Tall, Grande, Venti

Running a little low on energy? Well, here's a Sega Genesis triple shot, featuring the AtGames Genesis Flashback on the left, the real deal from 1989 on the right (minus the cartridge cover), and the Genesis Mini in the center.

Just like the Playstation Classic before it, the Genesis Mini is just so gosh-darned tiny and cute you'll want to hug it. The big difference is that you'll still feel that way about Sega's system after you start using it. 

Admittedly, I do have some gripes. The included three button controllers feel like you're gripping a monster truck bumper after thirty years of increasingly ergonomic joypads, and alternatives are limited to controllers made by Retro-Bit. I've got at least a dozen USB pads lying around the house, but sure, what's one more to add to the pile? Input seems a little touchy in the menu screen, and there may be a slight delay between actions and sound effects in some titles. It's honestly hard to tell without a slow-motion camera replay, unlike AtGames' Genesis where the imperfections were more glaringly obvious.

With all that said, the Genesis Mini is still pretty nifty. The case design is extremely faithful to the original in spite of its size, and the forty included games accurately reflect the Genesis library as a whole and are done justice by the system's strong emulation. The sound is so crisp that you start to notice subtleties in the soundtracks that were obscured on a real Genesis, and the graphics in each game shine when not held back by the original system's crummy composite output. However, most of the games aren't enhanced beyond what HDMI output can provide. For instance, Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition was recently given an improved color palette and cleaner sound samples by hackers, but what you're getting here is what you got in 1993, with all the rough edges intact.

There are a few exceptions. Mega Man: The Wily Wars, the decidedly lackluster Genesis port of the first three Mega Man games, runs a little faster and feels a little tighter than it had before. Not enough to make it preferable to the NES games, but it's a more pleasant experience than it must have been on the Sega Channel. The Genesis prototype of Tetris that was scrapped after a legal battle with Nintendo was also retooled, but perhaps not enough, with barebones gameplay and grungy digitized graphics that make it feel like a leftover from the Mega Drive's bungled Japanese launch. Finally there's Darius, which was written from scratch by a fan of the series and actually does feel like a bonus, rather than a booby prize. I was always a fan of its sequel, Sagaia, but this may actually be better. At four times the size of the Genesis version of Sagaia, it's at least a more complete arcade conversion.

The Genesis Mini is a solid micro console that Sega should have released a lot sooner. There are tons of these products in 2019, including several which can play the entire Genesis library with ten minutes of hacking. It doesn't help that the Genesis Mini was preceded by ten years of AtGames consoles which played many of the same games, albeit poorly. I imagine you'd have to be a rabid fan of the Genesis to fully appreciate its palm-sized counterpart, but with a generous selection of games, emulation provided by the always capable M2, and a slick if slightly cumbersome interface, they should be quite happy with the Genesis Mini. I know I'm satisfied with it... or will be, once that six button controller finally arrives in the mail.

Dick York (or, Leggo My Legumes)

Who names a kid "Peppermint Patty," anyway?

I just wanted to mention something, since we're going to be inundated with holiday specials very soon and the topic of Peanuts has been trending on Twitter. People have noticed from last week's Thanksgiving special that the Peppermint Patty character is kind of a jerk (you just noticed this? Really?) and seem convinced that an online shaming campaign will take care of this problem. Yeah, good luck with that. I'm pretty sure fifty year old cartoons are immune to your cancel culture.

Honestly, I wasn't a huge fan of Peppermint Patty growing up. She wasn't as bad as Lucy Van Pelt, because nobody could be as bad as Lucy Van Pelt, but she was coarse and tactless and her relationship with the long-suffering Marcy struck me as controlling, perhaps even abusive. (Who refers to their classmate as "sir," anyway? Someone who's gotten one too many swirlies from said classmate, I suspect.)

