Nine Things That I Am Delighted Came Back in the 2010s

Back in the late 2000s when I was doing this blog, I would occasionally pepper my videogame blog articles with other entries related to geeky things that I also enjoyed. Continuing that, here are nine things that amazingly returned in the 2010s and my thoughts on them.

Midnight Oil

My favorite band  in the world broke up in 2002 after a decades-long career, and only reformed a few times after that to do special gigs here and there. Peter Garrett, the lead singer, went on the serve in the Australian government, and the other members kept busy with other projects. There was, for a very long time, no talk nor hope of a reunion, much less a reunion tour.

Cut to early 2016 when Peter Garrett cranked out a solo album, his time in the government done and seemingly really enthusiastic to get back into music.

Fans who hoped that this was a precursor to an Oils reunion were ecstatic the following year when not just a reunion was announced, but a massive worldwide tour, to my amazement. The first dates announced, however, put the nearest show to me as either Toronto or Chicago, so I was resigned to not getting to see them due to the sheer distance needed to travel. Late in the tour, however, new dates were added that included The House of Blues up in Cleveland, and thanks to my generous significant other, we got tickets to see the Oils in a small venue. Many of their shows on the Great Circle Tour were in large venues, but this club was smaller and we had great balcony seats with this view:

The nightmarish insanity of the times we live in were not passed by the band, calling out the corruption of the then current administration and Trump in particular. Peter Garrett also told the audience that they had stopped to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where they found their band mentioned on a tiny plaque in one display. Not bitterness about their lack of recognition, but rather a shining light on the relevance of inclusion in the Hall, I think.

Of course the next hope was a new LP of new material from the band, but that did not come until late 2020 and in the form of a shorter album with multiple collaborations with other artists called The Makarrata Project":

Sadly, shortly after the album's release, bassist Bones Hillman passed away. Before his tragic passing, he apparently told the band to replace him and that the show must go on, because the cause is too important. Tour dates for a hopefully post-COVID 2021 in Australia were announced later.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Rifftrax continues to carry the torch from the 2000s, moving past synched-up mp3s playing alongside your DVD to multiple releases of fully riffed movies. We caught a few of these in the 2010s that were done in a live theater somewhere and simulcast to theaters all over the country. They did Manos again, and a Kickstarter to do Starship Troopers! It was a reminder of seeing the premiere of Mystery Science Theater: The Movie live in a theater full of Misties back in the 1990s.

But a huge flood of Netflix cash swept through the vast backlog of properties left untouched by other studios, and MST3K was continued for its 11th and 12th seasons with a new cast of humans, but the same bots. The formula held and the cast was great, even bringing back some level of invention exchange.

While fickle-ass Netflix gave up after two seasons, the show will go on. Best of all, there are free (but not commercial free) channels on Pluto TV that run reruns of classic MST3K and Rifftrax episodes all day long. How cool is that? The audience for all of this is big enough to ensure lots of riffs for the foreseeable future.

The Tick

Third time's a charm? After a classic 1990s cartoon, a "Seinfeld with Superheroes" short live-action in the 2000s, the great streaming wave of cash swept through Amazon Prime in the late 2010s. With it, a contest was created for viewers to select their favorite pilot from d a bunch of entries. The winner was a pilot for a new live-action Tick series, made with modern special effects and for modern viewing sensibilities.

What I mean by that is that this is a much darker version of the Tick, still hilariously funny at times, but with characters rooted in some deep psychological shit. The reward for winning the pilot contest was a full season order, and they delivered, creating a fantastic story arc, lots of great secondary characters, and one of the best super-villains to hit any screen, the Terror played by Jackie Earl Haley.

A second season expanded on the various side characters and developed more lore of their crazy version of a world with superheroes. Amazon, having taken fickle lessons from Netflix, axed the show after that. It's too bad, too, as it was really one of the best superhero shows ever made for television, with a ton of potential had it been allowed to continue.

Maybe they will try again in a decade.

Hassle Castle

For much of my childhood, I dreamed of being a cartoonist, and had been drawing my own comics on a regular basis since I could remember. No shame in saying that they were not that great, because I was a kid just doing it for fun. Copiers and personal computers with printers were not that prevalent a thing in the late 1970s, and although my dad was a press room foreman at a real print shop, there was no technical way to make and sell multiple copies of my comics anyway.

One day in 1977 in the next town over, my parents and I stopped in a newsstand and I saw an actual self-published black and white comic book among all the regular national comic books and magazines:

I did say it was a black-and-white comic, but I colored in some of the cover with marker in my youthful lack of concern for future appreciation. The author was, as I suspected, a local adult person with not just the creative genius to come up with this horror-pun-minute classic, but with the means to publish and sell it. I picked up 3 more issues in 1978 but never followed up on it until decades later, with a Google search for the author.

It turns out David Lady went on to distinguish himself as a world famous sci-fi/horror movie mask collector and expert and maintains a Facebook group for fans of his work. He did not abandon Hassle Castle, though, and published 2 large volumes in the 2010s. One was available from a personal website which I think he took down in favor of his Facebook group, and another is still for sale on eBay.

I cannot recommend them enough. Great characters, silly stories, subtle commentary, and the best horror puns I've ever read.

Zima

Nostalgia washes through modern culture so prevalently now, but it's a double edged sword. I sometimes fear a future where everything is nostalgia reboots and remakes and nothing original blows us away. The 1990s are at their peak of nostalgia as the children and teens of that time have taken their place as adults with spending cash.

Zima, the refreshing malt beverage that swept through 1990s culture starting in 1994, was retired in the early 2000s. The brand was owned by Coors, however, who revived it for the summers of 2017 and 2018, seeking to cash in on sweet nostalgia taste. 

My own nostalgia comes from drinking Zima at the finest restaurant I ever worked at, with the coolest crew. We kicked ass as a top-10 fine dining restaurant during that time, and Zima was our colorless, odorless drink of choice during those long days. It drank easy and quick, went down smooth, and looked like 7Up if you poured it into the Styrofoam cup that sat on your station while you slaved on the grill all day. I was (and remain) not a great drinker, so Zima was safe for that working buzz/keep your shit together ratio required by the job.

During those two aforementioned modern summers, I drank Zima again, and was openly mocked by friends and family for it. A few we shared it with enjoyed it, and some recommended dropping Jolly Rancher candy in the bottle. In reality, I did not miss Zima when it was gone again (and I keep a 6-pack stashed in the garage). There was a weird aftertaste to this modern Zima which is not present in my preferred replacement, Smirnoff Ice Triple Black.

Arrested Development

This 2000s comedy classic returned with a new season on Netflix which was good, but confusing at first because of a warped chronology within the episodes of the season. Noting that awkwardness, the new season was reworked to be more chronologically straightforward. I have seen that season but not the other new season they added, but have come to realize that Arrested Development is a tough show to drop in and drop out of.

Not that it's a soap opera level of continuity to follow, it just flows better in a consistent binge-watching schedule rather than an episode here and and episode there. Nonetheless, the show and cast were still outrageously funny and the pace of the show whiplash-fast. I'm glad we got to see more of the Bluths and their wacky world.

