So I have to ask, is Great Greed better than Quest 64? Give us your reasons.
You used to have a song playing in the background of your staff info page on the main site - somewhere in the 2005-2006 time range. What song was it and what game was it from? I remember hearing, loving it, and having no idea what/where it was from. I still can remember it.
Besides me (because the answer is always The 984), which RPGCer, Staffer or otherwise (or choose one from both categories), do you most miss talking to?
What is the precise reason that car is off limits to all passengers?
1: Where is this general life bio update you spoke of and;
2: What’s your real name? Facebook purposes. No homo.
The site declined mostly due to the rigors of age and not cultivating a crop of young go-getters to continue maintaining it. Even in the “good ole days” not as many people actually did as much site work around here as it might have appeared from the outside, but there was definitely a lot more community involvement. But as people got involved in first college and then life-after-college, I guess just interests, free time, and priorities changed? Ultimately I guess I’d blame myself the most for holding a relatively megalomaniacal grip on certain things and not doing a good enough job of delegating the work load to others, which harmed our ability to gain new staff? Despite everything though I’m still proud of what everyone accomplished, we covered a lot of games, call no person or corporation master, and hey we’re even ranked ahead of RPLamer! I can’t believe that actually.
Mostly though it’s zeppelin’s fault for pissing all over our forums until they would nary hold a further ounce.
When I first started visiting RPGC (back when I was in high school … oh lord we’re talking like 1998-1999 or so) I first would post under the name “Call Me … Flying Man,” a reference to Earthbound. But I later changed it to Merlin, which ended up sticking. I’ve always loved reading the Arthurian stories and I think that TV miniseries starring Sam Neil as Merlin had come on around that time period, so there you go.
As for the pianos, my memory on that is slightly weaker. I think during one of our goofing around threads way back, someone (Macc perhaps) pretended to “drop a piano” on me as part of the banter. At some point thereafter I started self-deprecatingly pretend to drop them on myself in threads and it eventually stuck as a sort of proto-meme. Remember when the internet didn’t have memes?
I have never played Great Greed. I can however attest that it is far better than Quest 64. It just has to be! I still remember that awful Quest 64 game somehow, it’s stuck in my brain. It’ll probably give me cancer someday.
Is it the song that’s still playing on my staff page? I don’t remember, I’m sorry about that. Back in those days I used to download midi’s, as mp3s weren’t quite the dominant music file format, and they weren’t all from games. In fact there’s a chance this one isn’t. If it is from a game I think it was Romancing Saga 3, the same game that my avatar is re-colored from. Or maybe an SNES FF game? There’s a possibility that it is from a midi artist that someone mentioned a long time ago. I think you can download it from this link if you want it.
This is a hard question to answer without hurting any feelings by leaving someone out. In general I think I remember specific qualities that I enjoyed about specific people. SK challenged me intellectually and made me a better person politically. Macc’s jokes. 984 and Sinistral’s confidence. I feel like Cid always had the best of me in an argument. Nulani’s bluntness. Weiila’s optimism. I probably talked the most in-depth with Mazrim Taim before he disappeared into some granola Colorado school. Nobody’s personality has varied so much as zeppelin’s. Ultimately though I think I had the easiest time being friends with Zero. I’m already thinking of a dozen people I’m leaving out. Cless. Kagon. Lunairis. And more.
As for non-staffers, I like lots of them. Some days I’m not sure if I made the right decision going to the mat so many times for MegamanX or Charlemagne, but the troublemakers are part of our history just as much as any nice person like Trillian or VickiMints. And Dragon Tear mailed me one of Mao’s Little Red Books, so I’ll always remember that.
…Maquiladora.
A funny way to keep the player on the “rails” of the story. I crack myself up.
- Here.
- B e n G r i t z. But I use facebook rather infrequently.
No. I remember when we didn’t call them memes, but shit like Mr. T Ate My Balls from back in 1995 were memes. They just weren’t called that because we didn’t ape a word from Dawkins. I can’t remember when we first started saying meme either.
Sometimes the nice people go on vacation and never return for reasons that are their own, leaving us stuck with Charlemagne (and it’s funny that of the five people you mentioned in the non-Staffer paragraph, three are Staffers, one was a database Staffer, and the fifth was Trillian). I too have one of Mao’s Little Red Books from DT. I tried getting zepp to send me a Chinese bootleg copy of Chinese Democracy, but he never found one.
Merlin, maz and I got together in boston once. We watched baseball, a game I’ve really run with over the years. I remember Merlin and I seemed to talk about that the most and it was fun. Are you a lawyer yet?
That’s the one! 
Can’t hear it in my browser though >.<
(Edit: I can play it once downloaded though )
Can’t blame you for not knowing about Great Greed. Its a Gameboy RPG that was pitifully bland and is thus the correct answer to my question.
