It is. The best. Game. Ever.

I cannot, of course, find a copy of it for myself. I found one store that claimed to have it in stock, and three days after I ordered it, they said "oops! it's gone." And I don't even own a PS2: I was going to buy one just to play this game. (It looks like Amazon's used site has it, but I won't give Amazon money; there are occasional copies of it on ebay, but I find participation in auctions far too annoying to tolerate: I can only really deal with the kind of commerce where someone tells you the price and then you pay it, or don't. Haggling and auction-delay-and-uncertainty drive me insane.)

So, I'm going to have to hit exoskeleton over the head and take his copy. Please don't tell him.

Then we started kickin' it old skool yo:

I picked up a copy of the Mind Candy DVD, which is ~4 hours of video of "demo scene" animations. These are, basically, little nightclub-background-video animations with bleepy computer-music soundtracks made by teenagers in the 1980s on computers that, at the time, you would think were way to wimpy to accomplish some of these effects. So that sounds interesting, right? Well, I've only watched a little bit of it but... it really doesn't stand up. The most cringeful thing about them is how they all spend 1/4th to 1/3rd of their time giving scrolling, spinning "shout outs" to their "homies". Who all have jolly pirate hax0r names like "acid burn" and "crash override". It's really pretty embarrassing.

Anyway, the thing that amazed me most about this disc is that I kept guessing that the demos were way older than they actually were: like, I'd watch one, and think, "that's pretty impressive if it was 1988 and an Amiga." And then it turns out it was 1995... and an Amiga. WTF?

Not that I'd turn any of these down if they were submitted for inclusion with xscreensaver, mind you. rzr_grl said I need to add an xscreensaver mode that just shouts out to the cru. Lest I fail to keep it real.

We also played the PS2 version of Test Drive (Test Drive 8?) and for comparison, fired up Test Drive 1 (from what, 1988?) on my Amiga 1000. Test Drive 1 is a lot harder, but a lot less fun. (This may be partly because I couldn't find my good joystick, so we were using an Atari 2600 joystick, which was already oldskool when Test Drive 1 was cutting edge!)

The audio portion of Test Drive 1 is like, totally electroclash. It could be a Miss Kittin song, all it needs is someone talking over it in a deadpan monotone going, "I'm playing the video games. With all my famous friends. It is, so glamorous. Ha ha ha."

Also picked up the Cabaret Voltaire: Live at the Hacienda 83/86 DVD. It's interesting, but I'd recommend against it unless you're already an obsessive fanboy about the band (like... me.) I haven't watched it all yet, but from what I've seen it's mostly a really craptacular recording; the sound quality is awful, and the video is mostly black. But it is interesting to see how much live instrumentation they used back then, due to the fact that making those sounds was actually work. So, interesting cultural artifact, lousy concert film.

There's are a few non-live video segments on it, one of which had several edits a second, leading me to comment, "wow, that took a hell of a lot of scotch tape."