Set Adrift a Second Switch

You know, Nintendo, you've got a pretty good hustle going on with the Switch Lite. People buy these pared down handheld systems hoping to save money, get frustrated with the tiny screen and lack of features, and go back to the store to get a real Switch, netting you five hundred dollars when your more cash-strapped customers were hoping to save three hundred.

You think you guys are pretty smart, but I didn't pay three hundred dollars for this Switch. It was more like $240 at a pawn shop, a pretty good deal which got even pretty better when I discovered the previous owner had left a 64GB memory card inside it. On the downside, the dreaded thumbstick drift that's been a bane of Switch owners for years has found its way to this system as well. The right Joy Con seems to be the problem, but it's not that big a deal as I have joysticks and adapters that will let me circumvent it.

With a different controller attached, this Switch works better as a handheld than my last one. I can flip it on its side, rest it on the couch, and play games like Exerion and Donkey Kong with their proper aspect ratio, boosting both my enjoyment and my high scores. Huh, now I get what all the FlipGrip hype was about! Thread some cables through the back of the docking base and drop the Switch inside, and it becomes a console... albeit one that's fighting my ThinkCentre PC and Genesis Mini for control of the third HDMI port on my television set. (I really need to do some pre-spring cleaning; my entertainment center looks like a Best Buy from 2017 exploded. You don't even want to know how my Wii U looks at this point.)

My only beef with the second Switch (aside from the fact that it chiseled another $240 out of my pocket...) is how it handles my account. It'll play the games I've already purchased, sure, but it takes a few extra seconds, checking with Nintendo HQ to make sure I've got the rights to play them. It doesn't bode well for those times when my internet takes a dirt nap, which happens more often than you'd like when you live out in the boonies.

But hey! I have a Switch now... like, a real Switch, and not some sorry half-measure that's only technically compatible with it. You can't realistically play Mechstermination Force or Rock of Ages on the Switch Lite unless you've got 20/10 vision and an electron microscope.

Inactive Visions

So. We've got a new president now (thank goodness), and he was sworn in on...well, this.

image from The Wrap

That Bible is hella thick and old. It looks less like the religious text you'd bring with you to church on Sunday and more like a weapon you'd use for protection while invading Dracula's castle. Then again, considering the last occupant of the White House, Biden could use all the protection against unholy nightmares he can get. Better bring along a sack full of garlic and stakes (not steaks with catsup; the last guy liked those) while you're at it.

image from the Castlevania
Fandom Wiki

Anyway. The eShop sale mentioned in a previous post is over, and my take from it was surprisingly slim... just Pure Pool, Panzer Dragoon, A Short Hike, and Clubhouse Games, with a copy of Captain Toad I managed to get at a steep discount, because Wal-Mart accidentally sold the game for the price of its DLC, and members of Cheap Ass Gamer were quick to flip all the copies they purchased during this brief mistake.

I haven't dug too deeply into my bounty yet, but I did leaf through Clubhouse Games and was slightly underwhelmed. It's polished yet bland, like a shellacked saltine cracker, and that's pretty much exactly what I should have expected from it. However, the selection of titles is unappetizing compared to its Nintendo DS predecessor, packed to overflowing with board games and card games I'm not likely to play. It seemed like the DS version was a little more creative, including a Jenga-like game of balance and the slightly nerve-wracking Soda Shake.

Also, Bowling was a bit of a letdown, at least from the perspective of a Switch Lite owner. I already have a couple of bowling games for the system, and the best of these, Strike!, wisely uses a vertical aspect ratio, giving you a better view of the alley and more room to swipe your finger for throws. Clubhouse Games Bowling is played with the system held horizontally, and I can't tell you how many throws I've guffed because of the limited finger real estate. At least the impact of the ball against the pins is more satisfying here, with a loud thunderous crash, compared to the unremarkable clacking of pins in Strike! and the toothless, tinkling sound effects in Knock 'Em Down Bowling.

