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Happy New Year! As we head into 2021, we all know it is a different world than even a year ago. Most brick-and-mortar retail, including for video games, has taken a very rough beating. Somewhat surprisingly, even online stores often had a short supply of many new games. If ever there were a catalyst to speed up our medium's transition to primarily digital download, it was 2020. Conversely...
The retro game market spiked in prices, as would be expected. Even PS4s and XBox One systems became hot commodities in some areas, not to mention the Switch. The massive increase in at-home workers using programs like Zoom meant less bandwidth for online play and slow download speeds. If anything, for me the last year was another reminder of why I enjoy collecting physical copies of video games.
Continue reading Thoughts on Gaming and Collecting Going Into 2021
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With 2019 coming to a close, we can expect to see all the obligatory GOTY lists rolling in. Rather than do the usual Top 10 GOTY list myself, I wanted to reflect on all the games I played instead of just the new releases. 2019 turned out to be a very productive year for me gaming-wise, as my number of games beaten for the entire year sits at 125 games, so I wanted to do more of a stream-of-consciousness reflection of the highlights from my year.
Continue reading Disposed Hero's 2019 in Gaming
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I recently played all the way through a game that was really outside of my comfort zone. My regular listeners and readers will know that I tend to see gaming as a relaxing, leisurely activity. I am not a fan of difficult games. Life has enough difficulties and although I don't mind a challenge here or there, I'm usually not looking to get my ass kicked. I recently signed myself up for a swift ass kicking, but I did not realize it when I first started River City Girls. I thought I was starting a run of the mill beat 'em up in the vein of Turtles in Time, and although I quickly realized this isn't that kind of game, I stuck with it through the end and I'm glad I did.
Continue reading River City Girls
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View inside 3 camera photo light box with no item
JJGames.com sells used video games for retro systems like NES, SNES, PS2, etc. Some of the items are 30+ years old and each one has a slightly different condition. Many of our customers are game collectors and they really care about the condition. The best way to show the condition is with high quality photos.
Taking photos can take quite a bit of time though and we have 500-1000 games coming through the warehouse per day. A fully manual process takes about 50 seconds per game (take three photos, upload to servers, and update database with photo info). With 1000 games, it would take 14 man hours per day to take all the photos.
How could we give customers photos they wanted, but not spend so much time taking them? We developed a multi camera light box and wrote a program to take multiple high resolution photos at the same time. Here's how you can cheaply create your own!
Continue reading Creating Your Own Multi-Camera Light Box
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If you have ever been playing a Call of Duty game and thought "I wish I could just whip out a katana and slash through these fools up close!" then boy do I have a game for you! Devil's Third is an obscure title only available on the ill-fated Wii U, but fans of schlocky action games should take note.
Continue reading Devil's Third
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I am a huge fan of "to do" lists. I use them at work and in my personal life. There is nothing quite as satisfying as lining up chores and knocking them down until your entire list is obliterated. Why then, have I never used a backlog for video games until this year? Throughout my life as a gamer, as a child, teenager, or adult, I have never so much as jotted down what games I wanted to play or even prioritized what I wanted to play in any way. I play whatever I feel like. I've noticed in the last few years that I fall prey to the FIFO principle, where I end up playing the most recent incoming titles to my collection rather than enjoying a game I have owned for years.
In past years I have made gaming resolutions of all kinds of different types. Whether it was my life-changing resolution of 2012 to finish every game I started, or my 2017 resolution to not spend any of my income on video games, I always find it fun and sometimes challenging to think outside the box and adjust my habits with some kind of goal in mind. This year, I decided to create my first backlog. I'd like to share it here and give an initial status report, as well as give a little insight into how I chose the titles or categories that I did.
Continue reading My First Backlog
[img width=640 height=360]https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/you_twitch.jpg[/img] I totally stole this graphic from Ars Technica. Give them some love.
Unless you've been living under a rock the last few years, you'll know that, not only is gaming a huge deal on YouTube, but it's exploded all over the internet, with regards to people streaming their gameplay live. With modern consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One allowing the ability to stream directly to services like Twitch.tv, YouTube, and others, it's more accessible now than ever. Some people even manage to make a living from streaming, or by offering services in conjunction with their streams, so they can make a living doing what they love. Those individuals are the exception, rather than the rule, but as the greater games industry continues to rake in billions of dollars each year, more and more people find creative ways to make a living either directly in the industry, or in the periphery. Others, like myself, see streaming as a fun way to expand upon the hobby we already love, and to be more active within said hobby. I thought I would regale my experiences from my first month of live streaming, and offer a few thoughts on the subject.