TV Star Trek

Movie Star Trek in the 2010s consisted of Kelvin-timeline cast adventures that were mostly satisfying. Late in the decade, Star Trek was back where it really belongs, on television. The big media conglomerate that owns it is CBS Viacom, and when they wanted to start up their own subscription-based streaming service, they smartly tapped into the Star Trek well and got a bunch of Trekkers to subscribe to it for just one show.

Star Trek Discovery takes place on a ship from just a few years before The Original Series. This ship is a science vessel containing a very experimental new type of engine that immediately makes no sense seeing as it would change everything in some of the previous Star Trek shows where no such engine is ever talked about or known to exist. it would have really helped out the USS Voyager, for example.

Luckily, this discrepancy is fully explained by the end of the second season. While the show started out in a weird direction with weird Klingons, the characters and situations have really gelled, and some familiar faces from The Original Series have shown up to help set up their own spinoff. In fact, Discovery was joined by Picard in 2020, a series centered around an elderly old friend whose name is in the title. That show, too , became really enjoyable, and helps justify the CBS All Access subscription a lot more.

Beavis and Butt-Head

In 2011 Beavis and Butt-head returned to MTV for a season. While more of these two was welcome, it did not last long and Mike Judge moved on to other projects. Their 1990s antics translated well to the 2010s, and they even riffed on modern videos and reality shows as well in the new season.

Rumor is that in 2020, he is looking to bring back the duo for another season, possibly on Comedy Central. 

Jay and Silent Bob

Kevin Smith's View Askew connected movie universe ended with Clerks 2, sadly, but understandable as the director moved on to other projects. After a near-death heart attack and subsequent recovery, he went to the well one more time to make Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, where the characters rehash their trip to Hollywood from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to stop a reboot of the movie they tried to stop before.

As with Clerks 2, though, this was not simply a rehash of old jokes and characters; no, this one had a lot to say about fatherhood, maturity, and of course Hollywood rebooting everything. Smith weaves all of that so well, even with the smallest moments featuring old characters whose own journeys brought them back to the world of Jay and Silent Bob. It was a heartwarming celebration of the silly joys of playing in that world and recognizing together that we've all gotten old, but that's ok.

Beaten: Marathon: Durandal (XBox 360 via XBox One) and the Glory of XBox Backwards Compatability

Before the Halo series and whatever they did after that, game studio Bungie cut their development teeth on a first person shooter series called Marathon, released primarily on Apple Macintosh computers in the middle 1990s. While I was enjoying the joys of this new genre on the Atari Jaguar and then the Sony PlayStation, PC and Mac elites got the best of the best, and Marathon 2: Durandal was one of the best.

For some reason, perhaps riding high on all that Halo 3 cash, Bungie re-released Marathon 2: Durandal on the XBox 360 as simply Marathon: Durandal in 2008. Fast forward to 2020 where I am equipped with a new sense of direction in terms of playing old games I missed over the years as well as a gift card for the online store, enabling a very cheap purchase of this forgotten masterpiece.

It’s a science fiction first person shooter a la Doom, but with aliens. If that sounds standard, it is, but it’s all those Bungie idiosyncrasies that make it shine. Weapons are standard- pistol, shotgun, and up the chain - but ammo can be scarce at times forcing one to get proficient at each one’s use. In one level, I was down to fists for a time. Enemies are generic aliens too, but with AI weirdness that the player can discover quite by accident, such as by observing the horde of aliens that had just spawned begin fighting among themsleves because one stepped into the line of fire of the other.

Level design is outstanding, and of course unorthodox. In one level I was vexed for a time because I couldn't find a save point, only to realize that it was partially submerged in a pool of acid. One has to take damage to use it, but it's right next to a health station, so no foul. My gaming instincts ruled out the idea that the save point could be in the acid pool, until I was cornered and forced to dive in and check.

One will spend a lot of time in vats of acid, falling into pools of lava, and diving into water levels, all the time managing oxygen levels as well as health bars. This is a standard nineties shooter, so there will be switches to find, but no Doom-style secret doors that I remember. But there are secrets of a sort. In addition to managing the above, save points can at times be few and far between, and at other times casually close.  It is worth backtracking to a distant save point after a tough fight, as enemies can spawn right on top of the player, and one cannot push through them in tight spaces. Death can occur suddenly.

The backstory unfolds on monitors one finds scattered throughout the levels, bringing the player up to speed with the events of the first game and narrating the context of the action as one plays. It unfolds gloriously and I would not recommend skipping any of them because the story is so well crafted. I honestly found the storyline more engaging than the one that accompanies Halo.

Marathon: Durandal was extremely fun and engaging, full of surprises, and is a great way for any middle aged gamer to enjoy classic shooter gameplay with some refreshing twists. An additonal point of satisfaction for me is that classic games I missed are becoming available in ways that does not require the setup of every classic system to play them.

Right now, thanks to Microsoft's XBox backwards compatibility initiative, my XBox One has games from three generations on its hard drive waiting for me to play. I am fairly certain with the XBox Series X release, they have continued that program onto a fourth consecutive generation of their console. While not yet as comprehensive as I would like, it is a welcome change which allows me to jump all over their vast software library and find something old or new to play.

Which fits perfect with my newfound wanderlust through decades of gaming. So, good job, Microsoft.

Beaten: Assassin's Creed Odyssey (XBox One) and the Weird Ubisoft Open World Malaise

 Back in the day, when one finished a great game, there was often this accompanying sadness that it was over. All the content that the game had was enjoyed, every side quest checked off, and one could walk away from the game knowing that the world left behind was completed and wrapped up in a nice bow. But sometimes, one wanted more.

I've played three nearly perfect Ubisoft open world games over the last year - Assassin's Creed Origins, Farcry 5, and now Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and each one started out as fun, but by the middle or so I was burnt out on the endlessness of the game world and was ready to move on. At that point, I would ignore everything but the story quests and race toward the end.

Am I complaining about too much content? No. Am I saying that the excessive content was bad? No, but some of it is very cookie-cutter and repetitive. I'm saying that, it's not Ubisoft's fault, but it seems my own gaming priorities and my desire to eventually experience other games is incompatable with a three month commitment to a videogame version of ancient Greece that probably has more content that actual ancient Greece.

Rushing through to the end worked well in AC Origins, as by the time I was burnt out, I was levelled up enough to finish. Farcry 5 was a slog, though, as there were unavoidable triggered boss fights that were not that much fun. The first time one occurred, I was somehow drugged and kidnapped while alone and flying a helicopter, forced into one of a series of overwrought cutscenes and weird time limited escape scenes, wrapped up with an unwelcome boss fight. As soon as the first one occurred I was done with any and all of the game’s story or characters and blasted my way to the end.

I was done with AC Odyssey, however, before I was levelled up enough to finish. So I spent days and play sessions scraping for content that I could enjoy enough to get there. There were some stupid player-made side missions that helped with that, but at the end I'm asking myself why I even cared enough about finishing at all.

Well that ones's on me too. My own gaming ethic requires me to finish a game if I can, and it bugs me forever when I don't before moving on. I hope to return to some of them in the glorious retirement I envision starting in 2036. Will I return to a finished game with unfinished content, though? My character in Assassin's Creed Odyssey sits there, on a rooftop forever, wondering if I will come back and get on all those unfinished side missions.

I cannot say if I will do that, because if I want to scratch the Assassin's Creed itch, there is already another installment in the series that just came out, featuring Vikings and such. At this moment in time, I can safely say that it will be years before I pick up another one of their gigantic open worlds, and if i do, it will probably be Watch Dogs Legion anyway.

