Sunny Side Up

 

(image from Inspired Pencil)

I’m not one to look on the bright side, and it’s gotten that much harder for me to be optimistic in the face of everything that’s currently happening in America. However, out of the ninety-nine problems I’m currently juggling, video games ain’t one. There’s a ton of great stuff available on all the major consoles, and thanks to recent spring sales on Steam and Nintendo’s eShop, it’s never been cheaper to enjoy it.

Let me give you a couple examples. Despite all the critical acclaim it’s received, I couldn’t bring myself to pay sixty dollars for a copy of Super Mario Wonder. However, at forty-two dollars, it was a lot easier to take that plunge. Same goes for Robocop: Rogue City, which piqued my curiousity when it was first released, but became a more palatable purchase when it dropped to fifteen dollars during an Xbox Live sale. After all, the original Robocop movie was brilliant, but that was nearly forty years ago, and nothing else in the franchise has been worth a damn. I needed some added incentive to take a chance on this game, which seemed to come out of nowhere.

I’m happy to say that while I wouldn’t have touched Robocop: Rogue City at its launch price, it’s been well worth what I actually paid for it... an earnestly designed first-person shooter that feels more authentic than practically everything else bearing the Robocop name. With rare exceptions, everything I’ve played lately has been worth my time and money, which is something I couldn’t say in those days before steep Steam sales and the last year of the Nintendo Switch, a game system with an impossibly comprehensive library. So let the world burn and the walls fall... you’ll find my corpse buried in the rubble, with a game controller clutched tightly in my hands and a smile on my face.

That wasn’t as optimistic as I hoped it would be. Anyway, here’s a handful of the games I’ve played over the last few months, ranging in quality from “surprisingly good” to “augh, why can’t I stop playing this?!” (Of course I’m describing Balatro, and of course I’m playing it right now, even as I blog. You’d probably need to pull me away from it with the jaws of life to make me stop.) 

BALATRO
Local Thunk
Xbox

One nifty touch is that if you beat the stage
quota with a single hand, your score is set
ablaze, audibly crackling as the points
pile up. It's the little things, man.
(image from Steam)

Calling this poker would be like calling chess checkers. Fundamentally, they’re similar, but Balatro is more strategically rich than poker thanks to the introduction of Jokers. These special cards change the rules of the game to your advantage... for instance, Odd Todd makes all odd-numbered cards boost your multiplier, earning you more chips for every hand. Smart players can combine the effects of two or more Jokers, creating “synergies” which lead to huge point bonuses. Pair a Swashbuckler (the price of all Jokers is added to your multiplier) with an Egg (which increases its value after every round) and you’ll be swimming in chips after a few antes. Likewise, combine Midas Mask (all played face cards turn gold) with Pareidolia (all cards are counted as face cards) and you’ll quickly have a deck of gold cards, helpful for earning the currency you’ll use after every round to buy more Jokers.

Adding to the depth are planetary cards, which boost the value of specific poker hands, tarot cards, which alter the cards in your deck, and spectral cards; monkey’s paws which offer significant advantages to the player at an uncomfortable price. There’s a lot to consider when you’re playing Balatro, but it’s rarely overwhelming because it’s built on such a familiar and intuitive foundation. It’s poker, on a higher plane of existence. (Adorned with charming pixel art.)

FREEDOM PLANET 2
Galaxy Trail
Nintendo Switch

Genesis may have done what Nintendon’t thirty-five years ago, but Freedom Planet does what Sonic the Hedgehog hasn’t for years, propelling players through two dozen speed-focused stages while keeping them eager to witness what’s next. Freedom Planet 2 isn’t an exact replica of the first three Sonic games, with melee combat replacing the blue blur’s trademark spin jump. However, in some respects, Galaxy Trail’s tribute to Sonic the Hedgehog feels like a refinement of Sega’s formula, with levels that encourage exploration, clever gimmicks that take advantage of the game’s emphasis on physics, and more substantial boss battles.

Like the original, you'll swear the awkward
Chinese girl from Turning Red made it.
(image from Pressed Sake)
(uh, I mean, Press a Key)

Freedom Planet 2 also shows marked improvements over the previous game, with a more agreeably silly storyline and accessibility options that give less skilled players an edge in the often brutal boss fights. Instead of being dragged to a checkpoint after losing a life, you can opt to revive yourself immediately, with almost no health. It’s risky, but oh so satisfying when that second wind lets you sneak in one last blow and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The game’s not perfect. Minor enemies are annoyingly damage resistant, and the set pieces aren’t as fun as they were in the first Freedom Planet. It’s also an unapologetically girly game, which may not be to taste for some players. (Suck it up, men! You lived through the My Little Pony fad of 2010, and you’ll get through this.) Having said all that, Freedom Planet 2 is one of the rare Sonic-like video games that can keep pace with its speedy inspiration, and even overtake it.

