Skippy B. Coyote

Classic NES Series: Xevious (Game Boy Advance) Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS) The Pinball Arcade (Android)

They both have their place for me, but more often than not the games I play are ones that can be beaten and have some kind of ending when you get there. I find it really satisfying to have and achieve goals in video games, but I also appreciate high score based games when I just need a quick fix of gaming for a few minutes before I go do something else. Which isn't a bad thing at all, since games geared towards setting high scores typically tend to be so fast paced and frenetic that I can't handle more than 10 or 15 minutes of gameplay before I start feeling kinda mentally frazzled and exhausted. I also really enjoy a lot of the late 80's and early 90's games that combine endgame goals with points scored along the way. From shoot 'em ups like the Raiden and R-Type series to platformers like the early Mario and Sonic games, I often find myself going back and playing through these old favorites to see if I can top my previous high scores by the time I get to the end and beat the game. I think my fondest memory of this is the time I maxed out the score counter in Super Mario Land for the original Game Boy at 999,999.

Great article! I'm not the biggest beat 'em up fan (mostly because I am utterly terrible at these kind of games ) but I have to toss in a recommendation for Tokyo Beat Down on the Nintendo DS. The action is fun and satisfying and the dialog is just ridiculously funny at times. Check the video review below for some examples of what I'm talking about if you've never played this one before: https://youtu.be/3BYvPC3aUi0

I'm in very much the same boat. There are some games that I really love and think are fantastic for their respective genres out on the 3DS eShop right now (Ironfall: Invasion, Moon Chronicles, and Dementium Remastered mainly) but the lack of physical releases for them make me really hesitant to spend the money on them again. And I say "again" because I already spent $50 buying those games once only to end up selling my old 3DS at one point without realizing that the games were keyed to the system and not my online account with Nintendo, so now if I want to own these games again when I get a new 3DS I'd have to pay for them all over again and pray that my 3DS never dies on me. Then there's the Xbox 360. On that system I paid for and downloaded a good $100 or so worth of games over it's lifespan, then later down the line my hard drive failed and I lost them all. After that I got a new Xbox 360 and went to re-download the games, only to find that half of them had been removed from Microsoft's servers and were no longer available for download. It's such a shame that so many good games coming out these days aren't getting physical media releases, because all it takes is one hardware failure (or the eventual and inevitable shutting down of the company's servers, in the case of Non-Nintendo brand digital download games) and those games are lost forever and you are out a substantial chunk of money. With that in mind, I too will be sticking to games that come on physical media from this point onward. I've already been burned too many times by the digital download sales model and I'm not falling for that again.

