The Deluxe Treatment

And here I was thinking I wouldn't get a chance to post this picture again! Anyway, Microsoft is offering a new "Ultimate Game Pass" subscription, which combines their Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass services. At $14.99 per month, it costs more than either Gold or Game Pass, but is less expensive than the two of them together. If you really want to save some money, Cheap Ass Gamer has your hook-up... one of its members discovered that when you sign up for Ultimate, your remaining months of Gold and Game Pass are transferred there, effectively doubling their value. 

Say you just bought one year of Gold and one year of Game Pass. Switching to the premium service gives you two years of Ultimate, so you'll have both online gaming and a small pool of free Xbox games for twice as long as you otherwise would have. You can get up to three years of Ultimate using this trick... some CAG members were able to stretch out their subscriptions to 2021 by purchasing a couple years of Gold, then switching to Ultimate. There's no telling if this was an unintentional goof on Microsoft's part, so you'd better get in on this deal quickly!

Well Played

E3 is almost here, and as promised, Sega has revealed all of the games for its upcoming Genesis Mini. Here's what's on tap for America, courtesy of the official Sega Genesis Mini web site:

Ecco the Dolphin
Castlevania: Bloodlines
Space Harrier II
Shining Force
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
Toejam & Earl
Comix Zone
Sonic the Hedgehog
Altered Beast
Gunstar Heroes
Castle of Illusion
World of Illusion
Thunder Force III
Super Fantasy Zone
Shinobi III
Streets of Rage II
Earthworm Jim
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Contra: Hard Corps
Landstalker
Beyond Oasis
Ghouls 'n Ghosts
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Golden Axe
Phantasy Star IV
Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition
Mega Man: The Wily Wars
Sonic Spinball
Vectorman
Wonderboy in Monster World
Virtua Fighter 2
Alisia Dragoon
Columns
Dynamite Headdy
Strider
Kid Chameleon
Light Crusader
Monster World IV
Eternal Champions

and here's a couple of extra surprises for good measure:

Sega Tetris
Darius

It's an excellent selection overall, barring a few questionable choices like the doomed to fail port of Virtua Fighter 2 and Sonic Spinball, which helped get the ball rolling on the infamous "Sonic Cycle" of hopefulness followed immediately by crushing disappointment. About two thirds of the titles are repeated in the Japanese version of the console, with the more Western games replaced with Genesis ports of Snow Bros. and Slap Fight, among others. 

Personally, I find the Japanese selection more appealing... they're getting Rent-A-Hero, Assault Suits Leynos, and Yu Yu Hakusho, and we're not. However, several under the radar Genesis games are coming to both territories, including Gunstar Heroes and Alisia Dragoon, one of my favorites from the early 1990s. It's nice to see that game finally getting some love after all this time, even if it's not quite as good as I thought it was back in 1992.

But let's talk for a minute about the two games released exclusively for the Genesis Mini. Sega Tetris is a retooled version of the Mega Drive game that was nearly blotted out of existence by Nintendo and its exclusivity agreement with ELORG, the technology branch of the Russian government. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Alexey Pazhitnov is free to license his game to whoever he pleases, giving Sega a chance to release Sega Tetris without interference from its rival. 

However, that wasn't good enough for M2. Word on the street is that they're going to rewrite the code to make it more faithful to the Tetris arcade game. No, not the one Atari did, but Sega's own version, released in Japanese arcades and full of digitized backgrounds that look like Windows 3.11 wallpapers now, but must have been impressive thirty years ago.

Darius is an even bigger surprise. Sega could just as easily have given us the Genesis port of Sagaia, which was finished a quarter of a century ago and given straight eights by EGM's review crew. However, they decided to give us the original game instead, most likely due to its popularity in Japan. M2 is taking the credit for the port, but a recent Kotaku report suggests that they just bought the code from a hobbyist programmer named AC Hidecade, who was already finished with a Genesis port of Darius. The icing on this already strange cake is that Hidecade wasn't the only one working on a Genesis version of Darius... RaelX16 had posted an early work in progress of his OWN port on YouTube years ago! Curiouser and curiouser...

Anyway, the Sega Genesis Mini is scheduled to be released on September 19th, roughly a month after the thirtieth anniversary of its US launch. It'll cost eighty dollars, and just like the original, you can accessorize it with useless plastic junk that just takes up space. (No, I'm still not over that whole 32X mess. I don't care that it was twenty-five years ago.)

A Matter of Restraint

I went down to Sierra Vista yesterday, and grabbed a buttload of stuff while I was down there. Here, have a look!