ROBOCOP: ROGUE CITY
Tayon
Xbox Series S

When not contemplating what it means
to be human in a chrome-plated future, Alex
Murphy blows away criminals and law
enforcement mechs with a pistol that
thinks it's a Gatling gun.
(image from MP1st)

What is the future of law enforcement? For officer Alex Murphy, it’s eternal confinement in the terrifying margin between life and death, man and machine, as the property of a sinister, all-consuming corporation. (Presumably one with free two day shipping.) When not blasting thugs into hamburger with his Auto 9, Murphy searches for his humanity in a society which has happily abandoned its own for the sake of convenience and comfort. It’s a science-fiction tragedy that has crept from “what if?” to “what is” in recent years... we still don’t have steel-plated police cyborgs, but the crass commercialism and frightening corporate overreach in the first Robocop movie isn’t far removed from life in the actual 21^st century.

This is an essential part of the Robocop experience, and one that often gets glossed over for that other Robocop trademark, extreme violence. Robocop: Rogue City has plenty of the latter... mohawk-topped gang members look like they’ve taken a ride in a high-speed blender after Murphy targets them with his firearm. However, Robocop’s search for humanity in an inhumane world also gets its proper due. Citizens in the urban wasteland of Detroit frequently need his help, and he can either do things by the book, upholding the law, or look the other way and let them make amends for past mistakes, serving the public trust while embracing the decency the scheming chairmen of OCP couldn’t quite snuff out.

As a game, Rogue City is adequate, a first person shooter with light adventure elements. You can scan for clues with computer-aided "Robocop vision," which earns experience points and eventually, stat-boosting skill points. As one might expect from his size and weight, Robocop is slower and stiffer than your average FPS hero, but as one might also expect, that inch thick metal armor makes him extremely damage resistant, letting him wade through hailstorms of bullets that would quickly bring down a human target.

There have been better games in this genre, and certainly ones with better graphics... the streets of Detroit are appropriately dreary and dimly lit, but the cast of characters dangle their toes over the edge of the Uncanny Valley, looking and moving like bug-eyed mannequins. However, thanks to the film-quality soundtrack and the voice work of Peter Weller, there’s rarely been better Robocop games. Heck, it’s better than nearly everything else bearing the Robocop name, and it’s all a fan can ask for after suffering through several lousy sequels and a wrongheaded 2014 reboot.

SUPER MARIO WONDER
Nintendo
Nintendo Switch

Good thing they labeled him as "Steve
Smith." I thought he was Cheech
Marin for a minute there.
(image from HG101)

Back in the early 1980s, there was an arcade game starring the rock band Journey, with two noteworthy features. The first is the introduction of digitized graphics, with each band member portrayed as a crude black and white photograph stuck on a tiny video game body. Inventor Ralph Baer originally wanted to use this early technology to let players take pictures of themselves for the high score screen, but since players in test locations wanted to take pictures of everything but their faces, he wisely decided to lose the built-in camera and just digitize some celebrities.

The second headlining feature of Journey is that each stage has a split personality. At first, the gameplay is fairly passive, with simple challenges that bring to mind games like Q*Bert, Donkey Kong, and Lunar Lander. However, when a member of Journey claims his stolen musical instrument, all hell breaks loose, and everything onscreen that was content to leave Steve Perry alone as he sailed past them on a rocket pack now wants him dead. (You know, like every other member of Journey.) The game instantly becomes more frantic, with players flailing on the fire button to clear a path through waves of neon gates, LP-firing cannons, and other musically themed hazards.

Super Mario Wonder. It's like Freaky Friday,
every day of the week!
(image from Nintendo Everything)

Super Mario Wonder takes this concept and runs a marathon with it. At first it’s Dr. Jeckyll, with Mario bouncing through a seemingly ordinary stage. When he finds the game’s MacGuffin de jour, a Wonder Seed, it becomes Mr. Hyde, with the prevailing theme of that stage taking an unexpected and often dangerous twist. Herds of grazing triceratops become a relentless stampede, rolling fossils come to life as flying serpents, and Mario turns into a squishy red blob, clinging to the walls of a cavern overflowing with gelatin. There’s a fun surprise waiting in every stage of Super Mario Wonder, and it’s exactly what the series needed after settling into a rut with the last handful of games on the 3DS and Wii U. This is the first Super Mario Bros. title developed without creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s direct involvement, and it suggests that the long-running series will be in good hands even after his retirement.

