Category: Musings

Legend Of The Cash Grab Dragon – NO BUYS

It’s been a while since I’ve touched on anything related to our old buddy JDF, but I felt somewhat compelled to chime in on this one occasion.

Full disclosure: I am not the biggest fan of Jason David Frank. I’m sure in real life, he is a genuinely nice guy and I have nothing but the utmost respect for his accomplishments in his martial arts endeavors and at one point, his place as a positive role model for kids. And however you feel about the character he portrayed on that one show he’s often associated with, I honestly felt the guy did a good job with the role he was given in his prime years. However, when it comes to his public persona and his overbearing ego, he just rubs me the wrong way and I try to avoid anything involving him whatsoever.

Continue reading “Legend Of The Cash Grab Dragon – NO BUYS”

A Compilation Of My Recent Thoughts On Seth Rollins’ Main Events

Seth Rollins claims that WWE has the best pro-wrestling on the planet. This is, of course, a total lie since WWE is not pro-wrestling, but sports-entertainment. Therefore, you cannot have the best pro wrestling if you don’t do pro wrestling, but I digress. In any event, I wanted to review the past year’s worth of Seth Rollins’ matches that I’ve seen… which isn’t much.

So I’ve copied-and-pasted the relevant pieces of business to this here blog post and added some annotations in bold for current day thoughts. Should be a fun experiment:

Continue reading “A Compilation Of My Recent Thoughts On Seth Rollins’ Main Events”

No Pick-Ups For Stained Blood

For anyone wondering about when the next pick-up video is going up… try the end of the month because June has been blankety blank in that regard… hence no June pick-ups.

Amazingly, I went through an entire month without buying any fancy pieces of plastic or digital disc mediums containing electronic digital gaming code to be played in specially-designed disc players and cartridge-based components. Most of my purchases have been relegated to digital downloads (which I don’t feature or make much mention of) or the oddball PC game or hardware gimmick that usually don’t get spotlighted regardless.
In any event, for anyone who gives a damn, I did mention that there was a Tetris game for Windows that I picked up from the Value Village for a couple bucks… and there was that C64 Mini that I got for really, really cheap… but would rather spotlight in its own video in some form or fashion. But yeah… other than that, no big pick-ups in June worth mentioning.
However, for curious parties who might care for some reason, I recently picked up the Bloodstained game that came out (the Kickstarted one, not the 8-bit version that came out last year.) And for the most part, I wasn’t disappointed with this game… it is precisely the same game that I’ve played in some form or fashion since 1997, except it looks a bit nicer and has a couple extra gimmicks here and there. I’m not knocking the game; IGA knows his Igavanias and nails that style down perfectly. Maybe this might get the review treatment down the line… we’ll see.
Actually, I might have some more free time than usual this summer. Assuming there aren’t any issues popping up – whether it’d be last-minute road trips, sudden medical emergencies, or the occasional brain pain – I’m probably going to start playing some of these Steam games that need to be played for once. There’s even a couple old games among the pack that I really need to go back to because I need something refreshing to cleanse the palette.
Actually, now that I think about it… I need to get back on the SFB saddle again… I’ll need to bug big brother about that one.
So, that’s it. Enjoy your Fourth Of July, everyone.

What Did You Expect?

On July 13th, 2019, All Elite Wrestling will present its Fight For The Fallen event, in which all profits will be donated to victims of gun violence. The main event for the show (or at least, the one match heavily promoted) is a tag-team match between The Young Bucks and Cody & Dustin Rhodes. It will be broadcast for free on Bleacher Report Live.

Some time ago this week, WWE announced that they would air the EVOLVE 10th Anniversary show live on the WWE Network on, you guessed it, July 13th, 2019. This has caused some fans of AEW as well as AEW executive and top star Kenny Omega to cry foul at a move designed to hurt the upstart promotion’s showing.

To these people, I would like ask… what did you expect?

For all of their talk about competition being good for business, the last thing Vince McMahon or anyone within the WWE power structure would want is the presence of viable competition that has the potential to compete on their level as far as product goes. This sort of tactic dates back to when Vince was counter-programming against the Crockett shows back in the 80s. Why do you think events like the Survivor Series and Royal Rumble exist? For the explicit purpose of fucking with Crockett. I need not go into details regarding their tussels with WCW or TNA when those promotions were vying for a piece of that particular real estate.

Surely, the folks at AEW (and their fans) should’ve known that they’d have an uphill battle. Not only in trying to do what others have failed to do, but do so while fending off any potential attacks against WWE on that particular playfield. If anyone honestly thought that WWE would let AEW become a thing without resorting to underhanded tactics to undermine the whole thing, they’re more naive that I would’ve thought.

