Hello everyone. I just found out about this place and read your messages yesterday. I wasn't going to post; I was just going to drop it and forget about the whole thing. That's what everyone should do. But I decided that I owe it to myself, after all the hard work I've put in, to clear my name. It's amazing the way rumors can get blown so far out of proportion in a group like this. Many of the things I've read above were a complete surprise to me; I've never heard of some of these complaints. Which is a testament to how far from the truth they are. I will just write one long post and try to get all of the truth out. Gambit, I don't know why you are so interested, but I'll tell you first-hand that these rumors you've heard are false.
First of all, I was never partners with Buyrite, of course. Dolphin's completely right in saying that I was too small time for a partnership with Buyrite. I mean, why would Buyrite even care about neoalec.com? And besides, if they were paying me, then why weren't there any Buyrite banners on the pages? I never had the same email address as Buyrite either. Any rumor that I was doing anything illegal is completely out of the question. Buyrite is simply a topic that came up a couple of times in the neoalec.com bulletin board, and Buyrite was okay by me. I didn't love Buyrite. I know they have a bad reputation with you guys online. It's just that I have done business with Buyrite many times and I have never had any real big problems with them. I don't doubt that you have been ripped off. I simply feel that at Buyrite you have to be very careful and you get what you pay for. At a store like that, whining about problems isn't going to get you very far. Anyone who sees Buyrite's cheap web site should be able to put 2 and 2 together and realize that they won't be getting the highest quality service. Buyrite is a small store with a cheap site. There are plenty of small stores out there with great service. Buyrite just happens to be a store with mediocre service, and the quality of service I get from them is about what I expect. If you don't want that, then don't order from them. I'm still sorry if you have gotten ripped off. I'm not saying that's okay. I still order from Buyrite and there is confusion with my orders once in a while, but I expect it. For their prices the bad service is worth it.
Master Terry Bogard, I don't know what you're talking about. You must be thinking of someone else. I have never sold Crossed Swords 2 on eBay. It was probably Buyrite that sold it to you, if they had Buyrite's address. You'd better check your feedback again. It's obvious that many rumors are out of control and unfounded. I mean, you can't decide if I'm from NY or DC, though I've never been to either of those places. Where do you get these ideas from? It's not any of your business where I am, actually. Your suspicion that this person wasn't me is correct. You shouldn't say so if you're not sure though.
Vince, you have some nerve to be talking about where I live and who my brother is behind my back here. I personally feel that you are violating my privacy. I don't trust you at all anymore. You wanted to meet me because you learned that I sometimes go to Raven Video Games. But I knew from the beginning that you would be disappointed to meet me and disenchanted. I'm sorry that I was rude to you at the store. I was embarrassed; I haven't ever really met someone else I knew from the Net before. I was in a hurry to. Forgive me for not saying anything. I realized I had been rude as soon as I left and should have emailed you or something.
Of course I have tried one of the Neo Geo emulators, but have not used it regularly. I only tried it with games I already own anyway. I did not like emulation, and I was very clear about it. I was not someone secretly enjoying the roms on one side, and then publicly hating them. It was not hypocrisy. You know very well that I was not a flamer in the BB. I had strong opinions that I voiced, but you know that flaming was something I always sought to prevent myself. Again, the idea that I was being paid off by Buyrite is absurd, and your suspicion only shows how little you know about the situation.
My censorship as the neoalec.com BB moderator was always anything but biased. My policy was always to delete messages that flamed and attacked other people. The opinions expressed were not what mattered, and I never kicked anyone out because of their opinions. A personal attack is what got a user deleted. Of course, I was opposed to emulation. I didn't like emulation and felt that I should use the influence I had to prevent it. That's why Neo-Alec's Unofficial doesn't deal with emulation. But talking about emulation was never a reason to get banned from the board. Illegal activity like trading roms or selling 'backup' copies is what got you in trouble with me. I had strong feelings about these issues and did what I could to prevent them. But again, I didn't ban the advocates of emulation unless they were flaming other users, which unfortunately, they often did.
I never had much of anything to do with the Dion thing. I don't know what he was doing to cheat people, if that's what he was doing. Again, I was simply being unbiased. Dion had always been polite to me and didn't make trouble in the BB. That's why I didn't delete his posts. I was not a Dion-ass-kisser by any means though. If Dion had been flaming, he would have been right out with all the rest of them. A number of times he emailed me and asked if I would help him with some of his ideas for online Neo Geo projects, and I always said no. When he emailed me and politely asked if I could put up links to his sites, then I always happily added the links for him because there wasn't anything wrong, that I could find, with the sites he wanted to post. I also had respect for Dion because of his high amount of involvement in the online Neo Geo scene. But if he was doing anything unfair, then of course I think that's unacceptable.
