Announcing Nohighscores.com, from yours truly and some of my Gameshark colleagues Hot

Congrats, Michael! Looks great so far.

You might want to know that any UK readership will look at that logo and instantly think "National Health Service". Otherwise, top work. I'm crazed with jealousy!

Wow, I had that book "How To Master the VIDEO GAMES". I would totally get off on looking at that again right now! I think I had one other book like this and one dedicated to Pac Man patterns. Brings back a lot of memories like those fucking older dudes who would line up like 20 quarters on the machine you wanted to play. Then you had to resort to playing the shit games with the faded screens or no sound. Fucking dicks. I miss those arcade days, they were like these dark taverns for kids. Exciting and somewhat seedy joints full of thrills.

I wish all you guys success to this endeavor. Content was a mixed bag for me. One thing stuck out like a sore thumb: Don't Shoot the Food? I don't know guys, this is a little too much outside the scope of gaming I think; and I say this even while I'm going though a stir fry cooking fever at the moment. Also the Dragon Age 2 post was too sarcastic to be worth the click IMO (and kind of goes against the mature tone too?). Anyway I definitely see good potential and wish you the best of luck to all. I especially liked there will be some game development stuff going on.

I have a long winded 2.5-year old post about how the Gears Of War camera system is THE way to do shooters (even though I think GOW multiplayer sucks). It is still very relevant because 95% of shooters are still 1st person. If you guys take submissions I could polish it and submit it. If not I'll publish it to F:AT at some point.

Sounds like someone needs to play more Gauntlet.

"Mature" Game Site. LOL, you mean "Old coot that remembers M.U.L.E." game site?

"Mature" Game Site. LOL, you mean "Old coot that remembers M.U.L.E." game site?

For me, it was Oregon Trail.

As for Don't Shoot the Food, I absolutely love that idea. I'm going to make that pasta thing Brandon posted about for the family on Wednesday. I will not, however, make his Bulletstorm Bacon Explosion which he's going to post next week. My heart retreats a bit when I think about it. As for why he's doing that, the idea is that we're going to post about things that interest us. Brandon loves to cook (as do I) so he asked if I thought it was a good idea, and there you have it. It's going to be 1 post every couple of weeks so it's not like it's going to be a cooking blog.

Hope you guys stop by on occasion.

Are you kidding? Do Not Shoot Food is going to be one of our best and most original features. Brandon suggested it, and we all loved it. So there, you're the outlier.

M.U.L.E....funny you brought that up...it's going to be in a column I'm working on right now, actually!

Hex- I had _all_ of those books. The picture one is one of my favorites, but I also loved this spiral-bound one called "How to Win at Video Games". I had never seen Phoenix or Venture before, and they were in the book and I'd go to the arcade looking for them. I loved the ones that had the diagrams of the screens, pictures of all the enemies, and so on...even if it was a line drawing and not even a photograph.

One day I'm going to collect all those again.

Ok, maybe I will, turn out to be the outlier; but I just hope none of you is into knitting as well. Hmm…come to think of it, I could use a Master Chief sweater. Anyone got instructions and a spare grandma?

I will tell you right now if I could find someone to post detailed instructions on how to knit a Master Chief sweater I'd post that shit in a second.

Don't you have a birthday this week Bill? Hope it's not too late...

Can't wait. Love M.U.L.E.

I've said it before, I think that's why I find Martian Rails so appealing. The theme, sparse illustrations, etc make me feel like I'm playing a boardgame along the lines of M.U.L.E.

That's too funny and I can relate. We would go scouting on the bus all over the place for games. I can even remember the victorious moment of finding a Venture console at a distant K-mart. Travelling to see relatives in another state was always great because they would have different stuff to sample. I can still remember what games were where. Well, the notable ones at least. Wierd.

We would sneak out at midnight and ride our bikes in the rain to play at the 7-11 a few miles away. I think the most perilous of our midnight adventures was about 9 miles on bike to the outskirts of town to play Robotron. Hooked!

I thought my head was going to explode when I got Venture on my Colecovision.

Nobody knock M.U.L.E. That game fucking rocked. It still rocks. I played that online one not too long ago. No one else managed to capture the essence of this in so simple a package.

I just read a great article on OREGON TRAIL. Great read.

I still have the ROM to M.U.L.E. somewhere around here....I keep all that old shit so when I'm old (and I mean REALLY OLD, smart asses) I can show it to my grandchildren to give them some perspective about what can happen to a world in 50 years.

Don't you have a birthday this week Bill?

I do. Friday. #39. Fingers crossed for a Call of Duty throw blanket.

I will tell you right now if I could find someone to post detailed instructions on how to knit a Master Chief sweater I'd post that shit in a second.

If you're paying, my wife will do it. She's a champ with all that crafty shit, but she's busy as fuck so I don't think she'd do it for free haha... I'll still ask though.

Perhaps not in the proper place, but all this talk of M.U.L.E. got me thinking...While looking at Planet Steam a lot of people compared it to M.U.L.E. Are those reports accurate? If M.U.L.E. is that good, does that mean Planet Steam is good? I've never played either so I have no idea personally.

Liking what I see so far. You guys should center your shit though. After 5 minutes of being on the site, I realized my eyes had been fixed to the left for far too long.

Hmm, I registered and was told that I would get an e-mail with a password. Still haven't though...

Looks good so far though. It's nice to see a gaming site that isn't for teenagers.

Check your spam folder. My reg email went there.

Yeah having issues with the spam stuff. Trying to get that fixed today.

Success! Thanks Jeb.

Cute site. And a nice alternative to Kotaku now that Gawker has seared my eyes with the new layout.

As to Planet Steam. It is good, and the market system is quite volatile, and clearly inspired by MULE. The rest of the game fits in as a Euro-y business game, albeit a good one.

What is missing from the MULE experience is the exploration and event aspects. There isn't a lot of random in Planet Steam (except for a construction roll). And it has various roles that are auctioned off so players are choosing the other aspects of the game that would normally be random.

As a closer feel to MULE, there is a canadian game called Sodbusters. Its market is to draw a card which sets the market for the turn. But it nails the other half of MULE, the expanding plots and growth and the event card actually make it feel much closer to the computer game. The problem is that it is less of a game---in practice it is basically farmer roulette. Ya plant your crops, hope they live, and hope they sell for a lot. You can diversify to spread out the pain, or stick with one pattern.

We had over 15,000 visitors _friday_ so we're off to a running start. Thanks to all you guys here that stopped by and registered- we're starting to get some conversations going and they're actually conversations and not just memes, L33T, or teenage jokes. I'm really excited, it seems that folks are really getting what we're trying to do with the place. We even got a link from Tycho at Penny Arcade. Onwards and upwards!