Catch Me, I'm Fall-ing

It's officially fall. The birds are chirping (well, my birds are chirping... all the other ones seem to have flown south), the weather has cooled, and the game industry has roused from its slumber to release several highly anticipated products in time for the holiday season. After several years in limbo, side-scrolling shooter/1930s animation throwback Cuphead has been released to rave reviews. There's also the Super NES Classic, which Nintendo has released in adequate supply to fend off both scalpers and torch-wielding gamers still angry that they weren't able to purchase the company's last plug and play console. So I guess I won't get a chance to post this image complaining about the supply bottleneck I expected... but heh, I'm gonna do it anyway.

As for me, I'm still plugging away at my classic Xbox. What's great about this system- aside from the crapton of emulators available for it- is that games for the sixteen year old machine are still in abundance, still reasonably priced, and still look great, especially on the Xbox 360.

Oh yeah! Speaking of the Xbox 360, it's last call for the system's Indie Games service. You've got about... hmm... three days to purchase the handful of standout titles in the massive (and if I can be honest, massively awful) XBLIG library. I'd personally recommend Crosstown and Leave Home, and others have spoken highly of DELTA and, uh, qrth-phyl? Pat, can I buy a vowel here? 

Anyway, you've got until the 7th of this month to grab what you want, and while the signal to noise ratio on XBLIG is atrociously low, there are still a few games worth your time. On a related note, Nintendo is (finally) ending its Wiiware download service, but you've got about a year to stuff your Wii with software, so there's no great rush there.

This begs a discussion on the ephemeral nature of digital downloads, and I'm sure we'll be talking about that a lot in the future. Since I've got other things I need to do tonight, all I'm gonna say for the moment is that backups are your friend. Keep a few hard drives and SD cards around just in case.