Vince, you remember neoalec.com Radio. I don't know where you get off calling me a narcissist though. Anyone who thought I was self-absorbed or big-headed was misunderstanding neoalec.com completely. Neo-Alec's Unoffficial Neo Geo Page was a site that I started when I was 16 in high school. It was my first web project. I mostly made the site because I was interested in the Internet, as it turns out, and the fact that the site ended up being about Neo Geo was sort of a fluke. I just happened to like Neo Geo and I noticed that there weren't many sites about it at that time. As time went on, I expanded what I knew about the WWW by expanding the web site. This wasn't always something that benefited the SNK fans. Silly and irrelevant activity sections like Neo Geo Madlibs are what came out of this. I was only messing around, trying out new concepts. The chat room and the Jpop site are what followed. At this point I had turned neoalec.com into a Japanese entertainment site, and Neo Alec's Unofficial Neo Geo Page just happened to be one part of it. I'm sorry to all you SNK fans that this is the way things turned out. The problem with neoalec.com, of course, was that it was about me, and not Neo Geo. And that's not what I wanted. I didn't want a site that was about me. When I hosted neoalec.com Radio, this was meant to be a joke. I would say things like "Not even I, Neo-Alec can do this." This was not meant as real gloating, it was a joke. You see, some of my offline friends who knew about the site would sometimes sarcastically call me "Neo-Alec". It was a big joke to all of us. The idea that anyone could respect 'Neo-Alec' and his site was a joke. The fact that the site was still called neoalec.com but no longer just for Neo-Alec's Unofficial was where the joke came from. Of course I wasn't being narcissistic, because why do you think I moved everything over to J-Fan in the first place? Because neoalec.com was a site 'about me' and I didn't want that anymore. I never wanted to be in the middle of all this cult celebrity crap, so that's why I knew that eventually the site would need to be moved and renamed. J-Fan was not a site about me. You attack me just because you misunderstand the sense of humor I had about the situation. Sorry for having a sense of humor about it. I could have been, as you put it, a "narcissist fool", but that's exactly what I meant to avoid. By the way, neoalec.com Radio was the predecessor of the J-Fan Radio we still have online today. Aaron Nanto is the producer of this (some of you may know him as the owner of pcenginefx.com) and he does an excellent job. It has been a pleasure working with Aaron on J-Fan.
DolphinLord, I've got no problems with you; I just wish you hadn't deleted your neogeodolphin.com. Why did you do a stupid-assed thing like that? I emailed you to inquire about why your web site was so similar to neoalec.com. I never wanted your site removed; I was just curious and flattered by your site's similarities. The right thing to do would have been to reply to my message and say, "I'll try not to plagiarize too much in the future." Doing nothing would have been fine, but what you did do was totally wrong. You should have taken your "I won't make any dumb-assed decisions" pills before you decided to delete your web site on the spur of the moment like that. I always take at least a night, if not days and weeks before making an important decision like that these days. I've learned from doing dumb things like that. I hope you learned too. I just wish you hadn't destroyed all of your hard work. Now look, people don't have neoalec.com or neogeodolphin.com anymore. Then you had to go and tell people that I 'made' you delete it. Let me tell you something dude, the only person that can make you delete your own web site is yourself. You should never have said that about me. The timing couldn't have been worse.
Toward the end of the neoalec.com BBS, I posted a message that let people into my personal life a bit more. Back then my philosophy was putting a personal image on the administrator. It's a model that I don't follow anymore. I said that I had been depressed for a few years, which I have been. I said that I was taking drugs for it and that I was seeing a new therapist. I was not saying I was a mess because of neoalec.com. I wasn't looking for people's sympathy either - I didn't want your sympathy at all. It's just that people were smearing my name like crazy back then because of the deletion policies I had in my BBS. The emux BBS became a safe haven for anyone kicked out of the neoalec.com BBS. This I never intended. Guys were tearing me apart like a KOF character that they hate. What I felt they didn't realize, and needed to realize, was that I was a real person here, not just a fake character. I just wanted to put a human face on 'Neo-Alec'. I always wanted nothing more than to do the right thing, and the fact that I was being treated this way about it was what bothered me. Again, being depressed had nothing to do with my actions, I just wanted to add a human element. Which I would now say was a bad idea.
Lou, I loved Gunstar Heroes. Don't say I hated that game, because you know I couldn't possibly say that. It was just my opinion in one of our discussions that Gunstar Heroes wasn't the BEST Genesis game.
By no means am I a person who believes Japan is a magical utopian place. I would be strongly opposed to anyone who believes that. Japan is a country with plenty of its own problems. I don't hate the US, I'm just cynical about it. The only opinion I ever expressed about this was that I disliked American video games in general. There are many people who feel the same way, because American games, especially in the 16-bit days, would tend to be very different in style than Japanese ones. I simply voiced my distaste for most American games, and you've blown it out of proportion to say that I'm a Japan-worshipper just because Jpop is one of my hobbies. I would strongly caution anyone who likes Japanese entertainment just because they have a false idea that Japan is a utopian place, and I have always felt this way. That is not a good reason to like Jpop. It may be true that being sort of a social outcast, I became interested in Japan. But I don't think this is a good way to become a fan of Japanese entertainment, and I hope that most people won't become J-Fans for this reason. Japanese entertainment is important and deserves to be acknowledged, but not just because a person has forsaken their own country.
