Ex-XBox

 

Somehow I get the feeling that was supposed to happen. Not being able to access the Xbox 360 marketplace, I mean. I just didn't think it was going to happen so soon. At the stroke of midnight? That is coldblooded, Microsoft. Reminds me of when Miiverse died precisely on the hour promised by Nintendo.

But channo, I feel like I squeezed all I could out of the Xbox 360 at this point. I'm just grateful that the bulk of its library is available, either directly or as remakes, on the Series S. There's a whole lotta gaming to be had on the Xbox Series... the library isn't as massive as Steam's, but compared to past game systems, there is an almost titanic selection of games, stretched across twenty years and four generations of consoles. (And that's not counting all the collections of games for systems released decades before the first Xbox!) There's always room for improvement, but really, you weren't getting this breadth of choice in the 1980s and 1990s.

Switched Off

Woot posed this question during the Amazon Prime Days sale, and I figured I could squeeze a blog entry out of my answer.

Uh... no, not really? I'm not even the sort to rag on the Switch because of its dated hardware. I just made a ColecoVision game, after all. Specs aren't really all that important to me. No, the reason I won't miss the Switch is that it straddles the fence between console and handheld, and does neither particularly well. It's not a great console experience because of the default controls and hardware that lags well behind the Xbox Series and Playstation 4. It's not a great handheld experience either, because games aren't formatted for the handheld's resolution, making many difficult or even impossible to read. Unless you've memorized all the text from the console versions, there's just no way you're playing Rock of Ages 2 on a Switch. 

The D-pad on the Switch Lite is junk, too. So prone to reading diagonals when you don't want them! So prone to not reading diagonals when you do want them! Fighting games are abundant on the Switch, but it's a special kind of hell trying to play them. I'm honestly more comfortable playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the Playstation Vita. That's how bad the Switch Lite D-pad is. It's Nintendo's worst D-pad since the Game Boy Advance SP, but at least that had the mitigating circumstance of a clamshell design, forcing all the inputs on the front of the device to be nearly flush with the shell. 

The Switch Lite D-pad just sucks. There's no logical reason for it to be as bad as it is, and that makes the system especially hard for me to love in spite of a dream library of retro titles. It's filled to the brim with arcade favorites... Donkey Kong! Mario Bros! Terra Cresta! Exerion! Moon Patrol! About a zillion Neo-Geo games! And they all play rather shabbily on the Switch, thanks to that lousy D-pad. It didn't have to be that way, it shouldn't have been that way given Nintendo's extensive experience with making directional pads, and yet here I am, not enjoying games I've always loved because the control kind of sucks. It's a cryin' shame, it is, it is.

So no, I won't miss the Switch much if its successor is both backward compatible and can reliably read your inputs, rather than making vague educated guesses like the Switch Lite does. If Nintendo plays its cards right, the Switch 2 could be the preferred way to play original Switch games, just as the best Xbox One you can buy is an Xbox Series. 

 

Oh! By the way, I thought I'd share this image I found on DeviantArt. User TheColorfulKitsune created an arcade-quality version of the extra stage from Donkey Kong Jr. on the Coleco ADAM. Check out the dough presses and the gelatinous dough monsters and the giant mixer and that wood-fired hearth. I'd play that, even if it looks slightly like an advertisement for Keebler cookies. They make 'em in a hollow tree, you know! (Or a factory in the midwest, one of those.)

Red Dead Rent-demption

 

The box stops here.
(image from Wikipedia)

It seems that after a successful ten years in business, and another ten less successful years in business, the rental service Redbox is no more. Originally conceived by a McDonald's executive, Redbox benefited from the low overhead of its automated kiosks and the eventual collapse of Blockbuster Video... only to itself be obsoleted by the instant gratification of streaming services like Netflix.

Reflective of its fall from grace and eventual demise, the Redbox brand was traded off to a series of increasingly unremarkable corporate parents, from fast food giant McDonald's to the more niche CoinBase to (and I am not kidding about this) Chicken Soup for the Soul, the publishers of those drippily sentimental books that fell out of fashion around the same time as Beanie Babies. 

For what it's worth, I used Redbox a few times in my life, but quickly lost interest when it stopped renting video games five years ago. One could hardly blame them... the Redbox booths were a frequent target for scammers, who would keep the discs and feed a printed code into the kiosk to make it think the games had been returned safely. 

Eventually, Redbox got wise to the heisting hijinx and sold their remaining stock of games for fire sale prices... I still have a few Playstation 4 games in those familiar clear plastic cases. Except now, they're going to look like relics of a bygone era, like my copy of Battle Arena Toshinden in the Blockbuster box.

By the way! I'm hard at work on another ColecoVision game, Eyebrawls. It's an adaptation of the little seen Rockola arcade game, Eyes. Here's a peek at what's in store in the next couple of months.

 

I'm not working as hard as Inufuto, though. When this Japanese programmer makes a video game, he ports it to every 20th century game console you know exists, as well as a few systems and home computers you never knew existed. One of his creations, Cracky, is available for at least two dozen machines, including such oddities as the PASOPIA7, the Panasonic JR-200, and the SuperVision, a low-rent Game Boy competitor that always prompted groans whenever it appeared in an episode of The Price is Right. (The crappy late night version hosted by Tom Kennedy, natch.) One AtariAge user described the system as the "video game handheld of the less fortunate," and few gamers were as profoundly unfortunate as SuperVision owners.

What's nifty about Inufuto's work is that it highlights the differences between the various game systems. Cracky is the same on every format... and yet it's not, due to the limitations imposed by each console. For instance, the VIC-20 version is less smooth and a bit more flickery than the others, while the Atari 800 version has brighter colors but a chunkier resolution than its ColecoVision counterpart. It's a fascinating science experiment... albeit an extremely nerdy one.