In any event, it should be an interesting night of wrestling on July 13th. And one has to wonder if this is going to result in a split in the audience… or maybe, just maybe, both shows might gain their own individual audiences. People cry foul when Nitro debuted… and then it turned out both Nitro and RAW got its own audiences. And really, if that ends up being the case, doesn’t everyone win?

In any event, I’m looking forward to the Fyter Fest show this Saturday… and even the FFTF show is piquing my interest… the EVOLVE? Not so much, but I’m not familiar with them… and it’ll be on the VOD anyway, so…

Thing are definitely heating up.

HEAT!

Full-sized C64 Clone Coming… Talk About Bad Timing.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/a-commodore-64-clone-with-a-working-retro-keyboard-will-1835836875

You know… they were selling the C64 mini things for thirty bucks and I picked one up. And then news broke that they’re coming out with a full-sized C64 clone with functional keyboard and a better joystick. Apparently, this new version also includes BASIC for the older Commodore VIC-20, which would be right up my alley…

But yeah… plenty pissed now. I could’ve waited for this thing instead of buying the flippin’ Mini.

Oh well. Should be interesting to see how this goes.

Limited Run Previews Its 8-Bit Star Wars Re-Releases… And They Suck

Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/limited-run-games-to-re-release-star-wars-for-nes-and-game-boy/

So the first wave of Limited Run Star Wars re-releases come in the form of three games; Star Wars: Bounty Hunter for PS4 (basically a disc version of the PS2 emulated game you can get on PSN) and the Star Wars 8-bit game for NES and Game Boy. While Bounty Hunter is getting a basic game case like most PS4 disc games, the cart games are being re-released in these action figure-like packages… which seems really, really stupid.

Here’s the deal, kids; both games are available for dirt cheap in their original cartridge formats. And while the NES Star Wars is a pretty decent game despite a few flaws, the Game Boy version of the same game is an unmitigated disaster. Still, if you wanted these games to play, you can still easily find them for 20-30 bucks… slightly more complete in box, which includes, among other things, a genuine honest-to-god instruction manual that taught you how to play the game.

No such thing appears to be included with these things… but I guess we’ll have to wait and see when the order goes up.

And I get it. These are “collector’s items” for the collectors… the ones who want to display these on a shelf, unloved and unopened… but even in that regard, this is just lousy. Whatever happened to the good ol’ fashioned cardboard box with paper instructions?

I don’t know… we’ll see on Friday and maybe I’ll lose my mind and pick one of these up.

The Night Is Stained With Blood

So, for those who haven’t gotten the memo, the new Bloodstained: Ritual of The Night game – the one from that IGA fellow who has made a career of making the same video game since 1997 – has recently been released and reception has been relatively positive. Apparently because he did the same game that he’s done since 1997 and kept it more or less the same as what came before… well, save for the usual names and iconography being replaced with everything new.

For my part, I have yet to purchase the game off Steam or anything like that. Presumably, I’ll get around to it for the summer and have something ready to go by October… and now that I think about it, I really need to get back to that Curse Of The Moon game that came out a while ago.
So much stuff to catch up on… so little time.

Konami Keeps A Promise

So if you’re some of the more anxious fellows who have been awaiting for Konami to upgrade their Anniversary Collections to include foreign versions, your patience has been rewarded with a free update. So now Castlevania fans who have never diverged into importation or the evil art of emulation can now officially play the Japanese Dracula’s Curse that everyone says it better.

For the most part, all games included in the Castlevania collection – with the sole exception of Simon’s Quest – have Japanese versions that you can play. The Akumajo Dracula game (Castlevania JP) included here is the Famicom cartridge version, which doesn’t have the save functionality of the FDS version, but does include an Easy mode which reduces damage and eliminates knockback entirely. Castlevania 3 JP has many differences while Belmont’s Revenge JP swaps the axe for the cross boomerang, which makes me happy. The other versions have minor differences aside from language change and things of that nature.

As for Contra, I haven’t played through all of them. From what I can tell, differences are seemingly superficial… though Contra III and Hard Corps’ JP versions have cheat codes which grants you multiple lives that were removed from the local versions, so that feels nice for those who care. Those who have played these Contra games from top to bottom will probably be better equipped to tell you the differences in greater detail.

In addition to the Japanese versions, the update also includes built-in BUTTON CUSTOMIZATION! So now you don’t have to fiddle with Steam controller settings to get the mapping that works best for you and thank fuck for that. Dealing with that shit is a headache and a half.

So who knows? Another House show might loom in the corner.