/vr/ - Retro Games

kek

>>10236758
Shmorky may have been a crazy dude, but I still miss his comics

whyyyy was i baaaaaaanned

>>10236758
well they also just don't make em anymore period

Raped by dickwolves

>>10236758
on the one hand, they definitely feel nostalgic. the "era" of those is truly gone.comics got appropriated by narcissistic gay artists from twitter, and largely the medium has been replaced by meme format. at their best, webcomics were a fresh stream of raw creativity, a crazy medium made by nerds for nerds.
but on the other hand… most of them were crap. yeah. half of them got popular because they were new and they were about vidya, and aged about as well as Nostalgia Critic and Smosh. at their worst they gave us Loss, and plain unfunny crap drawn by people whose idea of "hilarious" was somewhere between Futurama and Garfield. half of the humor was the 2000s schtick "but he makes le funny face". and just like today, those faggot artists often were quite narcissistic and opinionated. pic related.
as much as I miss some of them—sorry, 90% of them were simply bad and aged like shit too.

>>10237941
Making this exact same unfunny comic in video format and uploading it to youtube would probably make the creator some money. And that is why the webcomic medium died.

>>10237941
maybe I'm gonna post some more "so bad it's good" ones

>>10237947
This entire thread makes me want to say yikes and cringe. Can we get some real gamer comics with gamer words?

>>10236869
I seriously miss his stuff. It must be a cosmic rule that creative, funny people have to have a total mental collapse eventually.

>>10237992
What's the point in being funny and creative when the ultimate punchline is...le world....

>>10237992
>fucked up childhood leads to personality disorders
>schizoid tendencies make you very awkward / autistic but give you very strong imagination and a potential to create rich inner world (since you spend 99% time inside your head)
>attention seeking tendencies make you go extra mile to become funny / people pleaser
>narcissism makes you go an extra mile to get adoration / fans and create a larger-than-world persona
>psycho tendencies make you extra cynical / hostile which can give you extra "edge" if you do sarcastic type of comedy
>all these may lead you to become popular, but your symptoms eventually worsen despite all your efforts and you end in mental collapse
it's all a double-edged sword

>>10237941
reminds me of pic related
what an era of absolute cringe that was

>>10238023
It’s like a proto-gangweed meme

>>10238040
exactly. a lot of those comics were like: "we're GAMERS. don't mess with us.".
but it was a different time when stuff like this wasn't yet considered cringe or facebook trash. to be honest, most of the old internet would be considered facebook trash today. including "le old /b/".

>>10238046
LOL winrar, here's your over 9000 internets, itty bitty baby amirite >:3

>>10238046
Old /b/ had its eras, but I agree with you entirely. 2004 until Chanology was a low-IQ version of FYAD/YTMND. 2009-11 kinda had its moments here and there during the pre-irony era before the board essentially turned into an official porn dump board. Lasting legacy will probably be naked banana

>>10238023
Didn't he end up murdering his unborn son?

>>10238023
>JACK THOMPSON BAD
ahhh such simple times

>>10237941
Yeah they sucked.

>>10238059
No, his girlfriend had a miscarriage which he then tactlessly wrote into his comic.

>>10236758
ShiftyLook made a bunch of webcomics based on different Namco properties, and for some of those properties, that was the only official content in decades.

>>10238023
Man I remember a friend at school making this his avatar on the Red VS Blue forums lol.

>>10238046
Old /b/ had its gleaming nuggets, but the overwhelming majority of it really was unbridled garbage which won't be missed. Even 15 years ago, it was dogshit.

>>10238057
still it's a bit sad that the whole vibe of 4chan turned into sarcastic cynical "everything is shit". then again, that's what you'd expect from a website for antisocial doomers. when the alternative is facebook / reddit / discord, being cynical about everything doesn't look so bad after all

>>10238093
we used to say "/b/ was never good" for a reason, but it was better than /pol/
I miss when the stormfags would get told to go back to stormfront instead of getting their own board

>>10238046
Even back then /b/tards were frowned upon sitewide and were always told to fuck off when they left their containment board. They were only held in high regards when an external raid had to be carried out and /b/lackup was needed. Its comedy did not have longevity because the user base was primarily 14 year olds. /b/ was never good

>>10238057
Man, YTMND takes me back.

