I want to apologize for taking so long to update the site.  I just haven't been feeling well lately... shortly after the whole K-Mart fiasco, I came down with a kidney infection, and I'm just starting to get over it.

I've got to tell you, though, things would have been a lot more miserable for me if it hadn't been for the support of my friends and family.  My mother deserves a lot of credit for giving me both emotional and financial support over the past month, and I really appreciated Pat Reynolds and his wife letting me drop by last weekend.  I've got to give a hand to Jeremy Parish and Russ Perry, Jr. for sending me their respective fanzines... and speaking of Russ, I'd like to thank him and everyone else who sent in comments about my mod of the 2600 version of Galaxian.  Finally, I'm grateful to Atari Age for posting the ROM on their site, and for telling me about the editing tools I used to (re)make it.

The only people I don't feel indebted to right now are the yutzes running, and ruining, Nintendo.  Remember Club Mario, the quality assurance team assembled to defend the Game Boy Advance from T*HQ's onslaught of crummy license-based games?  Well, they're history now, and so is any chance of the system's software library staying at its once consistently high quality.  Now, the store shelves are filling with Rugrats and Men in Black titles, and the company who claimed to have our best interests in mind has broken their promise to gamers for the sake of a fleeting, short-term profit.  What Nintendo doesn't realize is that compromising the reputation of the Game Boy Advance so soon after its release could be a financially devastating mistake in a few years.  After all, it's possible that the Game Boy Advance could become Nintendo's flagship system if the Game Cube fails... and let's not kid ourselves, this is a definite possibility if the X-Box is a success.  Right now, the Game Boy Advance is Nintendo's only sure thing, and they simply can't afford to risk its reputation on rotten software people will buy but won't actually play.  Atari learned this the hard way in 1984... no matter how deep they buried those copies of E.T., there was nothing they could do to keep them from coming back to haunt them.

I guess Nintendo will just have to find this out for themselves.  So hey, here's what I've written for this update... a couple of N64 reviews, and half of a ColecoVision resource that should be useful to those of you out there who collect or just play games for that system.  Back to the N64 for a minute, though... I bought a beat up unit a while ago for about $15.  All that's really wrong with it is that it looks like someone tried to chew through the reset button, so it was a honey of a deal. 

You know, as much as I like to bash the N64, I have to admit that I don't regret buying one.  I'm having a great time with Paper Mario, and I can't wait to get my hands on a few of the other games for the system when I can afford 'em.  It'll be nice to actually see the replays in Mario Tennis for a change, because my friends always skip them as quickly as possible to get to the next serve.  I even want to try Superman, just to see if it's really as awful as everyone says... I guess I'm a glutton for punishment. ^^;

Past that, there's the edit of Galaxian for the 2600 that I just finished.  There was a guy on the web site AtariAge who inspired me to do this... Phillip Frey, or Rhindle the Red, as he calls himself on the AtariAge message boards, redesigned the graphics in Mario Bros. with a software toolkit, making them less stiff and blocky than they were in the original game.  I downloaded the toolkit myself and tested it out with Galaxian, and it didn't take long for me to improve the game's graphics.  Before, the aliens looked vaguely like teddy bears, but in my mod they're much closer to the interstellar insects in the arcade game.  Due to the terms of use at Emulation World, I can't post the modded ROM here, but you should be able to find it at AtariAge in a few days.  Who knows?  Maybe I'll even hook up with the guy who runs Hozer Video and start selling cartridge versions.

So, why the long face?  Well, I was "let go" (aka shitcanned) from K-Mart less than a month after I started.  I was starting to get the hang of the job, but the store manager, a sawed off tyrant who the rest of the employees secretly referred to as a "living Ken doll", apparently had a bad day and decided to take it out on me.  He seemed intent on starting a war of words with me, and even though I held my temper as best I could, I guess it wasn't enough.  Naturally, the manager didn't have the balls to tell me I was "dismissed" (aka fired like a satellite into orbit)... I found out a week later from the personnel department, who first told me that I wasn't getting any hours due to budget cuts.  Well, thanks, guys.  That was one week I could have spent looking for new employment.

It's a shame... I had no problem with the other employees, and the store was definitely better than your average K-Mart.  Unfortunately, this Big K was supervised by a Big A, and I became the victim of his nasty temper and easily bruised ego.

So, if you're a fan of this site, I'd like you to do me a favor.  Stay away from K-Mart for a week.  There are thousands of great stores in the United States, and I'd bet that half of them don't treat their employees like a disposable resource, branding them with numbers and whipping them in the ass like a herd of cattle being led to the nearest slaughterhouse.

Still haven't read The First Quarter yet? You should. Later on in the book the author details just how petty and cruel (and jealous of Hercules... no, wait, scratch that last part) the major game companies can be... there were allegations that Nintendo, upset about the success of the original Mortal Kombat on the Genesis, ignited the congressional hearings that threatened the entire industry's rights of free expression. Worse still, Sega had a debut party for the 32X with obnoxious rap music and plenty of 32X kiosks... and the press members that were invited there were essentially held hostage ("Oh, the buses? They won't be back until 11PM. In the meantime, why don't you play a few rounds of Kolibri?"). Trapped in a building with thunderously loud rap music and nothing to play but the 32X? Man, that's my definition of hell right there.