Time for another week of handheld hijinks! Ineligible Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo DS) - 65 minutes Brain Age (Nintendo DS) - 42 minutes Call of Duty: Black Ops (Nintendo DS) - 294 minutes Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 67 minutes The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) - 182 minutes Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS) - 438 minutes Mario Kart: Super Circuit (Game Boy Advance) - 19 minutes Sonic Rush (Nintendo DS) - 14 minutes Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Game Boy Advance) - 21 minutes Arcade Centipede - 15 minutes Centipede (Played on Atari Anniversary Advance for Game Boy Advance) - 10 minutes Frogger - 14 minutes Millipede - 13 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 11 minutes Ms. Pac-Man (Played on Namco Museum for Game Boy Advance) - 6 minutes Pac-Man - 7 minutes Time Pilot - 17 minutes Game Boy Kirby's Dream Land - 26 minutes Game Boy Color Monopoly - 146 minutes Total Play Time This Week 1,407 minutes (23 hours 27 minutes) [265 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo DS: 1,102 minutes Game Boy Color: 146 minutes Arcade: 93 minutes Game Boy Advance: 40 minutes Game Boy: 26 minutes I did manage to get in a little more tracker eligible playtime this week than last week, but once again the big standout system around my household this week was the Nintendo DS. Part of the reason behind that is that it was my birthday on Thursday and I ended up getting a few new DS games from the misses, including Animal Crossing: Wild World, Mario Kart DS, and Sonic Rush. Apparently at the time she picked them up for me she thought I would have had a DS of my own by now, but due to having to return the last two DS Lites I bought for defects I'm still stuck without a DS system of my own and had to borrow hers once again to enjoy the gifts. And enjoy them I did! I had forgotten just how incredibly fun and addictive Mario Kart DS was, having last played it a good decade or so ago when it first game out, and I know that once I really get into Animal Crossing it is going to consume my life for the foreseeable future. With that in mind I've decided to just bite the bullet, stop messing around trying to find an older model new condition DS Lite without any defects on eBay (a nearly impossible task, if my history with them is any indication), and go out and pick myself up a regular sized white New Nintendo 3DS when I get paid on March 1st. I really wanted to wait to see if Nintendo ever released the black colored regular sized New 3DS in North America, but I do need a DS system of my own to play all my DS games on and I'm just tired of waiting. I suppose that if at some point they do release the black New 3DSs over here I can always pick one up then sell the white one after I transfer all my data over. Anyway, as far as eligible gaming time this week goes I spent a fair bit of it taking turns playing arcade games with the misses. We played some old favorites together, my wife topped the previous household high score record in Frogger, and—after trying it for the first time—she got pretty into Time Pilot too. I also took some time to do a full play through of Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy one morning before breakfast this week, and much to my surprise (especially considering how groggy I was a the time), I managed to beat the whole game without ever dying even once! I had done it a couple times before, but it still felt really satisfying to pull off. Lastly, I also got in three games of Monopoly on the Game Boy Color. The first two didn't go so well, but by the end of the third one I had hotels on literally half the board (the entire bottom and left sides) and controlled all the railroads and utilities. It was a bit of a landslide victory lol That's all the gaming news from around here for this week!

That's only in regards to the question of things I've thrown away. If the question was "What do you regret selling?" I would have a very, very different answer. I've never thrown away anything gaming related and of value, but oh man have I ever sold some things that I wish I didn't.

Pixels on the two LCD screens that get "stuck" on a certain color and will display only that color whenever the system is powered on. Most of the time that color is red, but my most recent DS Lite has two pixels stuck on blue. It's a problem that every DS Lite I've ever owned has had, and though some people do get lucky and get DS Lites without any stuck pixels on the screens, it seems like the vast majority of these systems will either have one or two stuck pixels right out of the box or develop them within the first few weeks of regular use.

It's been three pages and no one has said it yet, so I feel like I kinda have to... I regret nothing.

Thanks for the feedback guys! Now if only there was a way to get a DS Lite without any stuck pixels. I've been through 4 of them so far (all new in box) and every single one either had one or two stuck pixels from the start or developed them within the first couple weeks of ownership. I guess that's one thing that just has to be lived with when it comes to these systems, since Nintendo no longer warranties them.

There's been a few over the years. Animal Crossing: Wild World on Nintendo DS and Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3DS are the first ones that come to mind, and I couldn't even begin to count how many hundreds of hours of my life disappeared into The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the Xbox 360. All of those games could make hours disappear in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

As others mentioned, the tracker doesn't log pinball machine play times due to pinball being a partly mechanical and not strictly "video" based game. But, if you're curious, the machines I played last week were The Lord of the Rings, The Addams Family, and the recently released Game of Thrones. Of the three the only one I had played before was The Lord of the Rings, and it's definitely my all time favorite pinball machine. I've gotten so close to destroying the ring and winning the game on several occasions, but I've never quite been able to pull it off. Practice makes perfect I suppose, but even if I never beat it I still love playing it. There's a huge variety of goals and interesting targets to shoot for on the table, four different multiball modes, and I really dig all the authentic movie music and voice acting clips programmed into the machine. Both The Addams Family and Game of Thrones were completely new to me, but I definitely liked The Addams Family the best of the two. The mechanics and table layout were well designed and it was pretty straightforward figuring out what to shoot for, and neat little touches like the hand coming up out of the table and grabbing the ball to capture it for one of the multiball modes were really cool. The Game of Thrones on the other hand was an absolute drain monster that seriously punishes you for missing any ramp shots with some very aggressive bumper placement, and the table has some built in strobe lightning that kicks in and totally blinds you at various points. The bar owner told me that they actually toned down the strobe lightning on the table due to lots of player complaints, but it was still so blinding that the machine really should have had an epilepsy warning on it. I'm not kidding about that either! The Game of Thrones will just wreck your eyes like no other pinball machine I've ever played lol Now I just have to hunt down a Bram Stoker's Dracula machine at some point, since that's my favorite machine from The Pinball Arcade video game and I still haven't had the chance to play the real physical machine yet.

