Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🦖 Oooh, baby, baby it's a wild world... Super Mario World  was released in November 1990 in Japan and August 1991 in North America as a launch title for the Super Nintendo. Coming out at the height of the Console Wars ™ , it is widely considered the best 2D game in the Mario franchise, and occasionally cited as the best video game ever made. It's the best-selling game on its platform--which is saying something as this is the same platform that gave us Nintendo's current best-selling franchise: Mario Kart . How I Remember It... My first exposure to Super Mario World  happened one summer during our church youth group's choir tour. The host family a group of us were staying with had a SNES and we ended up staying up all night playing it. We got as far as the Forest of Illusion before we got stuck. That's the area where the main exits in all of the levels lead you in a loop--the only way to escape that area on the overworld map is to find hidden exits in the levels. So

🌐 Saturday in the park, I think it was the fourth of July... Hey everybody, I'm going to be at WorldCon in Chicago in a couple of weeks. This is my first WorldCon, so I'll definitely be taking in the panels and events as an audience member, but I'm also going to be a participant. Here's what I'll be up to! Gaming On Friday night I'm running a game of Werewolf, which, for the uninitiated, is a social deduction game. It's kind of like Among Us , but analog. Should be fun, especially if participants have already started drinking. Panels I'm going to be on three panels over the course of the weekend and, bonus, I'm moderating all three of them. They are: Space Westerns An Intro to the MCU Film's Changing Sound Quality I do enjoy moderating panels and am really looking forward to these discussions. Concert I'm putting on a concert! Er... that is to say, I have a thirty minutes set midday Saturday. But it still counts! And what will I be playing,

🏰 Just the two of us building castles in the sky... The original Team Fortress  was a Quake  mod that pitted two teams against each other in first-person-shooter death-matches. The gimmick was that the player would choose one of nine classes that all played wildly differently: Solder, Scout, Spy, Sniper, Pyro, Heavy, Medic, Demoman, and Engineer. It was popular enough that Valve hired the team who developed it to port it to the GoldSrc engine in 1997 as Team Fortress Classic  to promote their software-development kit. In 2007, a sequel was made that preserved core gameplay but gave the game a visual overhaul. It was released as part of The Orange Box , alongside Portal  and a whole bunch of games with Half-Life 2  in their name. How I Remember It... Before Fortnite  or Overwatch , there was Team Fortress 2 , an online class-based shooter in which red and blue teams would compete to capture flags or control points or... whatever. I have spent an embarrassing number of hours playing thi