I don't think Jeremy's ever going to let me live down the fact that the next Grandia game is going to have the word "Xtreme" in the title.  Man, you'd think they'd finally just put that catchphrase to rest, but seven years after Micronet/Bignet changed its name to Extreme Entertainment, it's still popular... and overused.  I've seen it on a third of the toys in my store, including a WWF playset which proclaims, "Xtreme isn't a mood... it's a LIFESTYLE!"  I doubt Vince McChucklehead even knows what extreme means, and I don't think any of the other corporations who've beat it into the ground have any idea either.  They just like that the word convinces trendy morons to purchase their mediocre products.  I'd like to see how far companies can take this... maybe we'll see Xtreme Charmin, complete with flecks of broken glass embedded in the fibers of the toilet paper.  Then they can get rid of the British chick from Dear John and make Dan Cortese the voice of the rolling buttwipe in their ads.  "Look, d00dz!  You can either wipe the boring old fashioned way, or take your ass to new limits with Xtreme Charmin!"

But oh yeah.  About Grandia Xtreme... as ignominious as the name change is, I'll just have to accept the ignominy and ignominiously part with the fourty dollars it'll cost.  Then I can play it and decide if it's the name or the game itself that's full of ignominiousness.  Or better yet, I can avoid the ignominiosity of buying a Playstation 2 and just buy a copy of Grandia 2 for the Dreamcast.  I played that before and I know I wouldn't feel too ignominomininny-whatever about purchasing it.

By the way, I just bought Super Mario Kart Super Circuit the other day.  Not only is it the best game in the series, it's got a great stab at Hiroshi Yamauchi at the end... he's represented as Bowser, the angry turtle king who seems to get more and more beast-like every time he pops up in a Mario game.  In this one, he doesn't even talk, opting instead to roar and growl like some kind of shellbacked Godzilla.  He seemed so much brighter and more personable in the cartoons...

10/1/01

Damn, it's October already.  Gotta think of a costume for Halloween... I've got it!  I'll dress up as Hiroshi Yamauchi, the most frightening man in the video game industry!

I've been reading The First Quarter by Steven Kent, and it seems like there's a surprise on nearly every page... there was a lot of information about the industry that I'd somehow missed, especially during the crash of 1984 and the awkward transfer of power from Atari to Nintendo.  I was very young around that time, and my mother had remarried the year the industry had collapsed, so I guess I was either too distracted or uninformed to realize that the hobby I loved so dearly had nearly been destroyed by corporate greed and consumer neglect.  I also didn't understand that Nintendo had to sweat blood to revive the video game market in the United States... I just assumed that people would buy the NES because it was the best, most strongly supported game system available at the time.  It turns out that many of them- especially retail store owners- didn't even WANT to associate themselves with video games, and Nintendo had to come up with a sneaky business strategy to sell their products and eventually revive the market.  I always thought of ROB the video robot as one of Nintendo's biggest mistakes, but Steven Kent describes it as a possible key to the success of the NES, because it led people to believe that the console was something other than a (gasp!) video game system.  Essentially, it was more of a shield to defend Nintendo from the anti-gaming climate of the time than a useful peripheral for NES owners.  Once it served its purpose and people started coming to their senses about video games, Nintendo just chucked it in the garbage.  I suspect that people who'd purchased the NES for ROB felt a little burned by this, but I'm sure they got over it once they started playing the system for its games rather than to "interact" with some useless toy.

Anyway, about Yamauchi.  You remember that episode of The Simpsons where FOX CEO Rupert Murdoch refers to himself as a "billionaire tyrant"?  Well, I doubt Yamauchi would ever make the same admission, but he definitely fits that description.  In The First Quarter, Steven Kent details a "meeting" (more like a shouting match) between the presidents of Nintendo and Coleco.  Coleco made the mistake of designing an ADAM version of Donkey Kong while Nintendo and Atari discussed releasing the game for Atari's own line of computers.  From what I read, it didn't seem as though Coleco even realized it was infringing on Nintendo's copyrights, but Yamauchi didn't care if it was an honest mistake... the moment he saw the prototype version of Donkey Kong for the ADAM, he started muttering angry comments under his breath, then lept to his feet, stuck a finger in the Coleco CEO's face, and screamed... well, Kent never really describes what he'd said, but I'm guessing I couldn't print it here even if it were in Japanese.

I have to wonder how Yamauchi even became president of Nintendo in the first place, because this isn't the kind of behavior you'd expect from a leader of an international corporation, or for that matter, a native of Japan.  I guess one outburst would be understandable, especially in the early 80's when video games were such a high profit, high stress business, but according to Kent Yamauchi acts like this ALL THE TIME.  It kind of makes you wish that Nintendo would have followed Namco's lead and hired its best employees to run the company.  I'm sure Shigeru Miyamoto and Gumpei Yokoi (dead?  Well, yes, but that may not have happened if he'd taken Yamauchi's place after the success of the GameBoy) would be a little more sympathetic to their hardware and software designers than a firebreathing thug like Hiroshi Yamauchi.

If any Nintendo fans, historians, or better yet, employees, would like to debate or further discuss my opinion of the company's Japanese management, please either E-mail me or post your own opinions on the message board.  I know not everybody's going to agree with me about this, and I'd like to see some other viewpoints.