From left to right, we have a bootleg copy of Mega Turrican for the Genesis, the original Die Hard Trilogy, The Great Mouse Detective, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Super Mario Bros., The Last Starfighter, Galaxy Quest...

(draws a deep breath)

...the Sergeant Bilko TV series, two seasons of Adventure Time, five seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a pair of Turtle Beach headphones, which can be used with an Xbox 360 if you've got the engineering degree to figure out the connection schematic. Not shown is an air fryer, procured for ten dollars. It's how all the cool kids are cooking these days. (Just don't use it around your pet birds if you happen to have them.)

You'll probably notice a distinct lack of video games in this haul. It wasn't necessarily by design, but it's probably for the best, because I think I've got way too much crap already, and what I wanted to buy was going to add a lot of bulk to that manure pile. 

Take for instance the Arcade1Up cabinets currently sold at Wal-Mart. The price of these kits has been sharply reduced from a "no way in hell" three hundred dollars to a "I don't need it, but..." seventy five. The id of my collector's brain would love to have one of these. The superego is sticking with "no way in hell," and the ego concurs. They're not well made- the spinner on the Asteroids unit is atrocious, judging from the demo unit I tried- and beyond that, I just don't have the room in this trailer for it. I'm not even sure I have room for what crap I already have, so clearance priced or not, the cabinet remains on the shelf.

I gave more serious consideration to the Playstation Classic, which had its price slashed to a little over twenty five dollars in a sale at Target. Again, it's not a great product, but this lackluster mini console gets a whole lot better when you put RetroArch on a flash drive and stick it into the system's USB port. Again, I don't need this, considering that I already own a Raspberry Pi, a Super Retro-Cade, and that AtGames Sega Genesis from a couple years back. Nevertheless, my id would have won this battle if it hadn't been for the fact that the Sierra Vista Target had already run out of stock days before I got there. I was mildly disappointed, but just as relieved that I didn't waste my space and money on a system I already bought three times before with a different shell.

There's an internet celebrity named Marie Kondo... I haven't done much research on her, but from what I can tell, she's kind of an interior decorator, and kind of a life coach. She advocates paring down your physical possessions to lighten your emotional burden, and while I'm usually suspicious of people who claim that giving away what you own is a path to spiritual enlightenment, I'm starting to wonder if I may be toeing the line between collecting and hoarding. I'm reluctant to get rid of what I already own- even the stuff I don't really need- but I certainly don't need more of it.

I have a friend who had to sell most of his own sizable collection fifteen years ago to move to California. He's now a successful game journalist, so that decision, as painful as it must have been at the time, clearly worked out for him. Nevertheless, I have to wonder if there was a fringe benefit in throwing all that ballast overboard. Now it's someone else's problem.

Spin It to Win It

I gotta hand it to the video game industry. I've been involved with this hobby for forty years, yet after all this time, it still hasn't lost its capacity for weirdness.

image from the Hollywood Reporter

I'm referring specifically to the Play Date, a handheld game system with black and white graphics and, well... a crank. Now it's not completely unusual for home electronics to have a crank to charge them in case of emergencies, but this crank isn't meant for that. No, it's actually a rotary input device, similar to the paddles and spinners of old. It sounds ridiculous, but maybe that's why it's attracting famously weird game designers like Katamari Damacy's Keita Takahashi and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy's, uh, Bennett Foddy. They've both pledged to support the Play Date, with Takahashi already hard at work on Crankin's Time Travel Adventure. You can find a little footage of the game and more information about the system that will play it on Slash Gear. The Play Date will cost a kingly one hundred and fifty dollars when it's released next year. Better start saving your pennies.

So in short, the Play Date is unreasonably expensive, completely bizarre conceptually, and has a crank on the side for rotary input. How much you wanna bet Jeff Minter's going to want in on this?

The Haul of It All

Every once in a while, you find some really good stuff in the free bin at the local thrift store. Stuff like this!

Sadly, I couldn't find the disc for Super Paper Mario, but everything else was in the case... sometimes in the wrong case, but hey, it was free. I was most excited about Super Mario Maker for the Wii U, because I was always curious about that game, but never curious enough to pay sixty dollars for it.

Everyone's going nuts about the recent announcement of a sequel, which will offer new skins and features along with a multiplayer mode. I'm just happy to get in on the ground floor with the original, and while I haven't spent much time making stages, I've sure spent time playing them. The game starts you out with an eight stage "10 Mario Challenge," which offers familiar levels with unexpected and increasingly peculiar twists. It was quite a mind screw to dive into the open pipe in World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros., only to discover that the underground cache of coins had become a discotheque, complete with pulsing music, dancing lights, and a shower of currency from two spinning cannons. "What is this I don't even" describes the experience pretty well.