To sum up, Assassin's Creed Odyssey is as good as the real critics say. As long as you're not burnt out on the Ubisoft open world games, you will enjoy it as the testament to annual mass-production open worlds that it is. 

Complete: Odyssey 2 Adventure Magazine Collection

 

Started: January 1982 with the first issue

Finished: Late 2019 with the final issue

Magazines were an absolutely critical part of the early days of videogaming, and in an era with no internet, absolutely essential for players to learn about upcoming releases for their systems. In addition to commercially published periodocals like Electronic Games, most game companies began publishing their own public relations type of magazine, and the Odyssey 2 had Odyssey Adventure Magazine.

The first issue arrived, if memory serves, shortly after or at the same time as Christmas of 1981. Inside the console box was an application for membership in the Odyssey Adventure Club, including a one-year subscription to the magazine.

Of course I was all in on that, and each quarterly issue seemed to arrive with the latest big game release. Just as I was picking up Pick Axe Pete in the summer of 1982, the latest issue arrived heralding the game's release. As a young nerd, I also began corresponding with the magazine, getting replies (I will someday detail that correspondence in another article), and submitting tips.

I did not renew my subscription after getting the first five issues, and picked up the sixth issue at the local Magnavox dealer. Which was good, because my tip for Invaders from Hyperspace was published in that issue. By mid 1983, I was moving onto the Commodore VIC20 and the console videogame crash was underway, so I assumed that there were no further issues of Odyssey Adventure Magazine anyway.

I found out years later that I was wrong when digging through the archives of Digital Press, which emerged as the central videogame collector's website of reference once the internet was available. There was indeed a seventh issue featuring the game Turtles on the cover, and I no longer had a complete collection of Odyssey Adventure Magazine.

Thus, when I turned to Ebay in 2019 in order to complete collections of Electronic Games magazine and the North American Odyssey 2 Software Library, I also began a constant search for that missing issue. Of course, it was the rarest. The premiere issue is fairly common, but later issues become more rare as you get toward the end of the run.

I finally found it afer six months in a set with other issues and promotional material, and paid a pretty penny for it. The postmark is dated July 25, 1983 and it was filled with the usual articles, and since it is basically a part of a company's public relations, no sign that the whole company was about to collapse and Odyssey was almost finished with videogames.

Magazines from that era are a treasure trove of information, sure, but they also capture a lot of the energy and joy of a larger gaming community coming together for the first time to share our love of this hobby. Odyssey Adventure Magazine was always a positive and hopeful publication with an eye on a future that never came for the brand, and now I finally have a complete collection, and thus a more complete picture of Odyssey's final days.

Beaten: Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise (Switch)

 Sometimes, a game's story, characters, and all-around quirkiness can help the player overlook technical issues and seemingly primitive graphics. There has never been a much better example of this than the two Deadly Premonition games. 

The cult status of the first one, emerging in the years after its release, is testament to this."How did you know it had cult status?", one might ask, to which I answer "I saw a boardgame version of Deadly Premonition at a videogame trade show a few years ago." That's how you know a game has made it, just ask Zaxxon.

I downloaded Deadly Premonition Director's Cut for the Playstation 3 as a Playstation Plus free game at some point in the 2010s, sat on it awhile, then checked it out in 2016 and loved it. It's a silly masterpiece but a joy to play. Lots of it is original, some of it is derivative, but all of it is such a refreshing change from the giant studio cookie-cutter stuff (I'm looking at you Ubisoft) that I couldn't help but play, if just to see how wacky it was going to get.

When an unexpected sequel turned up on the Nintendo Switch this summer, I decided my enjoyment of the first game warranted a day one purchase.  Plus, I'm sure the cult fame of the first one granted the team more development funding and therefore the second game would be a much more polished one.

Well, not so much, and the rageful internet panned the sequel's technical issues and other gliches, as it is rightful to do. Nonetheless, and once again, everything under the hood the game is running along fine in terms of story, character, setting, music, and style. 

As the main character Francis York Morgan, you are tasked with solving murders in the small town of Le Carre, Louisana. There is a supernatural element to it as well, and in traditional Japanese norms, a bright and fiesty teenage girl sidekick. It's set in a relatively small open world which the player navigates by skateboard (fast travel is unlocked early on though). 

Combat is fun enough with just one gun that uses rubber bullets -  but I only counted 6 enemy types (3 natural and 3 supernatural) and 3 boss fights total. All of it was easy and not frustrating at all, which is good since the focus of the game is in interacting with the zany characters and solving the case.

Lots of side quests (kill 30 squirrels, gather ingredients for something. etc.) and some unique mini-games (stone skipping) add filler that is good, because sometimes you get stuck without much direction as to what to do. At one point, I was supposed to find 6 Anaconda Skins at "Park". I visited what I thought was the park, looking for anacondas and not finding them. Later, I realized that the skins were just more random loot lying around the park.

Crafting exists to use up all that random loot, but as usual, I did not dive in too deep. After some basic enhancements to my gun and physical stats, I really never found the crafting something I wanted to or needed to return to time and again.

The overarching story between both games comes to a head in a climactic and satisfying conclusion, wrapping up all the character threads and opening a small door for more Deadly Premonition. I hope a third game does show up in a decade or so, because the game's technical primitiveness is only forgivable by its charm, and I don't think that anyone's patience with those issues could be put aside for more frequent installments. 

Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise is a fitting sequel and yet another triumph of substance and style over technical expertise and programming elegance. I'd recommend it only for gamers who still care about that difference and want something truly unique once in awhile.

Beaten in 2011

Here are all the games and DLC add-ons that I beat in 2011. I look at this list and wonder how I squeezed all of it in.

Highlights include doing sequential trilogies with Killzone and Gears of War, 2 whole Bethesda RPGs (including all of the DLC for Fallout 3), and the sheer joy of exploding blimps with artillery over occupied Paris in The Saboteur.

Full:

Singularity (PS3)

Heavy Rain (PS3)

Enslaved : Odyssey to the West (PS3)

The Saboteur (PS3)

Dead Space 2 (360)

Splinter Cell Conviction (360)

Bulletstorm (360)

Crysis 2 (PS3)

Fallout 3 (PS3)

Portal 2 (PS3)

Killzone (PS2)

Killzone 2 (PS3)

LA Noire (PS3)

Gears of War (360)

Infamous 2 (PS3)

Killzone 3 (PS3)

Duke Nukem Forever (PS3)

Two Worlds 2 (PS3)

Deus Ex : Human Revolution (PS3)

Dead Island (PS3)

Gears of War 2 (360)

Gears of War 3 (360)

Resistance 3 (PS3)

Rage (PS3)

Uncharted 3 (PS3)

The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim (360)

Saints Row The Third (360)

F.E.A.R.(360)

Stacking (PS3)

Dead Nation (PS3)

Costume Quest (PS3)

Infamous : Festival of Blood (PS3)

DLC Packs:

Enslaved : Odyssey to the West - Pigsy's Perfect 10

Fable 3 - Understone

Fable 3 -Traitor's Keep

Fallout 3 - Operation Anchorage

Fallout 3 - Point Lookout

Fallout 3 - Broken Steel

Fallout 3 - The Pitt

Fallout 3 - Mothership Zeta

Mass Effect 2 - The Arrival

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood - The DaVinci Disappearance

Heavy Rain - The Taxidermist

LA Noire - The Consul's Car

LA Noire - The Naked City

LA Noire - Slip of the Tongue

LA Noire - Nicholson Electroplating

Gears of War 2 - Road to Ruin

Deus Ex : HR The Missing Link

Complete: Magnavox Odyssey 2 Software Library (North America)

Started: December 25, 1981 with Speedway!/Spin-Out!/Crypto-Logic!
Finished: Fall 2019 with Nimble Numbers NED!

