Minty

Found a copy of SaGa Frontier 2, but the guy was asking a wild price because it was "mint condition" and had "never been played"... Could've just gotten a sealed one instead. He wouldn't budge, but then I found one on eBay that was local - plus I had a $10 coupon.

Found a sealed copy Astral Chain at a trade show for pretty much retail; haven't opened it yet, but I'm gonna. Also caught WarioWare: Move It on sale. Also happened across a copy Quake 4: Special DVD Edition for $2 at a flea market.

Found an Amiga 500 with a Keelog power supply for under $50,000,000! Seriously, everything on eBay is $500-and-up after shipping, taxes, and duty; untested, no PSU, PAL, cracked, missing parts, and/or modified to hell... But this one is a stock A500 running Kickstart 1.2 for hundreds of dollars less than anything else, plus the seller was nearby. I still need to settle on a display solution (just using the monochrome output to my 1902 for now) and figure-out the best way to get disks going on it, but otherwise I think I've completed my vintage computer journey. Final(?) lineup is:

• Atari 8-bit: 800XL
• Commodore 8-bit: 128
• Atari 16-bit: 1040 STFM
• Commodore 16-bit: Amiga 500
• DOS/Windows 3.1: Digital DECpc LPx (i486DX2-66)
• Windows 98 SE: 300MHz Pentium II w/AGP GeForce 3 Ti200, PCI Voodoo Banshee
• Mac OS X: Dual-1GHz Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver 2002)
• Windows XP: Athlon 3200+ w/Radeon X1950 Pro
• Windows Vista/7/8/8.1/10: Core i7 950 w/2x ATi FirePro 3D V8800 in CrossFire Pro

...But yeah, in terms of simple solutions, RGB-to-SCART-to-HDMI plus a Gotek starts around $100. I'm thinking the simplest first step, however, is to find a Workbench disk and play around in monochrome, then decide how to proceed... Or maybe give this a shot.

Classic

DOOM + DOOM II is a welcome update. Legacy of Rust is epic, though the default music is kinda bad. Voxel Doom II w/ Parallax Textures is still the way to go though... And Doom Resurrection may be my second favourite :) Also, curious to see what Randy Linden's come-up with for the latest DOOM SNES next year.

Silent Hill: The Short Message was fine; didn't do anything groundbreaking as far as I could tell, but was suitably creepy.

Demon's Souls (PS5) is pretty. I still don't get it. Was only $20 though.

Borrowed my brother's 1TB Xbox One S to finally play Halo 5, and once I logged-in to it I was reminded that I owned Killer Instinct Classic & Killer Instinct 2 Classic; never got to play them before, so that was neat. Also, two hours to install Halo 5 from disc and update over a 100Mbps Internet connection... Only to find-out I never played Spartan Ops and have no idea what's going on, so finally installing The Master Chief Collection. Also, I'm gonna buy Crimson Dragon; always wanted to try that one.

Oh, and found a complete copy of Legend of Mana that wasn't ridiculously expensive! Not interested in the remaster; don't like the new backgrounds at all.

Speaking of remasters, still kinda miffed about The Last of Us Part II, Persona 5 Royal, and now Until Dawn - but thankfully one is a $10 upgrade, one is effectively just a framerate boost, and one is such an overhaul that I'm kinda happy sticking to the original vision.

It got confused...

The left stick on my DualSense started to drift left after just over a year of light use; tried a few things to clean it out, but not rushing to disassemble it... And then my partner got me a PS5 Slim (with a Disc Drive) for my birthday, so that helped :) Hooked it up to my AW2721D, set it to 1440p/120Hz/HDR, started ASTRO's Playroom, grabbed the free Matrix and Silent Hill games, downloaded my compatible PS3 games, popped-in a Blu-ray movie - everything was going great, but then video and audio started cutting in and out with horrifying flickers and pops once I exited the movie. Had to navigate through the flickering to change the resolution setting to anything but "Automatic", and that fixed it. Not fun. Anyway...

• ASTRO's Playroom - Fantastic tech demo and pack-in; best exclusive on the console to date, and the follow-up looks like it's going to give Super Mario Odyssey a run for its money.
• The Matrix Awakens - Really impressive.
• Flower - Better than ever!
• OlliOlli - Works well on the big screen.
• Silent Hill: The Short Message - Haven't really dug-in yet, but hey, it's free.
• Sound Shapes - Sad that the servers are gone, but really glad this still exists.
• The Unfinished Swan - Didn't finish it on PS3 or Vita... Third time's the charm?

Otherwise, restarted Kirby & the Amazing Mirror - still kind of overwhelming, but I feel like I have a better handle on it this time. Also finally played through the Cryptmaster demo and I'm into it; plus you can fart, so that's neat. Lastly, I missed the last few sales on Disney's Illusion Island and had been waiting for another, but it looks like it might've gone out of print(?) so I grabbed a copy.