As an update, I went to two local game stores today and looked at a total of 11 different DS Lite systems to compare the D-Pads on them to the one on mine. What I found is that every DS Lite with a serial number starting in UG5 had a loose D-Pad like mine, and every DS Lite with a serial number starting in UG1 or UG2 had much tighter D-Pads that didn't wobble around in their sockets at all. One of the local game store owners is about the biggest Nintendo fan and guru of all things Nintendo that you'll ever meet, so I ended up asking him about the D-Pad variations on the DS Lites. He informed me that due to many returns and user complaints about the diagonals not functioning on the tighter earlier model DS Lite D-Pads that Nintendo revised the later models with looser D-Pads to eliminate problems with activating the diagonals. So, there you go. It looks like my new DS Lite is perfectly normal and I will have no need to return it.

I wasn't sure whether to put this in Classic or Modern gaming general, but since the DS Lite is a decade old at this point I figured this should be a fine place to ask my question. What I'm wondering is that if certain versions or production runs of the DS Lite system were known to have really loose D-Pads? And by "loose" I mean looser than the original NES controller, to the point that the D-Pad slips around in it's socket and can go crooked like so: I ask because I recently purchased the Crimson & Black DS Lite pictured above new-in-box and was shocked at how loose and sloppy the D-Pad is on it compared to previous DS Lite systems I've owned. After a bit of looking around at pictures online I'm starting to get the feeling that all DS Lite systems with serial numbers beginning in "UG5" are afflicted with loose D-Pads and the systems with serial numbers beginning in "UG1" or "UG2" have much tighter non-sloppy D-Pads. Can anyone confirm this? I'm really just trying to figure this out so I can find out if this is a standard trait among particular production runs of DS Lites or of mine is defective and should be returned for a refund.

I take back my previous statement. After watching last year's E3 trailer for The Last Guardian I now know that I will have to buy a PS4 at some point. Between that, Alien: Isolation, Tomb Raider, Doom, Resogun, and Resident Evil Revelations 2 there are now enough games on the system that I really want to play to justify the purchase. I probably could have lived my gaming life happily without much in the way of regret if I never got to play most of those games, but The Last Guardian definitely looks like one of those rare "My life will not be complete unless I play this game" titles for me. I wasn't even considering getting a PS4 before watching the trailer for The Last Guardian, but that game alone just sold me on the system. That said, the handful of games I want to play on it still can't justify the $400 system price tag to me. Once the PS4 has been out long enough and is old enough that I can buy a used one for $150 to $200 though I'll gladly pick one up along with the small assortment of games I want it for. Until then I've got plenty of other systems and games to play, so I'm in no rush, but I now know that there will be a PS4 in my future at some distant point.

My biggest one has got to be the prices on Shmups and RPGs. Whenever I'm trying to collect for pretty much any out of production console and go looking for good games to play on it I see the same thing over and over again. Most good games are $5 to $10, but if it's a Shmup or RPG? Oh no, that price is going up a good 10x for no other reason than the genre of the game.

Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS) Kirby's Dream Land (Game Boy) Call of Duty: Black Ops (Nintendo DS)

6. Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS) This one was an early birthday present from the misses that I've been (obsessively) playing over the last few days. After beating all of the tracks on the 50cc mode with gold star ratings the credits started rolling, so I'm going to call this one "beaten"; even though I'm still going to keep playing it until I've taken 1st place in every circuit on 100cc and 150cc modes and unlocked all the extra characters too. You can never go wrong with a Mario Kart game, and this is definitely one of my favorites in the series. 7. Kirby's Dream Land (Game Boy) I had half an hour or so to kill before breakfast this morning so I whipped out my old Game Boy Color (and the almost mandatory Worm Light accessory) and spent about 25 minutes playing through and beating this classic gem. It's a fairly easy game, which is good when you're all groggy and haven't had your morning coffee yet, but I was still happy to have beaten it on 1 life without ever dying. Great success! 8. Call of Duty: Black Ops (Nintendo DS) I just beat Call of Duty: Black Ops for the DS a few minutes ago and I honestly have no idea what the last half of the story was about. I think I'm going to have to play through it again to understand the story, since a lot of it didn't really make sense to me the first time around. I was actually surprised when I saw the credits start rolling! It's entirely possible that it was a perfectly sensible story and I was just distracted and talking to my wife or our roommate too much during the cut scenes in the later parts of the game. I had a pretty good idea of what was going on in Cuba, but once the game took me to Russia I had no idea who the characters were or what my mission was from there on out. And the ending was like "Oh hey, I blew up a *REDACTED*. Wait? Why are the credits rolling!? Was that the goal all along and I didn't know it?" Yeah... I'm gonna have to play through this one again and pay more attention to the story the next time around. The action and gameplay were really good though, so I won't mind giving it another go.

Hey there everyone! Sorry for my absence last week, I was really sick on Sunday/Monday and didn't have much eligible playtime to contribute so I ended up taking a week off. That said, I'm back in the swing of things this week! Ineligible Call of Duty: Black Ops (Nintendo DS) - 221 minutes Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 216 minutes Doom (Game Boy Advance) - 15 minutes The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) - 592 minutes Nintendogs: Best Friends (Nintendo DS) - 29 minutes The Pinball Arcade (Android) - 612 minutes The Pinball of the Dead (Game Boy Advance) - 20 minutes Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Game Boy Advance) - 12 minutes Arcade Centipede - 8 minutes Millipede - 13 minutes NES Castlevania (Played on Classic NES Series: Castlevania for Game Boy Advance) - 4 minutes Xevious (Played on Classic NES Series: Xevious for Game Boy Advance) - 7 minutes Sega Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - 151 minutes Total Play Time This Week 1,900 minutes (31 hours 40 minutes) [183 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo DS: 1,058 minutes Android: 612 minutes Sega Genesis: 151 minutes Game Boy Advance: 47 minutes Arcade: 21 minutes NES: 11 minutes As you can tell I didn't have a whole lot of eligible playtime this week, but I still managed to log a lot of gaming time in general. The release of Fireball and El Dorado reproduction pinball tables on The Pinball Arcade for Android really re-sparked my interest in pinball, so along with playing those tables I ended up going to a few local bars and pizza shops to play a lot of real pinball too. The Nintendo DS got a whole lot of love from my household this week too, with my wife still grinding her way through The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and me borrowing her DSi XL system to play Clubhouse Games, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Nintendogs: Best Friends (Don't judge me, I was sick in and in need of cheering up! ). The misses and I also did a little gaming together this week, taking turns playing through zones in Sonic 2 on the Genesis until we beat it. On the Game Boy Advance front, you might notice that there are a lot of GBA games in the picture above but no system to play them on pictured. The reason for that is that when the brand new Crimson colored DS Lite that I had been waiting for arrived in the mail, it ended up having a defective D-Pad that was so loose it slid around in it's socket, rattled all over the place, and didn't register diagonal button presses. I spent a little time testing it with GBA games but ultimately I did return it for a refund, and that makes it now the third new in box Crimson colored DS Lite that I have purchased and then had to return because it had some kind of defect. The first one had dead pixels on the upper screen, the second one had a totally screwed up touchscreen, and this latest one had a defective D-Pad. The DS Lite really is my all time favorite handheld, but I've had such bad luck finding a new condition one without defects that I'm honestly starting to consider giving up on my quest to get one and just settling for a different model DS system that isn't so prone to defects. As much as I love the DS Lite (due to it being able to play both Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance games), I'll admit that it is the one Nintendo handheld that is absolutely plagued with all kinds of defects. From the touchscreen, to the hinges, finish, dead pixels, and D-Pads there are all kinds of things that can and do regularly go wrong with DS Lites; even brand new ones. If Nintendo would just get their act together and release the smaller sized New 3DS in North America in any color other than white I'd just settle for that and pick one up, but given how badly white handhelds tend to yellow over time I may just have to continue my quest for a perfect working and new condition Crimson colored DS Lite until Nintendo decides to provide another color option for the New 3DS. Or until my wife gets tired of letting me borrow her DSi XL, whichever happens first lol. Every other region has the option to get the New 3DS in black though, so I figure North America will have to get them eventually... I hope. Anyway, that's enough complaining about Nintendo handhelds for one week I think! All in all it was a pretty good week for gaming, and here's hoping that next week a little more of my household's playtime will be eligible for the tracker.

