Well, no, not really, but apparently a lot of news orginizations took a random picture of a Japanese guy (In this case Hideo Kojima) and put it up claiming THAT was the man who assassinated Shinzo Abe.  It wasn't.  It was someone else, and that man's motives are as yet unknown.  Apparently he constructed his own gun.

It's an unfortunate situation, and of course pointless to kill someone who isn't even Japan's current leader any more.  Apparently this person believed Abe was a member of some organization or another, but this is also unknown at this time.  It's likely part of some Japanese conspiracy theory if I were to guess.

In any case, Shinzo Abe was an ultranationalist who wanted Japan to rearm and have a military again.  This is, of course, against Japan's constitution which went into effect as part of the peace accord between Japan and the US after the end of World War 2.  I kept remembering Itoi's old ad from before his Earthbound days.


(The text apparently translates to "After You, Prime Minister", which frankly is a very effective line.)

Nintendo has decided that fan covers of their music are now targets for their lawyers.  Just note that for decades, Nintendo let them be and even celebrated their covers in issues of Nintendo Power.  They have no legal obligation to do this, no matter what nonsense some dedicated younger fans say.

It's such a heavy handed step that basically means the end of all those piano renditions and metal remixes and so on, but so far only for Nintendo's own music.  That should mean Megaman covers are safe.

Woe to uſ!

Activision Blizzard just investigated themselves and good news!  They're innocent!  I mean COMPLETELY innocent of absolutely everything!  The employees of A-B that did their own self investigation then gave themselves a raise for all their hard work.

It's all so neat and clean and not suspicious at all!

No, it's the opposite of that.  I don't care about A-B's self-investigation at this point.  I want outsiders to investigate it.  Like, lawyers and law enforcement and stuff.

The time's come.  I'm never going to get an AES at this point.  The AES was the home release of that system, but I've come to find out that it's hardware identical to their arcade machines.  Kind of crazy to think of getting an entire arcade cabinet, but I am entirely willing to get an arcade board and rig it up to one of these "consolizing" kits called Superguns.  I've found that these arcade boards were so common that they are still cheap to this day, as well as the arcade versions of the games themselves (which include the full code for the home version and EVERY region on the same cart).  So, next year I think, I'm going to do that.  I'm going to find a nice MVS board, consolize it with a supergun, and apply a number of interesting mods to do everything from region/console mode switching to allowing the home versions controllers to be used to adding internal memory card support.

I'll post back here once I manage to accomplish this stuff.  I'm putting this off until next year because I still have a few consoles to pick up on the Atari side of things.  I really want a 7600, and maybe even a 5200.  Definitely a Jaguar, but I'm probably going to skip out on the toilet shaped CD add-on since there were perhaps 6 games for that thing, and I'm not really interested in any of them.  Yes, that's right I have more interest in the 32X than a Jaguar CD.

I love finding out about hidden features, yet hate that some of these features were ever hidden to begin with.  Behold, the original Playstation had a built in "undelete" feature, so long as you act while the system is still on.


Bonus tip!  Want to disable random encounters in Xenogears?  Open the disc cover.  Instead of locking up when it can't load the data, it will just skip the fight entirely and let you keep going.

There was no E3 this year, it was cancelled.  But in lieu of it we did get some video presentations, and even a few in-person events in LA for journalists.

I watched most of the presentations online,  And as for the rest of this not-E3... well, it sure wasn't E3.  Microsoft had a full, regular E3-style show.  Two hours long.  It was pretty good, and they showed a lot of interesting indie games, but MS has almost nothing releasing this year -- basically their second half 2022 schedule is 'well we've got updates for a bunch of our current games and a couple of smaller projects like Obsidian's pretty cool looking new medieval-themed adventure game.'  Then in the first half of 2023 they have some major releases again, including Starfield and the next mainline Forza Motorsport game.   AAA game development takes too long, that is the core of it.  MS started a bunch of major projects several years ago now.  That they are still so far from completion that they are almost all more than a year out says a lot about how overlong game development takes now.

Other than MS, though, there wasn't a lot of note.  At least, not all that much on the AAA front outside of maybe Street Fighter 6.  Capcom had a full one hour showcase.  They had no new announcements, but did show info about their upcoming stuff, including Street Fighter 6 and one other game that looked kind of cool.   Geoff Keighley did a summer games show.  It had footage of a bunch of the big AAA-tier shooters and zombie games releasing in the nearish future.  I found this show quite boring, there was almost nothing at all of interest.  There was also a Day of the Devs showcase, which had a bunch of neat stuff in it, and PC Gamer had another PC Gaming Show.  That one was good, several pretty cool strategy games were shown, among others.  Oh, and Sony had a little half hour video last week.  No full presentation from them.  They showed ... I don't even remember any of it other than the barely-any-different-looking Last of Us 1 remaster.  So not much.  Oh, SF6 was first shown at the Sony show, but it's not PS-exclusive this time, thank goodness -- it'll also be on Xbox Series.

