Teh_Lurv

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Love Glider. It was one of my favorite games to play on the old B&W Macs in the school computer labs back in the day.

After buying that last lot I thought I was done with arcade marquees for awhile, but I won this pair of marquees last week with a lowball bid for $40 shipped. They arrived this afternoon.

More arcade marquees for my game room wall. I grabbed this (mostly) Nintendo marquee lot as soon as it popped up on my eBay saved search and I saw the price the seller was asking for the lot. The DK Jr at the bottom left is a vintage bootleg marquee (according to the seller.)

This year has been the worst for packages handled by the USPS. Just in the last two months I've had delivered to my house: A parcel of parts for my MAME cab arrive utterly crushed. I opened the padded envelope and poured out a pile of plastic bits. The mailman dropping off a box with a long tear and all the contents (except the invoice) gone. A cardboard tube containing translite prints I ordered that got the Randy Savage elbow drop.

Yeah I found some good stuff in the clearance bins lately with the 50% off all clearance items currently going on. But Gamestop still manages to annoy... I scored a copy of the board game Rising Sun for $42 over the weekend. The box had a yellow $95 clearance sticker stacked upon two other stickers. Immediately I thought the board game must've been msrp $150-200. I get home and carefully peel off the stickers. $50 is still a good deal, but what a load of BS...

I got screwed over by this practice too. A couple of years ago I bought the display "new" physical copy of 40k Space Marines on PC from Gamestop for cheap. The case was gutted and the DVD and inserts were in the drawers behind the counter. Normally I wouldn't mind except when I tried to install the game and use the Steam CD key, it was flagged as already been used.

I discovered a new form of low-level shitty thrift store behavior. I was at my local Savers yesterday and I noticed an older lady quickly working through the DVD/BR shelves, pulling out all the inserts from each case, and shoving them into her purse. It took me a second to realize she was pilfering the digital code slips.

I've been slowly getting back into retrogame collecting over the last couple of months since taking a break at the start of the pandemic. I thought I'd show off some of the recent pickups I made: With the fiasco that was the Amico, I've been keeping an eye on getting a "physical product" as a collection curio. Early in the summer, I came across a guy dumping his full set of Amico games on eBay for $20+shipping. Pretty obvious the guy just wanted to get his money back. I grabbed Missile Command from him. During the pandemic, my interest shifted a bit to buying arcade marquees (non-reproduction) to adorn my game room as wall art. I picked up yesterday a good condition DK3 to complete my set. I dipped my toes back into buying eBay lots to help file the holes of uncommon games in my collection. Two lots I won at auction arrived this afternoon. Including the unlicenced games, I can add to my collection Last Crusade, Bigfoot, Darkman, Super Spyhunter, Roger Rabbit, and Starship Hector. Funny how I thought I owned both those last two games for years until I checked my tracking app.

To keep things simple, just look for an XBox 360 S or E model. If you are offered a good deal on an original model 360, only buy it if it has an HDMI port in the back. The motherboard & cooling issues were ironed out when the model was revised to add HDMI.

I stumbled upon this announcement video from Stern Pinball of a add-on topper for their Mandalorian Pinball table. The topper itself looks impressive with 3D holograms, but the main selling point is that attaching the topper to the pinball table will unlock additional pinball modes. The topper is set to retail for $1,999.99.

It's heat damage. The previous owner kept all their NES games in a plastic bin in the attic for 20+ years before selling them to the game store owner. All the games came out looking like that. I'm not really that sensitive to imperfections like that and it's not the worst case of cart warts I've seen. The owner knocked a couple hundred bucks off the asking price because it wasn't in mint shape.

I bought some NES games at my local game store:

Ian worked game store retail for 15 years, I think he earned the right to shit all over his former customers. I'm glad it sounds like Ian is doing something now he really likes. I like Pat's show, but my eyes roll hard whenever he brings up a childhood story of "thick but quick Pat".

"In the fall, the PC Engine returns to the stream in which it was born. There it will spawn the next generation of 16-bit consoles..."

Thanks!

You can go too large with PSUs. It won't hose your PC or anything like that, but if your system only ever draws 30-40% of the PSUs rated max, you wasted money on unneeded capacity and your PSU won't be operating at it's most efficient (which will result in wasted electricity cost over time). PSU recommendations for graphic cards tend to be inflated to account for people who have garbage PSUs in their systems. Checking Nvidia's spec page for the card, it comes with this note in the fine text at the bottom: 4 - Requirement is made based on PC configured with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor. A lower power rating may work depending on system configuration. A 3070ti consumes about 300w by itself, your i5 CPU is probably another 65w, and throw in another 100w for everything else, that's about 470-500w at full throttle. So a high quality 650w PSU probably could handle it. Keep in mind though PSUs do degrade with age and use. If you're 650w PSU is already a couple of years old, it might have problems with the increased power draw. Since you're getting an expensive new card, I'd say swap out the PSU for a new 650-750w unit while you are at it.

It bums me out a little that people are still returning to NA after a hiatus to see the smoking crater of what's it has become.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, I will be making the trek down tomorrow. I'll be sure to stop by to say hello.

This scenario happened to a friend of one of my college roommates. He was partying with my roommate and left campus to drive home at around 3am. On the way, he pulled over on the side of a highway (two-lane; woods on either side) to take a pee. Unfortunately for him, he stopped right across from a police cruiser speed trap. Cops went over and arrested him for public urination.

This trailer just dropped today; movie is coming to HBO Max on Nov 24th. I'm getting serious A Christmas Story vibes watching the trailer.

One of the websites I enjoy browsing when I'm bored is the SCP Foundation wiki, a collaborative horror writing community set in a generalized shared universe. I came across the webpage of SCP-4054 (The Seventh Door) awhile back and made a mental note to share it on VGS next time Halloween rolled around. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4054 The Youtuber TheVolgun made an audio adaption of the webpage:

The artwork looks good, but viewing that last pic of the Ninja Gaiden box sides zoomed in I have the gut feeling the boxes will have a different texture feel to them that gives them away as a fake.

I believe it. I think part of the reason for the worker shortage is businesses are content to play the waiting game until job hires are desperate enough to accept pre-pandemic job wages and conditions. Business Insider ran a story of a Florida man who tested the "no one wants to work" by sending 60 job applications for entry level positions at local businesses complaining the loudest about lack of workers. He got one interview. "Two weeks and 28 applications later, he had just nine email responses, one follow-up phone call, and one interview with a construction company that advertised a full-time job focused on site cleanup paying $10 an hour. But Holz said the construction company instead tried to offer Florida's minimum wage of $8.65 to start, even though the wage was scheduled to increase to $10 an hour on September 30. He added that it wanted full-time availability, while scheduling only part time until Holz gained seniority. Holz said he wasn't applying for any roles he didn't qualify for." "By the end of September, Holz had sent out 60 applications, received 16 email responses, four follow-up phone calls, and the solitary interview. ... In a Facebook post on September 29, which went viral on Twitter and Reddit as well, Holz said, "58 applications says y'all aren't desperate for workers, you just miss your slaves."" https://www.businessinsider.com/worker-applied-to-60-jobs-got-one-interview-labor-shortage-2021-10

I came across a link to this twitter thread on another forum's discussion of the video and I thought I'd share. It's a long thread, but the author provides some supplemental info that complements the video: