I said I’d be updating here more regularly (I gotta write all those Talking Time pledge posts!), but maaaaaybe it will take a little longer than I intended. I got kind of obsessed with finishing up the Game Boy World 1990 book — Volume 1, that is, which covers the first half of the calendar year… and the first third of the release schedule. With more than 150 games released in 1990, I had to break GBW 1990 into three parts, and I’ll need to do the same with 1991 and 1992 if I make it that far, because CreateSpace doesn’t offer the option to make books large enough to include the entirety of 1990’s releases… and as it is, Vol. 1 is sitting at $40 list price. Anything above that creeps into to the “prohibitively expensive” price range.

Honestly, $40 is too much, but the page count on 1990 Vol. 1 is almost two and a half times that of 1989 (236 vs. 104), so the fact that it only sells for 50% more is a miracle of economics. (Currently Amazon has knocked the color edition down to $36, so that’s a little more reasonable.) Really, I was afraid the price was going to be much, much higher and I’d have to compact the images and text and end up with a crampy, crowded look like the original Amazon edition of 1989. But no… look at those gorgeous, giant, 8×8″ packaging photos and all the airy, comfortable text. Ahhhh. I’m so happy with this book. Like, beaming with pride.

So happy, in fact, that I couldn’t quite shake my obsession and immediately started working on the next book as soon as I had wrapped GBW 1990, and that new project has occupied most of my evenings this week. It’s not just some sort of sickness, though, I promise. Taking a design-as-I-go approach with these things will help make them less disruptive when it comes time to publish, since I won’t have to do a ton of production all at once. (Also, photographing and processing the games and packaging in advance will allow me to integrate those photos into videos the way I have with the R.O.B. episodes of Good Nintentions, which I think is a nice touch.) GBW 1990 Vol. 1 has made a mess of my free time over the past couple of months, but I don’t expect that to be the case with Good Nintentions 1985, as I’ve laid out all the games I’ve already covered on video and just need to rework the text; I’ll take each new topic as it comes each week, and I’ll probably have this thing together in a couple of months. Huzzah.

(Yes, there’ll be a Good Nintentions 1985. I didn’t track down all those stupid Black Box games for my health.)

Speaking of Black Box games, I’ve finally checked off the last of my big wish-list items for the Good Nintentions project: Stack-Up. The cost and complexity of creating this video turned out to be even worse than for Gyromite, and I’m proud to be able to say I’ve put together a definitive (again, not the definitive, because I’m sure someone will do it better one of these days, though I doubt anyone’s in much of a rush because, well, the game’s terrible) look at Stack-Up. I still did a pretty good job here, even if I cheated and used some Japanese components for the video and photos — do you know how much a complete Stack-Up costs!? Just buying the box, cart, manual, and tray made for a heart-stopping experience. Several heart-stopping experiences, in fact, since I did them piecemeal.

On the plus side, Stack-Up brought me to my senses. For a while there, as I was acquiring rare-ish and hard-to-find-for-a-sensible-price Black Box games, I thought it might be pretty cool to build a decent complete-in-box NES collection. After spending time with Stack-Up, though, I realized what a completely stupid idea that would be. There’s literally nothing worthwhile about owning this game, especially not with all its little knickknacks, and triply so in light of its price. Soooo… I decided it would be much smarter to just own a handful of really great NES games complete, like maybe two dozen I dearly love, and dump the rest on eBay. Please, for the love of god, take Stack-Up far, far away from me.

Anyway, I need to prep for my new obsession, which is daily video streaming for USgamer. Well, almost daily. Several times a week, anyway. I’m sure eventually this blog will circle around to become an obsession for me again, though. See you then!