It all began here for me as on Christmas morning of 1981, the Atari 2600 I had asked for ended up being a Magnavox Odyssey 2, I suspect thanks to a shady salesman at the O’Neils store at the Richland Mall in Mansfield. As I always say, I made the best of it and thankfully Odyssey cranked out a lot of great titles before the crash of 1983.

As a teen with negligible income, I was at my folks mercy in terms of software acquisition for it, getting new releases for good grades and birthdays, and for larger chores. It worked out well as new Odyssey 2 releases were months apart. I managed to pick up a few older games as well when they became discounted. Christmas of 1982 brought my last big roundup of Odyssey 2 games, as well as the Voice, the add-on voice synthesis peripheral.

By early 1983, the Odyssey 2 was at least fifth place in the market, but the last few games were stellar, including Killer Bees and a port of Demon Attack. As the great crash of 1983 took hold and consoles went down, I managed to talk mom and dad into a computer with the Commodore VIC 20, and the Odyssey 2 started gathering dust. In the fall of 1984 I picked up one last discount game in Volleyball and considered my collection done at that point.

Pictured above is my first inventory of any video game system, with prices. Some of the games - Freedom Fighters, Pick Axe Pete, and K.C’s Krazy Chase - were release day prices. I moved on to the Commodore 64 for the rest of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s I had started picking up older games at the same stores I was buying new games.

In addition, those early eighties consoles started popping up in flea markets and thrift stores and I was cleaning up. In an age before eBay, where few of us were thinking to preserve the games of yesteryear, I had my run of a major metropolitan area for years. Additional Odyssey 2 games were certainly picked up then, along with extra consoles and controllers.

In the early 2000s I turned to eBay to pick off a few rare Odyssey 2 games I had missed. Atlantis was the only other third party release for the Odyssey 2, again by Imagic.  Power Lords, the last Odyssey 2 game from Magnavox/NAP , was a weird tie in to a comic book/toy line or something. I also picked up a few amazing homebrew titles during this decade as that scene exploded, but they are outside the scope of this collection.

Of course the Odyssey 2 survived the Purge I did on eBay around 2007-2008, and in 2019 I decided to track down the relatively cheap remaining titles to round out the set. It didn’t take long as none of them were very rare, but it took a while to find SID the Spellbinder and Nimble Numbers NED with  the extra documents they contained.

Thirty eight years after obtaining my first piece of video game software ever, I have completed my first complete collection of every commercially released title for a system. Say what you will about Odyssey, they fought hard in the face of Atari’s market dominance, with inferior hardware and virtually no third party support.

You never forget your first love, and I’m glad I’ve held onto mine, and completed the software library for it. Decades from now I hope to still be playing U.F.O. or getting my retired friends to sit down for a session of Quest for the Rings. The Magnavox Odyssey 2 was my first video game system, and if it ends up being my last one, I’d be okay with that.

Beaten: Ys Book 2 - Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Whew, that was close. Again.

Pictured above is my stunning defeat of the final boss of Ys Book 2, the Turbografx 16 CD classic that took me 30 years to get around to playing. Ys Book 2 is actually Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter, originally released on Japanese computers in 1989 before getting bundled with the first Ys game for the Turbografx 16 CD. 

Fantastic music, cutscenes, and polished gameplay shine through this straightforward masterpiece of its time. You start Ys Book 2 bereft of your armor, weapons, and most items  from Ys Book 1, but levelling continues from the first. Pacing is perfect and you level as you explore with no need for grinding, but occasionally you’ll find a sweet spot and go for it anyway.

The major addition in Book 2 is magic wands and MP to power their effects. Since the first wand was fire, and shot fireballs, I assumed the others would be also elemental themed effects, but Ys is a little offbeat in its design. Instead, the other magic included useful effects like teleportation back to any town, shield, and disguise as a monster. 

While disguised as a monster, you get access to monster only areas and converse with the enemies, who sometimes offer useful clues regarding your next step. It added an unexpected and wholly delightful twist on the normal gameplay.

Most boss fights were epic challenges worthy of song with insane attacks and razor edge margins for error. Hell yes I used the save anywhere feature of the Turbografx 16 Mini to save optimal gameplay runs on a few of them. If I started out good in a boss fight, I’d save that point and start subsequent attempts from there. Again, don’t judge, I’m middle-aged.

Some of the boss fights were pushovers, but I’ll take it. 

I previously stated that back in the day I was not convinced that Ys Book 1 &  2 was the killer app that would make me take the plunge and get the Turbografx 16 CD. I was wrong and I know that this game would have been a favorite of mine back then. Here in 2020 hindsight is still 20/20, but at least I got to play it now thanks to the current wave of 90s retro gaming nostalgia and the good-enough-for-now Turbografx 16 Mini.

Beaten: Ys Book 1 - Ancient Ys Vanished (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Well that was close.

Pictured above is my stunning defeat of the villainous Dark Fact, a final boss whose name is as silly as his attacks are deadly, and whose end signifies the end of Book 1 of this legendary Japanese action RPG series. Originally released in 1987 for some obscure Japanese computer I've never heard of, this epic remake arrived in 1990 for the Turbografx 16 CD with both Book 1 and Book 2 (Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter).

Man, I wanted to play it back then. But even a bachelor's budget can only go so far and there was a lot of hardware to get in the early 1990s. I passed on the very expensive CD Rom drive for the Turbografx 16, as there were not many titles beyond Ys for it that I wanted to try. Hey, I had a TurboExpress though, and that was money well spent.

It's a strange early entry into the action RPG field where a lot of the norms get twisted a little. You're not allowed to use any items such as a healing potion during a boss fight, for example. Most unique and at first just bizarre is the combat where you simply bump into monsters to do damage. Just equip your best gear and run right into them, no button presses required. There is some nuance involved, as making your collision with the enemy head on can be less effective than hitting it at a corner or from an angle. It's hard to define in words and it definitely takes a minute to get used to but once the player gets the feel for it, it's like if Robotron didn't have guns and instead you chest bumped the robots. And you're in a dungeon.

Also weird is that instead of the standard 8 or so dungeons of equal proportion, Ys Book 1 has a small outdoor area with two towns, and three dungeons total, the last one being 25 levels tall. Also, there is very little warning that once you go into that 25 level final dungeon, you cannot go back to the villages again.

There are a few items and better gear to get, and the dungeons present labyrinthine layouts and puzzles to move forward. In my playthrough I hit a dead end after beating the penultimate boss fight and had to backtrack way down the tower to find an item to move forward.. Take the whole package together with the beautiful CD soundtrack and cutscenes, and the fact that this came out in 1990, and Ys Book 1 makes for a rewarding and exciting videogame experience even in 2020.

