Gen-Assist

Oh boy! It's the last post of the year! It's the last post of the DECADE! 

Before I begin, there's a Twitter post you may have already seen from Cinemassacre regular and professional coat tail surfer Mike Matei, which reads as follows:

Retweet if you agree: If you use the “rewind feature” that’s now standard on many NES and SNES games available on Switch, you DID NOT by any stretch of the imagination beat the god damn game.

First, I don't personally use rewind in games. Not because of any silly moral objection, but because it's slightly disorienting and I find myself hitting the button by accident until I turn it off completely in the options screen. However, I do use save states, loudly and proudly, and you'll have to pry those from my cold, dead hands.

See, here's the thing. I'm not as young as I used to be. I'm not as patient as I used to be either, and I don't feel a pressing urge to torture myself for hours on end just to prove my worth as a gamer. It's a video game. I don't have to prove a damn thing to it... it's there to entertain me. If save states are necessary to wring all the enjoyment I can out of a game, I'm using them. If I need an outlet for misplaced bravado, there are achievements and trophies for that.

Second, look at the balls on this Matei guy! Mr. "No Shortcuts Allowed" has been nursing from The Angry Video Game Nerd's jewel-encrusted teat for years. He's been playing his entire YouTube career on easy mode! As far as I'm concerned, my success at Punch-Out!! is exactly as legitimate as his success as an internet celebrity. My own foray into YouTube may have been met with all the enthusiasm of a school of hungry candiru, but at least I earned that failure. 

Anyway. There was something important I wanted to tell all of you. Project Lunar, the hotly anticipated hack for the Sega Genesis Mini, has arrived! Here's an installation tutorial from Restalgia if you want to try it yourself. Trust me, you do.

In way of warning, there isn't enough internal storage in the Genesis Mini to hold the entire Genesis library. A few games don't work with the M2ENGAGE emulator, and tons of games for the system are best left forgotten anyway. Why bother with Back to the Future III when you can just watch the movie? Why play Bart vs. The Space Mutants when you can just watch old episodes of The Simpsons? Why spend time with Dark Castle when you can roll around naked in a bed full of mouse traps? Eh, you get the idea. Upload only the games you want to play, and you'll be happy. If you're having trouble deciding, maybe I'll make some suggestions in a later post.