Mega Man 1&2 for Game Boy

2025-01-08, 5:44 pm
Categories: Games, Status Updates, Stream of Consciousness

A couple of years back, Marc Robledo released a colorization patch for Mega Man 5 for Game Boy. Since then he's released similar hacks for 3 and 4, and together with SpecialAgentApe's hacks of the first two games, that means all 5 are now available in color:

I figured now would be a good time to play back through the series. I feel like these games get a bad rap (except for 5, which everybody agrees is the good one) and I remember them not being nearly as bad as their reputation. I was curious to see if I still felt the same way or if the critics were right.

So I replayed the first two and it's a little of both — their shortcomings are more obvious to me than they were when I was playing them on an old DMG, but on the other hand I think they're above average for Game Boy platformers of their vintage. The first game is the better of the two, but the second has more interesting ideas that would pay off in later sequels (and in at least one case eventually make it into the console games).

Mega Man World GBC Edition

First, the bad: the game is only six levels, and about half of them are boring. There's not a lot of variety to the enemies, either; hope you like Suzy, because you're going to be seeing a fuck of a lot of her.

But. It feels like a Mega Man game.

I don't know if I'm overrating basic competence or if the critics are underrating it, but this game manages to do a lot of little things right: it's got full-size NES sprites but the smaller screen doesn't feel cramped. The rooms sacrifice a substantial amount of vertical space but still feel like there's enough room to move, and when enemies scroll onscreen horizontally you always have time to react to their appearance. The physics and hit detection all feel right. It may sound like I'm damning the game with faint praise, but it's pretty striking how many Game Boy platformers, especially Game Boy adaptations of console platformers, get these very basic things wrong. (Hell, even Super Mario Land 2, one of the best games on the system, has physics that feel a little off for a Mario game.)

The music is great; it's mostly remixes of the original tunes from the NES games, but they're reproduced well on the Game Boy sound chip.

The sound effects don't fare as well; everything's weirdly high-pitched. I know the Game Boy has a different sound chip than the NES and it wouldn't be possible to reproduce the sounds exactly, but it's certainly possible to do it better than this — and we know that for a fact because 3, 4, and 5 do.

People frequently describe these games as being made up of levels from the NES games, but that's really not accurate — sure, you've got Cut Man, Elec Man, Ice Man, and Fire Man, and their stages look roughly similar to the NES versions, but they're not the same levels. There are definitely sections that feel like they're copied from the first NES game and reworked into a more compact form, but there's also stuff from later games, or stuff that's entirely new. It doesn't all work — like I said, about half the stages are downright boring — but it's not bad.

The final stage is the best; it's longer and it's tricky (I admit to using save states liberally) but it's tricky in a way that's consistent with the rules of other Mega Man games. Yes, there are times you jump down a pit and there are spikes at the bottom, but if you've played a Mega Man game before you know that trick and you have a pretty good idea where they're going to be and how to avoid them. There are disappearing blocks with tricky timing where you have to jump at exactly the right split-second or you'll die, but the game lets you watch the pattern before you start. Decisions like that show a level of polish that I don't think these games usually get credit for.

The structure of the game is interesting even if it doesn't entirely work. It includes four Robot Masters from the original Mega Man on NES (Cut Man, Elec Man, Ice Man, and Fire Man) and then, when you get to the teleporters in Dr. Wily's castle, instead of re-fighting the same bosses from before as in the NES games, there are four from Mega Man 2 (Flash Man, Quick Man, Bubble Man, and Heat Man) and finally a new boss (Enker) who, like the other eight Robot Masters, gives you a weapon when you defeat him. The formula is a little raw here — getting 5 new weapons in a row right before moving on to the last level in the game doesn't exactly give you much chance to use them — but it's a promising start that gets greatly refined in the sequels.

Anyway, I think Mega Man World (or Dr. Wily's Revenge if you're nasty) is better than its reputation and if you're a Mega Man fan it's worth a look, particularly in this new color iteration. And if you don't want to play through it yourself, here's a YouTube video of somebody named NintendoComplete doing it:

Mega Man World 2 GBC Edition

This one's widely regarded as the worst of the series, and on replaying it I think that's probably about right. But it has a lot of interesting ideas that are developed later in better games.

Most notably, where the first game had teleporters leading to another set of Robot Masters, the second one has teleporters leading to an entire second set of stages. The third game would dispense with the teleporter gimmick and just give you a second level select screen; splitting up the eight Robot Masters into two sets of four would eventually make its way into the console games.