I have to wonder what other undiscovered treasures are hidden in the vast unknown library of 1980s Japanese computer software. As Apple, Atari, Commodore and others battled in the North America and European markets, it appears as if a number of computer models in Japan were getting software like this while I was playing Sword of Kadash on my Commodore 64.

Ys Book 1 ends and a gorgeous CD cutscene drops the player right into Book 2. With all levels intact, but no gear nor items it seems. Just the six books I gathered throughout Book 1.  Onward I go.

Complete: Electronic Games Magazine Collection

Started: Early 1982, 2nd Issue
Finished: Late 2019 All issues

Few moments in my personal video game history were as pivotal as picking up the second issue that early 1982 day after school. One of the my neighborhood cohorts showed us his copy and within minutes we were on our ten speed bikes racing toward the newsstands. Long before the internet a small town of 13,000 could support three newsstands, and that's on top of every grocery store, drug store, department store, and convenience store selling magazines too.

Videogaming was a thing. A hobby or pastime that gets big enough to get a magazine has by some sort of metric made it and as I turned the pages I began to understand what a much bigger world it was. From handhelds to consoles to the vast unknown of computer gaming it was all masterfully covered by the now legendary journalists Bill Kunkel, Joyce Worley, and Arnie Katz. In that second issue they establish review standards and journalistic integrity that only makes their comprehensive coverage of the field so amazing.

I missed one or two issues over the years but in 1985 the run ended shortly after transforming to Computer Entertainment, which was the launching point for my Commodore 64 collection. Consoles were done, and videogame magazines were gone with them. Over the years I referenced them from time to time as I built my retrogame collection.

I eBayed them during the Purge ahead of my wedding, not seeing much reason to keep them around without the games. A few years later I began to regret it, and finally in the summer of 2019 I decided to see if I could round them up. How hard would it be to complete, I wondered.

It took about four months without much effort, but some amount of cash. I consider them essential research materials if I continue to ramble online about it well into my sunset years.

Ys-ing Into the Turbografx 16 Mini

I've had a week to play around on the finally-shipped Turbografx 16 Mini console, a tight little unit larger than similar mini consoles from Nintendo and Sega. As promised, it came with one controller, a back cover, and a lineup of classic Turbografx 16 and PC Engine titles.

The PC Engine is the Japanese name for the console, and as such all of its titles are in Japanese.  On some games it doesn't matter, as the player can just jump in and play. In fact, the vast majority of games that make up the PC Engine lineup are amazing bullethell shooters, schmups, or what have yous where the screen is full of bullets and I die quickly. It's never been my genre, but damn this console is a treasure trove of the golden age of them.

It is very regrettable that there wasn't a localization effort for these titles, though. I've always been curious about Snatcher, which is on here, but unplayable for me in Japanese.  Adventure games in the lineup like Jaseiken Necromancer and The Legend of Valkyrie would have been worth exploring as well.

Also annoying is that some of the titles exist twice on the console, in both libraries. So, let's talk about the Turbografx 16 side of the library. With these mini consoles you take what you can get with the lineup and there is no way that every game one personally wants or fondly remembers will be on there. That being said, there are definitely some essentials on here (Military Madness, Splatterhouse, Neutopia, Ninja Spirit, Dungeon Explorer, Chew Man Fu, JJ & Jeff, Bonk's Revenge), 2 CD ROM games I never got to experience (Ys Book 1 & 2, Lords of Thunder), 2 Working Designs classics (Cadash and Parasol Stars), and some middle of the road stuff (Moto Roader, Power Golf), and a few more shooters that are not on the PC Engine side.

Missing on the TG16 side are Bonk's Adventure, Devil's Crush, The Legendary Axe, TV Sports Football, and the system pack-in game Keith Courage in the Alpha Zones.  I would even put Bonk 3 on that list for completness. Regrets aside, this mini console is perfect for my limited retrogaming needs, and the main draw for me is getting to play Ys Book 1 & 2 after a three-decade wait. I'm at the second major boss in that game already, and still enjoying its gorgeous art and amazing music along with its quirky combat. 

It is absolutely great to have this beloved old friend back in the roster, albeit with its limitations. I would recommend it to any retrogamer who needs a fix of this classic era but does not have the desire to go all in on building a full Turbografx16 collection.

Beaten: A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Game Boy)

The David Crane classic A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette has been in my backlog since March of 1992, surviving the Purge with my entire Nintendo Game Boy collection, and occasionally played via the Gamecube's essential Game Boy Player attachment over the years. Admittedly, my earlier efforts were short sessions at best, but I recognized some of that David Crane (Pitfall) design magic and vowed to return to that title.

The player controls Boy, who is accompanied by Blob, a fiesty AI companion that will just murder you at times for not paying attention to the game design, dammit. No, serously, when you enter a new room, Blob will follow, and if you're stopped at the edge of a cliff or some "what's it even for" stamping machine, he will push you ahead to your death.

And that's what the real puzzle of this game is - figuring out the mechanics and rules so you can navigate to the intended puzzles. Boy goes from zero to a hundred with just more than the slightest urging of the D-pad, and making short steps to be in just the right place involves micro-tapping the direction and hoping you don't start sprinting - which by the way ends in sliding, to add distance to your already-overshot attempt to put yourself on just the right pixel.

The brilliance of the game design really shines when you figure out what jellybean to feed Blob at what spot. Different flavors get different results, and learning how to use them to overcome obstacles is a blast. There's not a plethora of these moments in the game, but they are a treat.  Most of the gameplay will be figuring out how to trampoline up to ledges and high places in caverns to collect treasures and other items.

Admittedly, I beat the game but did not play for a perfect run, where I also collect all of the treasures. If I ever decide to try that, though, I know where they all are thanks to this map I made:

Earlier this year I had my "Play games from every era of gaming going forward, you're getting old" epiphany, so I went waaaay back to William Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, the first text adventure. While playing, I mapped it out in the very primitive MS Paint, but in spite of the frustration and limitations of that program, I had as much fun mapping the game as I did playing it.

I've always been a map nerd, and in the early days of gaming players were on their own with that one. There was little to no room back then for the program itself to map it all for you, so it was graph paper, pages of notes, and meticulous exploration of complex and devious dungeons. I still have a vast set of file folders with maps and notes from that era, and recently broke out my folder for The Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown to test it against the remaster released on the XBox One. The maps still held up!

So, when I decided to take on A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette, I broke out a much better program than MS Paint known as AutoCAD. The same program I use at work to create shop drawings for clients turned out to be a great videogame mapping program.

Again, I enjoyed that nerdy mapping buzz as much as the game itself. While I won't do it or even need to do it with every game I play, once in awhile I can scratch that old itch, as much a part of my personal videogame history as the games themselves.

Iron Man VR Demo Impressions (PSVR)

See, my blog is not just a whimsical dance through videogaming's history, I can cover new releases too, right off the servers, like a million younger sources you might find on the internet, but with a middle-aged viewpoint.

Iron Man VR for the Playstation 4's VR headset, which I guess most folks call PSVR, came out with a playable demo a few days ago, and I got to sneak in a full playthrough of the demo this morning.  It utilizes the move controllers and from the first time taking flight, it immediately feels like they nailed it.

