Category Archives: Featured

Featured, Travel

State of retro game collecting 2025 Edition

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We travel to Phoenix Arizona for the massive Game On Expo to do some video game collecting. I share some of the rare and uncommon things for sale plus I give you an overview of the event itself. WATCH >> https://youtu.be/XtoQeiu6agQ

Retro game collecting in 2025 is a delightful blend of treasure hunting, mild financial irresponsibility, and explaining to your significant other why you definitely needed a third copy of EarthBound — “this one has the original sticker, babe!” Prices for cartridges have inflated like they’re NFTs with nostalgia, and suddenly everyone’s digging through attic boxes like pirates hoping to find a gold-plated Pokémon Yellow. It’s gotten to the point where garage sales are now stealth battlegrounds, with collectors speed-walking like Olympic athletes the moment a “Sega” logo is spotted from 40 feet away.

One day you find a mint-condition Chrono Trigger for $40 because someone’s grandma listed it as “Old Nintendo book,” and the next day that same game is priced higher than your car’s Blue Book value — and somehow, someone buys it. Forums and Facebook groups are full of people arguing over label variants like they’re art historians, and every collector’s dream is to be on YouTube holding a $5 thrift store find while saying “I couldn’t believe it, but there it was — a sealed Little Samson, just next to the VHS tapes!” It’s chaos, it’s passion, and it’s beautiful. Just… don’t check your credit card statement.

Featured, Music

Journey: Restoring Rock & Roll’s Rarest Arcade Game

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Ah yes, the Journey arcade game from 1983—proof that someone at Bally Midway stared into the heart of rock ‘n’ roll and said, “What if we turned Steve Perry into a pixelated superhero with a jetpack?” In this fever dream of corporate synergy and neon bravado, you control the actual members of Journey—each represented by hilariously realistic digitized faces slapped onto cartoon bodies—on a mission to recover their stolen instruments across five mini-games. It’s like Mega Man, if Mega Man’s enemies were groupies and his powers were “bass solo.”

Each band member gets their own personal level, from dodging barriers with a flying drum set to platforming on conveyor belts while trying not to look like a floating head on a stick figure’s body. Once all instruments are recovered, the game climaxes with a full-blown concert scene—complete with pixelated fans losing their minds while Journey rocks out. Oh, and it plays real samples of “Separate Ways” on 1980s arcade sound hardware, which sounds like a fax machine trying its best to sing. It’s baffling, bold, and beautiful—a perfect time capsule of when arcade cabinets, classic rock, and utter chaos collided in a haze of synth and denim.

Featured

Derek’s 2 Year Journey to Solve the 30-Year Myth of Faceball 2000

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Faceball 2000 on the Game Boy is what happens when someone looks at the gritty rise of first-person shooters and says, “What if instead of guns and gore, we had floating smiley faces and pure confusion?” You play as HAPPYFACE, a yellow orb of emotionless optimism, wandering a maze that looks like a wireframe dentist’s office from a cyberpunk fever dream. Your goal? Blast other floating emoji-like enemies into oblivion before they do the same to you. It’s like DOOM, if DOOM was designed by someone who had only ever played Pong and once saw a sphere.

Somehow, this plucky little Game Boy cart managed to cram in a 3D first-person experience using approximately four pixels and the processing power of a microwave. Each enemy has a distinct face, ranging from “mildly annoyed” to “existentially over it,” and they glide silently through the maze like ghosts of MSN Messenger past. The cherry on top? The game supported up to 16-player multiplayer via link cable—because clearly the Game Boy was designed for LAN parties in 1991. In the end, Faceball 2000 isn’t just a game; it’s an experience—a surreal, minimalist art piece disguised as a shooter where every kill feels like you’ve just disappointed a sentient emoji.

Featured, Q & A

The Most SURPRISING Game We’ve Still NEVER Played? 😮

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The Spork Guy from Patreon asks: What would be considered the most surprising game you’ve still never played before?

