Category: Personal

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It’s been a while since I just did a normal blog post. My Roundup fame has taken me to new heights of internet content producing. I have moved the roundups to their own section with the intent that this may encourage me to post other types of things. Such as more frequent smaller things like using the aside post format in WordPress, which I feel was the original intent.

I recently got the Playdate from Panic and have really enjoyed just looking at it. It’s the perfect desk companion. I can’t wait for the dock.

I have 98% written a review of a few games I’ve completed recently. So I may post that here soon.

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MiniDisc Memories

I really enjoyed this comprehensive mini-doc from the YouTube channel This Does Not Compute.

I had three portable MiniDisc recorder/players growing up in high school & college, and I still have the latter two. The format wasn’t the coolest but for the age where music was being downloaded from some… back alley websites it was a great way to copy it on the go and modify playlists without having to re-record an entire tape.

I was able to listen to whatever I really wanted while on bus rides, or even record music from someone else’s CD player or cassette player.

When I was dabbling in music and writing it on my computer I wanted to share it as I heard it on my computer. Although MIDI is a standard file format for recording/playing music, the engine and sound samples are not. A program I wrote them in called MusicTime had a more robust sound catalog and so I was able to output these to MiniDisc and play them on the sound system in the band room at school. When playing them after school a classmate exclaimed “You wrote that?”

I did not know that there were kiosks in Japan similar to the Famicom Disk System where you could download music. Another shared history between Nintendo & Sony.

My last memories of MiniDisc were in college working at the WMSR radio station. Most of our prerecorded audio was done on MiniDiscs. There was a recorder and player in the production studio as well as in the main studio. The systems were tied to the soundboard so when you tapped a button to go live with a source the music would play and only play that track. However, by that time, MP3 DATA CD players were also in use and easily made and that’s what I used to bring music or prerecorded audio from my computer to the station. I also was rocking out my first iPod by that time and loved it.

I should break out my MiniDiscs and see what I still have recorded on those bad boys. I would imagine they are just as susceptible to disc rot as other optical media.

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Mario’s 35th

I have been playing a TON of Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury. 3D World was a game that I loved when it came out **checks notes** nearly EIGHT YEARS ago. I wrote about it in my obituary of the Wii U, and said that it was in my top echelon of Mario games. After playing through it again, I can cement it there a while longer.

Bowser has been fast, but now he’s furious. (Image from Nintendo)

The addition of Bowser’s Fury is a great bonus. While many are predicting this bonus game to be the future of Mario, I won’t hold my breath. It’s a fun and fantastic experiment.

If you got burned out on the more traditional Mario games from the New Super Mario Bros. series, or wasn’t one of the seven people who owned a Wii U, I’d recommend this over the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection in a heartbeat.

Mario is old enough now that I don’t know if we need to celebrate every five years, but this has been fun. The 3D All-Stars Collection was fun to play through Sunshine again, but with the 1-2 Combo of 3D World and Odyssey on Switch, I think that’s enough new* Mario to last for a bit.

*Obviously over half the Mario games on Nintendo Switch are from older systems. Maybe we’ll get super Mario Odyssey 2?