I'm enjoying this game, but I really didn't need to be
reminded of Miiverse's demise. Believe me, Nintendo,
I haven't forgotten... it's why I haven't bought a Switch.

The other games are just gravy (diaper gravy in the case of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, if the reviews are to be believed). I already owned Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but it's nice to have a case to go along with it. Super Mario Sluggers I've never played before, but the Mario cast in a baseball game seems like a solid concept. Wii Play didn't get great reviews, but it may provide me with some fleeting entertainment. Then there are the two GameCube games, Mario Party 4 and Wario Ware. I can't imagine getting too much use out of the former, but I had the latter game in Michigan and it's comforting to have it close at hand again.

Oh! Before I go, I should probably mention that Sega has announced the next ten games that will be included with the Sega Genesis Mini. You'll find the details on Polygon, but the Cliff Notes is that there will be a lot of Capcom games in the final product, including Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Street Fighter 2: Special Championship Edition, and Mega Man: The Wily Wars. (Are you ready for a Genesis collection of the first three Mega Man games which somehow aren't as good as the NES originals? Too bad, you're getting it anyway.) Some other goodies include Phantasy Star IV, Wonder Boy in Monster World, and Beyond Oasis. Some baddies include Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle and Sonic Spinball, just in case you needed a little kusoge in your retro gaming diet.

Two other things! I've finished seven chapters of the Neo-Geo ports book, and just installed a 128GB SD card in my Playstation Vita. Sony's proprietary cards always left the system at a loss for storage, but with this monster in place, my Vita will never go hungry again!

Last Exit

There's a new hack out for the Playstation Vita... and it's likely to be the last. Hacker TheFlow released Trinity a few days ago... it's an exploit that lets you run the VitaShell file browser and some unlicensed applications. Unlike Henkaku and Henkaku Enso, this one's not easy to use, requiring you to download a PSP game, send it to your computer with QCMA (an altered version of Sony's content manager), decrypt it, insert a file, re-encrypt it, and send it back to your PSP. It's a rather involved process.

The creator of the hack recommends that once you've installed Trinity, you use it to roll back your Vita to an earlier firmware, then install Henkaku Enso for more reliable and user-friendly access to homebrew apps. On the down side, you'll lose access to the Playstation Store, but on the plus side, there won't be too many more games released for the Vita anyway. Just back up everything you've already purchased to your computer before running the hack and you should be set.

One fun thing you can do with your Vita after you've installed Henkaku Enso is change the splash screen that comes up when you first power it on. Courtesy of Talking Time user Tegan Robichoud, here's Danny De-Vita!

If you want a taste of this kind of fun, you'd better act quickly. Sony usually seals off these back doors with a security patch shortly after they're discovered, and with TheFlow retiring from Vita hacking and general interest in the console dwindling, you probably won't see another jailbreak for the system again.

One other thing... I've got four chapters of the SNK book finished, and started a fifth one last night. If things continue to move at this pace, I'll have the whole thing done in just a few months!

SNK-o de Mayo

Whoops! Looks like I forgot to post on May the 4th. Well you knew what I was gonna say already... Star Wars fans are obsessed nerds, etc. etc. Here, I'll just let Triumph the Insult Comic Dog do it for me.

So we'll just jump to a legitimate holiday, Cinco de Mayo. I celebrated the occasion by picking up the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection... the connection to Mexico's day of independence is tenuous at best, but it was cheaper than the retail price, and I don't have anything else to discuss. So there. 

The purchase seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm having second thoughts. Would the thirty dollars have been better spent on a copy of Nier Automata: Become As Gods Edition? The time I spent with anti-classics like Bermuda Triangle, Munch Mobile, and Vanguard suggests that yes, it would have, and yes, I was a dumbass for picking door number two. It's too late for regrets, so I'll just dump cherry pits into an approaching garbage can while you save a ravaged planet Earth from mechanical monsters.

Anyone care to explain what's going
on here? Because I don't have the figgiest.
(image from Wikipedia)

On the bright side, this is the Xbox One version, with all the games already included (no extra downloads are necessary), plus the NES version of Baseball Stars as a bonus. I spent a fair amount of time playing Baseball Stars as a teenager, building teams, playing games, and firing the dead weight, so that definitely adds to the value of the collection. 

On top of that, it's always fun to p'sharktank soldiers across the screen in P.O.W., listen to an early version of Fatal Fury's South Beach theme in Street Smart, and gun your way through the various anachronisms in Time Soldiers, best described as a prequel to Alpha's Ninja Commando without the Street Fighter influence. So I'll live. I mean, how good could Nier be, anyway? (Don't answer that.)