You should definitely try picking up a DSi XL (or a New 3DS XL, if you don't mind the soft blur around the pixels when playing original DS games). They're great for people with big hands and Contra 4 is just plain awesome. You get Contra, Super C, and the pretty sweet Contra 4 all on the same cartridge. And thanks for the clarification about the invincibility power-up! I was wondering what was going on there.

4. Resident Evil: Deadly Silence (Nintendo DS) Not a year goes by that I don't play through some version of my all time favorite video game: The original Resident Evil. This time it was the Rebirth mode in RE: Deadly Silence playing as Jill, and I gotta say that this DS port is one of my absolute favorite versions of Resident Evil. Rebirth mode is fairly easy with all the extra ammunition you get from the treasure chests exclusive to the DS version, but I love the addition of knife fighting sequences and the fact that Jill can finally use the flamethrower in it. The whole play through was really enjoyable and I'm sure I'll play through it again later this year with Chris. 5. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Sega Genesis) Last weekend my wife and I played through this one together, taking turns completing zones, but since I was the one who completed the final zone and beat the end boss I figured I'd add this one to the list. I think my favorite thing about Sonic 2 has to be the music. I've been playing this game since I was a little kid and I've never tired of the wonderful musical scores for every stage, and the level design is just as good. The only thing I could really criticize about Sonic 2 is how ridiculously hard the special stages are! Even after playing this game off and on for 2 decades I've never been able to collect more than 5 of the chaos emeralds. I never had any problem getting all of them in Sonic 1, 3, or Sonic & Knuckles, but man are those last couple ever hard to get in Sonic 2! Ah well, maybe some day. Special stage difficulty aside though it's still a phenomenal game and one that I'm sure I'll play through many (many) more times.

Absolutely nuckin' futs man! Huge congratulations! I gotta ask though, what happened at 13:01? I could have sworn it looked like you took a hit, but you didn't die. Did the enemy bullet just vanish off the screen at the exact millisecond for you to avoid damage?

If you're looking for the absolute best CRT television for retro gaming then the Sony KV-27FV310 is the finest ever produced. It's a 27" TV that weighs just over 100 lbs., though if you want larger and can handle the weight then the 32" KV-32FV310 and 36" KV-36FV310 are built to the same quality and have all the same features. There are some studio quality production monitors that may be slightly nicer, but for consumer grade televisions the KV-27FV310 and it's bigger brothers are the best out there. Frankly though, pretty much any Sony Trinitron or WEGA should work great as long as it hasn't seen too much previous use. I'm very happy with my 20" Trinitron, and I can actually lift and carry it myself! Beware though that some of the later model WEGAs do exceed 480i in their resolution and thus will not be compatible with light gun games. If you're unsure of whether or not the WEGA model you're thinking of picking up will be light gun compatible just check the serial number here to make sure it's a 480i model and not a Super Fine Pitch or Hi-Scan one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FD_Trinitron/WEGA Hope that helps!