The improbably good DS
game Tony Hawk's American
Sk8land, created by Vicarious
Visions. Guess we won't be
seeing much of that action
anymore, thanks to Bobby
Kotick.
(image from DarkZero.co.uk)

There's something else worth mentioning... oh yes, Vicarious Visions is being absorbed by the Blizzard half of Activision-Blizzard. I'm not just saddened by this news as a fan of the Game Boy Advance, where many of their games were published, but also a little mystified. VV was one of the few game companies that could turn the sow's ear of a television license into the silk purse of a respectable handheld video game, and their specialized talents will be wasted at a publisher best known for World of Warcraft. 

There's still room in this industry for a game company that can make entertaining handheld games based on cartoons and movies, really! Just look at Wayforward, which has made it their bread and butter for the last twenty years. I'd personally just leave well enough alone and let Vicarious Visions do what they do best, but hey, what do I know? (More than Bobby Kotick, the guy who cratered the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero series with a decade of oversaturation and inferior products.)

Besieged with Choices

"There was a poem
in ancient Rome
about a dog
who found two bones
he picked the one
he licked the other
he went in circles
he dropped dead!"

Freedom of Choice, DEVO

Can't decide! Brain aneurysm!
(image from IGN)
(also, Psyduck looks less like a Pokemon here
and more like a bit character from a Munch
painting.)

People like choice, but they hate deciding between two equally appealing choices. That's the dilemma I'm currently facing with the eShop New Year's sale, which offers a whole lot of appealing choices and only so much money to stretch between them. Do I get Clubhouse Games, packed with over fifty different diversions? None of these insubstantial games would be especially tempting on their own, but when you pack them all together in one package and cut the price to the lowest it's ever been, you start to take it a lot more seriously.

Perhaps I should go one step further and get SmileBASIC, a programming language which lets you download hundreds of games or even create your own. The promise of infinite gameplay for a paltry seventeen dollars is hard to ignore, but then you realize that a programming language also demands an investment of your time... time to download the fruit of others' labors, and time needed to learn that specific dialect of BASIC. Let's not forget that without a keyboard, typing in those programs is going to take a whole lot longer on the Switch than it would a personal computer.

No no, that's starting to sound more like work than play. Maybe I should snap up some of the games in the Sega Ages collection, currently being sold at healthy discounts. Maybe recently released indie titles like A Short Hike and CrossCode (a dual stick shooter/RPG mash-up?) would be a better investment. Then again, I could always set my sights a little higher and buy one of the big budget games  on sale, like Ghostbusters, or Crysis, or Assassin's Creed IV, or Borderlands: The Handsome Collection. I've got to assume that Borderlands 2 would be a much better experience on the Switch than it was the Vita, which could barely keep up with its demands.

Perhaps I should just save what money I got from the stimulus and put it into the computer I bought at a thrift store a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, that comes with its own tough choices... should I stick with the small form factor case the system came in, saving space but also sacrificing expandability? Or should I risk transplanting it into the more spacious case I purchased at an estate sale last year? There'd be plenty of room for a video card in there, but it's also plenty big and bulky.

I can drag my feet on the computer for a while, but with the New Year's sale ending on January 21st, I've got a whole lot of choices on the Switch and not much time or money to make them.

Where We're Going, We Do Need Pictures

Hey! I got a new phone with a thirteen megapixel camera, so it's time to take some snapshots!

I wound up with these Sega Genesis games quite by accident when I purchased a lot on ShopGoodwill to rebuild my library a couple of years ago, but they seem a lot more relevant now. Rest well, gentlemen. You may be gone from this plane of existence, but we'll always have you in digital form, as well as thousands of game show reruns and Slim-Fast commercials.

(Fun fact! This was not Alex Trebek's first brush with electronic gaming! He was the host of video game show Starcade in one of the pilots!)

In cheerier news, I went to the bustling city of Tucson the other day for some long overdue thrifting. Some of what I found in the Bookman's, Goodwills, and pawn shops in the area was exciting, but not nearly as thrilling as this.

I leaned out the window while waiting for my aunt to finish her shopping, and caught this out of the corner of my eye. Could that silver wedge in the Wal-Mart parking lot really be a DeLorean, made famous in the Back to the Future trilogy?