Another interesting idea that doesn't quite work: where the first game's soundtrack was largely made up of remixes of the tunes from the NES games, the second game's is largely original — each stage will take the first couple of bars of the NES version but then launch into an original tune from there. It's a neat idea; the biggest problem is that none of them are anywhere near as good as the originals.

In fact the entire soundtrack has this kind of grating, tinny sound to it. There's a hack by forple that improves it and pitches everything lower, and SecretAgentApe's colorization hack includes the audio mod as an option on the start screen. I think it sounds good; my one gripe is that the sound effects frequently sound clipped. YMMV; I played it on an Analogue Pocket and I don't hear the same problem in this video of Amy Rose Longplays playing it on an emulator:

Mega Man World 2 improves on the previous game in some significant ways, including much more enemy variety. But I feel like the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The stages are more diverse than in the previous game, and they manage to fit some of the more striking setpieces from the NES games in, like the giant wolf on Wood Man's stage and the giant cat on Top Man's. It doesn't feel as sparse or repetitive as the last game. But the stage design isn't as considered, either. It's too easy (I used save states on the final level but probably needn't have bothered; the last boss is easy to beat with your basic P-shooter and while he hits hard, I only had to use one energy tank out of my full count of four). And while the second round of stages should hypothetically mean a better balance of weapons to use, in practice the devs make some pretty dumb decisions on which Mega Man 2 weapons do or don't work on which Mega Man 3 enemies — why in the hell doesn't the Air Shooter work on the monkey guys in Hard Man's stage? Where the first game did what it could within some strict limitations, the second game feels like it has a lot more tools to work with but doesn't quite know what to do with them.

Anyway, that's the first two Mega Man games for Game Boy and, more specifically, the color hacks by SpecialAgentApe. I'm hoping to give Marc Robledo's color hacks for 3 and 4 a shot (and maybe replay his 5, which I played through on release but which has been revised since). If I have anything to say about them later, maybe I'll share here.

Crackling Audio on a DualSense Controller

2025-01-06, 5:43 pm
Categories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I'm going to cut to the chase in case somebody finds this post searching for a solution to this problem: try a different USB cable.

Okay, so now that I've gotten the actual solution out of the way, a little bit of background on how I got there.

I use Arch Linux on the PC in my living room, which is my primary gaming device. A couple of years back I was having trouble with Bluetooth connectivity and I bought a couple of cheap 15' USB A-to-C cables on Amazon.

(By the way, I have a simple "try this first" recommendation for Bluetooth connectivity issues in Linux, too: rmmod btusb && modprobe btusb)

Up until this point those USB cables worked great. I've used them with an Xbox controller and various 8bitdo controllers and never had any issue.

Last month I picked up a DualSense controller, because I heard it's got some advanced features that certain first-party Sony games like Horizon Forbidden West and Ghost of Tsushima (and a few third-party games like Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade) use.

So I fired up Horizon Forbidden West and instead of haptic feedback I got this godawful crackling audio out of my controller.

And I've never actually used a DualSense controller before, but it pretty clearly wasn't supposed to sound like that.

So, okay, it was the USB cable, and I've already told you it was the USB cable. But I didn't figure that out right away. As a Linux user, I have spent the past twenty years training myself to assume that any given issue I have with my computer is some weird Linux problem.

I did some reading. It seems that DualSense features are supported in Steam Play and work just fine on a Steam Deck.

But just because something works on the Deck doesn't mean it's going to work on my particular desktop Linux setup. As any PC gamer will tell you, there's a world of difference between a single hardware target and the countless variables of a general-purpose PC.

So I set to work, trying to figure out if it was a problem with Pipewire, or Proton, or my udev rules, or what.

It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say I spent weeks on it. It did take me weeks to figure it out, but it's not like I was working on it consistently. I have a job, a one-year-old, and not a whole hell of a lot of free time, and those times I did manage to spend some time troubleshooting the controller, after awhile I'd say "fuck it" and just play the damn game for awhile. (And if the audio crackling got to be too distracting, well, I could always just use a different controller. Or play a different game.)

But finally, scouring DuckDuckGo results for other posts by people who'd had similar problems, I found a Reddit post where somebody suggested trying a different USB cable.

And well, you know that fixed it because I already told you that back in the first sentence of this post.