BERSERK BOY
Berserk Boy Games
Nintendo Switch

Go berserk? You probably should, if you like the fast, challenging action and futuristic sheen of the Mega Man X games. Thanks to its focus on multi-stage melee combat, it’s probably more accurate to compare Berserk Boy to the Gunvolt games by Inticreates... in his default form, Berserk Boy must first tag enemies with a charging dash, then finish them off with a blast of lightning.

Here's just the thing to top up your
testosterone after a few froofy games
of Freedom Planet 2.
(image from Instant Gaming)

Like Mega Man X, the title character can unlock more forms by beating bosses, but these feel less like optional weapons and more like entirely different characters. Soaring Wind is pitifully weak on offense, but spans wide chasms with ease. Meanwhile, Ice Kunai is the only form that can strike enemies from a safe distance, and moves more swiftly than the combat-focused Flame Drill. You’ll want (and sometimes need) to frequently switch forms to progress through each stage, which finds a comfortable middle ground between the linearity of Mega Man X and the more open level designs of a Metroidvania.

There could have been better balance between the five available forms... you’ll probably stick with lightning and Ice Kunai until you’re absolutely forced to switch to something else. Moreover, it’s a bit of a kludge to quickly switch to specific forms when the terrain demands it. The cast of characters aren’t especially interesting and the plot about “berserk orbs” makes even less sense than Mega Man X’s, but that’s the extent of the flaws in this top shelf platformer that should prove especially compelling for speedrunners. It looks great, sounds even better thanks to the Tee Lopes soundtrack, and encourages players to not only beat stages, but master them with repeated playthroughs.

 

Attack of the Constipated Ninjas

 

They're dream makers, in the same sense as
Freddy Krueger or Doctor Destiny.
(image from Giant Bomb)

You'd think I would love Shadow of the Ninja Reborn, the latest release from Natsume-Atari. It's an old school experience with driving music and lush graphics; the kind of game we would have seen more often on 32-bit systems if not for the dick-dribbling, tech-chasing writers of magazines like Next Generation, who never missed a chance to tell their readers that their games aren't worth shit if they don't have polygons. (What, me bitter?)

Unfortunately, Shadow of the Ninja Reborn brings back all the annoyances of video games from the 8-bit and 16-bit generations, along with lead-footed assassins that make an already frustrating experience that much more agonizing. Reborn is ostensibly a remake of Natsume's similarly named sleeper hit for the NES, but the designers have taken creative liberties with the source material. Stages have been expanded, character sprites have been redrawn, and the weapon system has been completely redesigned, with everything from caltrops (you know, floor tacks that always land point first) to giant swords to laser beams added to the slim arsenal in the original game. 

The Kasurigami (hooked chain) is now
a permanent part of your arsenal,
but each throw leaves you locked in
position until the head of the chain
returns, and doesn't snuff bullets or
shuriken. This becomes a problem
when fighting the elusive aquatic ninjas in
the second stage. Prepare to pick a lot
of ninja stars out of your keister.
(image from Nintendo)

You might think this would improve the experience, but the new weapons quickly become a nuisance, with massive set up times and weird trajectories that make using them more trouble than they're worth. Adding to the frustration is a weapon select system that forces you to hold in a button while cycling through the available items with left and right. Left on the D-pad moves the current selection right and vice versa, forcing you to adapt your muscle memory to the mad whims of the designers. Just pressing the weapon select button swaps between the default katana and the first of the seven items in your inventory. This must have seemed like a good idea in theory, but leaves the player struggling to reach the one health restoring item in their stock that could save their lives in a tense situation. Got milk? Nope, you got a mallet instead, and now you got killed by that giant robot samurai flinging chunks of metal in your face.

Oh, but the frustration doesn't end with the weapon system! In addition to way too many useless weapons, Kaede and Hayate are armed with ninja techniques that would be impressive... if they weren't so kludgy to perform. Take for instance hanging from platforms. Jumping under a platform makes your ninja cling to it... simple enough. Up flips your hero up to the top, while jump drops them back down to a lower level. Up and jump would vault your character upward in any other side-scrolling platformer, but here, you just fall... possibly into a pit, which robs you of precious energy. 

Your ninja can also climb walls, but pressing up and down to adjust your poisition a'la Ninja Gaiden II won't cut it... you have to press up and toward the wall, then hammer the jump button to make them race upward. Similarly, there's a spin that lets you float over gaps in tight areas, but that's triggered by holding down and to the left or right, while pounding the jump button. You can't double tap in the direction you'd like to air dash, as has been customary in video games since 1996's Guilty Gear. No, Natsume had to be unique, and the player suffers for it. (Really, you're making me press DOWN on the controller to defy gravity, a force which tends to pull you downward? That makes perfect sense. Wink wink, give middle finger.)

