Tim Walker

Q) My music skips during Block 2 of Arrange! A) So does everyone else's who owns the Japanese version. Except for those whose music skips in other levels. :\ Seriously, the Japanese version of this game suffered from the BM skipping in a few places. For most people this was limited to Block 2 Arrange, but there were a few scattered reports of skipping music in other levels. (Both the obvious nature of this "bug" and the semi-random nature of where it occured for different people made me wonder if this was a result of a botched pressing and not a bug...) This has apparently been fixed in the US version.

Ah, yeah, there we have it (from a FAQ on GameFAQs).

It’s a shame they fixed this for the US release but also completely cut out the voice samples from the cursed dolls, which are an essential part of the experience for me.

That’s wild…I’m glad to know it’s not just my copy.

I seem to recall a few other tracks having this problem on the disc, with some of the four available OSTs on there working fine, others not so much.

But yeah, I’m glad I own the box set OSTs brick with its 3 discs of X68000 magic.

An excerpt from the segaretro dot com page on this pad, explaining its weird lack of independent turbo functions.

It just keeps getting better and better.

The 達人 (Tatsujin) pad by Mumin Corporation. No, I did not buy this one. Sometimes you can sense the shoddiness just by looking at a still photo on eBay.

Yeah, okay…the 達人 of garbage plastic perhaps.

It was busted all along?

I have audio drops on my Japanese copy, but I didn’t specifically recall them being there back when I got it, so I assumed I just had a scratch on the disc.

If Hasbro needs to apologize for anything related to the Transformers cartoon, it's for apparently not allowing the Omni Productions dub to be on Shout's DVD release of the Headmasters series.

youtu.be/n79KigeG6Tg

Oh man, the classic trio of Kip, Arcee, and Wally!

I actually have the box and manual for the MD version of Moonwalker. The game on MD in any form is stupidly expensive: I feel justified in calling it such when there are dozens of copies up on eBay in the $300 range and none of them ever sell.

I have all of these freak versions as parts of my Genesis set of course. :)

Quackshot and Bonanza on MD are both in there.

Splatterhouse 2 is one I’ll definitely get eventually since it’s one of the final two Namco games I need (the other being MegaTrax, which is cheap at least).

Man, what an incredible trade! I hope he liked racing games, but also, you made out like a bandit!

All of the 4500 games in my collection. RPGs and Action RPGs, with your random baseball game thrown in for no discernible reason.

The 5500 series, used for their later RPGs/Action RPGs. And, you know, Super Monaco GP II and a soccer game, because why the hell not?

Special shout out to Sega’s non-4000-numbered games (4500 and 5500 series): The longer I collect, the stupider these subsets get.

Re-shelved and organized my Japanese Mega Drive games for the first time in about a year. I’m up to about 140 unique ones, and managed to fit it all by double stacking. More shelves? Maybe someday!

(Zoom in to see the discerning tastes of a man who has a copy of Fatman in his JPN MD collection)

I had some fears about that game going in but wound up loving it! Plays like a dream and couldn’t be a more different experience from those punishing PSP games.

I’ve never tried one, but it looks like that version uses an authentic SNES cross pad. No idea why they gave that one the luxury treatment while cheaping out on the MD and 3DO models.

YouTube video by 83Chrisaaron Brigandine Japanese Commercial

New Brigandine? They’d better be bringing back this guy.

youtu.be/mxu0rDMl17Q?...

(Artist’s rendering)

It’s that wonderful time of year when the dry air works hand in hand with my sleep mask to give me that one little spot of dry skin on my nose that busts open at anything stronger than a gentle breeze and causes me to hit around 0.8 on the Muta Scale.

Hana makes herself at home atop my cable storage unit.

You try to clean out your closet, you’re going to get an infestation of cats. It happens.

After doing some digging, I found a dead SNES controller, and…voila! A perfect fit!

It feels much better now. I still can’t do a DP consistently on the left side to save my life (again, that’s a me problem, not the pad), but I’m batting 1.000 on the right.

Yeah, or Earwig and the Witch.

One of my biggest controller regrets remains that I’ve had an official full-sized Konami controller for over a decade and have never been able to get it to play nice with my Dreamcast (I’ve tried a couple of PS to DC converters, but no dice). The DC ports of 1-4 are so much better.

This reminds me how terribly timed my main stay in Japan was for Ghibli output: I was there for 3 years but arrived just after Mononoke had ended its run and left about 9 months before Spirited Away was released.

So I got… My Neighbors The Yamadas. *sigh*

It’s time.

youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA?...

Like I said in my reply, it’s very comfortable! It looks awkward but it honestly feels really good!

(And TBF, standard Genesis D-Pads also sit lower, but not *that* low, and they’ve got support underneath to compensate for this and are made of better material)

This is part of the reason why the D-Pad isn’t the greatest. The material also feels cheaper than an NES one (left), but also, check out the height difference!

No idea why ASCII appears to have used actual SNES crosses for that version while cheaping out on this one.

What’s weird is that the cable is actually tied into a knot inside the controller case, so undoing that would probably give you about an extra inch at least.

Too many to count, but a few that come to mind:

Pulp Fiction (opening night)
El Mariachi (opening weekend)
Body Snatchers (1993) (Midwest Premiere)
UHF (opening weekend)
Akira (US opening weekend)
Star Wars (sometime in 1978; ‘77 was a bit early for me)

Nice! Yeah, I’d completely forgotten that they reissued it for 3DO but came across that version today while researching this one.

It looks like it has the same pad though, just a different color. The SNES version seems to use an actual SNES D-pad, which seems like a much better choice.

The logo for Crank the Weasel (Midway Games, cancelled)

(Ronnie James Dio singing)

I don’t remember if I was near that cab after going in the water, but it must have been pre-dip in the pool, or I likely wouldn’t be here today. But still, I was definitely barefoot. Not a pleasant experience.