miketheratguy

I like that the future of multimedia includes a brick-sized single-button mouse.

Nah, see, the fanboys riot not because they were loving everything that they'd been given to that point, but because the empty promises and dashed hopes have caused their frustration to reach a plateau. They're giving Lucas his final chance, reluctantly allowing themselves to buy into what appears to be one final, truly heartfelt promise to drop the bullshit and be good, and then they're violently stabbed through the heart with a lightsaber at PRECISELY the moment they were won over enough to believe that that trust was finally going to be rewarded. The fans don't lose their shit because they were kicked out of a limo, the fans lose their shit because their buddy in the hooptie kept doing that thing where he kept braking and pulling forward to trick them into thinking that he was going to stop and let them get in. Then backed over them at full speed. Anyway I'll give TPM Qui-Gon, I actually had no problem with that character. I felt that Liam Neeson brought some much-needed dignity and restraint to the film and was, as a result, one of the very few things that I legitimately enjoyed about it. Also, the Phantom Menace duel WAS good - that eight or ten second series of attacks and parries between Obi-Wan and Maul immediately after Obi-Wan is let free of the force field walls is probably my favorite single lightsaber trade in the entirety of the films. It's hard for me to say whether it's the best duel - the most proficient, I suppose, and the three-person dynamic was really interesting (and incredibly awesome the first time I saw it). I also give that duel points for being particularly well-shot. Lots of dramatic wide angles and sustained shots, something that they didn't do very much in the prequel trilogy. That said I've got a soft spot for Anakin / Obi-Wan from Sith, and I greatly enjoyed the two duels at the end of Force Awakens for the sheer simplicity of the combat. By that I mean that there were zero flips, zero moments of grandstanding - it was simply two people striking hard with lightsabers in an attempt to win.

The Phantom Menace is literally one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I would argue one of the worst movies ever made. The acting is terrible. The script is terrible. The plot is terrible. The pacing is terrible. Loads of individual choices are terrible (Why do aliens have so many ethnic accents? Why did you have Anakin build C-3PO? Why did you completely retcon the definition of the force? Why did you imply that Anakin was immaculately conceived? Why did you hide Darth Maul in the shadows for 90 percent of the film and then kill him after ten minutes of screen time? Why was the podrace scene 15 minutes long? Why was it narrated by Greg Proops using a voice that sounded like it was ripped straight from a modern day racing commentator from Earth? Why was the entire plot motivated by trade disputes? What is the practical purpose of those multiple force field walls that prevent Obi-Wan from helping Qui-Gon, other than to serve the plot?) I could keep going but I think you get my sentiment. Everyone passionately hates the walking Stepin Fetchit comedy routine that is Jar Jar Binks, and with good reason, but I just rattled off an entire paragraph of things to hate about that film without even getting to him. That's how god-awful The Phantom Menace is. If you want to call Revenge if the SIth a hot mess that's fine but if you're going to do it in comparison to this piece of nightmare filth then people are definitely going to have some questions for you.

Ah, touche.

Yeah, but I'd like to think that you'd get swept up in the carnage all the same. If not out of legitimate rage, then out of the urge to do something fun and productive. I've been told that I compartmentalize really well, at least regarding things that I like. I thoroughly enjoyed Jeepers Creepers despite the fact that it was directed by a massive, slovenly, convicted child molester, I still love watching Chris Benoit matches despite the fact that the man murdered his entire family, and I will always love Revenge of the Sith despite the fact that The Phantom Menace and much of Attack of the Clones exist. So you see? All you have to do to enjoy Revenge of the Sith is to learn to look past the thing that Jeepers Creepers, Chris Benoit, and the other two prequels all have in common: The rape and murder of youth.

See also: Their stance on graphic violence. It's okay to kill someone in cold blood as long as they don't bleed.

This is true. And if it happens, I'll have my trusty crowbar ready. Glad you enjoyed it, hanks for reading. To each their own, my friend. I can't think of five things that I like about Episode I (I can get to about four). Meanwhile I can't think of five things that I dislike about Revenge of the Sith.

