Stumbling through Little Nemo

[davidn]

I cannot believe that the demographics of videos uploaded on Youtube are so heavily weighted that putting the innocent word "through" in a video title immediately throws up the tag suggestions "fire" and "flames".

Anyway. I tried another NES game, this time with an elaborate recording setup that I was playing about with all day that allows me to record my voice through the headset connected to the computer, while simultaneously running the game's audio to the guitar processor thing I use and recording it on that, then editing the two together at the end. So you can now hear both Little Nemo: The Dream Master and my reactions to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQItDEQn69Y

I'd never so much as seen the game before I started recording this video, but as it turns out, it's a game in which you hop around a dream world lulling monsters to sleep by throwing boiled sweets at them and then hijacking their bodies to get yourself around the level. It also turns out I'm dreadful at it, even though I was very proud of myself for getting to the second level.

The method I used for recording worked out rather well, but I'm confused by how out-of-sync the sound gets in Camstudio - it seems to play my voice and the video at normal speed, and yet the voice always drifts slightly ahead or behind the video over time. The process of resynchronizing them in iMovie just got more and more difficult as it went on, having to re-import the same file multiple times to split it up, having the Trim menu disappear entirely and with it preventing me from scrolling down to the last row of thumbnails on the video to edit the end - it came to be so excruciating that I found myself wondering insane things like whether Windows Movie Maker might actually be better at it.

Comments

[davidn]

I have actually been surprised at the extent to which there wasn't even much of a fight in America during the NES era... it seems that if people are talking about games pre-1990, it's exclusively Nintendo, and the Master System was all but unheard of. Even after that, Nintendo seemed to dominate to a far greater extent than I was aware - I don't know the figures for the PAL territories, but it always seemed to me that the sides were about equal.

I'd be very interested in your reactions to Commander Keen, actually, as I went through a couple of those again recently and was really surprised by how short and simple they were - I wonder if someone coming at them anew would have the same reaction. When I was younger, they seemed so huge because I was squeezing every last piece of unnecessary exploration and experimentation I could out of them without even knowing it - that and perhaps I was just slightly less good at them at that time.

[kjorteo]

In America, we basically went from the Atari 2600, to the video game crash, to the NES. You're right that the Master System was basically unheard of--to this day, I have a two-second "Master System? Is that what you called the [system I've actually heard of] over in the UK or something?" before I remember that Sega actually tried to have an answer to the NES.

The war was only really on when the Genesis and Game Gear were introduced, and that was primarily a battle of Nintendo's huge opening advantage (Sega more or less had to fight the idea that "video games" and "Nintendo" were interchangeable synonyms after their NES dominance, which is kind of why grandmotherly types still get that confused to this day) versus Sega's sheer unmitigated cheek (with their extremely aggressive Take That-style marketing.)

Edit: And yes, I suppose subjecting myself to Commander Keen is only fair after all my suggestions for you (including at least two more in the works!)

[davidn]

I find quite a lot of American adverts unpalatably aggressive - the height of it was the political attack adverts last October, which were at the same time unbelievably nasty and so hysterically overblown that it was impossible to believe that they were actually put together seriously. But that mood extends to a lot of other things as well - the major difference I've seen is that people seem to be allowed to say things about competitors and perpetuate a culture of negativity (what's Comcast's one just now... "Don't fall for FiOS", it sounds more like a political advert than a telecommunications company) whereas when I was growing up, it was always a vague "other leading brand" or words to that effect. I don't know whether there are actual regulations against it, or if it was just done that way out of some sort of unwritten and unlikely politeness!

Having said that, I'm certain that I had seen the wordplay "what Nintendon't" in the 80s, although it wouldn't have been called the "Genesis" - perhaps "Sega does what Nintendon't"? That would have been very unusual at that point, even though the mood here is so much lighter - I think that it's positively incredible that to point out their colour superiority, someone at Sega thought up an advert in which a strategically-cast fat bastard whacked himself on the head with a dead rodent. Still, despite that it seems now that Nintendoes what Sega don't - namely, survive in the hardware race.

And 'subject yourself', I'm not asking you to play something infamously dreadful with a soundtrack done entirely a capella by Mark Vanderbilt or anything! This is something that was so popular that it was part of the cluster of games that basically invented Internet distribution. I'd certainly be interested to see what it's like coming at it now - and I'll keep going if you keep fuelling me with suggestions as well :)