>>10237941
That one was pretty damn funny.

>>10238098
If it's any consolation, stormcucks have had /pol/ ruined for them because it's now crawling with brown third worlders malding about the west (while insisting they're very white). On the other hand, Wumao are comprehensively unbearable apparitions in their own right, and probably worse.

>>10238114
>stormcucks have had /pol/ ruined for them because it's now crawling with brown third worlders malding about the west
there's always a bigger fish

Is there anything more early 2000s than the sprite webcomic? I remember discovering 8 Bit Theater really early on and enjoying it until each strip became this insane wall of text.

Many gaming comics are still around. I have to remind myself that Penny Arcade exists occasionally. They were pretty much universally beloved until they made an implied rape joke during the GG era, right?

Oh and I just found out that CTRL+ALT+Delete still exists...wow.

>>10238138
PA only became hated by normies because their fans would harass anyone online complaining about the Raped by Dickwolves joke.

>>10238138
>words words words

>>10238149
In fairness, normalfags deserve to be raped by dickwolves.

Tbf they deserve it for complaining about dickwolf. It's was the starting moves of what become gamergate

Awkward Zombie is just about the only one I can respect... and even Katie tends to repeat the same formula of "thing that happens in game would be illogical in real life"
It just a really rich formula so I don't mind.

Speaking of Penny Arcade, here's a short story they made, circa 2001.

Now, what did we learn?

>>10237957

The crossover part never gets old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e60JlM6ZXHc

>>10238138
No matter what it eventually became, I'll always owe 8-Bit Theatre for having a special comic on Thanksgiving extolling the virtues of Bangai-O. The comic made it sound so good I asked my brother to get it for me for Christmas without any further research. He did and we spent months playing through it together. It's now one of my favorite games.

So if nothing else, dumb gamer comics taught me about Bangai-O and Treasure in general. That's something.

If these comics and the culture that made them were so "cringe", then why were people way happier back then and way more miserable, spiteful, resentful, and petty now?

>>10237831
this guy is good. He helped Howard Phillips make a book about his time at Nintendo of America, it was pretty interesting. Could have used a better editor, but that's typical of game books, so I don't mind too much. Of course i also backed it on shitstarter, so I'm biased about it, but even so, it ended up being the rare KS thing that was actually worth it, so I can't really complain.
anyway, wish he was still doing this comic.

>>10238674
>8-Bit Theatre
The author later went to create the awesome Atomic Robo, which took everything 8BT did right and elevated it to the 9th degree.

>>10238695
There was a sense of community and identity in all that cynicism.

The complaining about the culture was from a place of love or while now its just a bunch of Twitter/twitch clout chasers looking for easy signal points to get more followers

>>10238097
I get being averse to a lot of mainstream shit and being apprehensive and tired of a lot of the bullshit, but some people are so fucking cynical or/and irony poisoned that I can't fucking stand them. How do they stand themselves? I'd want to fucking kill myself if I was like that, they can't even enjoy shit they love anymore.

>>10238742
Definitely people who have no genuine love for any of it.

>>10238695
shitty comics were just a small part of the past. also, be careful with blanket statements like these—it may be just your own internal projection of your own unhappiness.
but I do believe people in general got worse during 2010s, when everything got politicized, getting offended about everything became the norm, and people got urged more and more to be petty and spiteful under the guise of "moral cause". America became less and less a paradise where you could trust your neighbors and can leave your door open, and more and more like a battlefield where fostering division and gender / age / racial warfare was encouraged at every step. zoomies are simply the first generation that have been raised in this environment.
and also, not in the least, internet made half the young people antisocial.

>>10237945
yeah, once you could justify the bandwidth and have higher than 360p videos as a matter of course, it wasn't long before comics would turn into videos. Easier to shove ads into now too, though thankfully adblockers still make a mockery of them. I struggle to imagine what youtube is like when you have to watch some trash tv commercial before each video.

>try to google some crappy comic from Fanboys
>looks like the site got 404ed
>have to go to internet archive for it
it feels like nothing ever vanishes on the internet, yet here we are. those comics are being erased, and some may be gone forever. funny how suddenly I start missing all that crap

>>10238607
that perennially, people will cry about mediums being ruined for all of time, instead of using their time by enjoying things. For what it's worth, I remember reading posts like this on gamefaqs in 2002. Madden, GTA, and Halo were the worst things to ever happen to gaming, by their recollection, and the PS2/Xbox/GameCube were harbingers of the apocalypse. Basically, it was pre-/nu/ke /vr/.

>>10238747
where do you find these people? I talk to people in real life and on forums and don't get that impression. Maybe they're mad about some small things, but they aren't doom and gloom about everything. You sure you aren't just on /v/ or on social disease? social networks are nothing but cancer, of course people will be miserable if all they do is spend time there. In fact, normalfags are coming around to this and are starting to distance more from it, in my experience. Haven't met one yet that wishes they could go back.
I think /v/ got ruined a bit by things like DmC and TORtanic. It's like everything had to be a massive blunder that could be made fun of after that. Also, I wish that place was still dominated by PC users. FotM were better when everybody's using the same hardware.

>>10238864
that's why I started just downloading anything I like a lot. Too easy for them to go missing. Speaking of, the sonic reveal trailer from smash bros brawl is gone, I think. You can get to the announcement page from 2008 but the video won't load. Probably doesn't help that it was a flash video.

>>10238864
I was into NES collecting in the late 90s and part of the online scene. There's dozens, maybe hundreds of old webpages that are completely gone now, many not even able to be found in archive. Our old board went kaput for good earlier this year. The old Shoryuken.com forums are gone and it had one of favorite posts ever online - a guy recounting his time playing Street Fighter in arcades in the early 90s. Some of the most soulful shit I've read online. Just gone now.

Feels bad, man.

>>10238930
good times, you could just scrape shit up for nothing. I remember people complaining that some expensive games were as much as 40 dollars. Boy if only they knew.

>>10238889
>>10238930
it's weird that while a lot of info on the web is preserved nearly forever—you can find old Google Groups posts from 1997, for example, see Mifflin Devin—, SOME areas of web are prone to vanishing: mainly Flash and small pages like boards and webcomics.

>>10238931
Yeah, you could just waltz into any Funcoland with 30 bucks and come out with a bag full of absolute classics, sleeper hits, odd but interesting games and shelf filler. You could still find old NES games at garage sales or toy stores liquidating old stock (I bought stack of mint Dr. Mario's for 5 bucks each around 2000 or so). People would just give you their old NES games if you asked them. It was great. Collecting is pretty much entirely inaccessible now unless you want to spend a fortune.

>>10238607
Hard to believe this was released during the early 2000s which many believe to be the golden age of gaming

>>10236758
Allegedly Shmorky used to post on some yoshi fanforum back in like 2003 (I think it was the one with the logo you always see on old mario world YTPs) and this comic got him permab& lol

>>10238023
lol I didn't know that one. Up until the penultimate ballon, it was bland, but acceptable. But the last one was pure cringefest. If he added "we do not forget, we are legion" at the end, it would be perfect.

>>10238806
Yeah. Part of it for me to is the rules absolutely exploded for the smallest of conversations. Christ you join a discord server now and then have 5 pages with 28 rules on them, I get tired just looking at it and leave the server. Yeah forums had rules before but it wasn’t layers upon layers of be Le Excellent to each other. I keep hoping Forums and Forum Culture (tm) will make a comeback but it never happens. It’s like everything centralized, people realize it sucked, but they’re just walking away from it all in general. Discord is awful for catching up on things in my opinion, it doesn’t have the same level of discourse a proper forum does.

>>10239154
I want to hold hands with the sphinx

>>10237941
>comics got appropriated by narcissistic gay artists
anon comics have always been the domain of narcissistic gay artists, I'm not sure why you're under the impression otherwise

>>10239201
It really is an absolute state of the world when there exists people more autistic than fucking Shmorky

>>10239334
Stand aside, mortal

>>10239360
last I heard, uli overcame his fear of water and now he's really into scuba diving
bless his soul

>>10238057
>irony era
Genuine question: what is this "irony era", "post-irony era" terms I see thrown out here and there? I don't do regular social media since 2013, only 4chan, internet forums and blogs. I hope it's not a new buzzword.