At least Quest 64 had that elemental spirits system, ability growth through use ala SaGa games, and free roaming battlefields to fight in even if they almost always devolved into dumping everything into Water and Earth for the healing spells and Avalanche, ignoring the attack stats since you should be casting spells constantly, and getting dogpiled by every enemy and/or you running around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to heal up enough to be able to attack more than once before needing to heal again respectfully. Basically Quest 64 needed more than one playable character (among the myriad of other issues in the game like the crappy soundtrack, the stupid way items are handled, the encounter rate, the bland designs, the horrid difficulty spikes, etc).
Great Greed meanwhile has all the same issues on top of being an early GameBoy game but has only the occasional temporary ally who’s biggest contribution is maybe pitching in an attack or two randomly during fights, tying controls to the face buttons even though the game isn’t action oriented in the slightest, and an incredibly abusable save anywhere mechanism that’s practically necessary for the stupidly difficult endgame going for it.
I’m going to tack on another question;
I was digging through some decade old burnt CD’s in my car the other week and one came on that I remember grabbing from mIRC ages ago. I think it was called “In the Limelight” and you, in particular, were nutso over that song. I can’t find it on any of my HD’s or on googletube. Who was the artist and how did you come across it originally?
@Sorc baseball is still fun, not a lawyer, decided I didn’t want to do it.
@Killmore agree to disagree! Quest 64 made me want to throw out my N64.
@Kagato I believe what you’re referring to is a song from a Charlie Chaplin movie (Limelight) that was mentioned in a Walker Percy book I really liked back in high school called Lancelot. There were many versions of it, here’s one from the original movie I think.
Oh wow, Charlie himself wrote this?! Thanks for the link!
Interesting analysis. Why did you pick the swordsdude from RS3 for your sig rather than another character?
I have so much piss, no toilet can hold me
Just curious, how did you pay your law school debt without doing the lawyery thing for a few years first. Cause isn’t that what most people do, sell their souls for a few years until they can afford to do what they love? At least, that’s what I have to do with business school, sell my “soul” to wall st for a few hours before I can afford to get back to Asia and start my opium den/harem/ICBM smuggling business. If there’s a better way, I’d love to hear it.
Why do you do anything?
Looking back on the many years of RPGC doing its thing, what is your fondest memory? And if you could do it all over again, what would you have done differently? And also, smooth or crunchy peanut butter?
Oh why not.
Granted, I have changed tremendously over the past decade. I used to collect Video game music. Now I collect tarantulas. Who would have thought ?
Would you get a Mexican Redknee tarantula as a display animal to show off say… in your living room ? This is the classic pet tarantula, heavily featured in '70s horror films and made a brief appearance in “Indiana Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Ark”. Remember that scene in the beginning with large spiders all over Indiana ? Those were Mexican Redknee.
Mine is always out on display. But my more colorful Mexican Fireleg tarantula steals the show. Because she’s much more pretty 
Anyways, would you get a tarantula as people would get tropical fish ?
I don’t really remember now for sure, but there are two likely reasons. Lunairis was doing a lot of re-modeling and customizing of sprites. He either did the one I use on his own initiative or maybe it was my favorite character from that game and asked him to work with that one? I feel like I had some input on the hair/clothing colors.
It’s not all paid for as of now. There is a program for federal-based student loan debt called IBR or income-based repayment. It caps your payments at 15% of your AGI and any amount not paid off in 25 years is cancelled. I strongly recommend looking into it for anyone with student debt problems as it makes your obligations manageable. Be careful if you’re married though, because one year I filed taxes jointly with my spouse, which then treats our joint income as if it’s all mine for payment calculating; which resulted in a monthly payment that was almost half my take-home pay for the month. But if you’re on your own (or use filing separately status for taxes) it is the only way to relieve the burden. In a few years my wife’s income will change which will help speed up the repayment so I don’t anticipate using up the entire 25 year window. I have some private loans which don’t qualify for this program, and those have to be paid too.
But I was determined not to have to “sell out,” there is just a trade-off involved.
Either by choice or obligation! I went to see Fast & Furious 6 just now because I like movie explosions, I do the dishes because I ‘should’ do them. My parents played the guilt card with me a lot when I didn’t want to do stuff as a kid, so now I end up feeling bad if I don’t pretend to fake good manners on occasion.
Probably my fondest memories are either the long nights staying up late chatting with people, the first time I saw Mr. Saturn’s site layout load indicating that RPGC was ours, or when Mazrim told me that he put Alexandria together to do something nice for me. In terms of what I’d have done differently I probably regret the bickering the most, especially with Sinistral, although we both share the blame. Crunchy peanut butter definitely.
I would definitely get tropical fish before I got a tarantula.
Less a ‘ask you anything’; I just wanted to pop in and say thanks Merlin, to you and several others (but I have the opportunity to speak with you the least), for in part being the maintainers of a cohesive place which I, for many years, greatly enjoyed. I am happy to say I still keep in touch with many former RPGCers, and I think to some extent RPGC was an early incubator of- and more personal kind of- the broader forms of communities we see on the internet now.
So thanks. It was a blast.
And to meet the threads criteria:
Are you happy?
:kissy: