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.