And excuse me, you're calling me immature? Coming from this crowd, if that's not the pot calling the kettle black, then I don't know what is. I am 20 years old right now. I started my first web site when I was 16. I am by no means immature and experienced. 20 years old, as far as I'm concerned at this point, is old. Heck, these days 20 is old enough to be a CEO of a company, heh heh. Anyway, I just think that's really ridiculous to call me immature for the site that I ran. If you think you could have done a better job, then do it yourself. I am an experienced webmaster, and I have learned a lot from my time with neoalec.com. I had a commitment to running the site fairly, which I know I did. The problem was, I wanted the hands-on experience. I wanted to participate as just a regular contributor in the discussions. Today I know this isn't possible, which is why I always take the hands-off approach to any of my web projects now.
Thanks for sort of believing in me, Asmoday. I always thought you were a good person back when I knew you. I guess in these situations you do find out who your real friends are.
About Orochi Kaede... She was someone who I met back when we were running neoalec.com Chat. In fact, most of us trusted her so much that we made her one of the moderators there. She did a good job up until the point that she left. Since I was her friend in this way and trusted her, I was more than obliged to link to her site. When I started hearing people complain of being ripped off, I was shocked. I always trusted her, but I never had any business dealings with her, so I don't know in what manner she conducted them. I merely kept the link to her web site because I was not involved at all in those problems, and took no stance on the issues. As always, I was very neutral. You may want to go easy on her, because from what I know, she was extremely physically ill. Again, I'm sorry if you got ripped off though. As far as I would know for sure, it didn't happen. I just don't know.
Another guy I've had problems with, of course, if Chris Mullins, and I'm not sure why. If you want to call anyone immature, then he's the guy for you. It started out with him just asking me for advice and feedback on the early version of his own Neo Geo site. I was always as helpful as I could be and I thought he was an okay guy. Unfortunately, he decided to hate me for one comment I eventually made. He mentioned once that my site was as good as "Christopher's Neo Geo Page" (which was a really old Neo Geo site, one of the first decent ones on the Net, if anyone can remember it), which was meant to be a compliment. I told him not to say that because I was certain that I had surpassed Christopher's site. I said this because Christopher's had been rather small and I had worked hard to make neoalec.com big. So I had every right to say so. I meant this out of no disrespect for Christopher, of course. But Chris Mullins apparently didn't like that and was insulted because he had been a personal friend of Christopher or something, and since then he has taken every little comment from me that he doesn't like and over-scrutinized it. Chris, you should be ashamed for being so incredibly competitive about this. This whole situation was never that important to me. And talking shit about me was definitely the immature way to deal with your problems.
So that's about it. In my experience with the online Neo Geo scene, I've found that I don't like it. It seems to be, in some ways, a warring community that simply loves to fight. I am not of this nature, which is exactly why I tried so hard to keep neoalec.com Bulletin Boards clean in the first place. In the future, I will always try to keep a hands-off approach to my webmastering. This gets a person into far less trouble. If you're interested in what I'm doing now, I'm the owner of J-Fan.com. neoalec.com got changed last March into J-Fan, and the site still exists. Obviously, J-Fan isn't a Neo Geo site, so as you can see, I've moved on to something different. (On a side note, I had a new Neo Geo forum opened for you guys at J-Fan, but nobody used it, so I closed it.) Luckily I have a lot of other people working on J-Fan, so it's not a huge one-man undertaking. As I was saying before, I changed the site to J-Fan because it was obvious that the neoalec.com name just didn't fit anymore. I didn't want to run a web site with my name stamped all over everything (I was never in this game for personal glory) and it was obvious that I was moving into other fields besides Neo Geo with the web site. neoalec.com was my personal web site that I used for everything, which was exactly the problem with it. neoalec.com was never a great Neo Geo site, never very committed to serving the SNK fans. So it's good that other, much better sites, like this one have come along since then. This BBS is great. It has fully realized the potential that the neoalec.com Boards had. I never wanted the neoalec.com BBS to explode as big as it did, and I wasn't prepared for it either. It was simply something I had setup for the site's visitors to communicate with each other. I never intended for it to become a huge all-purpose forum for all Neo Geo fans. Leave that job to a real committed site like this one. Sean, you're doing a great job with this place. I don't know why anyone took so much notice of the neoalec.com BBS in the first place; it wasn't that great. And so I'm sorry, to you fans, because that's where I failed you. I was not committed to the cause, which is why I was so quick to shutdown and stop the neoalec.com BBS. Sorry. If anyone still cares about what I'm doing that much, then J-Fan is where I am. I still exist. Neo-Alec's Unofficial still exists. It is at
http://j-fan.com/neogeo/ It is rarely updated anymore, but I still update that damned list of "Signs you've been playing too much Neo Geo". Heh heh.. Maybe I'll write a few more new reviews someday for the hell of it. I still play Neo Geo a little, but have no interest in discussing it with people online anymore. Thank you for reading at least some of this post and I hope you will understand.