What kind of games do you have added to your arcade cabinet and how easy would you say it was to assemble and set up? I'm very interested in learning more about it!
I loaded all of the Sega Genesis (+CD), Game Gear, SNES and GBA games I've ever played, as well as a few arcade games. It doesn't handle anything with 3D graphics very well, though, so no Saturn/PS1-era games. SNES works well enough as long as the game doesn't use the Select button for anything critical, but even with a USB gamepad there's no way to map all of the buttons.
The physical setup of the cabinet was pretty easy, and loading your own games is done through the AddOn Tool on your PC to package the ISOs and ROMs on a USB stick. It's pretty user-friendly.
My favourites are Hitman GO and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.
Hitman GO is just a great little puzzle game that's easy to waste time with. The whole GO series is great too, but Lara Croft GO and Deus Ex GO are a bit more involved story-wise so they're harder to chill out to. Hitman is the purest experience, with everything looking like a mini board game.
Sword & Sworcery is a beautiful and surreal pixel art adventure game with a great soundtrack. I actually haven't played very much of it, but I can't help but recommend it because of how high quality it is. It's more like a full game than a mobile game (probably why it was also ported to PC and consoles), so it takes a lot more time investment.
I started replaying Dark Souls 3 again. Elden Ring is really good, but it's a lot less polished than Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne. I consider those two to be the pinnacle of the soulsborne genre.
Since it isn't open world, each area feels hand crafted and there's zero filler. No big, open, useless spaces filled with copy/pasted assets. No repeating dungeon designs. It's way more balanced. There's more variety to the enemies, and they're all placed strategically instead of being scattered haphazardly around the map. And none of the main bosses are repeated. Elden Ring has a lot more bosses, but only seven of them are unique and never duplicated at the end of a mini-dungeon or evergaol.
I watched Escape from New York for the first time, and I hate to be that guy but Escape from L.A. is way better. The story is cheesy and the special effects are terrible, but at least it isn't boring like N.Y.
I considered getting an Arcade1Up arcade cabinet and modding it to play more games instead of the Legends Ultimate because of the price difference and I like how they replicate the look of actual classic cabinets. But the Legends Ultimate can add your own ROMs out of the box with a USB stick and neither has great support for SNES games due to being one button short. Also, after trying an Arcade1Up demo unit in a store I realized how tiny they actually are. Their pinball tables are 3/4 scale, but still a decent size and come with about a dozen of the Zen pinball tables which I think are generally pretty great.
The great thing about anime is the genre is so huge that there's something for everyone. If anyone tells you they "don't like anime," they just haven't found the one that they will inevitably fall in love with.
For example, I haven't heard of any of the series you mentioned, syx.
My tastes are 100% sculpted by Toonami and Adult Swim in the '00s. Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star and of course DBZ are the ones I got into.
When it comes to the stiffness, I actually have the opposite opinion. Well, I do agree with your point when it comes to TOS and early TNG, but DS9 and VOY felt so much more natural than anything in DIS and PIC and what I've seen of SNW so far. Like, yeah, they use real life slang and do "relatable" little things, but it's all so surface level, like a Google Home advertisement. I actually think Sisko alone was much more of a believable, full person than anyone in Discovery. I think it wasn't stiff acting but rather theatre inspired, which befits the tone honestly.
Oh, yeah. When I mentioned the stiff acting, I was definitely just talking about TOS. That's what I'm mostly comparing SNW to. I think the formality and naval-style decorum you mentioned was more of a TNG introduction, or maybe the original movies. Both TOS and SNW are like the wild west compared to the Picard era.
Also, Sisko is by far my favourite captain! I love Avery Brooks's delivery.
And when it comes to the Orville; good question! I did watch the first season a while back, and there were as many good things about it as there were bad things. I think the comedy in the early episodes falls VERY flat, with most of the jokes befitting a bad sitcom more than anything else
The comedy definitely takes a backseat after the first season. It's still there, but the show is much more interested in telling Star Trek-quality moral, emotional, intellectual and philosophical stories now. Instead of feeling like a sitcom, it's more like Star Trek but if everyone was a lot more relaxed and sometimes drunk.
Seeing that background, do you think I would enjoy Strange New Worlds as much as you did?