(Warning: a wee bit of sexual content in here). Flash back to the spring of 2005, when the entire world breathlessly awaited the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. It was to be the Star Wars film that fans had waited all their lives for, the movie that finally revealed what caused Anakin Skywalker to turn to the dark side and become legendary supervillain Darth Vader. It was also intended to be, as everyone understood it, the very last new Star Wars film that we'd ever get. Expectations were high. Excitement was through the roof. Around this time I was talking to my favorite cousin, a guy about my age and with roughly the same sense of humor. He wasn't a Star Wars fan at the time - he tolerated them and picked a few elements that he enjoyed from each film but generally found the whole affair to be tedious, due more to the fanaticism of many of its fans than the quality of the actual films themselves. We were on the phone one day during one of our many hours-long conversations and the subject of the last Star Wars film was raised. How is it going to end? There was some back and forth discussion, mostly realistic stuff. Maybe Anakin will turn because of this. Maybe Darth Vader will come to power because of that. We talked of the various rumors that were floating around, as well as things that fans were hoping would or would not come to fruition. There was a lot at stake with this film, not just the saving of the prequel trilogy but the redemption in many fan's eyes of the Star Wars franchise as a whole. The prequel-era image of George Lucas as a self-indulgent, legacy destroying hack was brought into the discussion, and I think it was I who made an amusing observation. "You know what would REALLY piss the Star Wars fans off? If the film was really good, got like two hours deep, hovered right on the verge of the big reveal, and then abruptly cut to footage of George Lucas furiously masturbating. End scene, cut to credits (complete with the famous John Williams fanfare, of course)". As always happens between my cousin and I, we immediately began escalating the absurdity of the hypothetical scenario by bouncing more humorous details back and forth in rapid-fire succession. "He's giving the middle finger while he's doing it", my cousin added. "He comes right into the camera", I pitched. "RIGHT into the camera". It took all of ten seconds for us to turn the idea of this decades-long moment of suspense into nothing more than an obscene, self-serving gesture of brazen hostility towards the audience. "The audience would riot", I said. "I mean not just yell and piss and moan, I mean actually tear seats from the theater floor and throw them through the screen". My cousin responded with his own imagery. "The fans would be so enraged that they'd quickly turn their hostilities towards each other. People in the theater would be punching each other in the face". "There'd be stabbings", I added. "People will be hanged in the lobby. "The ecstatic moans of George Lucas will be the soundtrack to the revolution", said my cousin. We quickly concluded that the rage could not be contained in the theater and would spill into the streets. Not just a single theater either, of course, but EVERY theater in the country. At roughly 2:00 AM on May 20th, 2005, the apocalypse would begin. Hordes of people would emerge from their screenings, throngs of humanity locked in violence. Corpses would litter the roads. Property would be destroyed. Fires would flare from every neighborhood. At home, the people who for some reason hadn't attended the film would turn from their televisions to look out the window and see armed citizens running through the streets. "They would know what must be done", I said. My cousin agreed. "They'd answer the call to action. They'd solemnly nod and leave the window to retrieve their axes and pith helmets". I concluded that the first hour would be anarchy but that the crowds would quickly mobilize and form factions of original trilogy fans and prequel trilogy fans. In a single night they would run across the landscape in armies hundreds of thousands strong, savagely screaming with weapons held aloft. "They'll run beyond the streets seeking their foes", my cousin said. "Into the water. Across the plains. Through the forest". "They'll encounter Bigfoot", I said. "The horde of people will be so large and cover so much ground that they'll stumble upon him while he's just doing his thing in the woods. They'll spot each other and stop. The mutual shock will be so palpable that Bigfoot and the angry Star Wars army will just stand there staring at each other in disbelief. Then all at once the crowd will resume screaming and rush him". "Bigfoot will be immediately engaged". "The fans will storm the White House. There will be martial law. The clans will clash with spears and clubs and flaming swords. Some will still be in costume. Many will be wearing armor. Others will commandeer fighter jets and drop bombs from overhead. In mere hours entire cities will be burned to the ground. The unrest would spread across continents. Terrified governments will respond by launching thermonuclear war. There will be human sacrifices and new world orders. The dead will rise for some reason". Needless to say, this went on for some time before we finally became so exhausted and sore from laughter that we finally just had to kind of catch our breaths and hope that this wasn't how things were going to go down before quickly agreeing that no, actually, that would probably be the raddest way for things to go down. Unfortunately Revenge of the Sith wound up being great and humanity never got the chance to put its primordial survival instincts to the test of its natural limits. ...Yet.

Mid / late 90s EGM, some of the hardest ones to replace. Thanks for this awesome effort!

Yesssssss!!!! This one's an all-time favorite. Some of my greatest memories of reading EGM come from this issue. I can still recall precisely which mall bookstore (remember those?) I was at when I first spotted it. Really good times. This is a huge gap filled for me, thank you!

Good. That's how it should be. These girls were often more flattered than anything. "Oh, what a sweet guy". "What a nice personality". Oh, okay. So I guess assessing every female customer's fuckability while they're trying to walk out of there with a copy of The Constant Gardener or some shit registers as "sweet" now.

Big magazine! Big prizes! I LOVE IT!!!

