Biff Burgertime

Were these always just scans of the game boxes? It's definitely cool how well they've preserved the boxart front + back, they look far clearer than anything printed on cardboard could be. I'm just curious if they ever featured unique art (besides the added borders and such, of course).

All I've got at the moment is a Dreamcast Arcade Stick + RaphNet USB Adapter. This DC stick is great for controlling 3D games of its era like Soul Calibur, but doesn't work well at all for games with 2D gameplay. The joystick itself is a bit too "loose" with each direction having too much travel for precise 2D movements. It's even worse for games with 4-directions in mind like Pac-Man. For now I'm digging around in RetroPie's settings to see if I can improve playability with this stick via software, but I doubt tweaking settings will make enough of a difference. Playing arcade games in RetroPie is more a novelty though, not something I do regularly. So if I decide to buy a new arcade stick for this purpose, I wouldn't want to spend too much. I'm not at all familiar with what's out there or if it's possible to go the budget route without tossing money at a piece of crap I won't want to use anyway... so I'm hoping by asking here I can gain some knowledge. Are there any USB joysticks you'd recommend for playing 80s/90s arcade games via RetroPie? Anything under ~$50? Is this the type of thing where going the cheap route will end up costing more in the long run? Any general info/tips to be aware of? (brands to avoid, build quality, maintenance, etc)

Making legally-distinct versions of popular songs is a true artform, and it's rampant in pro wrestling. Nobody does it better than Jimmy Hart, who wrote a few songs for the WWF but is best known for cranking out tunes for WCW in the 90s. The funniest thing about it is, these songs are owned by the lead musician and/or the company that commissioned it. So when a wrestler leaves and joins a different company, the new company's music guy makes a legally-distinct cover of a legally-distinct cover! Here's a YT playlist of 2 of the most egregious examples coming to mind, DDP & Shane Douglas. I'd imagine most will recognize the songs being ripped off immediately but if not, click the spoiler: When a riff is consists of just 4 power chords, they'll rearrange them in different orders until they run out of options haha. Sometimes they'd also license production music for certain wrestlers, generally for the undercard guys but sometimes the stars too- Chris Jericho's WCW theme comes to mind. My brother had a book on music law many years ago when I was a young teen insomniac with no internet in my room. I spent a lot of time reading it to better understand how the law attempts to interpret a subjective thing like "how similar is too similar?" in an objective way. But unfortunately it's one of those things were too much time has passed, I don't recall any of it... but I'm still amused by this topic!

Why does that dick have 2 holes? (@ the 2nd pic)

I recognize that pic! It's from this video:

Never fear. Whenever I'm in an international chat/forum, it's super easy to tell where my fellow American native-speakers are at. Their English is usually worst of all! I feel ya though, I could never run a site like yours. I tried keeping up with a health/illness-related blog for a while, but found that the level of content I wanted to produce really wasn't working for me. I can type out my thoughts freeform all day long, no sweat. It's the proofreading/editing phase afterwards that my brain's not equipped to deal with, I'm just out of energy by then. I can get it done, it just takes a looong time. So I eventually recognized that and scaled back. A little self-awareness goes a long way. Semi-related: I remember when even game magazines would call 1v1 fighters "Beat 'em Ups" in the 90s. Thankfully that died out rather quickly and everyone sorted out what the proper terminology was.

Whoa, hang on a minute... are you guys regarding in here without me?

So many jaws hitting the ground..

Opinions are like assholes... I've got a million of 'em. wait what

Bubsy can't get any better, that's imPAWsible!!!

Whoaaa... it started off like TV static, then morphed into a lava lamp. Cool stuff dude.

Super Mario Bros. CD Is A New ROM Hack Inspired By A Console That Doesn't Exist A certain someone out there must be pleased to see this! That aside, the graphics look a bit shit for a SNES game (in part due to the Mode 0 I assume) but it looks cool nonetheless. That kind of parallax aesthetic has some appeal even if ugly. From the "if this were an official SNES-CD Mario game" perspective, I can't imagine Nintendo would ever put out something like this. The graphics look 8-bit, they wouldn't have rewound the clock for their shiny new hardware like that (and the music sounds like demoscene stuff). I'd imagine they'd have gone the Sega CD route, but with better colors (Road Blaser probably would've looked cool).

That's awesome. I love Galaga!

He does a poor job of that, too. Maybe I could help him out a bit...

I was wondering why this thing has a thumbstick, but after taking a closer look via YouTube I see that it's a spinner (duh, d'oh!).