That's kind of the beauty of Peanuts, though. Charles Schulz freely acknowledged that people aren't perfect, and illustrated this through his cast of characters. Charlie Brown is morose and easily discouraged. His sister Sally is selfish, asking Santa for enough toys to turn her letters into queen-sized pillows. Linus is quietly insightful, but sanctimonious and insecure enough to carry a blanket with him wherever he goes. Even the dog is demanding, quick to anger, and a hopeless daydreamer.

The warts and all approach to character design is refreshing in a Christmas special, really. While other shows around this time of year shove object lessons and merchandising in your face, Peanuts offers a bunch of simply drawn cartoon kids who are sincerely flawed, sincerely quirky, and sincerely human. Peppermint Patty can't possibly be a pleasant person to be around, and she barged into that Thanksgiving dinner uninvited, but you can't tell me you've never had someone like that at one of your own holiday parties.

Oh yeah, this is a gaming blog, isn't it? Well, I broke down and bought that Genesis Mini, because of course I did. I'm hoping there will be a hack available that opens the system up to a wider selection of games, but until that happens, I suppose forty and some change will do. Also, I grabbed a cheap copy of Forza Horizon 3, and you can too if you follow this link.

Rage Stoker's Dracula

They say patience comes with age, but as I play through the games in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, I find that I have far less of that virtue than I did when I was a teenager. As I struggle in vain to keep the lead-footed Trevor Belmont safe from an onslaught of heat-seeking ravens and frustratingly elusive skeleton fencers, I find that my best weapon isn't the boomerang cross or the arcing axe or that crappy dagger the game constantly drops in your lap, but save states... lots and lots of save states. How I beat Dracula's Curse without them is anyone's guess. Don't even get me started on The Castlevania Adventure for the original Game Boy... it's amazing what you were willing to put up with thirty years ago when handheld game systems were new and you were too young to know any better.

Anyway. I'm sure you already know this by now, but the Sega Genesis Mini is currently fifty dollars at most stores, and will stay that way until December 7th. I couldn't bring myself to spend eighty bucks on one of these, but for nearly half the price I'm taking the purchase a lot more seriously. Is it possible that the price will drop even more in 2020, like the Playstation Classic had the year before? Sure, but considering the quality of the system and the likelihood of a hack by the end of the year, I think it's worth taking the plunge now. Just in way of warning, it's got a Castlevania game too, and you're... probably not as good at this sort of thing as you used to be.

Just What I Needed

Pokemon Sword and Shield was released for the Nintendo Switch, in spite of the bitter complaints and death threats of thousands who refused to be satisfied by anything less than every monster from the past twenty-three years of games. I have my own beefs with Nintendo, but it's nice to finally see a game company that refuses to knuckle under to petulant, unrealistic demands. 

Besides, we all know those characters will be coming back, probably in an expansion pack that fixes all the other issues with the previous games. Maybe they'll call it Pokemon Armor, but I call it another sixty dollars sucked out of the pockets of poke-marks.

Now this is more my speed.
(image from Game Informer)

Honestly, I'm not all that concerned about Pokemon. What does interest me is the reboot of Samurai Shodown, released early this summer. I bought that a couple of weeks ago during an Xbox Live sale, and I'm been pretty happy with it so far. EGM writer Mollie Patterson describes it as the authentic sword dueling experience envisioned by the original design team a quarter of a century ago, and I'm inclined to agree. It offers some of the features of the fourth game (background dodging, rage explosions, and lightning strikes) without letting them clutter up the defense-oriented core of the gameplay. You can get hit five, maybe six times in a round. Get careless or greedy and you'll get sliced into lunch meat.

Critics have complained that the story mode is lacking compared to offerings from Bandai-Namco and Netherrealm Studios, but all the dross in Soul Calibur VI and Injustice 2 doesn't necessarily enhance the experience for me... it just complicates it. I'm not here for angsty, convoluted plotlines and I'm not here to play dress up with Superman... I just want to fight. The new Samurai Shodown gets that, and gets straight to the point. There are several styles of gameplay, including a welcome wealth of offline options, but there's a katana-sharp focus on combat in all of them, as it should be. Recently, there's been an alarming amount of bloat in video games in an effort to broaden the experience and boost replay value, but if all that fishing, dating, and bowling comes at a cost to the core of the game, well... what's the point?