>>10239394
I think he got a job at walmart a few years back but then he quit or got fired for being too autistic, so now he sits on his ass all day trying to find undiscovered glitches in old snes jarpigs

>>10239498
it's not like a particular point in time when it changes but a lot of the very earnest webcomics of the 90s and 2000s would be considered "cringe" if they came out in the 2010s. people got insecure about simply liking things without some sort of pretext

man I used to read the hell out of Bob and George. Haven't thought about that strip in years. I wouldn't dare going back and trying to read it now because I'm absolutely sure it was actually terrible.

>>10238806
Great analysis, my dude. I wish I was this good with words. Thanks!

>>10239645
I'm not doubting those guys exist, but I don't recall seeing them here. Unless you mean contrarians or whiners, there's a good portion of them. Anyway, there were always cringe things; self-awareness is essential. I've always loved games, but some of those comics with "I'm special 'cause I'm a gamer" theme were detrimental and made me feel embarrassed that people would lump me together with those guys, even though I have quite a large list of things to be shameful about myself. I mean, having a hobby, just like everyone else, why would my particular one made me better?

Neglected Mario Characters, along with the website that hosted it (SMBHQ), was the first thing I ever saw on the internet and defined a lot of my tastes and humor going forward. In addition to the regular gag-a-day strips, they'd also do detailed story arcs that were very entertaining and funny. Over two decades later, I often crack up at my hazy memories of certain running gags.

In fact, NC (always without the M) was the world's first sprite comic, and laid the groundwork for stuff like Bob & George. I still can't see some of the sprites from the NES Mario and Kirby games without thinking of Dr. Donez, Prof. Executrain, Fred the Spanyard, and Bill the Extra Guy. Good times.

>>10239498
Pre-irony was when redditors didn’t exist and ironic shitposting was frowned upon. It’s not a “new buzzword”, what’s the matter with you? You were either here long enough to have seen the difference in the site culture or you’re an election tourist.

>>10238050
You think cracky was a Sega or Sony or Nintendo fan?

>>10239849
>what’s the matter with you?
I'm just curious. And what's the matter with you? Why so on the edge? But I'm talkative today! Let me introduce myself: I first visited here in 2006, because of some tryhard kids on an internet forum saying it was all the rage. I quickly got out, didn't like it at all. However, I did join here in 2018, after knowing there was a board focused on retrogaming. And that's my story on 4chan: /vr/ and nothing else. Whatever has to do with elections or other boards doesn't matter to me, I don't even go there and never discuss any politics.

Now, back to our discussion. While I do share a dislike for Reddit (same for every social media based on metrics), I find it strange you blame everything on it. Quite an unwise projection, for it limits your view. In fact, as a tool, Reddit at least has some potential, since you can create a low-profile community focused on quality discussion (though it would require a kind of members rarely seen there, so it's more of a hypothetical thought). That aside, we need to make clear what is an "ironic shitpost". Is it the standard definition of "low-quality post"? Is it "someone badmouthing something I like"? Is it anything but a strictly serious and completely on-topic post? I've seen people labelling "shitpost" on so many different occasions. I know I'm relatively new here, but not on the Internet.

>>10238098
>but it was better than pol
Neither were good. I hate to death when I meet pol posters irl that go around saying based, seethe and cope in normal conversation. They're generally spineless and overweight too.

>>10239893
>when I meet pol posters irl that go around saying based, seethe and cope in normal conversation.
That... isn't true, right? You're making that up for the sake of a joke, or to troll us. RIGHT????

>>10238152
Not the comic's fault you're stupid.