And ANOTHER thing! Power ups
increase the length of your katana
blade, but taking damage takes
that advantage away, forcing you to get
dangerously close to that chimpanzee
with spike-lined armor.
(image from Nintendo)

Worst of all, these two ninjas are gallingly weighty and sluggish, making you think they should have considered a career in accounting instead. In that 8-bit tradition, Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is a demanding game, forcing players to make split-second adjustments to their positions to cleanly leap from platform to platform, and to keep a safe distance from their enemies. Kaede and Hayate are just too doughy to match the reflexes of their foes and meet the game's overwhelming demands, which means players will have to memorize each stage and react a half-second before each enemy strikes. You can adapt to the slight reaction delays, but when you're playing as ninjas and not sumos, it shouldn't even be necessary.

Look, I want to love Natsume-Atari's games. Unfortunately, whether it's Wild Guns or Pocky and Rocky or Shadow of the Ninja, they feel like the twelve labors of Hercules with Sisyphus' boulder clamped to your ankle. If you're going to present me with a brutal challenge, at least give me the tools needed to meet that challenge. Don't give me shinobi who spend most of their downtime at the all you can eat buffet.

Another Year Birthier

 

Why, thank you for the birthday wishes, PSP Go! I can always count on you, unless UMDs are involved. I'd buy an M2 card, or even better, an M2 to SD card adapter, but I can't justify the expense when the last time I used my PSP Go was, uh... exactly this time last year. You can see the position I'm in here. This thing gets less love than my flippin' Vita. The 3DS spends more time in my hands.

If it's just an R4 with 208 ROMs
on it, is it still a 208 in 1 multi-
cartridge? The Channel 4 News
Team investigates.

 

Speaking of which! I found this interesting little trinket floating around in the wilds of Tucson earlier today. It advertises itself as a 208 in 1 3DS cartridge, but it's pretty clear from the SD card slot alone that it's really a clone of the R4, that Nintendo-enraging flash cart that everyone with a Nintendo DS knew about, but absolutely nobody actually owned. (Wink, wink.)

Sure enough, there are precisely 208 games on the included SD card, which can be played on a Nintendo DS, IF the R4 can slip through the handheld's security checks. This seems to happen with every other boot, and the inconsistent functionality lends a sense of cheapness to these products. Maybe I'd have more luck if I upgraded the dummy ROM... this one's currently running, or pretending to run, Deep Labyrinth by Atlus.

But when the cartridge does work, it's a fun trip back to 2010-era gaming. Well, New Super Mario Bros kind of bites, as ponderously slow as it is starved for fresh ideas. You know how Super Mario Wonder was made by junior Nintendo staffers, and full of all kinds of creative twists to the formula? New Super Mario Bros. is... kind of the exact opposite of that. If it tells you anything, Tose made a Super Mario Bros. game for the Nintendo DS, Super Princess Peach, and that has more character and identity than New Super Mario Bros. Actually, a lot more, which is surprising coming from the makers of Chubby Cherub. "Hey, Tose. Why don't YOU make the fun game for a change, and we'll make the aggressively formulaic, barely adequate one?"

Anyway. I can always nudge myself back into Solatorobo, since that's also on the cartridge. I didn't see the attraction before, but maybe it'll finally click.

End Game

Well, it's the last day of the year. Just in case you were wondering, this is what I've been banging away at for the last couple of months.

And what might this "this" be, you ask? I call it "Allcade." It's a homemade arcade cabinet that integrates with an Android tablet, allowing the user (that's me!) easy access to one of four hundred and fifty arcade games. It's pretty neat, and nearly complete... I just need to add LED lights behind the marquee and I'll be happy with it. 

Did I say happy? Well, it doesn't run everything. I'm pretty sure performance in MAME4Droid would improve if I swapped the el cheapo 2019 Amazon Fire with something beefier, if I could even squeeze it into the cabinet. So I'm not totally happy with the results, but I'm mostly happy. It runs games way better than similar cabinets by My Arcade, and the vertically oriented screen means that Toaplan shooters and those really old arcade games (Donkey Kong, Time Pilot, Xevious, Pac-Man, etc.) fill the entire display, just as they should. 

So like I said, I'm mostly happy. And on that note, I wish you all a mostly happy New Year!

Better Ways to Fill Your Palms

I'm faintly amused (wait, I meant the other one. Bemused) that America isn't just willing to compromise its principles when it's convenient... it'll sell itself at a steep discount for the most petty and trivial reasons. Case in point: after months of warning the world about the dangers of electing Donald Trump as president, MSNBC broadcaster and soulless shell of a man Joe Scarborough immediately went to Mar-A-Lago to schmooze with the president-elect. A real profile in courage, there.

