MY BRAIN HAD A THINK ABOUT A GAM3

Balladeer wrote:

Ooft, that feels like a very harsh judgement of retro gaming!  As long as it makes your brain happy there should be room for it, but I can completely understand where that (IMO unhelpful) feeling comes from.  What's it up against, what are your other major hobbies?

Retro gaming definitely makes my brain happy and I get some joy out of playing things from my collection and from occasionally adding new things to it. I think my low opinion of it comes from the fact that it’s not an especially cultured or rewarding hobby, and also because it’s not really something that I have any true sense of community with. Unlike with my other hobbies (whisky, beer and football mainly) I don’t have anyone to share it with in real life.

That's interesting - I feel all the best and closest friends I've ever made in my life have been fellow Nintendo enthusiasts.

That community makes a lot of sense. In and of itself I'd struggle to see following sports (football for you Cappa, cricket for me, anything else for anyone else) as less 'worthy' than playing games, because at least you're taking part in the playing - but that fades into insignificance compared to having a community of people, ideally ones you see in real life as opposed to/as well as online, you can talk about sports/gaming with. Like Buska, I'm lucky to have found many fellow gamers to talk to, which is a privilege. (Fewer Nintendo heads though.)

I used to have that privilege, I grew up with loads of game-playing mates. I’ve got endless happy memories of times like being introduced to the NES and SNES by the twins who lived round the corner, swapping Mega Drive games with folk on my street, having multiplayer sessions on all the N64 classics with the guys I went to Boys Brigade with, convincing my teenage pals to get GameCubes so we could visit each other’s Animal Crossing towns and of course the many, many empties where the Wii was a focal point of that evenings, nights and morning’s entertainment. It was when the Wii craze started dying down that I felt all of this starting to coast away from me though, sort of leaving me behind with my copies of Boom Blox and SEGA Superstars Tennis when nobody else stayed interested.

Apart from the odd times when old school pals and I would have FIFA tournaments and maybe have a few matches on the latest 2K sports game at their place, in the last fifteen years my gaming community has pretty much exclusively been here. Posting on here, having the occasional online game with youse when there’s new Mario Kart 8 DLC and a rare Glesgames event is about as much as I share my interest in gaming with anyone nowadays.

I think it’s really just the local multiplayer gaming that I miss. I went to a couple of gaming meet-ups in an arcade bar with a work colleague during the months before the first COVID lockdowns and they were decent fun – I played through Golden Axe II with some Italian guy while I had about five pints, won a board of Super Mario Party and introduced a bunch of people to Mashed on the original Xbox. It was something I started looking forward to at a weekend each month, but they stopped for a couple of years and I’ve since moved back to a part of the country where there’s nowt like that.

I also don't really have any pals who are particularly into gaming, and those that do play video games don't tend to play many of the games that I do - so I'm also limited to reading and chatting about games here. And I'm not even here that much!

I do miss local multiplayer too. A few years ago a pal organised a tournament with a bunch of other pals which was really fun (and I won a 3D-printed trophy!) but sessions like that are few and far between.

Meanwhile I collect gaming communities like Mas collects collectors' editions. So far I belong to two fora (including here) and two Discords dedicated to gaming, as well as another Discord with a heavy gaming slant; and most of my close friends are into games to some degree. I'm aware of the massive advantage I have being in (or now near) London regarding the latter point. It's easier to find fellow nerds there than in some places in Britain, I'd imagine.

Wild that we live in a lifetime where there’s one console that hosts all three entries into these legendary gaming trilogies:



What a console. Viva la Nintendo.

According to the director, he considered Skyward Sword > Breath of the Wild > Tears of the Kingdom to be his trilogy. Your point still stands.

Right... right... this has bothered me for 30 years now: are the guys on the Rival Turf box supposed to be kids? It's like they got Bing Image Creator to make box art for the game.

Cool kids of the 80s I assume, who therefore look nothing like actual children.

With my laptop in for repairs and GNamer not working best on mobile, I'm limited in the amount I can post.  That said, here's a brief round-up of Balla material, in here rather than Chat Thread after I realised they were all gaming-related.

- Every waking moment not spent playing TotK is spent wondering if I prefer TotK to BotW, and whether either is still my GoaT.  Fortunately most waking moments outside work are spent playing TotK.  Boo to work, it doesn't have enough Zonai rockets.
- I did buy Casette Beasts though.  Got to get that 10% launch discount!
- I enjoyed the promo episode of Hyrule Field Report that found itself in the LLP feed!  I do just like listening to people talking about TotK, it's fun.  That said, I can't find the podcast on Pocket Casts so I may not get around to the rest.
- On LLP itself, it's nice to hear Buska and Andy speaking properly for once.  If I send in an e-mail to HFR I want Jas to read it in my voice.
- Every single thing I posted in the June releases thread is wrong and bad because I missed out basically all the games. Good job all the rest of my posts are solid gold, then.
- My attempt to understand Mas' takes on BotW got stranded on point 1 and never recovered.  The only correct thing for me for do is to return the favour.
- I now have a list of my top 100 games. Do I love lists too much?  I might do, you know.

But you love lists why a 10 points of what's wrong with BotW and TotK.

Balladeer wrote:

- Every waking moment not spent playing TotK is spent wondering if I prefer TotK to BotW, and whether either is still my GoaT.  Fortunately most waking moments outside work are spent playing TotK.  Boo to work, it doesn't have enough Zonai rockets.

I have too much else going on (and I got sick for a bit.) I've played 30 hours of a videogame in two weeks but . . . it doesn't feel like enough!

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I enjoyed the promo episode of Hyrule Field Report that found itself in the LLP feed!  I do just like listening to people talking about TotK, it's fun.  That said, I can't find the podcast on Pocket Casts so I may not get around to the rest.

Hmm, annoying. This is the link my hosting app tells me is the Pocket Casts page: https://pca.st/itunes/1687039323 but I get a 404 on my web browser. Transistor tells me its connected, so I'd like to fix that . . .
This is the RSS feed you should be able to input directly on any podcats app worth a damn: https://feeds.transistor.fm/hyrule-field-report

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- On LLP itself, it's nice to hear Buska and Andy speaking properly for once.  If I send in an e-mail to HFR I want Jas to read it in my voice.

I enjoyed relistening to those, glad they amused you too.

I'm getting a 404 too, bah. Hope it's fixed soon, and if not I'll see if I can wrangle with the RSS feed.

30 hours is no way near enough, get twice that amount again down yourself pronto.

Balladeer wrote:

I'm getting a 404 too, bah. Hope it's fixed soon, and if not I'll see if I can wrangle with the RSS feed.  

I wouldn't hold your breath - I wouldn't even know where to start fixing that.
Also, Transistor is having a couple of issues right now - the ability to autotweet has been Musked.

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30 hours is no way near enough, get twice that amount again down yourself pronto.

Man, I wanna