I’m making good on my promise to get stuff done in 2016. Today, I finally managed to complete playing through all 160 USgamer Super Mario Maker contest entries. And I’ve completed the line art for the Retronauts Kickstarter book cover.
I also think I’ve nipped the audio buzz in my RGB NES capture setup: If I turn the integrated volume switches on the Analogue NT way down, it diminishes the buzz but doesn’t have a noticeable effect on the game audio. Of course, I figured that out only after buying shielded cables, rearranging my office, and coming up with a ludicrously arcane arrangement of A/C cables to prevent any component of the setup from sharing a common electrical ground or touching any A/V cables. And, of course, after completing the Wild Gunman episode of Good Nintentions. Oh well. Episodes 005 and up are gonna look and sound swell, though, just you wait.
I’d like to say that having accomplished all of this made for a pretty great day, but that would be a lie. It was an awful day, one that began with the news of a great musician’s unexpected death and rolled on in to discovering that our insurance company has royally screwed up and apparently decimated our finances for the rest of the month with their blunder, which is really a great addition to all the other financial setbacks that have popped up for us over the past two weeks. Pretty… pretty awesome. So… I put the two latest Retronauts covers up on Etsy as a sort of hail Mary longshot. I was really hoping to keep these pieces, but it turns out I’d like to make this month’s bill payments even more. Thanks for that, American health care system. I have also added a set of classy Famicom Disk System games to my eBay pile… all very enjoyable duplicates from various inexpensive lots I picked up last fall.
Incidentally, playing FDS games via RGB on a high-end cathode monitor? Almost makes me forget how angry I am at Blue Cross. I wish I could let you all hang out with me and soak in the radiating beauty of those chunky pixels. I might even let you take a turn on the controller, who knows?
Hi Jeremy. Sorry to see the Anatomy of Games page go. The archives on this site, unfortunately, are missing all the images on the few games I checked. Is there any way to see them in a similar format to what they were on the official site? Thanks.
I, too, feel like I am finally accomplishing some goals, in between dealing with health insurance bullshit. (I’m off Blue Cross Blue Shield, but United Healthcare doesn’t really seem a whole lot different.) Best of luck on all counts.
If you don’t pull the Anatomy books from Amazon until after my next paycheck, I’ll be more than happy to refill your coffers that little bit.
Hang in there, and I hope you have some better tomorrows in the works.
I’m going to keep them there until March. And I probably won’t delist Castlevania and Metroid, because they’re still pretty solid.