Huge Roblox controversy, collectors ruining game collecting, Pac-Man Atari 2600+ console, and more!
2025-08-20 16:18:12 +0000 UTC View Post
We discuss the new superhero movies, Superman and Fantastic Four!
2025-08-20 00:32:01 +0000 UTC View PostLast weekend’s convention was great. The folks at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo put on another great show. I hope I can go back next year, but it all depends on the timing of our move. I did two panels, one with Frank Cifaldi and the usual live podcast with Pat. I hated doing panels when I first started doing conventions, but over the years I’ve grown to look forward to them. I think Pat and I have a slightly different energy when we’re live. It was also my birthday and my first gift wa...
2025-08-17 16:36:54 +0000 UTC View PostI leave tomorrow morning for the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. I’m looking forward to it! I’m not looking for anything specific as far as games, and I’d be surprised if I pick up anything, but I’m pumped all the same to look through the Game Boy games on the floor. Who knows, maybe I’ll find something weird? All I’m bringing to sell this year are copies of the Yokoi Kids zines. If I end up bringing any games to sell it’ll be a small amount and decided upon last minute.
La...
2025-08-06 21:06:36 +0000 UTC View PostSan Diego Comic Con was last weekend and, again, I was lucky to attend thanks to Vani. I spent more time on the floor this year than I have since probably 2016. It was a combination of having the time off and needing to get out of the apartment that got me there early and kept me there late. I attended my first preview night in a long time and remembered that it’s probably my favorite part of Comic Con. I’m not there for panels and I’m not often looking for the exclusives. What I like a...
2025-07-31 18:01:14 +0000 UTC View PostVani and I went out and saw Superman on Tuesday. I’d been looking forward to it since the first trailer, hoping it would be a Superman story good enough to get the taste of Snyder’s Man of Steel out of my mouth. It was. I loved it. I thought the acting was great, the story was good, and the side characters were done very well. I enjoyed Krypto, but felt like he could have saved Superman’s ass one less time. My big sticking point, and this is a SPOILER, deals with the k...
2025-07-19 02:05:13 +0000 UTC View PostWhat have I been up to? Painting Battletech. Playing Battletech. Hyperfocusing. I’ve been able to get out and play, something I’ve wanted to do again since I was a teenager. It’s another way for me to get out of the house, and my head, after work. As I creep into my mid-forties I’ve become a Hobbies Guy. I don’t want to focus on bad news all of the time or waste every night on the internet. It has been nice.
Things get more exciting in the coming weeks. San Diego Comic Con is...
Xbox Game Pass a failure, Amico developer speaks out, #CUPodcast listener hassled by a game seller, and more!
2025-07-09 18:07:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Pat talks about Too Many Games and the stuff he picked up.
2025-07-09 03:33:34 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s the 4th of July weekend and my buddy Jon, co-host of the Extra Napkins podcast (plug!), is coming down for a couple of days. We need to get a couple of recordings in, but we also plan to stream some music and cook some food. I think burgers and maybe potato salad are on the menu. The weather is nice and I’m hoping the apartment grill will be free this evening. Most people in San Diego head out to the beach, especially in my neighborhood.
I played my first game of ...
This past weekend was a quiet one for me so I checked out some indie games that had gotten updates since the last time I played them: XENOTILT, Picayune Dreams, and the soon-to-be-leaving Early Access title, Maze Mice.
I hadn’t played XENOTILT since I was a beta tester. It wasn’t because I don’t like the game, I love it, but after ~20 hours of heavy play and bug recording I needed a break. There is so much great stuff I never saw. The EX Mode i...
Vani and I went to the San Diego County Fair on Sunday. This was probably the earliest we’ve ever gone. I’m usually scrambling to find time for it in its final week. This year’s theme was pets and included light decorations, places for pet adoption, and information on how to care for different animals. I don’t ever find the fair themes particularly well integrated, but this year was one of the better attempts. I do have to give a big thumbs down to the number of AI-generated images of...
2025-06-18 17:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve slowly begun going through some of my things in preparation for our move next year. I’m already going to have a lot of heavy stuff to transfer, mainly my record collection, arcade cabinet, and pinball machine, so if I can get rid of some bulk that will make me happy. My current focus is on my books. I have a lot of them and surprisingly I still have some left over from college, so those can easily be tossed.
Next up is the board games, but I won’t really be getting rid of th...
The Switch 2 hits shelves, Amico games are coming to Steam and Switch, the Xbox handheld is announced, Pac-Man donuts, and more!
2025-06-11 17:51:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Pat discusses his pickups from SoCal Gaming Expo!
2025-06-11 00:49:20 +0000 UTC View PostSummer is here, and I’m feeling the need to get outside more often. I put film inside my camera and left it by the front door as if a carrot dangling from a string to lure me outside. It has worked a few times! I use an Instax Mini 99 for photography. It’s more than a point-and-shoot, but not overly complicated in any way. It has just enough options and settings for me to play around with and feel like I’m leaving a mark on the picture. This results in some less-than-stellar photos on o...