But that's it.  No Nintendo, no EA, no Ubisoft, no Square-Enix, no show floor... yeah.  For me of course Nintendo's so-far-complete absence is the biggest hole, but even once they finally DO have a Direct announcing things, it's still clear that we're way behind a "normal" year in terms of major releases.  There still were some interesting announcements and games shown, but I think that it is very clear that the pandemic is still significantly affecting game development.  On top of that,AAA game development is insanely overpriced and has overlong dev cycles. 

This combination leads to the fairly odd situation you see in the market now.  That is, there is a combination of an utterly insane flood of indie titles, and a dearth of top-budget ones, with few in between.  Independent small developers release so many games that Steam and the Nintendo Switch, particular, are inundated by games by the thousands, many barely of any note but some actually good and buried under the piles of forgettable stuff.  Finding the good ones is harder than ever, since no one outfit can actually cover everything; there are far far far too many games releasing now to even consider it.  There are like 1,500 games on sale on the Switch this week!  Of course ,few of these are fully polished modern games, but still it's a huge number of releases.  But on the other hand, on the top end game development costs so, SO much money and so much time that only the very safest games get made at that budget tier.  I of course am not exactly a fan of most of the "AAA" space, though a few are games I find fun here and there.  Countering their relatively small numbers though, many big-budget games are designed for long-term, high-time-investment play, making them hard to follow unless you really dedicate yourself to the game.  But no one person, or media outlet, can do that for every one of them.  So they don't try, and the resulting coverage is scattershot, covering the major titles and ... some random indie stuff that people notice.

Overall, this industry has grown and you can't follow it all anymore, or even try to. It's kind of sad honestly, I like to know what games are out there... but what I can see is an industry with problems.  The wealth of indie games is overwhelming, and their quality all over the place.  The dearth of mid-budget games is a big issue; "B games" mostly died out last decade.  And the AAA space is dominated by shooters I have little interest in.  There are still plenty of games releasing I like, but actually finding things is harder than ever.  E3 time is one of the best opportunities games have to try to break through that and actually get noticed, and there were some games I hadn't heard of but now will be looking out for... but still, there are no good answers here, I don't think.  The old ways of finding games -- magazines, reviews, coverage in gaming media websites, and such -- have broken down, and the new ones -- streaming, social media, etc -- only highlight the few titles which actually hit big.  The rest are forgotten in the massive floods of games releasing all the time.  And I'm sure that some of those are actually really good and interesting.

Yes, I know I've said this stuff before, but E3 time reminds me of how much of a problem all of this stuff is, and how few answers anyone has.  I mean, you can't say "make fewer games, developers!" when they are making enough money to continue making them... and solving the media, reviewing, and discoverability problems seem impossible.

Everyone here probably remembers that fun label I slapped on myself... geez 20 years ago now just for fun.  Well no, I'm not schizophrenic and I've been attempting to avoid using that in a joking manner these days, but it's that OTHER one.  I still remember thinking "Oh I'm a nerd and nerds don't like sex stuff" back then, not realizing that the jokes about nerds not having sex had more to do with a lack of charisma or outright antisocial tendencies than just "being interested in other things".  That's why I was often surprised just how often things drifted into the sexual around here and why I'd randomly comment "wait, YOU like that stuff? But I thought you were a dork like me not um, like lazyfatbum!", or whatever it was I said.  In any case, only recently I've come to find out that yes, that is actually a legitimate "orientation", if you just add a different axis to move along.  I may have heard about it off and on but didn't really look into it much at all, and well, people like lazy would just dismiss them entirely as "in denial" or whatever so I just ignored it.

But yea, having actually taken the time to (re)discover and actually research it this time, that... well that's me to a T.  I'm not sure why I'm bringing it up but I figured the friends I made online here of all places would probably get a kick out of the "how appropriate" comedy of it all.  Sorry Weltall but I'm gonna shatter any illusions you may have had that I secretly get more of the sex than the entire east coast.  I don't know why I stuck a rainbow on this one.  It's not really a "pride month" thing but I guess maybe... tangential to it perhaps.  The axis I find myself on is at a right angle to it at least, and if you pictured it like that I guess I fall flat at the bottom.  Frankly I get surprised any time someone shows sexual interest directed at me in the real world like, it throws me to have to consider that for a moment, and any sort of um, attempts tend to leave me pretty seriously grossed out but that's a "me" thing probably linking to things I would rather not go into here.  So yea, there it is.

