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Sega Consoles Never Die: The Soggy-1000 and MD3
It should come as no surprise that I love the retro video game fandom. There is a huge outut of effort and creativity to keep game consoles alive and improve them decades after they were abandoned by their manufacturers; and this is an international effort. So today I’ve ordered a few consoles from enthusiasts in China via Aliexpress. China is a major center of this due to their thriving electronics industry, so I’m excited to dig in. And of course, how could it be anything but Sega?
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You Can't Trust the Internet Anymore
I like things that are strange and a bit obscure. It’s a habit of mine, and a lot of this blog is to document things I haven’t heard of before, because I wanted to learn about them. I mean, jeez, I’m certainly not writing blog posts about strip mahjong because the people demand it. But I can’t stop seeing misinformation everywhere, and I have to say something. This post is just a rant.
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Story Follows Function: Mahjong Daireikai
We like to say that video games are art, and there’s truth in that. But in the capitalist world, video games are also a business. Not everything is the product of an auteur with unlimited funds; sometimes, the funds justify everything. That’s especially true in genres like strip mahjong. At the end of the day, everything is subject to the budget. Sometimes it’s just more obvious. PLUS: The AI apocalypse continues! Ghosts! The Legend of Makai!
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The Last Preset Machine: Yamaha's MR10
Earlier on the blog, I took a look at an early preset drum machine, the Panasonic RD-9844. How early was it? Not a single IC in sights, a pure discrete logic machine packed tightly into a case. Let’s take a look at the opposite end of things. The 1982 Yamaha MR10 drum machine. PLUS: Disco fever!
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Playing Arcade Mahjong at Home? Or is it just a Mirage?
A lot of the things I’ve looked at on this blog have never left Japan, often for good reason. One genre that stands out in this is mahjong, a tile-based gambling game popular in Japan, associated with nudity in their arcades, and associated with old ladies everywhere else. How can we add this to our supergun? Surely that’s a question someone other than me is curious about. Reader’s note: This post will be strictly “safe for work”. The game might be too. Depends on your workplace.
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Narcissus' Direct-to-VHS Return: MGA's Space Invaders Color FX
Remember the Game & Watch Panorama Series? The use of mirrors for a clever approach to a portable color LCD console. Of course, in 1999, you didn’t need that; this was the era of the Game Boy Color, which had a color LCD screen that you didn’t need a reflective mirror light trick to get sort-of visible color. So the panorama trick was long gone, right?
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How the Segmented Game changed, through the Eyes of Golf
The 1980s were a period of slow decline for the segmented LCD or VFD game. At the start of the decade, companies like Coleco were putting out tabletop games that could compete with home console ports in quality. Even as consoles improved, portability and tricks like the Panorama Screen kept them going, and even the Soviet Union wanted in on it. But that all ended when the pixelated LCD game consoles like the Game Boy attacked, and by the 1990s, the situation and the games were a lot different. Let’s take a look at two examples, recreating one particular game.
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