Hey there everyone After experiencing the joy of adding a multicade arcade machine to my gaming center last year I've come to the point where I'm really (really) itching to add some kind of pinball machine to my gaming area too, and I'm leaning towards a mini size virtual one from http://virtuapin.net For the last year or so I've been playing real pinball machines regularly at some some local bars and pizza joints, and I've also been playing the heck out of The Pinball Arcade on my 7" Android tablet. I seem to be one of those odd pinball fans who enjoys playing real mechanical tables and virtual ones equally, at least when it comes to the recreations of real tables available in The Pinball Arcade. This makes a virtual pinball machine pretty attractive to me, since I already know that I can have a lot of fun playing digital recreations of the real pinball tables I like best and I'm also pretty short on space in my apartment. I wouldn't be able to make space for more than one pinball machine, so being able to have dozens or even hundreds of different pinball tables in the same machine makes me think that I'd get a lot more replay value and long term enjoyment out of a virtual machine than I would a regular one. I'm also not the most technically inclined of people, and I get the impression that a real pinball machine would require a lot more long term maintenance work than I'd be comfortable doing to keep it running well. All those factors combine to make the hardware of a virtual pinball machine look much more attractive to me than a real one, but I could still use some advice on what exactly to purchase for the hardware and what kind of software will provide me with the most realistic experience. So far my only experience with digital recreations of real pinball tables has been playing the tables on the Android version of The Pinball Arcade, and I'm a little worried that the freeware tables available for Visual Pinball (which seems to be the most popular option for virtual pinball machines) might not have the same level of authenticity. Are there any resources that others who have experience with Visual Pinball would recommend for finding the best quality reproductions of real pinball tables? And how do they compare to the quality of The Pinball Arcade tables? Specifically, the tables I'm interested in the most are The Lord of the Rings, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Firepower, and Fireball. I'm not asking for links to ROMs or anything like that, since I think that would be against AtariAge policy, but a comparison of table authenticity between Visual Pinball and The Pinball Arcade would be really helpful! Lastly, would a VirtuaPin Mini be a good hardware choice? I really want to invest in the absolute best quality mini size virtual pinball machine that I can get, and while the research I've done so far does make the VirtuaPin machines appear to be the best quality and most full featured machines on the market, I am totally open to suggestions for other manufacturers if anyone thinks that there are other companies making better quality machines. If you made it this far then thank you for taking the time to read through my long rambling post, and any insight you might have to offer would be greatly appreciated.

After pondering it a bit more, I think the big reason that I skipped getting a home console for the first time this generation is that the hardware companies and game developers just didn't bring anything new to the table this generation; or at least nothing new that I would find personally appealing. Last generation Nintendo introduced the Wii, giving players a whole new way to control their games that was not only unique but actually worked really well. The Wii remote was more than just a gimmick, and it actually translated into new and interesting styles of gameplay that no one had experienced before. Sony and Microsoft may not have been quite as innovative on the hardware front (in spite of their half-hearted attempts to capitalize on the Wii's success with Kinnect and Move) but they still did their own thing introducing the world to some really beautifully rendered and cinematic games with realisim like no one had ever seen before. The countless hours I spent exploring the world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360 are still some of my all time fondest gaming memories. Those were all really exciting things when they first happened, but this most recent console generation just kinda felt like the developers all got together and said "That worked last time, lets do it again." It was a practical idea from a business standpoint, but the problem is that doing the same thing all over again just wasn't particularly exciting from the perspective of a consumer who has already been playing video games for a couple decades and contemplating dropping hundreds of dollars on new hardware. The problem was exacerbated by Nintendo's questionable decision to make the controller for their latest console a giant hulking tablet thingy with half a million buttons (a far cry from the simple and approachable Wii remote) and Sony & Microsoft's attempts to up the ante on the cinematic games they have been peddling by making their new releases so long and complicated that anyone who wanted to enjoy them would almost have to take a semester long course in the game to figure out how to play it. Complex games can be fun and engaging, but there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing" and I think the developers for the majority of the AAA titles on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One just didn't know when to stop trying to cram more stuff into their games. When sitting down to play a video game starts feeling less like play and more like work then it's time to dial back the complexity a little. I think that pretty well sums up my feelings about the current generation, but I am still optimistic about the future of video games. I'm really excited for the unveiling of Nintendo's NX later this year, and I'm definitely interested in seeing what the Coleco Chameleon brings to the table too.

Done! It was a neat and we'll organized survey, and I'll be looking forward to seeing the results.