I looked back at the Amazon listing for the USB cables I'd bought. The brand is iSeekerKit and the first thing I noticed is that it explicitly mentions they work with PS5 controllers. But on closer inspection I note that the listing specifically describes them as "Charger for PS5 Controller". It doesn't say anything about being a data cable for a PS5 controller. Pretty sneaky, iSeekerKit.

Anyway, I've ordered a new pack of 15' USB A-to-C cables, from a brand I've actually heard of (JSAUX). We'll see how they do.

I keep thinking of that new EU regulation requiring devices to standardize on USB-C for their charging connectors, and boy, they're gonna be mad when they find out a standardized connector isn't the same thing as a standardized cable.

Bill Boyd, COBOL Programmer

2025-01-04, 1:56 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Work

It wouldn't be quite right to say Grandpa didn't talk much. He talked plenty about the weather and college sports. But aside from those topics, he didn't talk much.

He'd occasionally talk about his time in the Air Force, or his work at SRP, the local electric company.

He only ever asked me about my work once. He knew I was a programmer, and he asked if people still use COBOL. I told him that it's kind of a niche language now but it's still used some places.

He retired from SRP in the mid-'80s; I picture him using a terminal connected to a mainframe. He was oldschool enough that he'd heard of FORTRAN but not C.

It was a short conversation but hey, I guess Grandpa was the first programmer in the family. How 'bout that.

Artie Facts: She Was a Good Citizen

2025-01-02, 6:39 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

In 2013, my wife and I adopted a puppy. At the shelter, her breed was listed as "pit bull terrier". We named her Artemis.

Around the same time, we started looking into adopting a child. We checked out various adoption agencies, listened to their spiel. You can probably picture about how it looked; group of 20 or 30 prospective parents sitting in a room while an agency rep gets up at the front and gives a presentation explaining who they are and how the process works.

At one of them, maybe the first one we went to, the lady giving the presentation got to the part about pets and said dog breeds didn't matter except for two: they wouldn't allow adoption by families with pit bulls or Rottweilers. She said something ignorant like "Those breeds aren't safe; we've tried before and no matter how they're raised and no matter how well-trained they are, they could lash out and attack without warning at any time."

My wife and I were stunned. We were still new to this; we didn't know whether we'd just given up our chances at adoption by choosing the wrong breed of puppy.

And for my part, I couldn't help noticing the irony of an adoption agency judging an adopted member of our family as unsafe based entirely on who her biological parents were.

(Incidentally, maybe a week after this, my nephew — two years old at the time — poked Artie right in the eye and she just let him do it and didn't react. Some vicious beast.)

My first reaction to the adoption agency judging my puppy was the same as my first reaction to a lot of things in life: "They can go fuck themselves." My wife, more diplomatic than I am, asked the lady after the presentation if there was anything we could do to change their mind. The lady said we could get a DNA test and if the dog was less than 50% pit bull that would be okay.

We also talked to the trainer we'd been seeing at the shelter and asked him if he had any suggestions for proving our dog was safe. He suggested getting her certified as a Canine Good Citizen.

We got the DNA test; it said she was 1/4 bull terrier, 1/4 cairn terrier, 1/8 boxer, the rest indeterminate. And we got the Good Citizen certificate. But in the end, we chose not to go with that agency anyway, or any agency; we opted for private adoption instead.

And when the social worker came to our house to evaluate us, we told her about the challenges we'd faced, including the adoption agency that didn't want to work with us because our dog was too dangerous.

The social worker looked down at her feet, where Artie had curled up and fallen asleep, and said "This dog?" and laughed. We passed the evaluation.

Close to a decade after we got Artie, we were finally able to adopt a baby. And when the baby became a toddler and pulled her tail and poked her eyes, she took it with quiet dignity.

Artie passed away last month, at the ripe old age of 11. I've given away most of her things but there's still a tote in the garage I need to go through. Most of her paperwork is going in the recycle bin. But I'm going to hang onto her DNA results and her Good Citizen certificate.

The shelter doesn't use the "pit bull terrier" designation anymore. They just say "terrier mix" now.

25 Years, Give or Take

2024-12-13, 6:34 pm
Categories: Announcements, Stream of Consciousness

The first post on this site is dated December 9, 1999. That means it passed its 25th anniversary a few days ago.

I meant to post something on the anniversary, but, well, my dog died and it's been a pretty rough few days! (Maybe I'll post some more about her coming up. I've got a lot of stories and some of them have photos.)

