Finally Back Again

Wow. November was my last post, huh? Well, this blog has had a lot of lapses over the years, and it’s always been my fault as I get distracted or my enthusiasm dips for a bit. But not this time! This time I was a bit shaken up by the crazy Wordpress drama that happened a few months ago, and decided that maybe I didn’t want to have my site hosted by them and built…

Sometimes (a lot of the time) I'll look back at my blog posts and realize that there's some really big thing I've been doing or working on that would have made for an interesting blog post, and while I might post about them on my socials, like Mastodon or Tumblr, I won't ever remember to mention them here. This is going to be one of those topics, and there may be several more that I go back to shortly. In this case, I started having fun converting pixel art into vector art a while ago, and then converting the vector art to 3D that could then be sent to a 3D printer. For a while I was doing it just to have fun and print cool things for me, but after a while I thought maybe other people would be interested too, and made an Etsy shop, Minus World Prints.

I've talked in a previous post about my love for the show GameCenter CX, a Japanese show where comedian Shinya Arino is tasked with beating a retro game by a certain time limit. The show is an hour long, and the main challenge is broken up by a couple of shorter segments throughout. The recurring one is TamaGe, where Arino visits an arcade, or at least a business that has arcade games attached to it like a candy store. One of the other segments changes from season to season. While there hasn't been a seasonal segment that I've actively disliked, there are certainly some that stand out as particularly entertaining to me. So today I'd like to talk about five of my favorite seasonal segments from GameCenter CX!

Monster Party for the NES was one of those consistent rental games for me as a kid. The gameplay was solid, and the setting had a unique charm to it with its creepy atmosphere. And the game was *just* challenging enough that I could make good progress with it, but never get very far in the game. I decided to go back and put in a solid effort to fully finish the game this time, and knock it off my ever growing backlog. What better time to talk about this weird game full of weird half fish monsters and surprising-considering-Nintendo's-censorship-policies blood than the Halloween season?

What features do you think make good selling points for games? An immersive world and interesting character development? Challenging obstacles and boss fights? Or what about how big the file size is to download? Because for some reason, video game marketers in the 90s suddenly started doing a lot of bragging about how big the game was. And when I mean big, I don't mean "the world is so expansive". No, I mean "32 megs". It felt perfectly normal at the time, but it's so totally ridiculous now to imagine.

Beetlejuice came to theaters in 1989, and while I didn't see it on the big screen, I caught it as soon as it came to our local VHS rental place. It was the perfect mix of creepy, funny and fun to get me absolutely hooked. We eventually got an action figure line from Kenner, makers of the wonderful Real Ghostbusters toy line, as well as a cartoon show that took quite a few liberties with the source material to make it work, but I still found it enjoyable, especially since it made Beetlejuice and Lydia the main stars, not to mention that great opening with Danny Elfman's score!

So of course with any hot franchise kids were into in the 80s, there were video games as well, and while none of them were fantastic, they had enough Beetlejuice charm in them to keep me happy. Two of the three I'll go over I enjoyed from my childhood, while the third I'm coming at with a completely fresh take.