Stern for the Worst?

Is that guy in the armor and cowboy pants
supposed to be Evil Otto? Because there's
a million ways I imagined how this guy would
look in real life, and brother, this ain't any of 'em.

It depends on how you feel about Atari, because the company which currently calls itself that now owns the Stern arcade game library. That includes Berzerk, Frenzy, and, uh, presumably other things. (Your mind naturally tends to go blank when someone says "Name a Stern video game" and quickly follows with "and it's not Berzerk or its sequel.") 

In case this needs to be mentioned, that does NOT include the games they licensed from Konami, including Super Cobra and Tutankham and that dumb alien vending machine title they released in 1980, under the name Leijac. 

Leijac? Wait wait wait a minute! That's not something you call a video game company! That's what you call a sweaty lumberjack from Quebec!

Two Weeks' Notice, or Smoke 'Em While You Got 'Em

He's mythology, and the 3DS is history. By
the way, now that the DS line is toast, can we
finally get a port of Kid Icarus: Uprising for
the Switch? It's not like Pit has anything
better to do at the moment...
(image from Polygon)

Yep, in just a couple of weeks, the 3DS and Wii U eShops will shutter forever. If there's something you want from these online stores, now's the time... especially since a big bunch of the games are currently on sale for three to five dollars. That includes Shovel Knight, complete with the DLC packs. You'll find a more comprehensive list of legacy titles right here, courtesy of CheapAssGamer's FriskyTanuki.

Just in the way of warning, you might want to make sure your Nintendo Network ID is linked to your general Nintendo account before purchasing anything. I was pretty sure mine was, but somehow they got un-linked, adding to the stress and frustration of buying these heavily discounted games days before they're sealed away forever in a question mark box hidden somewhere in Nintendo headquarters. Make sure you get all that squared away, and then you can dig into that bounty of Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Phoenix Wright.

One other thing... my unhealthy obsession with the Namco Museum cabinet is starting to peter out. That's due in part to a slightly scratched screen that became a HUGELY scratched screen after I tried to polish it, but also because there's really not much more I can do with the hardware. It's good for a quick, dirty arcade fix, but I'm hungry for something more substantial. Maybe I could graduate to an Arcade1UP Countercade, or perhaps I could build some silly homemade thing made of old computer parts and wood scrap. I've still got that old RCA Cambio... it might as well be doing something useful, instead of just sitting around gathering a snowy mountain of dust.

Super Energizer

So yeah, you know that Namco Museum cabinet I've been blabbing about for the past month? I've made what you could call... an expansion pack for it. Couple this with the Terry Goodwin hack (sold separately) and you'll get two hundred additional games, hand-picked for high performance and ooey gooey nostalgia. I actually played many of these titles in arcades, including that goofy Sega adaptation of Pitfall II and Ninja Kids, what happens when you replace the turtles of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Jim Henson creations.

Some games were just too much for this potato to handle, but there should be enough here to keep you occupied for hours. Standard disclaimers apply... this doesn't come with any guarantees, so if it blows up in your face all Looney Tunes-like when you use it, well, you spins the wheel and you takes your chances. Enjoy!

Coastin' and Co-Hostin'

Sorry I've been gone for a while (again). I just wanted to mention that if you'd like to read my random jumble of gaming thoughts on a more frequent basis, you might want to check out my Cohost, or my Mastodon account, if you just don't have the time for posts over five hundred characters. Twitter what now? That is like, so last year... this is the age of the Mastodon! Yes, again. The hirsute elephant that ruled the Ice Age is back, in social media form!

The Namco Museum cabinet, with a few
additions to enhance its performance. Strategic
use of a wooden bead, some zinc washers,
and a few drops of super glue yield a vast
improvement in responsiveness and comfort.

Anyway. In case you were wondering, right now I'm working through an unhealthy addiction to this Namco Museum cabinet by My Arcade. I didn't like it so much when I first got it, but one Android script by Terry Goodwin, one greatly improved joystick, and about a hundred extra games later, I'm starting to see its appeal. See, it's as much a vintage product as the arcade games it emulates, using an ARM processor from 2014 that's still stranded in Kit Kat land and very hamstrung by its hardware. It's been a fun and occasionally tedious process, finding out which arcade oldies can run on this thing and which Retroarch cores are needed to do it. 

The results of this informal study have been surprising... the age and technology of the arcade system being emulated does not perfectly correlate with its performance on this cabinet. Oh no, it's far more arbitrary than that. Sometimes what seem like gimmies, like 1983's Popeye, won't run for crap using any core, while games that should be well beyond the cabinet's reach somehow just work anyway. R-Type? Yeah, the technological marvel from 1987, whose FM Townes port left everyone drooling into their copies of EGM, runs at full speed. Pretty much anything using Irem's M series of arcade processors will work on this cabinet until you reach about 1991, where performance starts getting dicey.