2025-06-01 21:59:23 +0000 UTC View PostTomorrow we leave for the Golden State Pinball Expo! The line-up currently sits at 308 machines and I bet a few more get squeezed in before midnight. I’m mostly packed and we’ve got an early flight up to Sacramento. I’ll give my impressions of the new games when I get back!
I continued painting Battletech miniatures this past week and finished up three that I’m happy with, more or less. I learned a lot while working on them like how to hold my brush to the side to paint fine de...
Next week is the Golden State Pinball Expo in Lodi, California. This is my third year attending, I’ve considered it can’t miss since the first. Three days of free-play pinball for a 60-dollar pass on the Lodi grape fields. It’s a chill time and there will be 300-350 machines to play, plenty of them harder to find. All of the new games are there as well, this year Stern will have King Kong available and I P3 will have Portal. I’m interested in how P3 tables feel now that they have more...
2025-05-10 01:35:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Microsoft raises Xbox prices, retro gaming stuff Pat forgot he had, Ubisoft says we do not own games we buy, and more!
2025-05-07 17:06:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Ian discusses his newfound "love" of Warhammer tabletop gaming and why it's difficult for Pat to learn new board games.
2025-05-07 00:50:35 +0000 UTC View PostMiniature gaming has got me. This past Wednesday I played 40K with my friend again. He introduced some new rules and objectives and I liked the game even more than I did initially. The problem is I don’t want to drop the money on a Warhammer army right now so I bought two boxes of Battletech stuff and decided to get back to what I played in my teens. It’s much Detroit Basketballcheaper and everything in the boxes is useful. Players don’t need to spend much to start playing and you donâ€...
2025-05-02 23:29:11 +0000 UTC View PostLast night my friend taught me and another friend how to play Warhammer 40K. It always seemed interesting to me, but I never played it as a teenager because of the length of the games and the seeming complexity of the rules. I did dabble in Battletech as the money investment was smaller, but I soon found out that the games can take similarly forever despite the smaller amount of units. I left miniatures gaming behind and rededicated myself to killing hundreds of PlayStation RPGs. As I’ve go...
2025-04-25 02:19:14 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve been getting back into table-top RPG stuff lately. It started when I got my box set from the Cairn 2e Kickstarter. The package itself is incredibly nice and quite loaded after adding in all of the stretch goal rewards. Three player’s guides, one DM guide, one adventure module in zine form, three additional modules compiled into a small book, a pad of character sheets, and a DM screen come in the box for 50 bucks. It’s honestly one of the nicest Kickstarter projects I’ve seen and ...
2025-04-19 15:59:46 +0000 UTC View PostI started making shrubs this past weekend. A shrub is a fruit syrup rested with vinegar and then used as an ingredient in cocktails or non-alcoholic drinks. The process starts by mixing sugar with chopped fruit and letting it sit for 24-48 hours so the juice gets extracted. Then you mix it with roughly an equal part vinegar, bottle it, and let it do its thing for a week or two. I love the combination of sweet and sour and wanted to make something I could splash into seltzer or mineral water. ...
2025-04-10 20:38:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Switch 2 discussion and price analysis, a second Nintendo Playstation prototype found, Midwest Gaming Classic, Game Informer back, a Scumbag Seller of the Week, and more!
2025-04-09 17:50:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Ian discusses WonderCon and the changing expo scene, while Pat discusses the Amazon Prime show Goliath.
2025-04-09 01:49:29 +0000 UTC View PostVani and I went to WonderCon on Sunday. I look forward to it every year as a nice way to spend the day with her browsing comics. I picked up the five-issue run of Shadow of the Batman which reprints Steve Englehart stories from the late seventies. Some of these were later turned into popular Batman: The Animated Series episodes. I’m enjoying them so far! We also saw our friends Tom and Krys, picked out some stickers, and got a couple of prints. It was great!
We went to Paradise Dynas...
I went to the theater last night with Vani and some friends to see The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. I hadn’t seen any previews and hadn’t heard about it at all until a few weeks ago, but I’ll support hand-drawn animation any way I can at the box office. It was a fun movie! I laughed out loud more than a few times and I’m an easy mark for slapstick humor. The plot felt heavily inspired by 50’s sci-fi and horror movies and moved along at a fast pace. The Daffy...
2025-03-25 23:22:17 +0000 UTC View PostIt rained for most of the past week, so I didn’t have an opportunity to get out and do much of anything interesting. I hit Hunter Rank 40 in Monster Hunter Wilds and went on a losing streak on eOthello.com. The Pistons found themselves in a funk, losing what should have been an easy game to the Wizards. I’ll feel more confident if they can handily beat the Heat tonight.
Monster Hunter Wilds felt on the easy side of things...
Pat and I went to our first NBA game on Saturday night. We’ve always joked about flying up to San Francisco for a game, but we back down. The usual thought is it would be cheaper to find a game to go to in LA. Turns out, that isn’t necessarily so! When Pat brought up the idea of going to see the Pistons take on the Warriors at home we laughed it off fairly quickly. Unbeknownst to both Pat and myself each of us actually went and priced out the flight and hotel. You know what? More people s...
2025-03-12 16:49:56 +0000 UTC View Post