Hmm. I've been lucky and have never really had a "creepy" job before. The worst I can think of is when I did a second stint at Blockbuster in 2007, and my manager was a short, pudgy Hispanic guy named Lalo. He was friendly, but he was.....too friendly when it came to the attractive ladies. Not outright sexual harassment or anything like that, but overly affectionate with his words. He'd say something like "hello, what can I do for you beautiful?" or "I can absolutely look that up for you, come over to this register gorgeous". He did it constantly and it really irked me. What probably irked me more than anything is that most of the women seemed unbothered by this, in fact I'd reckon that several of them felt flattered. Is it really that easy to arbitrarily flatter someone by making throwaway comments about their physical appearance? Either way it was something that we, the cogs, were not supposed to do (and something that I think no register jockey should do period) so it was uncomfortable having a manager who did it.

I actually hate it anytime ANY pages are joined together. They screw up my orientation and I wind up having to click a different viewing option or reorient the display direction of my ebook raider to properly view them (and then back again).

No. Nintendo still hasn't gotten it right. In fact I would argue that they've been getting it more wrong than ever.

And, I can say without hyperbole, horse-mouthed hyena lady Julia Roberts has nothing on that cartoon prostitute.

Awesome! Like I said with the last EGMs, we're getting to that millennial sweet spot of 2000 and 2001 issues, the ones that I've had the hardest time replacing over the years. While all EGMs are appreciated, this recent emphasis on that particular era has me really excited. Thanks a lot!

A fox in a James Bond tuxedo preparing to play the Super Nintendo with a 48th street prostitute? Finally, a magazine for me!

Ah, good on you. Final Fantasy IV (in particular, the original SNES experience that was "II") will always be my favorite game in that entire series. For the handful of things that it did wrong, it did so much else so wonderfully right. It's not even that FFVIII was a bad game (I mean, I guess I can't really vouch for it, having abruptly abandoned it, but it didn't SEEM like a particularly bad game), it's that I just found myself so completely over it, despite having logged a good 15 or 20 hours into the game by that point. There have been games where I found myself too frustrated by a lack of progress, too daunted by insurmountable challenge or even too bored by what I'd vainly hoped would become an exciting title. But FFVIII was the only experience I can remember that saw me literally just sitting there, controller in hand, with the epiphanic feeling of "Wait...why am I even playing this?" washing over me. It wasn't irritation, it wasn't anger. It wasn't even boredom. It was sheer, shrugging indifference. I felt like I'd wasted my time on something that I would likely never finish, because I'd come to the sudden realization that I no longer even had the desire to finish it. I turned it off and popped in Silent Hill instead. I never touched Final Fantasy VIII again. From that day forward I never invested so much as a single hour into any of the subsequent Final Fantasy games (save for re-releases of the 8 and 16 nit games) and likely never will. Just like that, inside the span of one unpredictable moment in my life, the urge to play new JRPGs (Final Fantasy in particular) disappeared completely.

I feel bad for Mike Matei. So much of the internet hates him (not referring to you guys, just in general). He always struck me as a decent, enthusiastic (if a little spazzy) dude. Huh. For me this is defined as "Final Fantasy VIII".

Fighting to resist making dismissive masturbatory gesture regarding profoundly overrated professional whiner Kurt Cobain. Fighting so hard. She had me at Alison Hannigan. Ooooh, great choice. "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents". I bumped into Richard Dreyfuss at LAX the first time that I ever visited LA. That was pretty rad. He was very nice, stopped to sign an autograph and chat for a minute even though it was obvious that his mind was on getting somewhere. He was surprisingly short in person.

Hell, wait until they get to gimmick-ass motion controllers. They won't know how they good they had it.

2 EGMs in one day? Always a great way to start a morning! And what's this? A 2001 issue? Awwwwww yeah. We're starting to get into that millennial sweet spot. Thank you all!

In the order that they come to my head: Bold systems are the ones I own. NES SNES Genesis Gameboy Gameboy Color Gameboy Advance Nintendo DS 3DS Playstation PS2 PS3 PS4 Xbox Xbox 360 Game Gear Sega CD Sega Saturn 3DO Turbografx 16 Sega Master System Atari 2600 Atari 5200 Atari 7800 Colecovision Intellivision Game and Watch GP32 PSP Vita Virtual Boy Dreamcast Nintendo 64 Gamecube Sega 32x Sega Nomad Game.com CD-i Wii Wii U

You know what? I'd like to meet myself. Lil' Mike, around maybe age 12 or 13. I'd want to sit him down and tell him to never forget to show love and appreciation for those close to him, that the struggles of junior high and all the confusion and peer pressure and self-doubt will eventually settle down and become a non-issue, and that there are some truly amazing times ahead as long as I continue to make the right choices in life and remain true to the person that I've always been - but to take my time and enjoy childhood as much as I possibly can, because I'm only going to get to once.