Another, more video game-specific example is when the formerly respected retro gaming blog Time Extension (no link; they can piss up a rope) went out of its way to give a glowing review to the Chromatic, a Game Boy Color clone with an outrageous price tag. 

Stupid? Evil? Now you can
have both!
(image from GameStop)

 

Surprisingly, paying two hundred dollars for a handheld with exactly two kinds of games- Pokemon and crap- isn't the problem here. I'd point and laugh at it for a while, but stupid as it may be, being based on one of the more forgettable handhelds of the 1990s is forgivable. No, it's the baggage that comes with it. The Chromatic was spearheaded by tech magnate Palmer Luckey, who looks like he should be saying "whoa!" a lot on Blossom but in actuality is the kind of guy who would send a fleet of drones to blow up Mayim Bialik. Luckey is a war profiteer, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and a man who could charitably be called "uncomfortably Nazi-adjacent."

Time Extension didn't think it was important to mention anywhere in its lengthy tongue bath of a review that the Chromatic was bankrolled by Palmer Luckey, mirroring a similar incident when the blog attached its round, tooth-lined sucker of a mouth to Tommy Tallarico's buttocks for a preview of his vaporware console, the Intellivision Amico. It's the kind of journalistic malfeasance that would make even Kotaku blush, but Kiblitizing would like to make up for Time Extension's oversight (...?) by suggesting alternatives to the Chromatic that are cheaper, more versatile, and most importantly, not designed by Colonel Klink.

Taste the surprisingly bland rainbow!
(image from eBay)

GAME BOY COLOR
NINTENDO
PRICE: ~$60

Here's the most obvious solution for a Game Boy Color fix... a Game Boy Color. Personally speaking, I'm not at all a fan of this machine, regarding it as the least appealing of the late 1990s gaming handhelds. (Well, that and the game dot com.) As you may have already surmised, it's a Game Boy, in color, with double the processing speed of the original. And oh yeah, a mountain of film and cartoon licensed games so crummy, Nintendo had to insulate its successor from the imminent avalanche of crap with the quality control program Club Mario. It does play Game Boy Color games, however lackluster they may be, so if that's what you want, that's what you'll get, exactly the way they were in 1998.

Game Boys 2 Men.
(image from Wikipedia)

 

GAME BOY ADVANCE
NINTENDO
PRICE: ~$80

This is the system that brought the Game Boy line into the 21st century, with a wider resolution, 256 colors, scaling and rotation, and even polygons and emulation when pushed to its limits. I love this handheld, full stop, but there are a lot of models available, and not all of them have aged gracefully. I'd suggest skipping the original with its dim screen and the uncomfortably tiny Game Boy Micro, which can't run legacy Game Boy games, and head straight to either the Game Boy Advance SP (the explosively bright AGP-101, specifically) or, for a bigger screen, the Game Boy Player, a device that plugs into the bottom of your GameCube and plays everything but Game Boy Video titles. You don't want those anyway; it's like rubbing your eyeballs against Shrek-flavored sandpaper.

The choice of a new console generation.
(image from Emu-Gen)

PLAYSTATION PORTABLE
SONY
PRICE: ~$80

Speaking of favorite handheld game systems! The Playstation Portable is a worthy addition to any gamer's collection, particularly the PSP-3000, which has the sharpest screen and the most responsive D-pad of the bunch. This system can't play Game Boy Color games by default, but if you've hacked it- and it's so easy in 2024, there's no reason not to- you'll get access to emulators for that system, along with dozens of others. You can run Odyssey2 games on a Playstation Portable. You can run TI 99/4A computer games on a Playstation Portable. There's not much the PSP can't run, including hundreds of games designed specifically for the system, which were impressive enough to drop jaws and fill pants when the handheld debuted in 2005.

Lucille Ball's preferred handheld game system,
the Vita-meata-vega-min!
(image from Wikipedia)

PLAYSTATION VITA
SONY
PRICE: ~$120

The follow up to the PSP was never as impressive or as well supported as Sony's first color handheld, but the lush OLED screen of the 1000 model and the same immense pool of software make it a worthwhile alternative. It's got a fantastic D-pad, too, which is something I don't expect from Sony game systems. By the way, it also plays Game Boy Color games once you've hacked it. (Honestly, not much doesn't. You could play Game Boy Color games on a refrigerator if it's one of those fancy models with a screen.)