For the most part, anyway. In the tutorial area at the rocky shoreline near Stark's Malibu home, the player is given some targets to blast with repulsors, some hoops to fly through, and some other targets to rocket punch. The tool tip that popped up when it came time to rocket punch went away too fast, and I'm not exactly sure how to do that move. Nonetheless, I pulled it off during my clumsy attempts to figure it out and proceeded to the main demo level.

You get to play as Stark himself, chatting with Pepper and AI assistant Friday aboard the Stark  corporate jet before all hell breaks loose. The villain looked like the Ghost, sort of, and he/she hacks the plane into crashing, muttering the usual villain taunts and vague references to revenge. As Iron Man you fly around the jet, defending it from waves of drones, and sometimes flying close to broken parts of the plane to repair them. 

I don't think the level was on rails, but it took little effort to stay near the jet or get back to it after beating another wave of drones. The same ease came with the jet repairs that pop up during this chapter - I intuitively swooped in on those attempts to keep the jet in the air. Once you fly into the marker at the repair spot, the game goes into a mini-game where you move Reed Richards - sorry, Tony Stark's arms and hands to specific positions to initiate the repair action.

I slipped and said Reed Richards back there because Tony's arms in the game seem to stretch comically long when you reach out. I could not hold back a chuckle the first time it happened, and laughed even harder when I did it as Stark in the plane. I suspect that's just one of those VR things that have to be so the game works for players with all sorts of armspans.

So yeah, Iron Man VR controls beautifully, at least I think after taking it for a spin. Decent visuals and a good enough story for a demo make this a demo worth playing a few times at least, and should keep my interest in the July 3 release of the full game. 

Beaten: Gears of War Judgment (360)

I sampled the first Gears of War game back in late 2008, but was not impressed enough to pursue it at the time, as at that point I was catching up on a lot of other XBox 360 titles. It wasn't until 2011, after beating the entire Killzone Trilogy back-to-back, that I decided to do the same with Gears of War, and beat the first 2 and any substantial DLC they had ahead of the release of Gears of War 3.

And that was plenty of COG-tastic action for awhile. When Gears of War Judgment released in 2013, I ignored it, but in April 2015 when it was available for free on XBox Live Gold, I downloaded it, fired it up, and said "Nahhh, not yet."

Apparently I was in the mood last week, playing it as my upstairs campaign (a game played on one of the consoles in the guest bedroom). The action and combat are really just more of the same as the trilogy ahead of it, but the story is that of one of the side characters and his squad, all doing.....the exact things these soldiers do in every game - defy orders to win and get in trouble for it. Okay, so the action, combat, and story are the same.

It doesn't matter, because Gears of War games are all polish.They look great, the combat controls are tight, and the game's rules are kept simple. Area after area of waist-high barriers for fun cover shooting of badass enemies is what you get. The ally AI is better than most, and they aren't a burden at all to have along. The game's chapters let each of the squad have their own testimony about the situation to share, and the player controls them at these times.

So yes, I recommend Gears of War Judgment if you want more Gears. Me, I've got a still shrink-wrapped copy of Gears 4 in my backlog already for the next time I get that itch.

Something that was a first for me in gaming with Gears of War Judgment is that I was able to start the campaign on the XBox 360 and finish it on the XBox One. Microsoft's backwards compatability push over the last few years (and hopefully ahead) gets a huge thumbs from this middle-aged gamer. Hopefully we see more and more systems and gaming architectures maintain playability for past titles going forward.

Beaten: Beyond Oasis (Genesis)

When the global pandemic derailed production of the US version of the Turbografx 16 Mini, with it went my dream of finally playing Ys Book 1 & 2 for a good retro RPG challenge. Still wanting to scratch that itch, I turned to my Sega Genesis Mini and choose Beyond Oasis, an action RPG with great graphics and cool design elements.

Yesterday, I beat the game and decided to revive the type of posts here where I would write fresh impressions of it right after the credits roll. Beyond Oasis certainly made a good impression with its colorful graphics, mildly challenging combat and puzzles, and tight controls.

In addition, I realized that while I had a Sega Genesis back in the day, I had never beaten a single title I had for it - not even Ecco the Dolphin. That’s changed now, thanks to Beyond Oasis.

The nitty gritty of this action adventure are the 4 elemental companions you learn to summon throughout the game. While water, fire, and shadow are pretty common elemental archetypes, the fourth one was plant, which was weird but cool in its execution. Solving puzzles with the unique abilities of each elemental was very fun and satisfying, and balanced well with the hack and slash combat and the game’s great looking 2D sprites.

It should be noted that I took full advantage of the Sega Genesis Mini’s “save anywhere” ability. The game itself did not allow for saving within dungeon areas, but I was able to utilize that tool to save myself from repeated dungeon runs just to get to the boss fight again. On those boss fights they did a spectacular job, creating bosses that require some trial and error to figure out what works.

I would certainly recommend Beyond Oasis to my 1994 self, and tell him to appreciate the Sega Genesis more, but honestly that guy had just been playing Doom on his Atari Jaguar and would probably have none of it.

2010 - 2020: The Lost Years

So much has happened, I could write a thousand blog posts about those lost years. I still plan to do that, but for now let me offer a framework of yet another decade of insane circumstances.

When we left off, I was a happily married prep cook at one of the city's most acclaimed fine dining establishments. It paid the bills and kept me caught up with the latest gaming releases, and my skills were enlisted as a lead trainer in 2009 as I was sent to Dallas to train staff and assist with the opening of another restaurant.  The financial benefit of which allowed me to get a PS3 upon my return so I could dive into the insanity that was Demon's Souls.

My schedule was Tuesday through Saturday, which made Mondays heaven. The wife worked, I did the laundry, cleaning, and cooking and still had hours-long game sessions.

2010
There were no restaurant openings in 2010, which was fine as our social circle kept growing and we were enjoying the DINK lifestyle, partying with our friends and listening to them bitch about how bad their kids were. I played catch-up on the PS3 exclusives I'd missed, which means I beat the first two Uncharteds, two Riddicks, two Resistances, and too many others to mention. It was a year of twos - Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Just Cause 2, Saint's Row 2. By this point I was pretty much done with the Wii and DS.

In addition, the flood of DLC that followed each game release was a lot to keep up with, but I was kind of all over it. If I liked a game, I left no DLC unbeaten. Six followed Mass Effect 2, more came for Borderlands, and even Red Dead Redemption had a zombie one that was a blast. They were a lot more substantive for the most part back then, it feels.

2011
This year started out with a month-long restaurant opening in Denver, and I took the good old PS3 along for the ride. I worked 14-18 hour days but had the weekends free. I was already playing Singularity when I got there and finished it the first weekend. All in all, I beat four games that month, including The Saboteur, Heavy Rain, and Escape: Odyssey to the West. It was hard work but the reward each weekend was worth it.

There were more franchise sophomore efforts in the form of Dead Space 2, Crysis 2, and the overjoy that was Portal 2. The numbers shifted to threes though, as I decided to start doing trilogies of game series' that I hadn't caught up on yet, starting with Killzone. I dusted off the PS2 and fired up the original first, and then the second one, called Killzone 2. A masterpiece so good, with a final boss fight for the ages and a great multiplayer component, I actually kept playing the multiplayer all summer, even after beating Killzone 3.