So yeah, I may have missed the actual date by a few days, but here we are now. Twenty-five fuckin' years, huh? Ain't that somethin'. Lord knows this blog's had wildly variable levels of activity over those years, but still. I've had this blog for twenty-five years. How many people can say that?

It's not my first website — I had websites on Prodigy, GeoCities, and Dragonfire back in the '90s — but it's the one I eventually started calling a blog, once people started calling them that.

They used to say "The Internet is forever." Now we know that's bullshit. Maybe if you're famous. Or if you say something career-endingly stupid. But for most of us normies? The Internet is ephemeral as fuck.

Prodigy's gone. GeoCities is gone. My old favorite messageboard is gone. Flash is deprecated. Some of that stuff's still archived in the Wayback Machine, but the record and publishing industries are currently doing their very best to put a stop to that. Users have moved from silo to silo to silo — AOL, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter — and the websites that were really useful 20 years ago have gone to shit.

And here sits my blog. Sure, the layout and the domain have changed a few times, and a bunch of the links and videos don't work anymore. But all the shit from 1999 (and some I've added from even earlier) is still there. A record of the last 25 years of my life. Not a complete one, by any means, but kinda like one of those movies that goes through the main character's life, occasionally makes a time jump, with some periods getting filled in a lot more than others.

High school. (I made a silly little Flash animation when I graduated, but of course it doesn't work anymore.) Moving away to college. Buying a PS2. Motherfucking 9/11. My first breakup. Graduating and leaving Flagstaff. My first car, my first apartment (you know, I really didn't have my own place for very long), my shitty job in north Phoenix followed by my years as a temp. My first trip to Hawaii. That time I watched a bunch of Dracula movies. I got married and we got a puppy and we spent eleven wonderful years with her. My grandma died and I became a father. I had a lot of opinions on subjects like Jack Kirby, Ken Penders, and Final Fantasy, and for awhile there I posted a hell of a lot about Frank Zappa. I'm leaving some stuff out.

When I started this site I was a 17-year-old kid. I look back on some of my old posts with embarrassment, most with some amount of affection. I'm not that kid anymore, thank Christ, but you know what, he had his moments.

Here's to 25 more? Sure, why the fuck not. It's nice to have the occasional constant in life.

All Things in Moderation

2024-10-02, 5:46 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

I used to be a forum moderator.

It sucks. People get pissed off at you any time you do anything and frequently when you don't do things, and most people who do it are volunteers. But somebody's gotta do it, or the community goes to shit.

I think I did a pretty good job, on the whole, but as with anything in life there are things I look back on and think "Yeah, I could have handled that better."

My biggest regret is getting played by "polite" bigots.

It's an old, old game — somebody says something racist, or misogynistic, or homophobic, but phrases it "politely". Somebody else tells them to go fuck themselves. Moderators punish the second person but not the first.

I'm embarrassed to say that I fell for that one. More than once.

I think there were a few different justifications for it in my head, not just the "polite"/"impolite" contrast. I think that part of it is, a lot of us, myself very much included, said some pretty regrettable things when we were younger, stuff we're not proud of when we look back on it, and we like to think that we've learned to be better. And I saw myself in some of those people saying offensive shit — they just need to learn better; we need to talk to them like they're reasonable people and they'll change. But how will they ever learn if nobody bothers to tell them why what they're saying is wrong? If they open their mouths and all they get is "go fuck yourself," they're just going to get defensive and not consider why they're in the wrong.

I also think I may have had some notion of "neutrality" in my head, this idea that a moderator's job is to treat everybody equally regardless of how you feel about them, that led me to overcorrect and defend people whose views I didn't like more than people whose views I did. To try to correct for my own bias, you know? In much the same way that "liberal media" try to correct their liberal bias by spending hour after hour interviewing Trump supporters in diners.

Point being, I was a chump. The trolls played me. There is no such thing as polite bigotry; bigotry is inherently impolite, and "go fuck yourself" is a justifiable and proportionate response.

And hey, maybe some of those bigots will learn, will grow and change. But most of them won't. Most of them will just keep on being abusive and actively making the community worse. And by letting them do it, you're part of the problem.

I wish I'd banned more people.

Ars Technica is a community like that. A community which I've been a part of for years, where I often find interesting conversation on a variety of topics with knowledgeable and insightful people and where I don't think I'll be hanging around anymore because moderation policy actively and aggressively protects "polite" bigots and it's become clear to me that this isn't an accident, it's a philosophy.

