racketboy.com

Pleasuredome kicked the bucket this year. Was the best place to get MAME roms and had plenty of other timeless content for old arcades and consoles, some magazine and so on. Real shame on that one.

Anapan wrote:Oh! I just thought of something. Weren't the founding members of this forum actually refugees from when Sega Xtreme's forums disappeared? I know I missed that site and just switched over to PC gaming and emulation using dos-based emulators. It was relevant site topics by Racketboy himself that made me join the forums. Google kept steering me here and the forum always had answers.

Somehow I missed this one before.

SX was still pretty active at the time. Although, I did a lot of the conversation building that last year I was active. I was hoping to do some initiatives to grow things, but the admins weren't really interested. There weren't any hard feelings at all, but it kinda motivated me to start my own site/forum -- especially when I did more selling of products and such. Interestingly enough, part of my motivation was to share broad retro-themed news, but I gradually fell out of love with doing the news thing and ended up doing more guides instead.

Since I did some cross promotion on SX too, I ended up gathering some long-time SX users over here too.

Wait, Pleasuredome is gone? oh my! (takei face)
This is a bit troublesome actually.
I remember a few years back there was a planned merger/spin off of this site with blackjack and hookers Should I validate my membership card?

The early to mid-2000s internet in general was the wild west and was a lot more fun.

The NES Nation.

If I recall correctly, The NES Nation was the third website specifically devoted the the Nintendo Entertainment System, after NES World, which is still online, and TSR's NES Archive, which is sort of still online, but is now largely broken and has been on hiatus since early 2000. I miss both of them being more active, but at least they are still available.

Looking at archive.org, I see that there was an attempt to revive NES Nation in 2005, but I was completely unaware of it.

NES Nation started in 1996 and I think it was the first NES-focused site with a message board. I bought a few games from the guy who ran it, including Golgo 13: The Mafat Conspiracy and Werewolf: The Last Warrior.

Soon after NES Nation a lot of other NES-focused websites started popping up. The only one I really remember is "NESturbation" because it had a funny (and shocking to me at the time) name and a cool animated GIF of Mega Man dancing.

LordKat.com

I only now realized it was gone. LordKat (real name Jason Pullara) created a web series called "Until We Win" where he played very difficult games to completion. This video series, along with the Japanese show Game Center CX inspired me to revisit games I had previously written off as too difficult to finish.

He still has a YouTube channel, but it has no videos. All of his original run videos are still available if you look for them, but I'm not sure if his later videos or live challenges are.

Dave's Sega Saturn page. It was effectively dead but kept archived on-line for years and years. The page there now seems to have some of the Saturn content, but it all looks different, and it's also got fan pages for Indonesian sports, so it's hard to figure out exactly what happened to it.

marurun wrote:Dave's Sega Saturn page. It was effectively dead but kept archived on-line for years and years. The page there now seems to have some of the Saturn content, but it all looks different, and it's also got fan pages for Indonesian sports, so it's hard to figure out exactly what happened to it.

I came here to post this. I remember a post where he was moving a long distance and sold off a large chunk of his collection to site members. Site drove off with that move I guess.

Man... they get crapped on a lot today, but I really enjoyed IGN & Game Spot from 2000 to 2012 or so.

I know it's seen a "rival" but G4 was also really cool to see on TV.

Cinescape.com/Mania.com

Cinescape was magazine that dealt with scifi/fantasy/horror. They had a website in the late 90s and early 2000s that I frequented for movie reviews. They eventually got bought by Mania entertainment and rebranded but the content was mostly the same. I can't remember when it shutdown but I really miss their reviews.

Eventually I started following Chris Stuckman for movie reviews but he has started getting out of the regular review business. I'm still looking for someone or someplace that has similar tastes to mine. (I haven't been looking very hard yet)

I remember Cinescape... I think once they got bought, there was even some type of small magazine review book put out monthly.