Granted, the utility of the New 3DS XL is
diminished somewhat without Miiverse.
Still the best social network for my money,
although Bluesky is gaining ground...
(image from Nintendo)

 

NINTENDO 3DS
NINTENDO
PRICE: ~$100

This is where Nintendo dipped its toe into near console-quality handheld gaming, and some of the games on this system are indeed very close to what you'd play at home. Some highlights include the exhaustively generous Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition, a handful of Mario spin-offs, one of the better entries in the Smash Bros. series, and Kid Icarus: Uprising, which is a handful to play but at least looks marvelous. The Nintendo 3DS is also the only semi-recent handheld that officially plays Game Boy Color games, although the selection is miniscule, and if you haven't bought them before the 3DS eShop closed, you won't be buying them now. Once again, hacking is your friend... it'll open up emulators for a wide variety of systems, although it's not nearly as exhaustive as what you can get on the PSP.

By the way, if you should buy a 3DS, make sure it's the New 3DS XL. It's faster than previous models and the head tracking camera means that the 3D actually works consistently. There's also the New 2DS XL, if you're not married to the 3D gimmick.

You get a lot more than you'd expect from
the price with the SF2000 by Data Frog. I
grew up with Radio Shack and Tiger
handhelds for this price, so I'm not
complaining.
(image from Data Frog)

 

DATA FROG SF2000
DATA FROG
PRICE: $20 (yes, really)

Here's your best el cheapo option, a Chinese handheld with support for a half dozen game systems including the Game Boy Color. Truth told, the SF2000 is a bit of a fixer-upper, requiring some work by the user to optimize the experience, but it costs next to nothing and runs games for less powerful systems without too much difficulty. There's also the vertically oriented SF300, which looks more like an actual Game Boy Color and is somehow even cheaper. However, without an analog thumbstick and with a dimmer screen, you're probably better off going for the (ahem) deluxe model.

One of the many, many, maaaaany options
available to retro gamers in need of an
all-purpose emulation handheld.
(image from LITNXT)

ANBERNIC RG ARC S
ANBERNIC
PRICE: $70

There are dozens of aftermarket handhelds from Anbernic, Powkiddy, and other manufacturers, designed for various use cases. Some have square screens, ideal for the Game Boy Color's aspect ratio, while others have the horsepower to run games for much more powerful consoles, including the Playstation 2 and GameCube. My advice is to watch some Tech Dweeb reviews (he's not just informative, he's wholesome, a refreshing change of pace in this increasingly loud and cynical world), then choose the system that's right for you.

The system that was right for me was the Anbernic ARC S, designed to look like a Sega Saturn joypad with six buttons on the face and a floating D-pad. It's got enough juice for nearly every 20th century game system, except (annoyingly) the Sega Saturn, a console which continues to baffle emulator designers with its quirky twin processor architecture. However, the Game Boy Color is not a problem for the ARC S. Consider downloading an alternate operating system like Rocknix; the stock interface is a bit plain and janky.

So there you have it. That's over a half dozen handheld game systems that play Game Boy Color games perfectly well, without that Reich-y aftertaste. As for alternatives to Slime Expulsion, well, I'm working on that. There's Indie Retro News for starters, but it's awfully British, and I'm just not that into the ZX Spectrum. I'm open to suggestions for retro blogs if anyone's got any!

ARC-S Odyssey

We're not going to talk about the thing. The thing bothers me beyond measure, and I feel like we've lost a little of ourselves by making that thing a permanent thing. But like I said, I'm not discussing the thing. The ugly, rotting thing that grows like a malignant tumor at the base of our neck, sapping away our vital fluids and our will to live. That thing. Not talking about that. No.

The Anbernic RG-S uses the same clear plastic
design as the Skeleton Saturn, released only
in Japan. It's easy enough to ignore if you're
not down with the late 1990s, iMac
aesthetics... you're just going to look
at the screen anyway.
(image from Anbernic)
(which sounds like a celebrity coupling.
You know, like Bran-gelina or Ben-nifer.)

 

But hey, I got one of those fancy-schmancy aftermarket retro handhelds! It's the Anbernic RG ARC S, and it looks a heck of a lot like a Sega Saturn controller with a screen built into it. So it bookmarks well with my Data Frog SF2000, which looks just like a Super NES handheld... that inconveniently has trouble playing games for the system that inspired it.

Yeah, there are problems with the ARC S. It could have been just about perfect for a Sega lovin' guy like myself, but the hardware (the RK3266, which doesn't pack the necessary muscle to handle anything past the original Playstation, and the Dreamcast at a stretch) coupled with a trio of interfaces, each uniquely annoying to use, combine to keep this from totally obsoleting my previous emulation handheld, the Playstation Vita.

