And that, as we say, is that.

But let us turn our ever-mindful attention instead to cool, sweet, and generally radical things that exist in the present and future of my writing and production efforts, rather than dwell on middling disappointments of the past!

For one, I finally sat down and wrote the Zero Wing “All your base” meme retrospective I’ve been meaning to write for, uh, a long time. I interviewed Brandon Teel about it in August, if that tells you anything. And that is, I think, the interesting part of this article. It’s not “ha ha, remember that thing??” or a humor-suffocating blow-by-blow explanation of the introduction, but rather something of an attempt to look at the propagation of an early Internet meme by talking to the person who ran the site where I first discovered the thing myself. In a perfect world, I’d also have talked to some former Toaplan folks to ask, “What’s your take on all of this?” but oh well. Come on, just read it. USgamer’s mysterious read-time algorithm estimates it’ll take about 10 minutes of your life. You can afford that.

Also: videos.

I don’t quite have my GameCube capture setup where I’d like for it to be just yet, despite the very generous donation of some of those expensive component cables to the cause… so the footage I recorded for this video still doesn’t look quite as amazing as it should. It’s my own fault. If I’d bought an American GameCube, I could be recording perfect footage, but I just had to get an orange Japanese Cube like the one I used to own; the process I want to use employs a GameShark disc to allow you to launch custom software and force 240p resolution (and not have to use Nintendo’s absolutely terrible built-in Game Boy Player software), so I need to have a region switch inserted into the console before I can use my American GameShark disc. More fool me.

Also, the footage I grabbed is awful because I had to use the GameCube controller for it, and that was designed by someone who hated 2D gaming. I enjoyed putting this episode together nevertheless… it was nostalgic. I looked it up in my purchase history, and Ninja Five-O was the first thing I bought with my first paycheck at 1UP.com — I ordered it from Amazon the instant I finally had some money in my pocket after being out of work for a very long time.

And then there’s this! I don’t know how I had never played Burai Fighter before, but it’s pretty rad… even if I had always assumed it played more like Turrican than Side Arms. I feel like I should rescan the image for this video thumbnail, but I don’t know… there’s something charming about the game’s final boss belching a price tag remnant. It symbolizes the evil of VGA grading, or something….

I uploaded the final video for Game Boy World 1990 Vol. I for Patreon backers last night, so now I need to get serious about putting together the next book. I foresee an awful lot of product photography for the weekend ahead…