjoyed. I don't think the forums were ever that popular but I liked the content they produced.
And before forums, I was on the Turbo Mailing List. It was a mailing list for all things TurboGrafx/PC Engine related. I think some of those people have moved onto the pcenginefx forums but it is not quite the same.
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norm
Junior Member
Posts: 67
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Post by norm on Sept 7, 2017 0:58:40 GMT -5
Gamingfm.com used to be the greatest game music site of all time.
Never really seen anything like it since.
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Post by Kokoro on Sept 7, 2017 21:30:28 GMT -5
GameDaily. They had some pretty interesting top lists.
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