First disappointment: It plays Saturn games. Kind of. If "kind of" is as much enthusiasm as you can muster for the Sega Saturn, you'll be happy enough, but for those of us who made it our game console of choice in the late 1990s, the performance offered on the ARC S just won't cut it. Games that only need the 2D half of the Saturn's brain will work more often than not, and you might even shake a good game of Bulk Slash out of it... by the way, if you've never seen that one, imagine a 3D hybrid of Virtual On and Desert Strike and you're on the right track. 

On the flip side, even some of the 2D games run slowly (Blast Wind) or have weird broken graphics*, and 3D games are going to run a little slowly, if they run at all. Even Tempest 2000 is a big nope on this system, despite its seemingly humble hardware demands. My recommendation is if you can find the same version of the game for another system (Playstation for the 3D games, and Neo-Geo or CPS2 for the 2D games), play that instead and just pretend it's a Saturn game. With Capcom's Marvel vs. series, the arcade games are pretty much indistinguishable from the arcade ports anyway.

* EDIT: I mistakenly said Tryrush Deppy had broken graphics. Actually, that one has aggravating bouts of slowdown... it's Purikura Daisakusen that has issues with graphics vanishing at random. Apologies for that.

Dreamcast and PSP fare better, but your mileage may vary. You can get a pretty good game of Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX out of the ARC thanks to the button arrangement, although you'll need to give the PPSSPP emulator a good whack upside the head and move a few buttons around for a more arcade-like experience. Capcom vs. SNK 2 on Dreamcast is practically perfect, with Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Mortal Kombat Gold, and Under Defeat close behind, but Dead or Alive 2 is too slow to play comfortably, and the port of Samurai Shodown: Tenkaichi for the Atomiswave runs almost comically badly. (There are better SamSho games; play one of those instead. Not the third one.) 

Overall, Dreamcast borders on very good... not quite there, but within grasping distance. PSP is not as impressive, but 2D games and some 3D titles won't give you much trouble. Resist the urge to play the God of Wars or the Burnouts, though.

Let me touch on the other problem... there are three interfaces available for the ARC S, including the painfully plain stock OS offered by default, the more attractive but hardware constraining Retro Arena, and Rocknix (nee JelOS), which I hated with a bitter passion in the beginning but adjusted to after putting both it and all my games on one SD card. There are two SD card ports on the ARC S; Rocknix is supposed to read them both but only seems to recognize the first. Weird quirks like this and inconsistent button mapping (A is advance and B is back, until it isn't. Good luck figuring out which is which and when!) are profoundly aggravating, but it runs arcade games faster than Retro Arena and looks a fair bit nicer than the stock OS.

Beyond the gripes, the ARC S is a pretty good system for a pretty specific audience. Most players have fallen out of love with Sega's hardware design in the twenty plus years since it left the hardware business, but I still carry a torch for it, using Sega or Sega-like controllers on any console or computer that will accept them. A floating D-pad on the left and six buttons on the right is just how I like it, and Anbernic left plenty of room in the middle of the ARC S for a crisp, colorful screen. It's not on par with the OLED in the original Vita, but you won't find much else to complain about, whether you're playing fast-paced 3D shooters (Ikaruga, Under Defeat) or arcade classics (Donkey Kong, Black Tiger, and the Metal Slugs).

The RK3266 isn't quite beefy enough for Saturn and some PSP games, but for everything before that, fehgeddabawdit. The overwhelming majority of MAME and Final Burn NEO games run beautifully*, a boon for arcade addicts, and game systems that use the same 4:3 aspect ratio as the ARC S, particularly the NES, Super NES, Turbografx-16, and Genesis, look terrific, showing off each console's respective strengths and quirks. Even the relatively humble ColecoVision looks grand... I took my game Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons for a spin on the ARC-S after hammering out an issue with a missing BIOS, and it's never looked better, putting my actual ColecoVision's meager composite video to shame.

* not on Retro Arena. Kindly fix this.

If you're into 1980s and 1990s gaming, and prefer the feel of the D-pad and buttons on later Sega game consoles, the ARC-S gets an easy recommendation. It's not perfect, and it's aggravating how close to perfect it would be with a better user interface and a faster processor, but Anbernic is definitely on the right track with the ARC-S. (Just get Saturn games running on the follow-up. Running properly, not kinda sorta running.)

All the fixins... or, Happy Coleco-ween!

Hello, all you happy gamers. Jess here. I'm sorry it's been a while since you've heard from me... I'm just trying to hold myself together during a stressful election. Judging from my prolonged absence, you can already tell that's been a losing battle.