I made the decision after seeing that another community member, Snarky Robot, had quit after a conversation with the forum moderator where the mod said outright that it's unacceptable to call someone a liar even when they're lying.

I like Snarky Robot. I consider him a friend. And he's exactly the kind of person you want in an online community. I don't always agree with him and we've butted heads a time or two but he makes me think; he's smart and thoughtful, he knows his shit, and he gives a fuck.

And I disagree with him about one thing here: I think he's putting too much blame on Ars Technica's moderator (singular; they only have one mod for comments on front-page articles, which is a problem in itself). The mod isn't the problem; it's become quite clear, over years of these conversations, that his moderation priorities reflect the site owners'.

I've been concerned, for years, about the mod's tendency to privilege "polite" bad-faith posters but punish people who call them out. I've talked to him about it, and up until now I always felt like maybe I could change his mind, get him to understand. Something about the "you can't call a liar a liar" conversation finally hit me, in a way that the time he said "Ars is not a queer space" or the time he said "so you can be a bigot if you're polite [...] yes, sort of" didn't but probably should have.

Fuck, I've gone and done it again: I thought I could change somebody's mind through rational dialogue, when I should have realized a long time ago that it's never gonna happen.

Looking Back and Looking Forward in Social Networking

2024-09-30, 5:32 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

Portions of this post originally appeared on Brontoforumus, 2024-08-06.

The other day I showed my wife the Julia Stiles in Ghostwriter scene. She'd never seen it.

She commented, "It's funny how she says they don't judge you by what you look like."

And I said, "Yeah, this was back in the 'on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog' days. They didn't judge you by your appearance because nobody had a digital camera. But it was very white and very male. On the other hand, it was diverse in some ways — it was also disproportionately queer and furry."

Mastodon reminds me of the old Internet in some ways — it's similarly made up primarily of tech-savvy people, with a heavy queer and furry presence, but also very white.

I like the idea of Mastodon a lot. I don't like silos; I don't like focusing power into the hands of a single point of failure that, say, a rich fascist can buy and ruin at his leisure.

But I've gotten pretty disillusioned with Mastodon over time, too, and it's that very-white, very-European, very-engineer kind of vibe that's responsible. I've read so many Black posters reporting their experiences with racism on Mastodon, and so many white reply-guys responding that they don't see any racism and you must just be Mastodoning wrong, that I'm becoming disillusioned at its approach. It just doesn't seem like the developers, or the admins of the major instances, think this is a priority, because it's not happening to them.

I'm not on Bluesky, and that's because, as of right now, it's another silo, another single point of failure. But in theory, at least, that's supposed to change; it's supposed to be an open, interoperable protocol stack, and someday soon there should be other, independently-owned sites that can federate with it. And I look forward to that, because of the various up-and-coming social networking sites, Bluesky seems like the one with the most forward-thinking approach to empowering users to curate their own experience and keep abusive posters out of their feed and their DMs.

I'm a big fan of not-for-profit FOSS projects like Mastodon on general principle, but there's an old criticism that they're "scratch-your-own-itch" projects where developers create the software they want to use and don't bother with features they wouldn't use themselves. Unfortunately, there's some truth to that, and unfortunately I get the impression that Mastodon devs are stymied by Black users' complaints of racist harassment because they don't have experience dealing with anything similar themselves. One thing that commercial projects like Bluesky have going for them is an incentive to address things that their users are asking them to address, regardless of whether the devs personally find them interesting.

Bluesky's got some smart people there who've thought a lot about the moderation problem, including Mike Masnick, whose "Protocols, not Platforms" paper is largely responsible for Bluesky existing in the first place. I think Bluesky's the social network to watch.

In the meantime, Mastodon feels a little bit like the Old Internet. For good and for ill.

Old Days

2024-09-27, 5:45 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

The other day, a stranger followed me on Mastodon. He seemed to be a nice young man from Gambia who had followed me completely at random, and I was thinking Please don't be a scammer, please don't be a scammer.

Anyway, it turns out he was a scammer.

He made small talk for a little while, talked about his home country, asked me about my hobbies and interests, and then after a few days told me he needed some money to feed his family.

I'm not naive. I'd known all along that was probably where this was going. But wouldn't it have been nice if it wasn't? If somebody halfway across the world had just decided to talk to me for no reason other than curiosity and wanting to make friends?

I feel like if this had happened 25 years ago, there's a better-than-even chance that's what it would have been. That kind of thing really used to happen in the early days of the Internet, just people from all over the world excited at the opportunity to connect with strangers.