Depending on the game, you can push this system a whole lot farther than you might have expected. Trog, the late 1980s Midway game in PlayMation, will run on this cabinet with only the voice effects being a little worse for wear. Seibu Kaihatsu's Raiden is perfectly playable with an early version of MAME, and Dodonpachi from 19-effing-97 isn't perfect, but is certainly playable. Shooter fans who know how demanding this game is to play can also imagine how stressful it would be for an emulator running on dated Android hardware (I mean, the specs speak for themselves...), but the Namco Museum cabinet just barely pulls it off. 

I bought the Namco Museum cabinet to play all my arcade favorites from the early 1980s, and with few exceptions, it does exactly that. A selection of Namco games are baked in right from the start, but you can greatly expand on that library, and almost everything from before 1990 works. Yeah, get Ms. Pac-Man in there too, you know you want it. The Donkey Kongs? They all work. Pretty much everything by Konami from before the 16-bit era? Yeah, those all run just fine, and they're great, especially Jackal and Shaolin's Road. The obscure titles like Rockola's Eyes and Technos' forgotten platformer Xain'd Sleena and Meta Fox, the shoot 'em up which you'll only remember for its obnoxiously loud Japanese punk soundtrack? Throw 'em all into the van... there's plenty of room.

So I'm already stoked. There's like seventy percent of my childhood arcade experience crammed into this little toy, but the fact that it can go all the way to my twenties with Dodonpachi? Especially for forty dollars, I can hardly complain. That'll do, pig... that'll do.

The Man with the Goldeneye (finally)

They left us waiting a while, but Nintendo and Microsoft finally released Goldeneye 007 for their respective consoles. The two releases come with some caveats... the Switch version requires Nintendo's online service and the expansion pack, you can't play the Xbox version online, and no matter where you play it, it's got what you might charitably call "vintage" graphics. Pierce Brosnan and most of the thugs you blow away look like stretched out Minecraft characters, which is disappointing considering that the project started with much higher ambitions.

007, now with polygons so sharp and angular
they could pierce your brosnan.
(image from Eurogamer)

Despite the creaky look, Goldeneye is surprisingly entertaining. I was never a big Nintendo 64 fan and I'm sure I never bought this particular game, but it's not hard to figure out why fans of the system were so fond of it. It plays well and sounds terrific, with a catchy remixed 007 theme in the first stage and a small but effective arsenal at your disposal. Pop the first Russian soldier with your trademark Walther PPK and you can pilfer his machine gun... climb to the top of the watchtower and kill the man standing guard there and you'll get his sniper rifle, invaluable for picking off enemies in the distance.

The whole affair feels like a caveman ancestor to TimeSplitters and its sequels... which makes sense, as members of Rare left the company to work on those games. The life bar is even the same, a segmented orange half circle that only appears when you've been injured or you've paused the action. Hey, why mess with what works?

First-person shooters aren't really my bag, but I played a few on the Saturn and Playstation (Alien Trilogy, Tunnel B-1, Powerslave), and Goldeneye strikes me as more advanced than any of them. The stages feel like tangible locations, in a way the flat texture mapped walls and floors of Doom don't. There are also fresh objectives in each stage that fit the espionage theme, instead of the boring status quo of hunting for keycards to crack open locked doors. 

I wouldn't recommend it over TimeSplitters: Future Perfect or even TimeSplitters 2, but compared to what console gamers were getting in the late 1990s, Goldeneye is the high watermark... the gold standard, if you will.

This is what the world is watching!

So yeah. I got a bunch of emulators running on my Xbox Series S, and it's suddenly gone from "exactly what I had before, just faster" to "exactly what I wanted in a game console." It plays Xbox games dating back to 2001! It plays pretty much the entire Xbox One library plus next generation games, whenever those happen! But thanks to some clever hackers, it also plays Dreamcast games, and Playstation 2 games, and PSP games, and possibly GameCube games when I can figure out how that works. So I'm pretty happy about that. I tend to be a pretty happy camper when I can play Capcom vs. SNK 2 without having to dig a twenty plus year old system out of the closet first.

So it's official, then.

The Xbox Series is the worst name ever given to a video game console. It is and shall remain unparalleled in its utter craptitude for many years to come. 

Look, I've been playing video games for a while, and I've heard all the dumb console names. The Gamate. The Wonderswan. The FM Towns Marty. The Pippen. None of these are brilliant, but the Xbox Series does the customer the added disservice of naming itself after a quantity of products, without telling you what that product is, or which product in the series it is.

Microsoft tried to give the Series an air of sophistication and enticing mystery, while just confusing the hell out of their target audience. It's like one of those damn Avant Garde commercials from the 1980s, which presents an avalanche of cryptic visual information to the viewer without explaining how any of it ties together. You think you're so clever, but my good sir, you've only outsmarted yourself!

You're going to have to give us just a bit more insight about your product than this, Microsoft. Can I buy a vowel or something? I just want to know what you're selling, because when you name it the Series, it could be anything in the upper-middle price range. An electric car! A premium razor blade! A whiskey that goes down smooth! But a video game system? In particular, the cheapest next generation video game system you can currently buy?

I don't get it. This thing plays Pac-Man and several varieties of game where the world's sexiest swamp creature battles a Frankenstein's monster, named Victor just to twist the nipples of pedants. This is not a damn Lexus.