Continue reading Adventures In Streaming
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I planned to make this post a review of the original Xbox version of Dead to Rights. I picked up a copy after I saw it was part of Xbox One's backwards compatibility list. I started to playing the game and immediately was blown away by how good it looked on a modern television. When you put a compatible original Xbox or Xbox 360 game in your Xbox One, it doesn't play the game off the disc but rather downloads the game to your hard drive and uses the disc itself as a form of DRM. Sure, it's just an up-rezed game from the sixth generation, but Dead to Rights looked so clean and sharp it made me really excited to play it. Not to mention, the main gimmick of the game is the main character's dog Shadow, who can be used in certain sequences to rip the throats out of the hapless thugs who were stupid enough to mess with you.
Continue reading Take this Game and Shelve it!
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During Halloween, it is very easy to find games to play to celebrate the season. Any title with a spooky theme is fair game, and there are certainly no shortage of those these days. But what about the Christmas season? There aren't many games that carry an explicit Christmas theme, so finding an enjoyable title to ring in the holidays isn't always an easy task. Now that the holiday season is upon us, I thought it would be fun to take a look at some games that many may not know are set during the Christmas season to put us in the holiday spirit. Bear in mind that most of these titles have very little to do with Christmas, but don't let that stop you from giving them a try!
Continue reading Games for the Holiday Season!
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Late last year, once all of the annual 'Best of' lists started coming out for the games released in 2016, I lamented the fact that I had only played a paltry four new release titles from the year and thus had no opinion on many of the games that were being discussed. So in 2017, I was determined to play more new release titles during the year in an effort to stay more up-to-date with all of the discussions going on for the latest and greatest games. And just like with everything I do, I went insanely overboard and ended up playing nearly 30 new release titles this year.
Instead of doing a traditional Top 10 list of the games I played this year, I wanted to focus on a select few that I thought were particularly great but may unfortunately go unnoticed and slip under the radar of most people. Most of these games really aren't what you would call obscure, but with the massive amount of great games released this year, it can be easy to forget about the ones that didn't get quite as much coverage. These also aren't necessarily my favorite games of the year, as I am intentionally leaving out some of the more popular titles that were released.
Continue reading Disposed Hero's Games of 2017
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If you missed out in June, I was one of many who joined the Playcast gang in enjoying the great last gen action game Enslaved. Most of the discussion, as it should be, was focused on the game itself. The characters, the design, the variety of experiences, the ending, the gameplay, etc. But there was a small side discussion that I found quite interesting and as I've played a few games since then has peaked my interest further. Should technical issues hurt your gaming experience?
Continue reading Literally Technically Complaining
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Image by GeekTyrant.com
This blog entry is gonna be quite different than my usual ones. I'm looking for help from you guys this time around. I was recently offered a position to write for a local magazine. It has a small area of distribution, but regardless, I'm very excited about it. I get a whole page to write about gaming once each quarter. I can discuss something new, something old, board games, video games, RPGs, card games, and basically, whatever gaming related topic I want. The book will have an overall theme, and I have been asked to try and make my topic relevant to the theme for the issue.
My first article is already printed and out in public. I would like you guys to read over my article below and throw your brutal and honest feedback at me. I had very little time to put this one together, so I fully expect future articles to improve with more time to plan and revise. The theme of this issue was "Revolution." I used this broad topic as a way to introduce myself as a writer and my relevance to the subject matter. Please let me know what you think:
Continue reading Crabmaster Gets Published!
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*pic from Mission17.org*
Towards the end of 2011, I had a discussion with my late friend Jesse about gaming in general, as this was typically all we ever talked about. We were talking about the age old balance of gaming versus collecting. At the time, I was all about collecting and spent way too little time actually playing games. I was persuaded and inspired by Jesse to start enjoying my collection for more than pieces of plastic that look nice on the shelf. I decided to lay down and follow some "rules" for myself for the year of 2012. I would play no more than two games at a time (this allowed me to play one console game and one handheld game concurrently). I would finish every game I started. Lastly, I would remove at least one game from my collection for every new one that came in. The last rule helped me trim a lot of fat in collection, but it's not something I strictly adhere to anymore. However, I still try to follow the first two rules to this day.
Continue reading A Year of Unfinished Games
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Greetings bipedal organisms. It has come to my attention that we as human beings (or you as whatever you are) need food to live. While eating a few meals a day typically sustains us, we often crave something more: a snack! We also like to combine our snacking with doing things we love, such as playing video games. Woe is us, however, as many of us fall into bad snacking habits while playing. Since the holiday season is upon those of us in the good ol' US of A is mainly about eating (don't let anyone tell you otherwise), I figured it would be a good time to address the pressing issues about safe snacking.
Continue reading ThanksGaming: Snacking etiquette and choices while playing games
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Too Many Games is a nice little Retro Video Game Expo held near Philadelphia every June. I just returned home yesterday from my 4th consecutive TMG and thought I would share my thoughts.
Continue reading Too Many Games 2016
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