Another trilogy I beat was Gears of War, and the year wrapped up with 32 games and 17 DLC packs beaten, somehow. It boggles my mind that I found time to do all that. Fallout 3, LA Noire, and Skyrim are on that list. I remember a lot of partying, still, too. 

2012
I finished the F.E.A.R. Trilogy, had a blast in the open worlds of Mafia 2 and Sleeping Dogs, and beat Dark Souls. It was the year Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect let us down with their 3's, as well as the year I played and beat 2 Telltale episodic games. At the end of the year, though, I tried a free demo of Minecraft, a game I had previously dismissed, and was hooked.

On another note, the whole world came to know the glory of a comic book I was reading back in 1978 as Marvel pulled off The Avengers in movie theaters, something that was unthinkable most of my life. I never cried at a movie until Aragorn told some Hobbits that they bow to no one, but that was nothing compared to the "That's my secret, Cap...I'm always angry." assembling of Earth's Mightiest Heroes. The unspeakable glory of having lived long enough to see that on a movie screen packs a hell of a punch

2013
Minecraft captivated me for much of the year, as I built and created and explored that strange blocky world. I balanced by game time between regular XBox 360 and PS3 games and building Pinnacle City. That will be a whole separate article at some point.

I began another trilogy to start the year, and five years after an absolute asshole of a co-worker spoiled the twist, I had forgotten it mostly and enjoyed a perfect run on Bioshock. I finished the underrated Bioshock 2 just in time for Bioshock Infinite. Lots of zombie action on deck this year with Dead Island Riptide, State of Decay, and The Last of Us, a game 99% depressing. The 1% that isn't is worth it, though. Of course, nothing tops Spec Ops: The Line for depressing.

The pinnacle of portable gaming arrived in the form of Killzone Mercenary, the last hurrah not just for the PS Vita but for Killzone itself. Grand Theft Auto V arrived, was awesome, and heralded the end of the single player GTA game as Rockstar realized that multiplayer is where the real money is, apparently. Seven years later and there stands no announcement of GTA 6 as of this writing. A quick turnaround from the unlikable Assassin's Creed 3 brought us the awesome piratey goodness that was Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag.

2014
More time spent with friends meant less time gaming, and while I acquired a PS4 this year and entered the ninth generation of consoles (by my reckoning), the games for it at the time were depressing ends to two great series. KIllzone Shadow Fall was technically great, but the story made as much sense as Star Wars movies lately, in that not at all to anyone paying attention to the plot. Infamous Second Son was just okay.

Fortunately, Dark Souls 2 arrived to save the year, and before I was done with it and its DLC, I had logged nearly 230 hours paying it.  Other notables included South Park: The Stick of Truth and Watchdogs.

2015
Mostly a PS4 year, but damn there were some good newbies on the scene. Wolfenstein:The New Order, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Dying Light, Bloodborne, and Mad Max all felt fresh and were great to play. The last great Bethesda game, Fallout 4, arrived and lived up to expectations.

In my personal life, I was very burnt out on my career as a prep cook.  Even with experiences opening restaurants in Beverly Hills and midtown Manhattan, the joy had gone as a new generation of young idiot chefs were coming into the scene, not holding to the standards of yesteryear.

Our two closest friends are engineers, and one time while visiting they beheld the wonder of my city in Minecraft and informed me that not everyone can think in 3D like that. Sick of  hearing me bitch about my career rut, they suggested community college and a career change. When I brought up the financial concerns about paying for it, they directed me toward a federal tax break for people who change careers at my age, which I never knew existed.

2016
While in school, I worked full time and even did a local restaurant opening, and we kept up the usual level of over-the-top revelries. Most importantly, I kept gaming, taking on XBox 360, PS3, and PS4 titles all over the place. It was this year I became less focued on the latest and greatest, and more about not missing a cool older game just because it's a little less polished.

I finished the Army of Two trilogy, beat the first two Dead Rising games (having given up on the first one back in 2010), spent months on a space combat sim game called Darkstar One, and managed to still plow through Metal Gear Solid 3:Snake Eater, Darkest of Days, Gone Home, Grow Home, and the unreal coolness of Deadly Premonition:Director's Cut. I got an XBox One for Christmas, but nothing worth noting to play on it, and the wife got a Switch, with the usual suspects in terms of software.

In spite of the world beginning its slow painful slide into the apocalype after a Russian attack on our election put their pawn in the fucking White House, in December I pulled off the long shot I was hoping for after a year of busting my ass for a 4.0 GPA in community college. I made a total middle-aged career change, retiring from the culinary arts after 33 years of it, and starting as an entry level CAD Drafter at a unique family-owned company. I'm still there as of this writing, now in charge of the whole department somehow.

2017
I was making more money now, which was nice, but the price that had to be paid for it was losing those glorious Monday play sessions. My new work schedule meant that the wife and I worked the same Monday through Friday grind. Combine that with our active social life and you get a lot less games played throughout the year.

But Horizon Zero Dawn was a great one, and kept me busy for several months, also bringing some redemption after ending the Killzome series with Shadow Fall.  Mafia 3 was fun because of the setting, music, and the fact that historically racist enemies very much deserved the rampaging you do in that game. A few months were lost to Fallout New Vegas as well. Money was good so we got each other a PS VR set and a Switch for Christmas.

A Kickstarter gift from a friend got me in as a horror contributor to Perception, and my name is in the credits. It was an okay game with some definitely creepy stuff going on. That should be another whole article on its own. It was a year of firsts, as around this time I did a model shoot and was an extra in a commercial, but those weird accomplishments will also most definitely need their own articles to explain and show off.

2018
It was clear by this point that my wife had total control of the main downstairs television from the time right after work until the wee hours of the morning, I could only sneak an hour or so on it in the morning before work, because our hours were not quite lined up at that point. By now though I had set up a secondary gaming oasis at my desk in the guest bedroom, with the old PS3, XBox 360, and Gamecube retired there.

Between the Switch's portabilty and peeling off the XBox One upstairs temporarily so I could get some level of modern gaming, I beat The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as well as South Park:The Fractured But Whole, Watchdogs 2, Dishonored 2, Red Dead Redemption 2. Having the upstairs / downstairs dynamic to my gaming only served to encourage my new way of thinking about what I should be playing and why.

Now in my fifties, I started to realize that there were a lot of games that had passed me by over the years that I always wanted to get back to at some point. My gaming would be directed not by the release day camping out for the latest new title, but for a variety of games and experiences across a lot of platforms.

2019
I guess we will be looking back at 2019 as the pre-pandemic times going forward, and my new gaming directive toward variety was taking shape.  Having the second gaming station upstairs, and even adding a third gaming station in my mud room (another article about that is forthcoming) allowed me the opportunity to get more gaming in than I had the previous few years. Keep in mind, I was still catching up on years of backlog in my collection, so I played very few new releases this year.

Some of the old franchises were back and blander than ever (Mass Effect Andromeda, Farcry 5, Rage 2), but others were still on their, well, game (Dark Souls 3, State of Decay 2, Grow Up). Astro Bot Rescue Mission for the PSVR stood out as a new experience, as did Asura's Wrath (PS3) and What Remains of Edith Finch (PS4). Another part of my new directive emerged when I replayed in full King's Field: The Ancient City (PS2), which I had installed in the aforementioned mud room. There were some games so good that I might just replay them rather than dipping into my backlog.

