[HN Gopher] Cybermania '94: The Ultimate Gamer Awards [video]
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       Cybermania '94: The Ultimate Gamer Awards [video]
        
       Author : ArtWomb
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2021-12-26 23:24 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | jamal-kumar wrote:
       | This whole thing has "everything is terrible" vibes
       | 
       | Around 1:03 there's leslie nielsen introducing a section where
       | they interview a bunch of hackers which is pretty funny
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | Too soon. So cringey.
        
       | bellyfullofbac wrote:
       | Watched 1 minute of the content, felt the need to comment: hah, I
       | thought that was actually Hillary Clinton. Choosing her would be
       | odd, she would go on to have a history of blaming video games for
       | society's problems. And Leslie Nielsen's comment about "I sure
       | hope she has health insurance" is bleakly funny in 2021,
       | considering that 2.8 decades later, healthcare is still a fucked
       | up thing in the US (here come the defenders...), and back there
       | Hillary was working for her husband promoting a healthcare reform
       | program:
       | https://ballotpedia.org/%22Hillarycare%22_(The_proposed_Heal...
        
       | dfxm12 wrote:
       | Here's a contemporary review with the winners (Mortal Kombat took
       | home top honors):
       | https://ew.com/article/1994/11/25/cybermania-94-ultimate-gam...
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | The categories was a hoot, with some racing game being placed
         | in the "Action / Adventure" category and more fun stuff. I
         | wonder if we'll look back on today's video game genres and how
         | we put some games into some of them in the same way.
         | 
         | For posterity, here was the categories and their winners,
         | interesting enough (and maybe because it was related to the
         | academy), they had best actress/actor categories (where the
         | winner seems to have been a almost softcore "game"):
         | 
         | Best Action/ Adventure: Doom;
         | 
         | Best CD-ROM: The 7th Guest;
         | 
         | Best Portable Game: Aladdin;
         | 
         | Best Art or Graphics: Myst;
         | 
         | Best Musical: Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World;
         | 
         | Best Sports: Caesars World of Boxing;
         | 
         | Best Actress: Grace Zabriskie, Voyeur;
         | 
         | Best Actor: Robert Culp, Voyeur;
         | 
         | Best Overall Game (determined by a call-in vote): Mortal
         | Kombat.
        
           | arminiusreturns wrote:
           | The 7th guest was my first "cd-rom game" and to this day I
           | remember some of its cool mechanics. Especially the cool
           | video technique they used which added to the creepiness.
           | Still loving horror games all these years later.
        
           | jandrese wrote:
           | In 1994 there were scant few games that even had an actor or
           | an actress. I'm guessing Wing Commander III was released too
           | late in the year to be in contention?
           | 
           | Most of the games with live action scenes in this era were
           | horrible Macromedia Shockwave things with terrible hunt and
           | click or puzzle gameplay too, mostly banking on the shock
           | value of filling up an entire CD with short tiny Quicktime
           | clips superimposed over static backgrounds.
        
           | dfxm12 wrote:
           | I think taking this as a reliable source of info is a
           | mistake, as it was probably all designed around how much TV
           | time they had and worked backwards from there. There's no
           | transparency around how finalists were picked. Hopefully,
           | anyone really interested in the history of videogame
           | classification will take this TV show with a grain of salt
           | and weigh it less compared to something like EGM, Game
           | Informer or even how the publishers describe it. Although,
           | this is free on youtube and it might take some legwork to
           | track down the more reliable primary sources, so I dunno...
           | 
           | No matter what the subject, distinguishing the reliability of
           | sources is one thing that separates blogspam from real
           | research though.
        
       | pmarreck wrote:
       | ah, just before the dawn of the Internet. "You will be able to
       | vote for your favorite game online, via the Prodigy services
       | network"
       | 
       | It's too easy to forget that just before 1995 and using PPP and a
       | modem to connect to the formerly-only-academic-and-military
       | Internet (and the premiere of web browsers), there was a
       | patchwork of self-hosted dialup providers providing a network-
       | connected GUI of sorts like AOL and Prodigy
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | jandrese wrote:
         | Only $1 an hour for access! Actually I think Prodigy was more
         | expensive. AOL made money hand over fist during that brief
         | window before Web Browsers became mainstream.
         | 
         | As soon as ISPs starting showing up that were $10 or $15 for an
         | entire month of Internet all of those dial up services were
         | doomed. They had grown way too fat on per-hour billing and
         | couldn't hope to compete.
        
           | arminiusreturns wrote:
           | Then you had to have a collection of local isp numbers (and
           | for the cracker scene user/pass lists) so you could connect
           | while away from home.
           | 
           | I just remembered how happy I was when I had my palm pilot
           | 14k attachment and could get internet in class because often
           | live POTS were available in many more rooms than these days.
        
       | marban wrote:
       | Only watched the first second and fired up NBA Jam TE on the
       | Picade immediately. Greatest casual game ever with lots of fond
       | memories. SNES > Jaguar > 32X.
        
       | VectorLock wrote:
       | Lesley Nielson caught me completely offguard.
        
         | plussed_reader wrote:
         | So out of place, yet completely on brand. A true American
         | treasure.
        
           | jameshart wrote:
           | *Canadian
        
       | juancn wrote:
       | Who's the kid? I can't place him.
        
         | BugsJustFindMe wrote:
         | Jonathan Taylor Thomas. They say it like 10 seconds into the
         | show (t2:02 of the video)
        
           | dehrmann wrote:
           | He's most known for being the middle child on Home
           | Improvement and young Simba in The Lion King.
        
         | smegsicle wrote:
         | Teenage heartthrob JTT, you may recognize him from Tiger Beat
         | magazine, or perhaps the Tim Allen sitcom "Home Improvement"
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-28 23:02 UTC)