If you like, read this article from the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/kurds/alliance.html
It is untrue that the US provided the IRAQI regime with weapons (chemical or otherwise). They did provide them, as Zakaria said, with agricultural credits, as well as with "dual-use" items which were not inherently military items, but would be vital to any war-time situation. That said, even if it were true that the US provided Iraq with weapons during the iran-iraq war, it doesn't negate the fact that this regime under ahmedinejad is a brutal and repressive one, and is trying to cover up this fact as much as they can.


Ba baw! United States support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war. But hey, nice try. Oh, also interesting, the Iran-Contra Affair.

Gamers today are seriously spoiled.

They don't even have health boxes on the ground in FPSs any more - you just go hide around a corner for 5 seconds and you regenerate up to full. It would seriously blow a kid's mind that people would take the time to beat games like Super Mario Bros 2 or Bionic Commando. I did it, and the thrill you get from beating a hard game is much better than any of these checkpointed/infinite retries games we have today. (Of course, Contra was so ridiculously hard I only beat it with the Konami Code.)

While I loved Bioshock, I hated how bloody easy it was since you'd just pop out of a resurrection chamber every time you died. I'd get bored during a Big Daddy battle and just keep respawning on him over and over again until he went down... about halfway through I decided to just ignore the chambers entirely and play the game without dying.

>> ^Shepppard:
>> ^Shpydir:
>> ^Shepppard:
...Please, don't call me kid. And you missed my point. I know the roots of video games, my generation does...

Hey now, "kid" was just a term of endearment. I meant nothin' by it.

I got your point, I was just mocking your gravitas by playing the role of the 80's kid. I'm surprised some geezer hasn't come out to show off his Space War cred yet. My point is we really shouldn't ding this kid because he's only played (apparently) Halo and Call of Duty. Right now we're both too young to be doing that. In 50 years, I'll be right with you complaining, "Those kids these days, why back in our day we had to use our thumbs! THUMBS!"

>> ^ant:
"Get off my lawn!"


Only if I can help. After all it's my lawn too, and they're hurting the roses.

I realize this is probably all nostalgia talking, but I think the robots we Europeans got in Probotector (what the PAL version of Contra was called) were sooooo much cooler then these bare-chested Arnold types.

The problem is that gamers become employed by game development studios. Right now we’re breading the next generation of game dev’s. Just take a look at that video recently where the kid was playing Contra and thought it was so hard. These day’s we’re about making games so accessible to anyone. This means eliminating the frustrations from the player. There are no repercussions. No dying anymore and flashy light arrows pointing to exactly where something is hidden. We don’t challenge the player like we used to. On top of that we’re pushing to have everything console oriented. Pick your station, Xbox 360, PS3, or Wii. If we’re not careful we will lose our MOD community and the generation that is coming up now will not be as tech savvy as the one before. We’re turning our future game dev’s into mindless drones.

Videos games are simulation and simulations represent the pinnacle of human expression. We’re supposed to be pushing the boundaries not reinforcing them.

>> ^Deano:
I'm not sure why we bother with age ratings. Halo 3 is an M rated game. Yet this kid has been playing it (most probably) since he was about 9.


I was thinking the same thing. I have reservations about my 11-year old playing T rated games.

I'm one of the few who actually beat Bionic Commando on the NES. You know, the game that was intensely impossible to get through on certain levels? The one with no save feature? The one that took nearly six hours to play through? Yeah, that one.

But at that time, games like The Legend of Zelda, Mike Tyson's Punch Out, and Contra, were the fun games. Before that time, for computer games, was ones like Empire, Wing Commander, Space Quest, and even Zork. And before those games: Pong. While the graphics of games have improved tremdously, the game play has remained a constant.

Castlevania 2, Rescue the Embassy, Russian Attack, Jackal, JAWS, and others, were enjoyable games for their day. COD, WoW, EQ, and others, that are popular now, will soon be retired in favoror of newer, more graphic intensive games in 5-10 years.

>> ^Shpydir:
>> ^Shepppard:
I don't like the concept of "Project D"
My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.
Kid, I don't mean to sound like a cranky old fart and I kinda see what you're saying, but if you missed the 80's, you don't even know. There were these places called Ar-cades that we used to go to. They were just these whole rooms full of games. You put a token in and then you got to play the game for a bit.
It was nuts.


Please, don't call me kid. And you missed my point. I know the roots of video games, my generation does, We're not the generation that grew up into what we have now, and I can still appreciate where the industry started and came from.

This kid..not only does he probably not even care, but knows nothing about what came before a Ps2 most likely. Ask anybody around age 10 these days, and they don't even know what an atari, or NES are. You won't get someone to appreciate something if they have no interest in it, and that's what they seem to be trying to do with this project D thing.

>> ^Shpydir:
>> ^Shepppard:
I don't like the concept of "Project D"
My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.
Kid, I don't mean to sound like a cranky old fart and I kinda see what you're saying, but if you missed the 80's, you don't even know. There were these places called Ar-cades that we used to go to. They were just these whole rooms full of games. You put a token in and then you got to play the game for a bit.
It was nuts.


Well, to be fair, the arcade scene persisted very much into the 90's. Street Fighter 2 was not released until 1991, for instance. In Japan video arcades are still popular. But if you were born in 1989 in the US then you definitely missed a big part of gaming history. I was born in 1981 and I still too young to experience the real start of a gaming culture. I don't know when exactly that was, but Pac Man was released in 1980. Pong was back in 1972 so some old farts could claim that to understand the history of gaming you would need to be alive back then, but I'm skeptical of that.

I played the Atari but I never really liked it. It wasn't until the Nintendo with games like Final Fantasy (1990) that I was drawn into gaming. PC games like King's Quest, Hero's Quest, Sim City (1990), Civilization (1991), and Doom (1993) played just as big a role.

Having spent a fair amount of time hanging out in arcades, I can safely say that I don't miss it at all. I find the idea kind of sleazy, actually -- make children give up their money as fast and reliably as possible, in an environment with minimal parental supervision. PC or console games are so much better because they're not trying to quickly kill you so that you need to put in another quarter. They also have persistence, so you can build your character over many sessions. I've seen some clever Japanese arcade games that accomplish this by synergizing with RFID enabled collectible card games, though.

>> ^Shepppard:
I don't like the concept of "Project D"
My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.

Kid, I don't mean to sound like a cranky old fart and I kinda see what you're saying, but if you missed the 80's, you don't even know. There were these places called Ar-cades that we used to go to. They were just these whole rooms full of games. You put a token in and then you got to play the game for a bit.

It was nuts.

>> ^conan:
Payback, don't forget there are other countries in the world where the rating is organized in a different (more serious, lawfully binding) way.


Oh I don't, but including them would be out of context, much like gun control laws outside of the States. This is a North-American video series, aimed at North Americans.

Your video, An 11-year old plays Contra for the first time, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

* Missing Amazon items;
http://www.videosift.com/video/An-11-year-old-plays-Contra-for-the-first-time
The two games I linked here are gone. This appears to apply to all the Amazonised videos.

* Embed and email icons missing their tooltips

* Body text might be a tad faint for some.

[redacted]