Before I go, I should mention that John Champeau of Champ Games managed the impossible (again) and released a port of Galaga for the Atari 2600. The game, rechristened Galagon, is arguably closer to the arcade game than the conversion released for the Atari 7800, marred only by flicker and the system's prehistoric sound chip. I'm just sour that I didn't know about this sooner, because AtariAge seems to have a stranglehold on classic gaming news, and I gave up on that place when its forum turned into a cross between Fox News and this.

Life in the Fast Lane... and Bits of Egg

This is a good news/bad news kind of update, I'm afraid. The bad news is that after seven years of entertaining game reviews, the author of VGJunk has put his blog into retirement. Evidently he had started the popular site to work through a difficult time in his life, and I can certainly relate... depression is what inspired me to work on my Game Boy Advance conversion of GORF ten years ago. It's funny how creativity can become a lifeline when all hope seems lost, huh?

Anyway, things have improved for VGJunk over the last year. Rather than the endless, thankless drudgery of home care, he's got a full-time job... which is good! But that also means he doesn't have the time or motivation for his blog, which is... not so good. I'm happy for him, though. He deserved a break. Besides, there are so many articles in the VGJunk archive that it might take seven more years to run out of things to read on the site! Seriously, look at this list. I'd recommend starting with the withering ALF review... that game really had it coming.

Okay, okay, now onto the good news. After years of frustration, hacker Davee found a way to install permanent firmware on later models of the PSP, specifically the PSP Go and its cheaply made European cousin, the PSP Street. Technically, you could install Infinity on the PSP Go, but you'd lose the pause/resume feature that lets you return to games from the moment you quit them. With Infinity 2.0, that's no longer the case, a blessing for PSP owners with ball-busters like Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? and its sequel. Permanent firmware used to brick the PSP Street outright, but Infinity 2.0 is safe to install on this late addition to Sony's line of handhelds.

Between Infinity 2.0 and HENkaku, every portable game system Sony ever made can now be jailbroken... which is good, because we might get another one in the near future. They'll never beat Nintendo in the handheld market, but heaven help 'em, Sony will just keep trying.

Fail to the King

So, I had a rare opportunity to visit Sierra Vista to do some thrift store shopping. Here's how that went.

From left to right, we have Kingdom Hearts III, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, Chromehounds, Hyrule Warriors, Midway Arcade Treasures 3, and Kinectimals: Now with Bears! Not shown is the Logitech computer cooler, which will come in handy for my other laptops.

Earlier this year, I said I probably wasn't going to buy Kingdom Hearts III. As you can see, I was probably wrong, but the five dollar price tag went a long way toward changing my mind. Then I played it, and realized why I originally told myself that I wasn't going to buy another Kingdom Hearts game. It starts with an excessively long, largely hands-off prologue, and continues with large chunks of dialog occasionally broken up by exploration and chaotic, slightly awkward combat. Casting magic is done by selecting commands from a drop down menu... while the imp-like Heartless scatter in all directions. It quickly gets to the point where you abandon the spells entirely and stick to whacking the little creeps with your Keyblade.

The combat is tolerable, but what really sours the experience for me is the game watering down what everyone likes about Disney characters while cranking up the aggressive product placement. The first level you visit is ancient Greece, home of Hercules. He quickly offers his assistance to your party, but while he says what you'd expect him to say and does things you'd expect him to do, it feels predictable and, for lack of a better word, heartless. The writing isn't just below the standards set by the Hercules movie, but by the more modest yet surprisingly clever television series it spawned a couple years later. 