I don't mean to romanticize the Old Internet too much. People sucked back then too. I was trolled, brigaded, and gaslit. I got e-mails from strangers cursing me out. One guy called me the N-word, because back then it was text-only and nobody could tell what race anybody was and I suppose the racists just had to guess. One angry Sonic fan sent me an e-mail saying that I, quote, "hump Robotnik's ugly butt."

So the old days had their share of assholes too. But there wasn't such a commercial motive, you know? Back then assholes were assholes for the sheer love of the game.

So I Guess I'm an Evercade Guy Now

2024-07-03, 6:00 pm
Categories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

When I first read about the Evercade, I didn't see much to get excited about — another retro gaming device with old Atari and Namco games you can already get in plenty of other places, and despite "-rcade" in the name it didn't actually have any arcade games, only console ports of them. Like, it might be something fun to get my nephew if it didn't cost quite so much, but I didn't think it was for me.

Times have changed. Those early Namco and Atari collections aren't really representative of where the Evercade is today — in fact, they've not even in production anymore.

Stuart Gipp's done a good job of covering the Evercade over at Retronauts; he's called attention to it as a system that often highlights weird or obscure retro titles, not just the obvious stuff. And when he interviewed a couple of the folks at Blaze Entertainment in an episode of the podcast, I decided I should probably get me one.

So I got three.

But I'll get to that in a future post. For now, let's talk about the Evercade.

Why (or why not) Evercade?

The Evercade is a gaming device primarily focused on emulation and retro-gaming.

Thing is, there are plenty of those. I have an Analogue Pocket. Hell, I've got a Steam Deck, which isn't emulation-focused but is pretty damn great as a handheld emulation device. Those both cost a lot more than the Evercade, but you can get an Abernic handheld around the same price point and load it up with ROMs.

So what sets the Evercade apart?

Does going legit matter to you?

I'm going to leave aside the indie games and native ports for now (we'll get to them down at the bottom) and just talk about the retro ROMs you can buy for Evercade.

You can find all these ROMs on the Internet. You want a complete dump of every NES game or whatever, they're not hard to find.

But a lot of the retro games on Evercade aren't available anywhere else legally.

Now, let's be real: in the vast majority of cases, buying 30-year-old games isn't going to support any of the people who actually worked on them. But you are showing the publishers there's a demand for games like these, and giving them an incentive to release more.

Does curation matter to you?

So these ain't exactly Digital Eclipse releases here. They are, for the most part (but not always!) pretty barebones collections of ROMs that, as I understand it, run in Retroarch. There's a description and box art for each game, you can use savestates and a few simple screen filters, and depending on which version of the Evercade you have, you may or may not be able to remap the buttons. (Which you will usually want to do, because the default mappings are mostly terrible.)

But nonetheless, people put thought into what to include in each collection. Most Evercade carts make for a pretty fascinating and diverse lineup of games from different times and different genres and, often, different systems. And, given the choice between multiple releases of the same game, the one they pick usually shows a certain amount of care — for example, as Gipp notes, Interplay Collection 1 has the Genesis version of Earthworm Jim, but Interplay Collection 2 has the SNES version of Earthworm Jim 2. They chose the better version of each game. Similarly, Sunsoft Collection 2 includes the Genesis version of Aero the Acro-Bat 2 and the SNES version of Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel.

It's easy to find a dump of every SNES game ever released. But what are the odds you'll fire it up, look through the list, and say "Hey, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel sounds like fun; I'll play that one"? I've scrolled through those lists of Every Game, man, and it's like indecisively paging through Netflix for half an hour: too many options can make it hard to choose one. There's a value to a limited set of suggestions. Particularly if all the options are good, or at least interesting.

B-listers and deep cuts

Most dedicated retro-gaming devices focus on the hits. And the Evercade's got some of those — one of its upcoming devices is Street Fighter 2-branded — but it's also got collections where the most recognizable games are Earthworm Jim, Glover, and Dizzy.

And don't get me wrong, I love me some Mario, Sonic, and Castlevania, and the first thing I did when I got my Evercade EXP was fire up Mega Man X. There's nothing wrong with playing the hits. But the Evercade collections have that thrill of discovery. I've never played Claymates before, and it turns out I've been missing out. I haven't spent enough time with Joe and Mac 2 yet to realize if it's any good, but it sure looks great. Even something like The Fidgetts, which I wouldn't describe as good, has some lovely sprite work and is so close to being good, if only it weren't for oldschool artificial-difficulty mechanics like lives and a way-too-short timer. Even the games that aren't great are worth the time to check out, and I doubt I ever would have if they hadn't come in collections like these.

