As we’ve discussed before, I have been a Pokémon fan since Pokémon Red and Blue came out many, many years ago. When I saw Pokémon Let’s Go: Pikachu! and Let’s Go: Eevee!, like many others, I was excited for the opportunity to experience the Kanto region again. At that time, I wasn’t following Pokémon anymore, so I missed the announcement of these two new Mythical Pokémon. I eventually heard about them on the Nintendo Power Podcast. They are a set of Mythical Pokémon explicitly introduced as a tie-in between Pokémon Let’s Go and Pokémon GO on mobile.
You may have already heard this news break somewhere else on the Internet or perhaps on Twitter. But it seems like Netflix is going to dive headfirst into the video game streaming market within the upcoming year. Many people are comparing it to Google Stadia, but I think they will be different style offerings. Netflix’s business model is subscriptions. They want to get you to keep paying that fee every month. If they can include video games and raise your price by $6 a month, they will. Just like they did when adding 4K or multiple simultaneous streams. However, in this Bloomberg article, it sounded like they don’t currently plan to charge more, though I’m sure they eventually will.
Early on in the life of this blog, I wrote a post entitled “How to Update Your Analogue Super Nt Firmware.” It was a simple set of steps for updating to official firmware versions as the team at Analogue releases them. However, I’ve since found and experimented with the very-much-less-than-official jailbreak firmware and wanted to share that as well.
A couple of years ago, I bought a Panasonic Lumix G7 mirrorless camera. Folks like EposVox were touting it as one of the best budget cameras you could buy. It was capable of recording 4K video, had high-quality interchangeable lenses, and was very affordable compared to its competition. I wanted to use it to record the occasional one-off video and to use during live streams. It could produce a better-looking and higher framerate video than the trusty Logitech C920 I had at the time.
Back in 2019, I attended the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. While I was there, I picked up all the handheld Mario Kart games that came out over the years since I skipped over them when they were initially released. So I got Mario Kart Super Circuit, Mario Kart DS, and Mario Kart 7. I planned to play Mario Kart 7 first, but it already had existing save data on the game card.
When planning for a trip a while back, I found a cool little hack for safely bringing ten Nintendo Switch games with me. I have the official Nintendo Carrying Case, which only has slots for five game cards. While that might seem like a decent number for a short trip, I have the attention span of a goldfish when it comes to video games, and I wanted to bring more than that. I didn’t want to take each game’s entire case with me, and I didn’t want to keep loose cards in my bag or the mesh pocket of my carrying case. So I looked around my apartment for something that could hold a few more games.
Guitar Hero is not a game I’ve thought about for quite some time. Back in their heyday, I bought practically every Guitar Hero (and later Rock Band) game that came out. Well, except the Nintendo DS version because it looked lame, and not Guitar Hero: Metallica because fuck those guys. My inner 16-year-old still harbors resentment from when they sued Napster.
If you happened to come across the Games page linked in the footer, I thought I would quickly share my inspiration for it. I remember a while back, probably many years now, seeing a similar list that designer/developer Shaun Inman had been keeping on his website. It inspired me to keep my own list, but I started and stopped so many times and lost older ones. Shaun even wrote a blog post about why he started his, so I guess that link is kind of an inspiration Inception.
If you’re like me, you’ve no doubt accumulated a large number of games throughout the previous (still kind of weird to say that) console generation. I had a launch PlayStation 4, which only had a 500GB hard drive, and then upgraded to the PlayStation 4 Pro with 1TB. Even physical, disc-based games required massive installs and updates, so I constantly found myself running out of space. I finally decided to bite the bullet and purchase an external drive to use, and I sure am happy that I did.
I recently started playing Fantasian on Apple Arcade. It’s an incredible game from Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker Corporation. If you haven’t played it, you definitely should. I think Apple Arcade is predominantly used on iPhones and iPads, but those who want to can get a more console-like experience with an Apple TV and controller. Since tvOS 13 released in 2019, you’ve been able to pair PlayStation 4 and Xbox One controllers to Apple TV (really any Apple device), giving you a much more familiar feel.
I personally have Apple Arcade running on a spare 4th Gen. Apple TV from 2015. It’s capable of full HD output and runs games well even though it is a bit aged at this point. To pair with it, I needed to find a suitable controller. Since I didn’t have any spare PlayStation 4 controllers, I looked at my Xbox controller stock. And now we find ourselves at the titular conundrum. How do you know which of the many Xbox One controller revisions are even compatible with Apple TV?