>>10239887
>Let me introduce myself
nice 2 meet U!!!!!!! *holds up spork* my name is katy but u can call me t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m!!!!!!!! lol…as u can see im very random!!!! thats why i came here, 2 meet random ppl like me ^_^… im 13 years old (im mature 4 my age tho!!) i like 2 watch invader zim w/ my girlfreind (im bi if u dont like it deal w/it) its our favorite tv show!!! bcuz its SOOOO random!!!! shes random 2 of course but i want 2 meet more random ppl =) like they say the more the merrier!!!! lol…neways i hope 2 make alot of freinds here so give me lots of commentses!!!!
DOOOOOMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <--- me bein random again ^_^ hehe…toodles!!!!!

love and waffles,

t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m

>>10240039
>defending CAD
dude cmon

>>10238930
>>10238931
My brother was into collecting old video games back then, like Atari and other pre-Nintendo consoles (plus Sega). He got huge hauls just from hitting thrift stores and garage sales, paying with his allowance because mom wouldn't buy video games. We had like every Atari console with giant collections plus a lot of random other stuff. It was just laying around for the taking.

One time he told me about a story from Usenet. A guy had a dream where he went to a beach and this huge store full of old video games rose up out of the sea, and he collected all these super-rare games for cheap. The shopkeeper or whatever was this tiki idol named Bira Bira, and the guy found a little idol the next time he went to a thrift store. Bira Bira became known as this sort of good luck charm for finding old video games. The whole thing became like this injoke/meme where people would talk about the Reef Store and this idol.

But the joke is...back then, they were living in the Reef Store and didn't know it. Rarities were just lying around for the collecting. No one had to pay more than 10 bucks for a game. Now all of that is gone forever.

Even by the time I grew up all the really old stuff was scarce on the ground, but Playstation games were dirt cheap. Then within a decade everything got hideously expensive and collecting old video games became a rich man's hobby.

Save us, Bira Bira.

>>10240242
Heh, really nice story. Thanks for sharing!

>>10238023
if smoking in movies and TV shows is banned because it can make people want to smoke then violence should be too. ban both or neither

>>10239294
A forum I used to go to suffered from this shit. Like >>10238742 said, they were salty and cynical, but it came from a good place and it was mostly done in jest. At the end of the day, everyone was still friends and no one meant any harm. Then one of the mods started making an effort to be more welcoming and less 'toxic' and his new cronies were the epitome of anti-fun to the point where a simple post could be met with one of the mods crying about saying something sucks dick is hurtful to gays (And yes he was gay and even worse, there was an actual gay dude on the old team who had a sense of humor and wit). The irony in that the founders of the forum were as liberal as it got but there was a wit and humor to their liberalism and they weren't in your face about it either whereas the newer mods were as unfun and unwitty as possible and they have to be fucking obnoxious with their orientation or views. It's like all the fun was sucked out of the community and it never recovered.

Unsurprisingly, the forum is more or less dead with all the bans and power-tripping mods and the irony that every one of these communities that tries to be as safe and sanitized as possible ends up being as toxic as the toxicity they try to destroy.

>>10236758
I used to love webcomics when I was a kid but eventually became resentful of them, I would spend a decent portion of each day after school reading them and trying to learn to draw my own, but it always seemed like no matter how much I practiced (it was literally a daily thing for 2-3 years straight) I never improved, while some of my favorite series went from poorly drawn ms paint tier drawings to nearly professional looking, I'll never forget my high school art teacher practically begging me to not take a second year of art because I just wasn't doing anything well and otherwise had a nearly perfect gpa she didn't want to be forced to ruin

>>10239887
You are severely autistic. Your drivel does not warrant a proper response.

>>10240589
If you are just dumb to give a proper reply, don't even bother.

>>10237941

>and largely the medium has been replaced by meme format

something you'll never be able to unnotice is that most modern 4 panel comics are designed to be potential meme templates, in which the text in panel 3 can be replaced with whatever opinion you don't like

>>10239673
I think it actually ended at some point, I remember being blown away by the fact they put out a comic a day.

>>10239673
I remember it being weird, the sprite comic was just a placeholder while he was waiting for his wacom tablet but his art was horrendous so he just went back to the sprite art. It was also weird because he created all these OCs based on Mega Man characters but then just integrated regular MM characters and stories into the comic.

>>10236758
You guys don't emulate, do you?

>>10238098
You know /b/ was never good, but it wasn't all just porn like it's been for the past 10 years. One can barely even shitpost there.