Attenuation

Upgraded my parents' place to IPTV because their service provider was forcing them to migrate from their old mixed analog/digital service. One of their TVs was simple - 4K and Dolby Digital stereo over HDMI; the other is a 57" 1080i set and only has DVI, component, S-Video, composite, or coaxial... It was also connected (thankfully) to a DVD player + 5.1 A/V receiver combo... Which lacks any digital video I/O. Ended-up with the coaxial cable going into an attenuator, then a surge protector, then the new modem, then Wi-Fi to the cable box, then HDMI to one of these, then an HDMI-to-DVI adapter to the TV alongside TOSLINK to the receiver. Already had everything but the extractor, $35 is cheaper than a new TV, and 1080i is just fine. The service provider, to their credit(?) did offer us an HDMI-to-composite extractor... Ergh.

Finished Lady Sia... It is not a good game, but it is interesting.

Finished Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue - smaller and simpler than I'd expected, and the final boss rush is annoying; but still not a bad game. Looks better than Back from the Sewers, and Fall of The Foot Clan is still my favourite.

I restarted Final Fantasy II/IV and V on SNES alongside III/VI, and they all hold-up; actually having a hard time focusing on just one.

Also finally started playing-around with the Samurai Shodown RPG translation (been waiting for this one since the '90s) and Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition (slick!)

Passing Breeze

So Landstalker doesn't get any less annoying toward the end... Still not done.

Phantasy Star is way more impressive than I realised; seriously, a new translation and an automap would perfect this as an all-time classic... Which is already a thing, I'm now reading, in the Switch release... And it's from M2 because of course it is; they're the best. Kinda wishing I'd started it there, but I'm halfway through, so... Ergh.

Anyway, before I get completely distracted, I want to write about how I got distracted from Phantasy Star by Phantasy Star IV and ended-up ploughing-through it pretty quickly. Really good game, but not sticking with me after the fact - at least not like how the first two SaGa games, various Final Fantasy games, pretty much all of the Ys games, or the Personas have... It's weird. I've at least tried most of the Phantasy Star series, and IV is wonderfully streamlined - top-notch traversal, combat options, enemy design, and cutscenes layered on top of an expertly distilled collection of franchise hallmarks makes for a breezy and mostly-accessible (download the manual) RPG that I very much enjoyed... But I dunno; I feel like it's gonna be another Golden Sun or Bravely Default for me, where I found a lot to like but just kinda moved on afterward.

Speaking of moving on, I'm finally tackling Final Fantasy III/VI in earnest.

Unrelated: Glad that OutRun2006Tweaks exists; been happy with my XBOX copy, but now it's 1440p@240Hz!

Also, I think I don't like Alan Wake II... I'm trying, and it's really nifty, but I'm just not getting into it and I'm a third of the way through it now.

I'm looking for a...

Got what I wanted out of Redfall; gunplay got boring, exploration got boring, story was boilerplate by the end, and the last boss... Yikes. There's a good game in there, but Arkane Austin did not get to realise it. The Blackwood House side-story and the like were neat, and the other three bosses were alright, but yeah, moving on...

Found a Logitech MK850 (minus the M) for $8.49 instead of ~$75 on eBay, and a Microsoft LifeCam Studio for $6.99 ($30~$40 on eBay) at a thrift shop. Still looking for a new mouse; found another Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical (mine's getting tired after some 20 years) for cheap, but decided to keep looking - I hear good things about the Logitech G203. Need a numpad, too - the C64 Edition of the 8BitDo Retro 18 Mechanical Numpad is tempting.

Landstalker's not as bad in terms of perspective-issues making jumps as confusing as the reviews or the intro animation might suggest, but I am getting kind of tired of the game's jumping puzzles on the whole; it's all doable, the combat's fine, and the puzzles are neat - but it becomes a little too frustrating when you know the solution and the execution is the only issue. I've skipped at least one puzzle room because I looked-up the reward and decided it wasn't worth it. I'm almost through the Lake Shrine, so I should finish it... But it's just not winning me over like it was at first.

Otherwise, I started a Phantasy Star game for the umpteenth time (the original SMS release, in this case) and I'm about a third of the way in now. Always had a weird relationship with those games - could never get into any of them, and I'm not sure this is going to change things. There's a classic grind here, and I might check-out the Genesis titles again after this - but I don't think I'll ever be able get into the outright grindfest of the PSO/PSU/PSP games.

BioWare, Arkane, Rocksteady...

Got Redfall for, like, $12 a while ago. Installed it when Arkane Austin closed. I liked Anthem, but I got bored of it once I saw everything; this feels much the same. Disappointing, but not awful. Feels like Arkane-light.

Started Landstalker on Genesis... Again. Looks like I'm actually gonna finish it this time though. Really good game, surprisingly well-balanced, and definitely worth playing. I would've liked a better translation and less opportunity to miss important stuff... But seeing as how it's a proto-open-world, I guess that's something I shouldn't really be complaining about. 

Snagged Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon for $30 at Walmart.

Found a local guy selling a complete copy of PC Genjin 3 for a reasonable price; way better than $1000 for the censored NA release or $1800 for the CD release and its choppy sprite animation. Same guy also had an Arcade Card DUO and Tengai Makyō: Kabuki Ittou Ryoudan, so that was a nice surprise to bring home to my DUO-R and Avenue Pad 6 :)