When I'm not clutching my chest from heart palpitations and chewing my fingers down to the knuckle, I've been distracting myself with system repairs and modifications. I've been wrestling with this damn ColecoVision for the better part of the year, but after multiple modifications (and an equal number of maddening malfunctions), I think I've finally tamed this wild beast. Behold!

Note that the stock power switch, a flimsy slider infamous for its frustrating flakiness (here's a tissue for all that spittle, by the way), has been replaced with a manly red rocker, with solid construction and a satisfying tactile response. Flip the system on and you'll hear a loud click that resonates through the ColecoVision, making it clear to both it and you that the console is, in fact, on. 

Unfortunately, the switch didn't fit in the crappy stock switch's hole, forcing me to open it up with power tools (ho ho ho). After getting a little too aggressive with said power tools, I had to repair the oversized gap with hot glue and melted plastic before the switch would fit tightly in the system's body. So the ColecoVision isn't exactly stock from the factory, but it WORKS, and that's what counts. When you start a game, it actually starts, instead of barfing random tiles all over your screen, like it did here...

Pardon the finger. I think I earned that profanity, considering that the ColecoVision prevented me from testing my other homebrew gaming gadget.

 

This is my custom made ColecoVision joystick, built from the remains of a Hori Playstation 3 stick, a handful of arcade buttons, and the EZ Coleco joystick adapter from EdLaddin. Twenty five dollars gets you a circuit board and a membrane keypad, which let you turn an unloved game controller thrown into the back of a closet into something you might actually use.

No lie, I hated this joystick when I first bought it. It was better for fighting games than the standard Playstation 3 Dual Shock, but not nearly enough to make it worth dragging this behemoth out for a couple of merely adequate games of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or Capcom vs. SNK 2. In keeping with Hori tradition, the buttons don't have micro switches, but rather smoosh into rubber pads set over a circuit board, like an oversized joypad. 

I'll just state for the record that this is a lousy way to design what's advertised as an arcade joystick. Mad Catz never did this. ASCII didn't do this. Pelican didn't do this for its high end products, even though they looked like this. Even my crappy iCade, designed as an accessory for Apple tablets, doesn't do this. It's a little insulting that Hori thought it was fine and dandy to put membrane contacts in its arcade joysticks, especially considering their reputations as better than average third party controllers. Apparently nobody who buys Hori products has ever compared them to real arcade hardware, because brother, that's not what they're giving you. 

Luckily for me, the shell of Hori's joystick can be repurposed with a little drilling (keep your stick on the ice). Competing joysticks are said to be more mod-friendly, and it was certainly no picnic drilling a gap for the membrane keypad's ribbon cable, but I managed... and with all my fingers intact! Good, because I'll need one of those if the stupid system doesn't work.

Now I've got a perfectly decent ColecoVision joystick; one that brings some measure of arcade quality to an experience Coleco marketed as the "arcade experience at home." It's doubled my scores in DK Arcade, the sensational conversion of Donkey Kong by Opcode Games that should have been what ColecoVision owners had gotten right out of the box. It's made games like Frenzy that used to be a struggle with the stock controller a joy. It's still not the best arcade joystick I currently own- the Street Fighter IV stick with Sanwa parts that I bought from ShopGoodwill still wears that crown- but it's better than any ColecoVision controller that existed in 1983. It's not even a contest.

Oh yeah, I've done some mods not specifically related to the ColecoVision, although they're not ones I would have willingly made. A couple months ago, the Seagate Game Drive I had plugged into my Xbox Series decided that it was tired of living (it must have been following the election, too...) and randomly disconnected from the system, before refusing to work with it entirely. I had all my Xbox 360 games on you, you bastard! You want me to re-download fifteen years of games, on the microscopic internal storage Microsoft gives you by default? Oh no, Mr. Seagate. You will live again... even if I have to resurrect you as a zombie. It's bad enough that I lost all my games... I'm not paying another sixty bucks for another damn hard drive!

The reaper shall be left wanting! In the name of
all that is thrifty, you shall live again!
(image from Collider)
(yes, that's the smarmy alien who gets
killed a lot on Deep Space Nine)

 

So I took that drive out of its enclosure (and the Seagate people don't make this easy, believe me...), formatted it, and popped it into another enclosure I had lying around. Crash boom bang, the drive worked in its new home, and has continued to work for over a month. My best guess is that the connectors inside Seagate's enclosure got all melty when set atop the Xbox Series, but the actual hard drive survived the heat. One might suggest that Seagate should take these issues into account during the design process, rather than just shipping them out to stores as ticking time bombs, but whatever. As long as the drive keeps working, and as long as I'm not forking over another fistful of money, I'll live. 

(If the damn election doesn't kill me.)