The Man Who Erased His Physical Copies

Now you see 'em, soon you won't.
(image from Amazon)
(specifically the HG Wells book The Invisible Man)
(by the way, watch Time After Time. Malcolm
MacDowell is HG Wells, and the guy who played
Sark on Tron is Jack the Ripper. It's great.
Malcolm MacDowell kicks ass.)

Well, that's distressing. Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name (whew), the latest spin-off of the long-running Yakuza series, will be the second major console game to be released without actually being available in stores. Like Alan Wake II, if you want this title, you'll have to get your system online, and be willing to sit through what one presumes will be a lengthy download. Like the fly trapped in the split second before hitting a car's windshield, I don't think I'm going to like what comes next.

I'll be completely honest with you. I've gone the digital route with most of my games from the last two console generations, especially the Switch, where my digital collection far exceeds the games I've got on cartridge. (Plus, the digital games taste better!) At the same time, it's going to be a major blow to preservation efforts. You can't keep a game that exists in the cloud any more than you could clutch a real cloud in a closed fist. Once the servers holding your game are taken down, it's just gone, and you'll have cross your fingers and hope for a remaster. If one ever arrives, and if a completely different design team doesn't completely butcher it. (Cough. Cough. Ahem. Gee, I've got a scratchy and bitchy throat today.)

Yes, this is quite literally a case of Old Man Yells at Cloud. Consarnit.

Speaking of living in the past, I finally bought a ColecoVision power supply to go with the ColecoVision I bought six years ago. This thing is the Voldemort of wall warts; too heavy and gigantic to realistically hang from a wall outlet. If you don't have an extension cable for one of these monsters, you will be deprived of the joys of the Connecticut Leather Company's greatest game console and its wide selection of accurate (heh) arcade conversions until you get one.

The ColecoVision's default color set is,
by my humble estimation, a big 'ol bag of barf.
It's like a bag of Bertie Botts jellybeans, except
nearly all of them are some variation of pine
cleaner, phlegm, or earwax.
(image from AtariAge)

You may note a hint of reluctance at getting this system up and running. Well, the first thing is that I'll probably also have to install an A/V mod, as a standard RF signal just doesn't cut it anymore... especially not on modern flat-screen television sets. The second things is, well... my heart belongs to the Atari 5200. It's a big, clumsy, wrongheaded mess of a game system that saw the yawning gap of oblivion and screamed "FULL SPEED AHEAD!," but I have a weakness for these kinds of sad sack consoles. My very first system was an Odyssey2, I've got both a Saturn and a Dreamcast, and I was on the Neo-Geo Pocket train while everyone else was riding the Game Boy Color express. They're the little PC Engines that couldn't, but you have to admire how hard they try. (Except the Odyssey2; that was clearly goldbricking.)