Category Archives: Gaming

Gaming

Just about time for the yearly update

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Last year in December 2022 I made my first trip stateside since February 2020. That was when I went to Texas for about 36 hours for a friend’s wedding, then I jetted off to Maui to spend about five nights with my dad and stepmom in Lahaina, the town that was just burned to the ground a few weeks ago.

Crazy timing I had, huh?

During my holiday visit, which was about two and a half weeks, I first went to the Houston area to see some friends and family, took a trip to Nacogdoches to visit my alma mater, a trip back to Houston to see more family, then I was off to Florida to see my parents.

Well, until I was at Hobby Airport in Houston waiting for my flight and misplaced my backpack and didn’t realize it until I was on the f’ing plane! I immediately told the crew, rushed off the plane, and frantically looked for it in the wing of the airport where I thought I may have set it down. But I didn’t find it.

Continue reading Just about time for the yearly update →
Gaming

Review: Tales of Arise

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Note: This game has more typos and misspellings than it should, and I have included quite a few in this post. Some include characters you meet throughout the game, so those could be spoiler-ish. Also, the game allows you to customize the look of characters, hence why some have bunny ears, strange outfits, etc. They don’t normally look like that.

It’s been years since I’ve had as much fun with a role-playing game as I did with Tales of Arise. The game is not perfect, but it’s almost there.

This was my first experience with the Tales series, other than the anime adaptation of Tales of the Abyss. A friend of mine has recommended the series off and on over the years, but the desire to play it was never there.

The beginning hours of the story feels rather generic. Guy with amnesia meets angry girl who wants to topple some powerful rulers of the land who come from a different planet, Rena, and enslave the people of Dhana. But it does pick up, and it just keeps better and better and leads to things unexpected. When you get to the end and look back at the beginning, it feels almost like a completely different game.

Continue reading Review: Tales of Arise →
Gaming

What Extron can do for you

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Why matrix switchers are awesome… after the trouble of setting them up

In this post we’ll take a look at the two Extron matrix switches I purchase this year, the Crosspoint 450 Plus Series and Extron SMX Series Switcher, and why you may or may not want to add one to your setup.

Let’s say you’re like me and you have quite a few game systems you’d like to have all connected to your TV (or some other display device). The simplest option, but perhaps bothersome depending on your setup, is to swap out the A/V cables as needed.

Your NES is plugged in but you want to play SNES? Disconnect the NES and plug in the SNES. Want to now play your PlayStation 1? Same thing—disconnect the SNES and plug in the PS1.

If you only have a small selection of consoles, this might not be so much of a hassle. But if you have your display wall-mounted or in some other location where you can’t easily get to the inputs, you may find this challenging.

If you’re only working with composite video with RCA plugs (typically with yellow, white and red plugs), a basic RCA selector could work. Plug everything into that, and then that plugs into your display. Almost all of these are going to require you to get up and physically push a button the switch, but that’s not terrible.

My setup is a bit overkill. Click the picture for the full-size version.

But let’s say you have a lot of consoles. Five? Eight? Ten? Twelve? More??? You’re going to need to connect several switchers to each other, and that can get a little confusing.

What if you’re using a higher quality video signal, such as S-video, component or RGB? HDMI? How about a mix of any of those cables? Are you splitting the video to two or more displays at once? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a consumer option that fits your needs.

Enter the Extron line of video switchers.

Continue reading What Extron can do for you →
Gaming

Let’s make Rockman 4 Minus Infinity

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Rockman 4 Minus Infinity repro guide

The past few years I’ve picked up the hobby of repairing old game consoles, modding them for things like region-free gameplay or RGB output options for the best possible video quality.

One of the things I heard about along the way was a romhack called Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, an amazing hack that redoes the entirety of Rockman 4/Mega Man 4. Most people will probably play this on an emulator because the de facto flash cart, the Everdrive N8, doesn’t support ROM files of this size. The creator has said though he plans to release a new version of the N8 that supports larger games like this.

So, enter the 8-bitter from Voultar. Assuming you have experience with a soldering iron, it’s an easy solution to use to apply translation patches and romhacks to real NES and Famicom cartridges.

But I specifically wanted to make my own copy of R4MI. The only problem is most of the information online is using old methods of wiring messes before a solution like this existed. Not that they’re bad, they just haven’t been updated for modern methods.

And while Voultar’s video covers just about everything you need, he didn’t go over the process of replacing CHR ROM with CHR RAM.

So I spent several hours hitting various forums and sites to gather information on how to make my own. This guide serves as a way to demonstrate a fairly modern way (though there are probably a few things that could be cleaned up) to do this in 2019.

What you’ll need: (the below is image heavy)

Continue reading Let’s make Rockman 4 Minus Infinity →
Gaming, Random

That reminds me of a puzzle…

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Professor, what are going to do?!

Professor Layton was one of my favorite game series for the Nintendo DS. I loved the short, but wonderfully animated and voiced videos sprinkled throughout the series. I enjoyed the setting, music, and really just about everything about it. Oh, and the puzzles. But what I hated was how EVERY GOD DAMN THING LED TO A PUZZLE!

“I think we should eat our way to the clues!” — Something Layton would probably not say

Hey Prof, my dog died last night.
I’m sorry to hear that. Say, that reminds me of a puzzle!

Can you help me put this book back on the shelf?
Of course. By the way, can you figure out this riddle about books?

Regardless, I still enjoy the series. And so do the Japanese. A few months ago in Japan convenience stores around the country were selling small boxes of Professor Layton chocolates. Also, inside each box was a puzzle similar to what a player encounters in the games.

Below are pictures from inside the box as well as a puzzle and the solution. Continue reading That reminds me of a puzzle… →

Gaming

Review: Super Mario 3D Land

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This was written back on Nov. 30, 2011… but I only realized now, Oct. 1, 2012, that I never posted it. Whewps!

 

If you want to feel like you’re a rock star and god of video games, pick up Super Mario 3D Land. It’s that easy.

What I mean, is that after going through the first 8 worlds with little challenge. I had 220+ extra lives in reserve.

I was told the special worlds would be more challenging. I then went through the first 5 special worlds (S-1, S-2, S-3, etc.) I’m almost done with S-6 and I now have 240+ lives. I’m disappointed.

That’s not to say the game isn’t fun–it is. It’s very fun, but it’s not challenging. Almost all of my deaths in the game were from not being able to judge distance between foreground and background platforms. The 3D effect hasn’t remedied this, as I do just as well playing with the 3D off.

Segue! Other than a few little effects, the game doesn’t benefit from the addition of 3D to it. Sure, throwing a boomerang toward the screen is neat, but it doesn’t add anything. As I stated above, it didn’t really help me with judging distances between platforms.

Level designs are great otherwise, and there are some new items and interactive elements, such as ! switches that, when it, produce platforms that appear and disappear. Yes, platform switches. That’s one of the things that sticks out to me.

The tanooki suit is back from Super Mario Bros. 3, but it has been altered. You can no longer fly, but floating down no longer requires tapping the jump button repeatedly, but can instead be accomplished by merely holding the button. there’s a new boomerang suit as well, where you throw boomerangs.

Maybe the game is hard and I am a rock star. But with the trend of Nintendo trying to gain audiences by dumbing games down (my opinion), I doubt that.

In summation, the game is fun but too easy.