*blows the dust off*

A screen laid out to look like an old fashioned TV, with the game Castlevania VI playing in the main part. In a round window onthe right, a black woman with colorful braids gnaws on a SNES controller in frustration

Ayyo gang! How is everyone holding up in this the year of Our Pandemic 2020?

Seeing as we’re all stuck home I’ve been slowly ramping up my gaming, and recently discovered I missed streaming games on Twitch. So I started doing that again last week, after performing a long delayed Ritual of Digital Necromancy on my main computer, which had a drive failure last Christmas and had been sitting dormant for 8 months after that. Then I realized I hadn’t updated in here in a dog’s age so I’ve been in here cleaning up some. Going to be adding a few more game categories over the next week, reflecting what I’ve been doing.

But first off – The Tentative Twitch… Schedule. (Is there a T-word that’s a synonym of schedule? All I can think of is ‘Tinerary, which… no.) All streams run from 7-9:30/10pm EDT unless otherwise marked.

Monday – Minecraft Monster Builds. Just me noodling about the realm in Creative mode. Will take requests for what to build. May port in past structures from other versions of the seed with structure blocks.

Thursday – (every other starting August 27th, 2020) Throwback Thursday – I fire up my old, still operational SNES and play a game from my teens. Seeing as it’s leading up to the Halloweentimes, I’m of course starting with Super Castlevania IV.

Sunday – (starting August 30) Spooky Sunday Shenanigans! Again, leading up to Hallowmas, starting with an SNES favorite, Zombies Ate My Neighbors. This ought to be fun – I’ve never played the game all the way through.

Eventually I want to add a stream on Tiara Tuesday (no idea what I’m doing, but I will be wearing a tiara while I’m doing so; maybe Animal Crossing?) and have a weekly stream where I don’t play games but I do beadwork on camera. But I think for someone just ramping up their channel again three scheduled streams is more than enough.

Check me out, follow, subscribe, whatever, if you play Minecraft, come play with me.

Twitch

As for this blog, I’ll be slowly incorporating more posts about the games I’m playing off-camera as well. Looking to include stuff about Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Super Mario Odyssey (I never finished that… oops). Toying with picking up another PVP shooter game, which seems a little WTF considering some of the brain scars I have left over from Rust, but I’ve been watching my friend Legojer’s weekly streamed game of Hunt: Showdown with his friend FallDownGoBoom and it actually looks like fun? So IDK, if it goes on sale maybe. Depending on how long the pandemic wears on, I may succumb to my baser nature and pick up Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates again. Who knows? Not I.

Stay safe, sane and well out there.

…and of course, kill Dracula.

So the RCA to USB thingie arrived on Saturday. Installed and test ran it, and pleased to say that while the picture feed isn’t the sharpest, it does work pretty well after you tinker with OBS a bit. So for my Monday night stream, I’m going to be doing a nostalgia run of Super Castlevania IV, which is, oh, only my FAVORITE game ever for various reasons.

I’m hoping this’ll be my first “oh hey you can see my face!” stream too, provided I can work around some latency issues with my cam/phone/mic. So you’ll get to see each annoyed face I make when I mess up, in living color as well as in stereo (where available).

Anyway. Come check me out, I’ll be starting at 8pm EST.

Some thoughts on retro gaming, nostalgia and childhood stories

A section of the splash screen from Tetris (Original game boy edition)

So after a few weeks of streaming some of my current PC games, I’ve been trying to think of what sort of overall theme I want my Twitch/YouTube presence to have. I could keep mostly streaming Minecraft * but really there are a million MC streamers out there. Really there are about a millionty-one PC game and current console streamers already out there, and I feel like if I keep doing what I’m doing, even keeping the “my kids** and their friends are watching lol look at how bad I am at this okay self try not to cuss too much” angle, it’ll keep feeling a bit too much like a retread of what literally everyone else is doing.

This week I’ve been bopping around on Amazon staring lustfully at the ElGato HD60 because I was thinking about streaming my hilari-bad attempts at playing Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Odyssey*** but I can’t quite justify the cost of an HDMI capture card, not at this point in my fledgling streaming… experiment? Sure, let’s call it that. And then, poking around the cheaper options, I stumbled across RCA to USB converters and something in my brain said “Aha!” and immediately the theme from Zombies Ate My Neighbors started playing in my head.

Look, y’all know I’m an Old. Full disclosure, I’m staring down the barrel of 40. Not quite Pong old, or even quite Atari/NES old, but old enough to remember needing a box or a stool at the arcade because I was too tiny to reach the controls at five or six, old enough that having a personal computer (moment of silence for my Apple IIGS) was still a revolutionary thing to have, especially for a kid, and definitely old enough to remember the sheer unadulterated joy of finding Super Nintendo games under the Christmas tree in 1991, knowing that the console itself was under there somewhere (and my dad muttering something about “someone put the cart before the horse” but enjoying my moment anyway). I still have that exact console, which still works and get played with regularly in my house. I also still have a working Game Boy**** as well as all but one (two?) of my own games. So yeah. Old.

A while back, in a conversation I had about reissued game consoles that tend to hit the market every Christmas season, a friend of mine said something about not understanding the idea of spending money on retro-gaming. As far as games were concerned they didn’t want to keep wallowing in the past, but wanted to embrace the now or the future in terms of game consoles. This person has also previously stated a similar viewpoint on keeping/rereading books, because “what’s the point if you know how the story ends already?” Needless to say I respectfully but vehemently disagree, as my home library can attest. While I admittedly should go through and cull the books I am definitely never reading again, my library contains volumes I have acquired over the years – dusty hardbacks, Scholastic Book Club paperbacks I have meticulously repaired with scotch tape, gifts from friends – that I return to repeatedly to the point of almost considering the books themselves old friends.

Unsurprisingly, I have the same attitude towards games. While I had both Game Boy and SNES growing up, I only had a handful of games because I was 13, games were expensive and my parents, being Olds even at the time they were raising me, really didn’t see the point of constantly buying me new ones. I think I had less than 5 total for the SNES, only a couple more for the Game Boy and borrowed the rest from friends. Then high school started really kicking my ass and I didn’t have time for video games again until after college. As a result, I’ve played the ever loving crap out of my handful of games, and occasionally going back and revisiting them has the same feel as picking up a well-loved book. Sure, I’m older and wiser and not as blind to various flaws in the game (Example: that rampant Princess as Macguffin trope as well as other problematic gender stereotypes in Mario games – shoutout to Black Girl Gaming, btw) but picking up an old controller and executing a series of jumps that are still in your muscle memory a quarter century later is its own kind of weirdly comforting.

Anyway. I bought a cheap ass analog to USB converter dongle, and this weekend I’m going to see if I can get it to work. If I can, I’ll take y’all on my latest trip down Nostalgia Lane with me. Possibly with less cussing.


* I know, I know, I need to make a post about the Contemporary build eventually. lol I am bad at game blogging.

** by “kids” I also mean my former Minecraft server kids, they didn’t call me Server Mama for nothing.

*** insert pout about how much farther Husbeast and Wee Beast are than me – I’m still in what is essentially Mario Mexico because I’ve barely had time to play.

**** Not my original; my nephew drowned that one in a bucket of water in, like, 1997. I’m still bitter.