How do you feel about physical media?

Well, they've got their benefits and drawbacks, don't they? On the one hand, they'll probably still work in 30 years if you still have the hardware. On the other, they sure do take up space, and obviously it's less convenient to swap cartridges than to just pick a game from a menu.

Evercade games come on cartridges, in plastic clamshell cases, with full-color manuals. That's pretty cool! But maybe not the most convenient. But it brings us to:

The collector thing

It doesn't take long to figure out that the Evercade is a system for collectors.

I wouldn't say I'm a collector on purpose, but I definitely collect things — if for no other reason than I'm terrible at getting rid of the shit I have.

I've got a comic collection, a game collection, a movie collection; I'm a collector. But I buy comics to read them, games to play them, movies to watch them — sure, I've got a backlog, but I mostly don't buy stuff just for the sake of having it. I don't worry about gaps in my collection — sure, occasionally I'll think "Hey, I'm only one issue shy of a complete run of Simpsons Comics," but then I forget about it; I don't go on eBay and start looking for it because I just have to complete my collection.

But yeah, the Evercade encourages collectors; it's got numbered releases, a menu screen that keeps track of which games you have and which ones you're missing, the whole deal. The good thing about this is, if you buy a used Evercade game, it's probably going to be complete and well-cared-for. The bad thing is, once games go out of production they start to get expensive. You want a copy of the Oliver Twins Collection? It ain't gonna be cheap.

Since getting an Evercade, there have definitely been a couple of times I've seen an announcement that a cartridge has been discontinued and then thought "Oh shit, I'd better get that while I still can." And sometimes that's a good idea! I got the Codemasters Collection while it was still available for $20 new, and there are some great games on that thing. But it can be easy to get caught up in that mentality and spend too much money on stuff you don't need if you're not careful.

If you like to collect things, the Evercade will scratch your itch. Just don't go overboard, okay?

The unique stuff

Now, I've said that most of the retro collections are just simple ROM dumps, and that's true, but it's starting to change.

First there were modest modifications, like removing Charles Barkley from Barkley Hoops: Shut Up and Jam.

More recently, there have been ground-up remakes: this year's Piko Collection 4 includes Glover, which the Evercade site describes as "rebuilt from scratch" to run smoothly on a device that isn't exactly optimized for N64 emulation. And the collection that convinced me to buy an Evercade in the first place, Duke Nukem Collection 1, includes remakes of the first two games.

You can buy Glover on Steam. You can find Duke Nukem 2 on abandonware sites. But these specific versions of those games aren't available for any other platform but Evercade. A lot of work went into them, and they're pretty fucking cool.

And the indies

So now let's get to the indies.

They're fucking great.

If you have an Evercade EXP or VS, there's a featured indie game every month; you download it and you can play it for free until they replace it with the next one. And periodically they'll release compilations of indie titles, including those previously-featured downloads as well as others. And they're some of the best games on the system.

Some of them are modern ROMs for retro systems that run in emulators; some are retro-style games designed for modern systems and ported to run natively on the Evercade. In both cases what we've got are some games that look, sound, and feel like old 8- or 16-bit classics, but with another thirty to forty years of design iteration.

And once again, you've got other options for devices to play these games on — legally, even. Most of them are on Steam or itch.io or direct from the publisher's site. They're not necessarily a reason to get an Evercade in themselves.

But if you do buy an Evercade, you'd be remiss in not checking out at least some of them. It's a device whose primary purpose is playing old games, but the best games on it may very well be the new ones.

My current favorites are Alwa's Awakening, Full Void, and Tapeworm Disco Puzzle.

So that's a quick introduction to the Evercade. Next time I'll talk about the different models I've tried (and some I haven't) and where to buy (I like videogamesplus.ca). Join us, won't you?

TMNT: The IDW Collection, vol 1

2024-06-27, 6:16 pm
Categories: Comics, Stream of Consciousness

When IDW launched its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series by Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, and Dan Duncan in 2011, I picked up the first couple of issues and stopped there. I'm sick to death of reboots, I'm not interested in reading the umpteenth iteration of the origin story, and the pacing felt glacial.

But I've picked up a few issues and trades here and there over the years, and liked them a lot, so I've occasionally thought about getting into the main series.