Now let's do at some video game talks, or politics or whatever it is the kids like these days.

I've finally got a system I've meant to get for a long time.  The Turbografx, or PC Engine, sold pretty poorly in the U.S. but came in second behind the SNES in Japan, and had a rather surprisingly strong "import following" in Europe.  You know it as that one system with the caveman mascot.

Well, I did a lot of research and concluded the best one for me (that's actually affordable) was the Japanese version with an interface unit and the CD-ROM expansion.  The DUO consoles lock out various add-on devices, and the SuperGrafx is just ridiculously expensive (and had like... 7 games).  And, on an artistic level, I simply prefer the sleek and unique look of the Japanese original and that "briefcase" that links it with the CD-Addon.  It's a cute system, and competes with the Ouya as smallest console ever made (depending on which dimensions matter to you).

There were some caveats.  I found a very cheap one online (I've found... alternatives to eBay when it comes to buying imports from Japan), but the CD-ROM unit was heavily yellowed.  No problem, I have a retrobrite setup and just the right hair product that perfectly substitutes for retrobrite.  It worked, but I neglected to remove a metal plate in one half of it.  Did you know that retrobrite drastically rusts metal with just a few hour's exposure?  Well I do, now!  Alright, I remove the RF plate and soak it in some white vinegar for another day, scrub it with a sheet of aluminum foil, and it's rust-free again (if not as shiny).  One last detail.  I've become better and better at soldering over the past few years so there was one last mod.  I added a region free mod that involved slicing through 8 cartridge connector slot pins and wiring them to a little board someone made.  The board made the process FAR sleeker and easier, and it looks like it's supposed to be that way.  I removed the RF adapter from the board to make room for the region switch which is right where the former "channel switch" was located.  I won't miss the RF output, not least because it only worked on Japanese TVs.  Further, the interface unit pulls it's own video out the back so I have composite just fine.  I'll add a composite mod to the PC Engine itself later on.

Well, now I've got it, and there's an amazing collection of games on the thing.  Of course, I have Bonks one and two, and am currently looking for a cheap way to get the third.  I have Rondo of Blood, Splatterhouse, and a much cheerier game about rainbows and islands called Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2.

The console itself has only one controller port, but fortunately right at launch they had an official 5 player multitap, so literally every game supports it without the need for a switch.  Unfortunately, the connector plug is different between regions.  I'm using Japanese controllers which isn't an issue but I could always get the US multitap and just mod it's connector to the Japanese style if I needed to.

It doesn't matter which region you get, the controller cables are SHORT!  Three feet...  both the Famicom and the Super Famicom committed the same sin, but this one's unique in that it's true for the US as well.  This one as well I could probably resolve by finding an extension cable and plugging the multitap into that.

Anyway, next up is Bomberman.  NEC and Hudsonsoft cooperated to make this system, and it shows.  Heck the custom chips inside (the same "base" design as the NES and SNES processors) all have the Hudson bee on them.  I'm going to get that and really put the multitap to it's intended use: bombing runs.

Hmm... next up would be.. more Atari consoles (I'm thinking Jaguar and 7600), and... shudder... the Neo Geo.  Don't misunderstand, the Neo Geo was an AMAZING console with modern (for the time) arcade level hardware and utterly massive cartridges that closed in on the gap between CD and cartridge storage space.  It was also $650 in 1991 money, and the cartridges were incredibly expensive as well (and bigger than the boxes SNES and Genesis games came in).  You didn't think you were getting TRUE 1:1 arcade level performance cheap did you?  And that's why I shudder.  That expense made the system bomb.  SNK made all their money off their Neo Geo arcade cabinets (the games were literally just the arcade versions with a few slight alterations to account for the lack of DIP switches and coin slots, and so the home and arcade machines can actually run each other's games, with a BIOS mod), but the home console tanked.  So it was super expensive at launch, and super rare due to poor sales.  That makes them even more expensive today, including the games!  If I'm going to get into collecting these, I will likely either get the home console and BIOS mod it or find an arcade machine and "consolify" it's innards with a different mod (and also the BIOS mod).  In either case, I'll be collecting the rather dull looking arcade cartridges since those are far more plentiful and, as a result, far cheaper.