Vixty-Four

Whoa whoa whoa, back up the phone and hold the truck a minute. There's gonna be a new version of the C64 plug and play with a functioning keyboard? And it's going to play VIC-20 games too?! Evidently! Here's the promotional video from manufacturers Retro Games Limited...

They're planning a December 2019 release for this one, and if it's reasonably priced, I WANT IN. Special thanks to DIY Hacker for the scoop.

Lethargizer Bunny

Apologies for the extended absence. My get up and go must have got hit by a truck.

Anyway, the big news from Mollipen (I don't know how she gets these scoops before everyone else... it must be why she gets paid the big gaming journalism bucks) is that Arcade1UP is releasing a cabinet with three King of Fighters games. We're getting '94, '96, and '98, which aren't entries I personally would have picked, but it's a start. 

By the way, it's a little disconcerting that these cabs made of particle board and imitation arcade hardware are selling for six hundred dollars in Japan. I couldn't even justify seventy five dollars for the Centipede cabinet when it was on clearance at Wal-Mart! At six hundred bucks, you might as well buy a real arcade cab, or roll your own with a Raspberry Pi and actual wood. You might lop off a few fingers with power tools, but what's love without a little sacrifice?

Thinks, A Lot

Sorry I've been out of the picture for a while, gang. My mind's been elsewhere, mostly on the punishing Arizona heat but also on my acquisition of two ThinkPad computers. I got the first, a T530, as a replacement for an Acer that was long overdue for retirement. I'm using it right now, and it's pretty snazzy, with a solid build and more power than I've ever had in a laptop. Heck, it's got an i7 processor, which I've never had in any computer! Couple that with eight gigs of RAM and an SSD hard drive and you've got a user experience so smooth, you have to spell it with six extra "o"s.

The second machine, a T430, was an impulse purchase. I saw it for a little over fifty bucks on eBay, and figured "what the heck?" It was advertised as parts/repair, but the seller demonstrated that it boots to BIOS, and I can tell from personal experience that it can go a lot farther than that. It runs the build of Linux Mint I copied onto a flash drive, and I'm hoping to install Windows 7 on it when the SSD drive arrives sometime this week. It's not as powerful as the T530, with an i5 processor and 4 gigs of RAM, but I'm confident that it'll be more than suitable as a replacement for my RCA Cambio. That single USB port was really starting to chafe...

Anger Management

I'm not going to talk about the shootings. Life is depressing enough.

However, I will talk about the aftereffects of the shootings... specifically, the scapegoating of the video game industry. It's just like 1993 all over again, and not in a good way. Personally, I don't think video games make people murderously violent, but it's hard to make that case when gamers start a campaign of harassment against a developer who decided to publish his software on the Epic Games Store instead of Steam. 

Look, I get it. Video games can be frustrating. I've broken a few discs, screamed a few insults, and posted a few angry tweets about them. (Okay, more than a few.) Having said that, calling a game designer a "kike," telling them to "drink bleach," and suggesting that their wife should be- uh, I'm not going to repeat that- may be taking things a little too far. And it's not just in poor taste, it's poor timing, when you consider that the politicians who have the power to take your video games away may use what you're saying as justification to do just that. Take a deep breath, count to ten, and pacify those pectorals.

Anyway! Here's some better news. Konami is adding even more games to the TurboGrafx-16 Mini, including a half-dozen Namco titles which were an essential part of the system's library. I mean, how are you gonna have a TurboGrafx without Galaga '90, Splatterhouse, and Bravoman? Okay, you're not getting Bravoman, but those other games I mentioned will be included. You'll also be getting two Spriggan games, which would probably be a good thing if I knew what the heck a "Spriggan" was. It's some weird giant robot thing, I guess. Thanks to Mollipen from Twitter for the scoop.

Also, Garfield is now the property of Viacom after decades of independent ownership. I'm not thrilled with this development, but since I haven't been emotionally invested in this character since I was a teenager, I'm pretty sure I'll live.

The Incredible, Expendable Wii

Why do these things keep popping up for so cheap? I feel like I'm back in 1986, picking up pre-crash game consoles for pennies on the dollar. This is my fourth Wii so far... maybe someday I'll admit I have a problem and stop buying them. (Just not today.)

I marvel at how cheap and unloved these machines have become. Thirteen years ago, people were literally dying to get their hands on them, but now, they've been unceremoniously drop-kicked out the door of thousands of households, winding up in thrift shops, pawn shops, junk shops, and any other merchant that will take them.

America has turned on the Wii, and I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it plays hundreds of games. Most models are compatible with the GameCube, bumping that total up to hundreds more. It can emulate nearly a dozen other systems, pushing its overall library into the thousands. Sure, the Wii isn't trendy anymore, and some of its online features are no longer supported, but it's not useless.

Maybe I'll finally get around to sending a friend one of these systems, hacked with Letterbomb and loaded up with goodies. It's not like I don't have spares.