PixlBit

I've been hearing a lot about "blue light" contributing to depression. I just wonder why they don't engineer screens to filter it out on their own, similar to how CRT TV manufacturers were ordered by Congress to develop better shielding for TVs after it was discovered that color TVs were emitting gamma rays back in the 1960s. Even in late model CRT TVs i remember you could feel the electromagnetic energy from the screen if you were close to it. If you remember your parents yelling at you for sitting too close to the TV, that's why.  The joke in the Simpsons where there's a shadow burned into the wall with a silhouette of young Homer visible in it was an exaggeration, but maybe not much of one.

They were both founded by the same family but split apart decades ago. I liked Fry's Electronics. They had a combination of the kind of stuff Best Buy has with the kind of stuff Radio Shack had, plus things that neither place had. I bought a TV and a few odds and ends there over the past few years before they shut down. I remember back in the early 00s the one in Tempe AZ had a PS2 hooked up to a Jumbovision display with Virtua Fighter 4 running on it, and I played a few rounds. Then a few months ago, I went in, and most of the shelves were already stripped bare.

The Fry's grocery store chain is the local Kroger's affiliate.

I thought Texas had opened the vaccination up to everybody over 16? Keep looking, and look for sites like Walgreens or CVS that might have vaccination clinics open. Can you look in another county, or perhaps across the state line in Oklahoma?

I got the Pfizer vaccine, with my first shot being three days after Christmas as I work for the largest hospital system in the Southwestern United States and I happened to be looking at my work email at the right time to see that they had opened up a bunch of extra slots. I'd already signed up with the county at that time and had gotten an appointment for the following week, but this expedited it.  Mine was done at the Arizona State Fairgrounds, which had been set up as a vaccination site as it's one of the properties that has the largest about of open space to move cars through in Phoenix and is also located in Central Phoenix.

First shot, no problem. Second shot, I had a days' worth of aches and chills.

My elderly parents are just now getting their first shots this weekend after months of trying.

I only remember the ad campaign for this game, where two women were looking out at their neighbor's open window, implying they were watching him compiulsively whip his weasel... and then it cut to the game. And that campaign ran during afternoon TV and pro wrestling. How did that get past mid-90s censors?

Spy Hunter was one of my favorite 80s games. I knew about the 2001 reboot on PS2, but I didn't know about a lot of these other games. 

It's a necessity in Phoenix, given how sprawled out everything is here. When I work on-call, I have to cover the East Valley, which is basically everything east of I-17. We have clients in San Tan Valley and Apache Junction. 

I like it, but I wish it had save points like Final Fantasy VI does. I'm stuck on the air castle, which is a long dungeon, and the boss is brutal, so if you lose, you have to start the dungeon all over. 

Cage Match:

Chex Quest is actually somewhat competent as a game, despite being a breakfast cereal tie-in. Even the Angry Video Game Nerd admitted that it wasn't a bad game for what it is. So I'm going with that.

I will say this for Quest 64: after getting curb-stomped by FF7, it got back up and jumped into the ring. Quest 64 is the Glass Joe of video games: It's inevitably going to hit the canvas, but it never quits.

Notes from the show:

I always noticed how Chun-Li was much less banged up than the male Street Fighters when she lost. When Super came out, Cammy looked a lot more roughed-up than Chun-Li, but Fei Long, DeeJay, and T. Hawk all looked like they'd lost a fight with a blender. Game developers were, and to a degree still are, a bit squeamish about the idea of women getting beat up by men. Capcom edited out Roxy and Poison from the SNES version of Final Fight for that reason, and their other solution around the problem of not wanting to beat up on girls in FF, especially for Poison, was just as much of an "oof" moment, especially now. This despite Double Dragon having Linda as an enemy character. In Punch-Out for the Wii, they originally considered Peach for the hidden bonus fighter, decided they didn't want Little Mac smacking the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom around, and went with Donkey Kong instead. Over on Mortal Kombat, though, Sonya, Kitana, and Mileena got bloodied and beheaded along with everybody else, while Kitana was the bloodiest character the series had seen up to that point. Pretty much every one of her moves made the blood geysers erupt. Johnny Cage wouldn't do his groin punch on them in MKII, though he does now. 

Ninja Gaiden arcade came out before the NES version, but the two version were basically developed alongside one another. Back then, developers tried to add stuff to the NES versions of their games to make up for the lack of graphical fidelity, in many cases actually improving on the arcade games. The best-known example is Punch-Out!!, which was an interesting novelty arcade game that tried to give you a first-person view with a wire-frame boxer. Since that wasn't feasible for the NES, they gave the NES version a story line, new boxers, Mike Tyson, and their replacement for the wire-frame contender was Little Mac. When they had the technology to replicate the arcade games on the SNES, Super Punch-Out sold far less than the NES Punch-Out. There's a reason why the Wii game took its cues from the NES rather than the SNES. The most dramatic difference was Bionic Commando, which was one of the best-loved NES games of all time and a short, completely busted mess in the arcades.

Oh, man, i thought I was the only one who didn't worship Rare during the N64/PS1 days. Most of their games were prettier versions of stuff Nintendo already did, and they didn't have lot of of unique ideas for gameplay (save for maybe Blast Corps), so they relied on collectathons to pad out their games. I'd have happily traded Rare off for Square, Capcom, Namco, or even just Mother 3 N64, provided Nintendo were actually willing to localize it. I just wanted an RPG that was more competent than Quest 64.

I will eventually get a PS5, but so far I'm not too excited about next-gen systems (I'm not a fan of either Xbox or Microsoft as a whole and havent owned an Xbox following my brief stint as a 360 owner.) Hopefully by the time Final Fantasy XV drops, Sony will have gotten the PS5's supply issues sorted out. Right now, though, I'm having too much fun with the Switch. I'm honestly more interested in seeing what Nintendo does next than I am in the PS5 or XSX/S.