Retro Radiance

I found out about the game UFO 50 earlier this week and it is really lovely. The premise is that 50 retro games for an obscure system were unearthed, and now they’re available to play. All games are complete, nothing half-finished, and the verisimilitude is staggering. Also, no nonsense with unlocking games, everything is available. As others have said more eloquently, it’s like digging through the past and discovering retro-soaked wonders. I’ve played through maybe 12 of the games so far, and I gotta say, most of them are excellent. Some approximate “shovelware,” but hey, that’s the luck of the draw. They’re “NES hard,” in that most of them are inscrutable with weird controls, but that’s also part of the charm. And the games I would consider shovelware, others might love, so there really is something for everyone. I bought the game a few days ago and I do not regret it! Highly recommend. It reminds me of the DS game Retro Game Challenge which I’ve never played myself, but others have apparently drawn the comparison too. Anyways, it’s great, if you like retro games, or even the idea of playing them, check it out!

Otherwise I was playing an actual retro game tonight, Super Mario World. It’s excellent, of course, as it ever was. I have magical memories of playing it on my SNES I got for Christmas in ~1991 when it came out. What a nostalgia rush. It is astounding to me what sorts of creations people can make in terms of ROM hacks. (A friend linked me to that particular ROM hack of SMW and it’s wild!) I haven’t played SMW in a long time, so it’s been nice revisiting it.

It’s been a long week, especially after getting back from vacation. But it’s been good, and it should be a calm weekend. It’s supposed to be cooler and rainy over the weekend, which I welcome with open arms. We have a lot of errands to do tomorrow, but that’s OK. It’ll just be nice to relax a bit from a long week. And I’m always happy to play some videogames. I am also picking up the movie X from the library tomorrow, which I’ve wanted to watch for awhile, so that will be great. My sister says it’s excellent, and the others in the series are good as well, so I’m psyched. I couldn’t find it streaming anywhere, so I thought I’d just pick it up from the library, of course. Please support your local library if you can. The funding for ours is being considerably cut due to city budget cuts, leading to reduced hours at the start of next month, which is really a shame. I hope one of these days it will get back up to being open 7 days a week (currently it’s closed on Sundays, a result of previous cuts). I don’t use the library nearly as much as I should, but I love it and it is a net good for society.

I think I’m too tired to play more games tonight. I’m listening to music as I write this. I might listen to more podcasts tonight or something. I finally bit the bullet and subscribed to the Patreon of a podcast I’ve been enjoying for a few years now, Lingthusiasm. It’s, as you might imagine, about linguistics and fun with words, and the hosts are delightful, brilliant, and fun. I found out about the podcast on Mastodon, and they even have a (smallish) presence on Mastodon which is very cool! I listened to one of the bonus episodes today and loved it. I had stored up a few episodes and listened to other stuff, and then came back to it, and have listened to 3-4 episodes in the last few days. Just lovely and I highly recommend listening to it if you want to geek out about words!

Anyways thank you for reading as always, friends <3