As of this posting there's a Humble Bundle featuring the first fifteen volumes of TMNT: The IDW Collection, plus The Last Ronin, a TMNT riff on Dark Knight Returns which I've heard a lot of good things about. So I went ahead and snagged it.

I read TMNT: The IDW Collection vol 1, which collects the first twelve issues of the series plus an 8-page story from the 30th Anniversary Special and five "micro-series" issues (one for each Turtle, plus Splinter). And I liked it, but it also reinforced my initial impressions from 2011.

It is decompressed as fuck, but it feels pretty brisk in this format, where you can breeze through a 22-page chapter a couple of times a day instead of waiting a month in-between. So I like the main series better this time, but the done-in-ones are still the best part. Particularly Donatello, which has the best writing (by Brian Lynch and Tom Waltz, with artist Valerio Schiti), and Leonardo, which has the best art (by Sophie Campbell, with writer Brian Lynch).

As for the main arc, well, it sure does hit a lot of the expected plot beats. Turtles and rat get mutated by glowing green ooze of alien origin, Raph meets Casey and they beat up some street thugs together, Michelangelo has a holiday-themed adventure, Donatello makes a human friend, Leonardo gets the shit kicked out of him by a whole lot of Foot ninja, the lair is attacked by Baxter Stockman's Mousers, Splinter is captured, the Turtles meet April (who faints), they infiltrate the lab where the ooze came from, Splinter is captured by the Foot, the Turtles hunker down in April's secondhand store then find out where Splinter is and go to save him, big fight with Shredder, end of the book. It's fine, even good-to-great, but most of it's a little familiar (and the stuff that isn't, like the new origin where Splinter and the Turtles are a reincarnated family from feudal Japan, doesn't necessarily work for me), and I'd rather see new stories than just riffs on old ones.

That said, the characters are there, and that's the most important thing. Raphael and Casey aren't as angry in this depiction as in most; they feel a bit more like the older versions from Mirage's TMNT vol 4, who'd grown up a little and gotten some perspective. Donatello, by contrast, is kind of a dick; he knows he's the smart one and he never lets anyone forget it. It's Don, not Raph, who's constantly butting heads with Leo and questioning his leadership. It's an interesting twist on the formula; it makes Donny a lot less likable than usual, but it sure makes him queasily relatable.

And some of the plot changes are good, and serve the characters better than in the original series, when Eastman and Laird were just making it up as they went along.

Like, the original 1984 TMNT #1 is kind of weird. Splinter sends his four 15-year-old sons out to settle a decades-old blood feud for him. That's pretty fucked-up! And nobody addresses that it's pretty fucked-up until about 50 issues later, in City at War, when (IIRC) Leo observes that they are caught in the middle of a gang-war because Splinter dragged them into this. And that's following all the other shit that's happened as a direct result of their killing the Shredder back in issue #1: Leonardo and Raphael both got beaten nearly to death, and April got her apartment burned down. None of those things would have happened if Splinter hadn't roped his boys into a revenge killing.

Which, in hindsight, really doesn't sound much like Splinter at all, does it? Eastman and Laird weren't thinking of long-term character development when they put together that first issue, they were just thinking of chop-socky tropes. (Oh God. Is that why the villain's name is Saki?) And most subsequent versions have, rightly, rewritten the story so that Splinter isn't the aggressor. Usually the Foot is up to some nefarious deeds and the Turtles run afoul of them without even knowing of their connection to the Shredder. This is one of those stories, with some mysticism thrown on about fate and karma and destiny.

Most significantly, at least for Splinter's character, is that he only faces Shredder because he's forced to. He literally has to be dragged before the Shredder before he fights him, and even then he agonizes about whether he's willing to use lethal force — and only decides he's willing to kill because he thinks that's the only way to protect his family.

(He doesn't kill the Shredder, of course; this isn't the original series and they're not going to take him out that soon.)

I also like Leonardo calling out the Shredder for acting like he's a badass even though he's never won a fair fight. Like, what have we seen him do up to this point? Kill a woman and children, and then win one-on-one fights with Leo and Splinter but only after ambushing or kidnapping them and then making them fight like a hundred other ninjas first. The Shredder's only ever projected weakness, never strength, and Leo sees right through him.

All in all? I thought it was pretty good. I've got my gripes but I liked it, the potential is definitely there, and I'm interested to keep reading and see how it develops as they start to tell new stories and as Sophie Campbell becomes a bigger creative presence.

But maybe I'll get back to that Hellboy bundle first.