Conclusion
It was a decade of huge changes in my personal life as well as my gaming habits. I shifted from a lifetime of "too many games, not enough money" to a new problem of "too many games, not enough time". In addition, the shift in my perspective resulting from my advancing years took me from "I'll get back to that game later in life" to "I better get to that game soon, no telling how much life is left".

Work and relationships are hard. Finding a balance between fulfilling those commitments and still getting time to delve into a game like I did in my younger, single days is still elusive. Mad props to those that pull it off in this lifetime. It ain't me.

My hope now is to keep playing, keep writing about playing, and retire comfortably with a massive multi-generational backlog of games to enjoy. I love my new career, don't get me wrong, but the concept of having twenty years after that to dive into the backlog I'll have by then is enough to keep me going, even as the world outside today portends otherwise.

2010 Game of the Year Award

Another bit of housekeeping I must attend to upon reviving this pointless yet gratifying online journal is my annual Game of the Year award. Long ago, I had a companion website for this blog where I had an extensive page of my Game of the Year Award dating back to 1981. It’s all gone now, and I don’t appear to have it backed up anywhere (with the possible exception of an old hard drive I might have stored around).

Since 1981, I have chosen a personal Game of the Year based on what I played that year. In some cases, I played the game years after it’s release, but it was still better than anything else I played that year. In addition, throughout my life I’ve not always had access to the state of the art systems and  PCs required for much of gaming’s history. So, to sum up my long-winded caveat, this is a personal award  and not an industry award.

I hope to find time to recreate the entire list of Games of the Years at some point. For now, you can squint at the header at the top of this page, and behind the giant Middle-Aged Gamer logo you’ll find the cover art for every winner from 1981-2008. As with everything in my life,  I’ve got some catching up to do, starting with the 2010 Game of the Year:

2010 Game of the Year - Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360)
This spacefaring action RPG got rave reviews for a lot of reasons - technical improvements over the first game, story, and such. But putting the game over the top were the many intricate connections to the first game in the series made real by having the game incorporate game save data from it to show the outcome of decisions made in that playthrough.

It’s a gaming concept dating back to Wizardry, where your seasoned party of adventurers could be loaded up at the start of the second game and carry over their experience and equipment, with some limitations. Mass Effect 2, with some difficulty, even allowed players who had played an iPhone spinoff game to also incorporate that game’s results into it. It’s a shame more developers don’t see the value in that.

Runner-Up: Uncharted 2: Among Theives (PS3)
2010 was my year of catch-up with the stellar PS3 exclusives I had missed, and this 2009 hit was at the top of the pack. Story, action, gunplay, and breathtaking levels make this a game that is so hard to put down until it’s done.

Runner-Up: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (PS3)m
Continuing with the Renaissance era adventures of Ezio Auditore, this game offered the usual mind blowingly gorgeous historic cities of the time, but also added larger assassin management duties, all while continuing to unfold a great story.

Runner-Up: Red Dead Redemption (PS3)
It’s Grand Theft Horse, and it’s exactly as perfect as one would expect. A vast western in story and scope that covers everything from gunfights to card games to tying people up and leaving them on the train tracks. A masterpiece in every way.

Archived Turbulent Waters

In case you forgot, The Turbulent Waters was my Ultima Online fansite from April 2000 - Early 2005 (or so) that was focused on ships and sailing in that pioneering MMORPG. After I closed up shop it was hosted for years by the cross-server guild the Fishing Council of Britannia.

Sadly, they seem to be gone now, and I had assumed that The Turbulent Waters went down with their ship. It turns out not being current on the internet in my old age missed the fact that what's left of the site (the main page) is preserved at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, a place that the internet is partially backed up, thankfully.

All of the graphics are missing but there are some great and passionate articles there regarding my last days playing Ultima Online and being an advocate of the development of the nautical aspect of it.
It's good to know that my efforts from that bygone era are still visible for future historians to ponder.

Ready for the Apocalypse

Shelter in Place! Self Quarantine! 

The long delayed but absolutely inevitable apocalypse we've all kind of known was coming has arrived in the form of a global pandemic and today's big victory was finding toilet paper at the grocery. Going in, the only things we have stockpiled here are:

• Alcohol
• Wetnaps
• Videogames

I feel good about our chances!

Beaten in 2010

I may not have been blogging about games for the last decade, but I did maintain lists each year of the games I have beaten in each year. Here is 2010, which was the year I caught up on the PS3:

Full:

Assassin's Creed 2 (360)

Mass Effect 2 (360)

Uncharted : Drake's Fortune (PS3)

The Chronicles of Riddick : Escape From Butcher Bay (PS3)

The Chronicles of Riddick : Assault on Dark Athena (PS3)

Uncharted 2 : Among Thieves (PS3)

Just Cause 2 (PS3)

Saint's Row 2 (360)

3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3)

Red Dead Redemption (PS3)

Resistance : Fall of Man (PS3)

Resistance 2 (PS3)

Infamous (PS3)

Dark Void (360)

Halo : Reach (360)

Alan Wake (360)

Red Faction Guerilla (PS3)

Fable 3 (360)

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (PS3)

DLC Packs

Mass Effect 2 - Normandy Crash Site (360)

Mass Effect 2 - Kasumi - Stolen Memory (360)

Mass Effect 2 - The Price of Revenge (360)

Mass Effect 2 - Firewalker (360)

Mass Effect 2 - Overlord (360)

Mass Effect 2 - Lair of the Shadow Broker (360)

Assasin's Creed 2 - The Battle of Forli (360)

Assassin's Creed 2 - Bonfire of the Vanities (360)

Red Dead Redemption - Undead Nightmare (PS3)

Red Faction Guerilla - Demons of the Badlands (PS3)

Borderlands - The Secret Armory of General Knoxx (360)

Borderlands - Claptrap's New Robot Revolution (360)

Left 4 Dead 2 - The Passing (360)

Alan Wake - The Signal (360)

Alan Wake - The Writer (360)

Ten Years Later

Hey it's been a minute. Because decades seem to go by in a minute these days.

I can't believe that this blog still exists. Well, I'm still alive and still very middle-aged and have come back to a place in my life where I want to write about videogames again. The only issue with that is that my ability to discipline my time for it is as poor as ever.

Yet here I am pecking away at the keys. At 53 years old now, the feeling of immortality I once knew has faded into the realization that if there was something I was waiting until later in my life to do, I should get to it. Big dreams like uniting all of humanity into one society are still on the backburner, but small ones like leaving an accounting of my time as a lifelong gamer behind are certainly reasonable.

I play sporadically these days, not rushing to the hottest new release, so things like reviews of new releases are going to be rare (although Iron Man VR is on my radar for its May release). Last year I replayed King's Field The Ancient City (PS2), beating it again 13 years after first conquering it. Doing so has inspired my to delve deep into gaming's past and take care of some unfinished business from the many eras I’ve seen come and go.

Like Colossal Cave Adventure - I had it on the C64 back in the day but never took it on. And in a few weeks when the Turbografx 16 Mini comes out, I’m finally going to play Ys Books 1 & 2, which I missed back in the early nineties as the TurboCD attachment never was in my budget.

But I'll get into what that has entailed thus far in future posts. There is a ton of catching up ahead, and this middle-aged gamer doesn't care if anyone is reading anymore.