A Kingdom Hearts comic panel, found by reader
John Harris. If this twaddle doesn't make much
sense to read, imagine hearing it in Donald
Duck's voice. Your ears would grow hands,
grab a couple of knives, and cut themselves
off your head.

Some actors make the most of the lines they're given (James Woods and Jim Cummings aren't great people, but at least they're dedicated to their craft) and others are clearly there for the paycheck (Tate Donovan), but even the best actors can only do so much to keep a limp script afloat... and this one's as buoyant as a sack of pennies. It reminds me of Warner Bros's Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers, except while that was a deliberate parody of how lame the Looney Tunes characters had become, there's no satire to be found here... just contrived attempts to merge the many, many properties owned by the Walt Disney Company.

Oh yes, I can't forget about the synergy. The lead character Sora eventually gains access to more powerful (and thankfully, more readily accessible) forms of magic, with the most potent of these attacks being theme park rides. You know, just in case you forgot Disney owned some theme parks. This not-so-subtle product placement tends to have the opposite of the intended effect on me... for instance, when you plaster the screen with ads for Chupa-Chups candy in Zool, it just gives me an appetite for Tootsie Pops, or Dum Dums, or anything Chupa-Chups doesn't make. I suspect that by the time I'm done with Kingdom Hearts III, I'll have bought a lifetime pass to Cedar Point.

I didn't spend much time with the other games I bought... in fact, I wouldn't have purchased Chromehounds and Dark Souls II at all if they hadn't been two dollars each, and Saint Vincent dePaul hadn't enforced a five dollar minimum. I wanted that copy of Hyrule Warriors for the Wii U badly enough that I was willing to make that (negligible) sacrifice. Midway Arcade Treasures 3 cost a dollar at another store, and this grab bag of racing games has proven itself to be worth at least that much, even if the emulation of Race Drivin' and STUN Runner could be charitably described as a flaming wreck.

As for Kinectimals: Now with Bears!, I hope I don't need to explain that.

Mi Arcade es Su Arcade

Hand-burger.

Heck, at the current price, My Arcade can be just about anyone's arcade! Wal-Mart is selling the Micro Player series of tiny arcade cabinets for as little as five dollars each, and while the hardware is nothing special, you can't argue with the price. Better yet, some models of the Micro Player can be modified to play six different games. Take home a Dig Dug and with roughly an hour of work, it can become a Galaxian, a Pac-Man, or even a Rolling Thunder. (Good luck playing that with just one action button, though.)

I won't lie... these teeny weeny arcade machinies aren't perfect. All of them are built with a combination joystick/d-pad that's awkward to use, and the Burgertime cabinet in particular is a mess, with off-key sound effects, fidgety control, and hamburger patties with a stomach-turning green pallor. The Data East games in general are a pass; hapless NES conversions of arcade titles that look about as appealing in 2019 as those old, cold, and so very full of mold Burgertime patties. But the Namco games, yeah, I'd take home one of those. In fact, I did, and will likely get another if I can figure out how to hack it.

While at Wal-Mart, I also grabbed an Atari Flashback 9 for eleven dollars. It's more economical than buying a real Atari 2600 and hooking that up to your modern television set, but the Flashback's price is reflected in its build quality. The joysticks are especially frustrating, adding unwanted challenge to the outer space battles in Yar's Revenge. It would be swell if you could replace the sticks with a Sega Genesis gamepad, but despite having the same 9-pin connectors, you can't... the system ignores most of that controller's input. Like how AtGames ignores the pleas of its quality assurance testers.

You can't even use the paddles designed for an Atari 2600 because the ohm values are different, forcing you to open the Flashback 9 and replace the resistors inside it to achieve the compatibility that should have been there in the first place. You bought a game system, but you took home an electronics project! Better warm up that soldering iron!

You've gotta hand it to AtGames. They're selling an eleven dollar game system that still makes you feel like you didn't get your money's worth.