It does feel like something is fundamentally missing with the decay of not just specialist darkrooms but retail facing labs and even photo kiosks in chemists etc. Not in a romanticising the past or the final product kind of way, but as a creative & community process: there’s something about the embedded, effortful ritual of image retrieval, observation & archiving that’s severely lacking in the ways we tend to encounter our own & others’ digital photography. I’m glad you got to take a memento with you, at least.
I think All Eternals Deck is often slept on, it’s got some of the most beautiful musicianship & production in their whole catalogue I think. ‘Prowl Great Cain’ is also just… that really is what it’s like lmao. Jenny from Thebes is still occupying that space for me that new tMG albums often do - I don’t fully ‘get it’ yet, but suspect that it’ll suddenly click during a future long play. Maybe this is my cue to give it another go :)
I’m glad I’m not the only one who often has this experience. I find that it happens with just about every new one: they’re often about individual stand-out tracks for me at first, and then after I marinate in them for a long time, I grow to better appreciate them holistically. I know a lot of longtime fans aren’t necessarily as big on modern-era TMG, but I’ve found a lot to appreciate with each new album’s evolution of their sound and also subject matter
I mean, it sounds like great advice! The person who wrote it is probably some combination of cool, and hot, and smart, and leaning forward pointing at the camera with an avatar provided from that thread!
ohhh this all makes a lot of sense now… okay yea I’ve probably interviewed or podcasted with most folks around here at some point. Wow, hey o/ late to the party but my name is Solon, I heard there was forum archeology need from Esper and was looking to help. I’m a first-year library science grad student right now and that’s some sicko stuff that sounds really cool to me.
This is embarrassing to admit but probably a great boon for ya’ll: I am coming into these forums and have never listened to insert credit even though it’s absolutely my shit and I adore the whole cast. Does anyone have fun reccs on where to start? Deep lores to know about? The iceberg post?
hello, i am a friend who is but in their mid-20’s. didn’t play games much until i was like 16 (other than a few things here and there) and then immediately got into stuff more ‘out there’. i like the games, the musics, the films, the books, the comics, and just most art really. my taste is a bit too eclectic to word out, but weird stuff and freak shit is all right up my alley in particular, both thematically and mechanically, but i like heaps
i’m doing my best to slowly make games myself as well
thought i’d get around to the forums after a while and see if i can’t jazz up existence a lil more cause the pod is so good and this seems the place to be
I started by going through and listening to whatever caught my eye, then I’d jump back 10 or 20 and move forward from there. Then I just started moving backwards and that got confusing real quick.
I guess what I’m saying is, follow your heart because it can’t be worse than jumping around, catching up, then listening to like 50 in reverse order at work.
Hi everyone, I’m Ash. I’ve been listening to Insert Credit basically forever but have never really used the site before. Twitter is a cesspool now so I suspect forums might become a bit of a more valuable community space again.
A bit about me: I used to be a games journalist many moons ago, on a British mag called gamesTM. I work in the games industry now, at an indie publisher. I love games of all kinds but especially if they were made before the year 2000. I often contribute to Retro Gamer and Time Extension, and I have my own blog called Games From The Black Hole.
My favourite game ever is Shining Force III and the game I wish was my favourite ever is Burning Rangers.
Hi All! Long time fan of the show. My first encounter with anything related to this podcast was visiting Frank’s Lost Levels website back in the early 00’s.
I’ve also been co-hosting on various retro gaming podcasts since about 2012 including Retro Obscura and Genesis Gems.
My favorite games include things like Snatcher on Sega CD and Xenogears on PS1 and lately Uchuu Race: Astro Go! Go! on Super Famicom.
My favorite music is usually a toss up between XTC and the severely underrated punk/prog insanity of Cardiacs.
Final fun fact - I once interviewed Keith Robinson (RIP) back in 2014. He was one of the original Intellivison Blue Sky Rangers, and then head of Intellivison Productions (prior to Tommy T taking over for the Amiico).
Keith was my favorite person to interview. Warm, gregarious and a great storyteller. And I may have been the only person to ever interview him about Normy’s Beach Babe-O-Rama - based on his syndicated comic strip ‘Making It’. It’s that one that’s been mentioned on Insert Credit by Frank. Hopefully I can get the interview back online soon enough!
Otherwise - I look forward to getting to know you fine folks.
Welcome! Have enjoyed Time Extension and your contributions. Love those first 3 Shining Force games too. I also wish Burning Rangers was less of a mess.
Welcome to you as well!
I just want to say that I do like burning rangers, in part because it’s a mess. for whatever reason I really appreciate games that feel like they’re about to literally break apart, like they’re barely holding together. The graphics in that game are so in and out, so jittery, but so ambitious that it pulls me through the whole experience.
Another good example of this is Thunder Blade for PC Engine. That little 8 bit console was not made for this. It can’t really even do super scaling, and also can’t natively do parallax! And yet in this first scene, you’ve got “3D” buildings made of stacked sprites. Then starting at the minute mark we go to a behind the helicopter superscaler.
It’s a complete mess, and looks like if you coughed on it it’d break apart. but even Sega didn’t attempt this on their own console:
There’s no 3D in the top down sections, and no attempt to transition between them, they’re just separate stages.
Video games! pretty cool even when they’re all messed up.
Thanks! And you’re not wrong - Burning Rangers is probably worth a revisit - even with its flaws.
Some of my favorite jank filled games are things like Home Alone on NES (Developed by Bethesda - remember them?) .
Even with its shaky frame rate, erratic AI and eyesore inducing graphics - Home Alone has some interesting cat and mouse / trap setting gameplay I find pretty addictive. You get 1 life and have to survive for 20 minutes without getting caught. Things are kept interesting by having certain traps ensnare Harry and Marv for different amounts of time. Or the fact that they can “see” you a room over and “hear” you if you drop something near by. Out of all the 8 and 16 bit Home Alone games - it’s my favorite by far. Even if the Genesis version is objectively better.
It looks like the ZX Spectrum port of Thunderblade used a similar technique of stacking sprites. I love the tricks developers had to use to fake a super scaler type effect on weaker hardware. https://youtu.be/SxjWdougJ1A?feature=shared
Whoa nice! Anything running on the spectrum feels like a miracle to me. This one trying to break the laws of the physical world is exactly what I like to see.