Yes! Yes, it really could be! It's the same model of car featured in two classic movies and that annoyingly prescient Pepsi commercial sandwiched between them! It obviously wasn't showroom quality, with occasional scrapes along its metal frame, but it was nevertheless incredible to see one of these up close and personal. By the way, did you know the trunk of this car is in the front? I wondered why the driver was piling groceries onto his engine block until my aunt explained the car's design.

Anyway, here was what I managed to find in the Tucson trip. Like I said, there's nothing here that would generate DeLorean-caliber excitement, but there are a few things in this picture that made me pretty happy. The best catch by a mile was this HP ProDesk, found at a thrift on Speedway for thirty-five dollars. It wouldn't boot when I first tested it, refusing to go to POST or do anything beyond lighting a few lamps on the front of the case, but unplugging the hard drive seemed to fix that problem. (Thanks to reader nightrnr for that suggestion, by the way!)

I was thinking of using this as my entertainment PC in place of the already capable ThinkCentre I bought last year. However, as it turns out, this HP is more than twice as powerful as my main desktop, the Acer I threw into a custom case seven years ago. The original plan was to replace that machine with all new parts, loaded into a spiffy case I found at an estate sale last fall. However, that less than generous stimulus check (six hundred dollars? For eight months?) makes me think I should just drop an SSD and a video card into the ProDesk and call it a day.

All right, onto the video games. PS-Pickins were disconcertingly slim at the two Bookman's stores I visited... it seems like the pandemic and the boredom that came with it gave people a new appreciation for a handheld typically ignored by the masses. Games that had once been easy to find were suddenly far less plentiful and more expensive, although I did notice a few random Japanese imports, like Daisenryaku (given a chibi, Advance Wars-like overhaul on the PSP), Shin Megami Tensei, and Densha De Go. Having no need for train simulations or RPGs with an impenetrable amount of Japanese, I left them behind.

What I did buy was a couple of 3DS games, Super Mario Maker and Project X Zone 2. Critics claimed that the former title wasn't as good as its Wii U counterpart, and I'd have a hard time arguing the point. It seems more humble and constrained than the console version, even judging from the limited time I've spent with it. I strongly doubt there's ever going to be a situation where I jump into a warp pipe and find a discotheque waiting for me there. 

Project X Zone 2 has more promise, although it's more for the lulz than the gameplay. It's a crossover game with characters from Sega, Namco, and Capcom, including such deep cuts as Saturn spokesman and psychotic judo master Segata Sanshiro. Does it matter that it's a turn-based strategy game, a genre for which I have little interest? Not really, as long as it's not the tire fire Cross Edge was. Does it matter that Segata Sanshiro had no presence in the United States, beyond a write-up in Tips and Tricks? Nope, he's here anyway, and I can't wait to find him.

The other goodies include a tiny MP3 player for those lengthy trips to Sierra Vista and a cable that will let me finally shake a decent image out of my Sega Genesis. Yes yes, I'm sure an OSSC or a Framemeister would give me a better picture. Anyone care to break their piggy banks and buy one for me? Yeah, I thought so.

The Birthday Post, 2021 Edition

This birthday brings with it both relief (I survived 2020!) and a sobering thought. The characters Mai Shiranui and Cammy White are close to exactly my age. According to official Fatal Fury and Street Fighter canon, Mai was born on January 1st, 1974, while Cammy arrived five days later on the 6th. Note that they were intended to be the youngest members of their respective casts, with Street Fighter leads Ken and Ryu dating back to the 1960s and Zangief going back even farther than that, to the 1950s.

I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and
presume she's no longer a hair over a
hundred pounds, either.

Cammy matured in later entries of the Street Fighter series, with more confidence and a posh British accent, but Mai seems to be preserved in amber, looking and acting pretty much just like she did in her 1992 debut. By the way, both Street Fighter II and the first Fatal Fury debuted thirty years ago... if that makes you feel old, just remember that you're in good company.

What else? Christmas and my birthday treated me well... I've got some pocket cash, Bookman's credit coming out of my ears, and a second Genesis Mini in case I need a spare. I'm dangerously addicted to Starlink, even without the silly toys sold separately. The Satiator is finally out, and at $259, my Saturn's need for games on solid state storage will have to go unsatiated. (I mean come on, even the Analogue Duo doesn't cost that much, and it's a full friggin' system!) That is all.