Control Issues

Nope. I used to have a setup like that, but this time decided to just bring them down one at a time and hook them up when I want to play. I've got the cables all organized in a separate storage thing that makes it pretty easy to swap out consoles.

...and a ElGato HD60 S capture device.

Also, got a couple new toys... RetroTink 2X from CastleMania games...

Figured I'd start a thread here to post about collection and pickups... I mean, that's what this is for, right? lol First... stuff on the new shelves.

I have a certain NES guidebook by Pat Contri. Bought it from Pat himself at Retropalooza in Arlington Tx a couple years ago. Didn't even realize he had signed it until I showed it to my daughter earlier this year and she pointed it out. Her mother is a librarian and she has several books signed by the authors. When I told her I bought it directly from Pat, she said she immediately started looking for a signature. Anyway, it's a great book. Not sure if I'll get the SNES one, though, as I don't have as much nostalgia for that machine. I got a TurboGrafx that generation.

I wouldn't say collect... and I don't cook with it often... but I do have a cast iron skillet that I enjoy using when I use it. It reminds me of watching my mom cook when I was a kid.

Surprisingly, nothing gaming related for Christmas this year. That said, we are selling the house and moving to an apartment in Dallas. Closing is today and moving day is tomorrow. With money from the sale, we intend to get some new furniture, including some new shelves for the gaming stuff and possibly a new chair. So I'm counting that as gaming related Christmas gifts. Plus, just the reorganization and display of stuff is a gift in itself!

This was the Pi pie. The joke was pi r square.

I've also scoured my old photos to see if I had any others that I could use as "proof" if someone claimed it wasn't me... lol. I have other pictures that show the counter the bowl was sitting on. The floor of the kitchen... lol Added them to this post. The pic that got "famous" and a pic of the kitchen where I took the picture. The bowl as on the counter between the fridge and oven on the left. You can see both of them in the bowl pic. Also you can see the patter on the floor in both pics...

I think my biggest bit of fame was when a picture I put on Reddit was picked up and reposted by George Takei (or his social media team) on Facebook. It was a picture of a pie I made back when I was a math teacher. A square pie with the Greek letter Pi on it. It was made for "Pi Day" (March 14th). It was kind of funny because I posted it on Reddit, then it got posted by Takei on Facebook, then people commented on my Reddit post saying I stole it from George. Sigh... people... Another picture of mine from Reddit has been picked up by other sites and you'll sometimes see it around Halloween. I had a plastic container of fast food condiments (ketchup, hot sauce, honey, ranch dressing...) that I posted with the caption "I know what I'm handing out for Halloween this year." It was pretty popular on Reddit and got stolen by various "funny" Facebook pages. Interesting to see someone share a post with a picture you took. Anyway, once again, there were idiots. A lot of people posted about how I was going to get my house egged or rolled with toilet paper. It was a joke, dummies. I wasn't actually going to hand out ketchup packets. I bought real candy. (And then ate it all myself and didn't hand out anything...) My girlfriend was on the local news in Louisiana once. She worked at a vet clinic as a vet tech, and the local station had a guy with a segment where he went and did someone else's job for a day. My gf wrote in about her job and he came to her clinic and "worked" her job for the day.

I guess you could say that I might be someone else's "guy" they knew. People always talk about how they knew the TurboGrafx was a thing, but never knew anyone with one. I had one. Got it when I was in high school in the early 90s. Not sure of the exact year, but it was before the SNES was out in North America. Still have it, too. It's the system that I've owned the longest. Added a few games and controllers after it was discontinued. Got some of the same games I had rented before when the store sold off their rental games. But there might be someone out there thinking, "I knew a guy back in high school who had Blazing Lazers." lol

Pong Clone. Don't remember exact model. I've searched before to find one that fits my memory, but I was pretty young. Got a 2600 later... so I'm sure Combat was second...

I can't be for sure that this is the only one out there... it certainly wasn't back in the day, but I doubt that anyone else kept it. And I'm sure it falls into the "rare but probably not worth anything" category... but I have a letter from Sega to retailers that came with promotional materials to help them sell the Sega Saturn. Also have some of the promo material that was on the counter for customers to read and such... wish I had the VHS video that is mentioned in the letter, but I can't have everything. (The imgur link is to a gallery of scans of all that stuff.) https://imgur.com/gallery/2ZX4upv

Kyle had Super Mario 2. Jeff had Mike Tyson's Punch Out and Metroid. Kirby had an SNES and Super Mario World and a computer with Wofenstein 3D. Jason had ROB and Gyromite and a Master System (but don't remember what games he had for it).

I was never a huge fan of the N64 even back in the day. It was super exiting... and I stood in the local Toys R Us and played Super Mario 64 for hours (surprised they never asked me to leave). And when my brother-in-law got one, I was over at their house playing it all the time and eventually beat it with 120 stars. But after that, I never really found another game on the system that grabbed me. I liked the Snow Speeder stage of Shadows of the Empire... I remember having a bit of fun with Mario Kart 64... but most of the games I played were just okay. I have an N64 in my collection. But haven't played it in years... and to this day the only game I have for it is Mario 64.

It's not a case of "worse than I remember" because I never was really that big of a fan. But I never did get into Ocarina of Time. First Zelda game I really enjoyed was WindWaker. And yeah, I'm old enough to have played all the others when they were new. I think a lot of times, we feel games are worse than we remember because there are similar games that came long later that just did the same thing better. So now we're used to that new way of doing things and going back is too difficult. For example, I LOVED Tomb Raider when it first came out. Played the heck out of it. Bought the sequels... but these days, there are so many 3D action adventure style games that do it so much better, that it really shines a light on the flaws of the original. Or Phantasy Star 2, which I recently played through. It takes 22 button presses just to save a game. That includes having to put in a name for the save file every single time, it could be a few more or less depending on your file name, but still... TWENTY TWO! These days, there's auto-saving, or at the very least, just streamlined saving where it only takes four or five... do you want to save? yes. which file? this one. Okay to overwrite? yes. Save complete, press x to continue. Or, if you wanted to heal more than one character in your party, now you can go to the menu, select the character, select the heal spell, select who you want to heal, heal them, then select another character and heal them, then select another, and heal them, then exit from the menus. On PS2, get the menu up, select the character, select the spells, select the spell, select who you want to heal, heal them... then the next button press backs you completely out of the menus so you have to go all the way through it each time you want to heal another character. It's these little "quality of life" issues that make going back to some old school RPGs difficult. The Suikoden series is like this. If you play the first and second ones, it quickly becomes apparent how much they refined the menu system and buying things and inventory... the rest of the game plays really pretty similar, but the way you actually play the game makes quite a difference in how much fun it is. (IMO) But for all their issues. I still like playing them. I spent 48 hours playing Phantasy Star 2 from beginning to end. I'm not going to do it again any time soon, but I did have fun. And then started up Phantasy Star III. Who knows... maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment.

Control Issues on Twitch, Twitter, YouTube and Atari.io. Eltigro on AtariAge. Not a whole lot to say. Checking out the forums. Heard about the craziness with the buyout and such.