If you want something that's designed and filmed just like TOS or TNG, then probably not. Strange New Worlds is very faithful, but it has been modernized. The bridge looks very much like the one from TOS, but it's glossier and the consoles are all touch screens instead of analogue. It's much closer to the original set design than the Apple Store look of the JJ Abrams films, though.
It's shot like a single-camera production, giving it a more cinematic look, and the acting is more natural. Not to criticize the original cast, but shows from that era are always kind of stiff. Pike has a very relaxed demeanor, even compared to Kirk, so the tone of the dialog follows suit.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about The Orville? That seems closer to what you're looking for. Before Strange New Worlds, I considered it the closest thing to new Star Trek available.
Now that the first season is done, what did you think of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?
I can't describe how I feel without first talking about the other Nu-Trek series. After Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks, I felt like Star Trek wasn't for me anymore. I hated all of the changes they made to "update" the series. It's like they were embarrassed to be part of the same continuity as the previous series.
The two worst changes, for me, were redesigning the Klingons and the overall shift toward a dystopic future. I stopped watching each series after being appalled by the first few episodes. I did go back and try to give them each a second chance, but aside from one episode of the third season of Discovery, I still wasn't happy with them.
But then along comes Strange New Worlds and I'm absolutely in love with it. The episodic storytelling, the optimistic outlook on the future, and updating the design and technology while still being true to the original series are exactly what I've been hoping for. The Enterprise is more modern, but it's still unmistakably THE Enterprise. The same goes for the classic uniforms, too.
The one thing I'm still hoping for is that they undo the changes to the Klingons, or at least give an explanation for the altered look that allows it to coexist with the other two appearances.
Oh don't tempt me, I already do everything statically in the most impractical way possible. Now excuse me as I open up the Mousepad text editor to continue my XHTML-only static blog I wrote from scratch and copy-paste my CSS from one document to another so I can then upload it via SFTP to the server so I can debug the changes I made. Ahem. After that I need to refactor a little piece in the layout so I will open up every post I have ever written to make that change in each.
This is probably why it's more common for retro websites to have a unique design on every page or to use frames. Personally, separating content from the template is a luxury I won't give up. As soon as I learned about Server Side Includes, I abandoned the old ways. I'm still working on plans to create my own retro-style site, but I'll definitely be using PHP or Angular when I do.
School. It absolutely ruined my motivation and love towards learning for a while, and I was bullied as well. The school drama was terrible as well, and the world felt so small in that sense, like your classmate doing x or y was the most important thing in the world. And being a kid and getting insecure about your hair or face or clothes... Ugh.
School is the one thing I don't miss as well. My mom used to say how happy I was as a kid until my first day of school. I did well in most of my classes and it was pretty much the only time I got to see my friends because I lived on a farm and no one I knew lived close by. I was bullied a bit, but never to the point where that was my main reason for not wanting to go to school. For some reason I just absolutely hated it. I would have rather stayed home and been by myself most days, so I faked sick constantly to get out of going.
I wonder if I'm the only one who does this. Ever since I was a kid, I would listen to one song over and over again on repeat. I think it's because back then it took so many hours to download a single song, I had to make do with what few songs I had. But even when we got high speed internet in high school, I maintained the habit to the point where friends would make fun of me for it. I still do it to this day, though.
So does anyone else find themselves listening to the same track over and over again? And, if so, what's your current obsession?
Right now I've been listening to "Stellar" by Incubus for days. Before that was "6 Underground" by Sneaker Pimps.
I have a special admiration for Wii/DS/3DS era Nintendo
I was really into the Wii/DS as well. Both systems worked really well for first-person shooters but were tragically underutilized. Golden Eye, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Red Steel 2 and The Conduit on Wii all showed how great the pointer could work, but there weren't many others. On DS we pretty much only had Metroid Prime Hunters. I actually thought the DS was kind of lame when it first came out, but I instantly changed my mind when I tried the MPH demo at a Toys R Us.
For me it is a 3-way tie between Snes, PSX and Sega Saturn.
Three systems that I never owned
I managed to catch up on the best games for SNES and PS1 years later through emulation, but I have never managed to get an emulator working for the Saturn.
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