John Linneman: https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalFoundry
Gemma: https://www.youtube.com/@TheGebs24
Gaming off the Grid: https://www.youtube.com/@GamingOffTheGrid
Rad Junk: https://www.youtube.com/@RadJunk
John Hancock: https://www.youtube.com/@johnhancockretro
Retro Maggie: https://www.youtube.com/@Gamermaggie
Game Sack: https://www.youtube.com/@GameSack

Featured, Metal Jesus Likes

Graphical tricks in classic video games – Your questions answered!

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Here’s a list of graphically impressive retro games—with a side of snark and nostalgia:

🎮 1. Donkey Kong Country (SNES, 1994)

“Rendered so hard, your SNES needed a juice box after.”
Rare flexed its silicon muscles with pre-rendered 3D sprites that looked like someone stuffed a Silicon Graphics workstation into a banana.

🕹 2. R-Type (Arcade, 1987)

“Scrolling left to right never looked so aggressively biomechanical.”
This game made you question whether Giger was moonlighting as a sprite artist. Also: lasers. So many lasers.

🦑 3. Ecco the Dolphin (Genesis, 1992)

“Because nothing says cutting-edge like an emotionally haunted dolphin.”
Wave effects, lighting, parallax scrolling—and existential dread? Ecco had it all.

🕯 4. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1, 1997)

“Come for the vampire hunting, stay for the unnecessarily fancy capes.”
2D never looked so lush. Every hallway looked like Dracula’s interior decorator went to town with a velvet fetish.

🚀 5. Star Fox (SNES, 1993)

“Polygons so sharp they could cut your lunchables.”
The FX chip said “screw pixels” and gave us wireframe dreams rendered in what felt like 4 FPS, but we loved every choppy second.

🏙 6. Shadow of the Beast (Amiga, 1989)

“The graphics were so good, nobody noticed the game was impossible.”
16 layers of parallax scrolling because someone clearly had something to prove.

🌈 7. Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995)

“Time travel, techy wizardry, and sprites with more expression than most actors.”
Akira Toriyama’s art came to life like a pixelated anime fever dream, and the backgrounds were works of art.

👾 8. Metal Slug (Neo Geo, 1996)

“Beautifully animated chaos. It’s like Looney Tunes joined the army.”
Every explosion was lovingly hand-drawn by someone who really wanted you to enjoy blowing stuff up.

💀 9. Doom (PC, 1993)

“Yes, it ran on a potato. Yes, it still slapped.”
Those pseudo-3D corridors and pixelated demons were revolutionary. Also, 90s kids’ first intro to heavy metal and Hell.

👁️‍🗨️ 10. Out of This World / Another World (Amiga/SNES, 1991)

“When minimalist polygons punched you right in the feels.”
Rotoscoped animation and cinematic presentation that made you think, “Am I playing a game, or watching a French art film about loneliness?”

Want a ranking based on how hard they flexed their consoles? Or ones Claude might enjoy watching with you in a few years (minus the demon hordes)?

Featured, Mobile & Handhelds

‘Too Big’ For Steam Deck: AAA Games Are Struggling On Valve’s Handheld

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Oliver Mackenzie (Digital Foundry) does his best to run the latest triple-A games on Valve’s handheld. Which games run well? Which games run well and look decent? And which games are indeed simply ‘Too Big’ for Steam Deck? Does a more powerful handheld like the Asus ROG Ally power past the Deck’s problems?

The Valve Steam Deck, aka Gabe Newell’s love letter to PC gamers who secretly wanted a Nintendo Switch but were too proud to admit it. This chonky handheld beast is basically a gaming PC crammed into a device the size of a grilled cheese sandwich on steroids—portable enough to take anywhere, but still big enough to make your wrists question your life choices after an hour of Elden Ring.

What Makes It Special?

  • Runs your entire Steam library—which means you can finally ignore 90% of the games you impulse-bought during a Steam sale… on the go!

  • Has trackpads! Because Valve still believes that trackpads are the future, despite a decade of gamers collectively going, “Ehh…”

  • Customizable as heck—want to install Windows? Emulators? A toaster simulator? Go wild.

  • “Portable,” but in a “you might need a dedicated backpack for it” kind of way.

The Downsides?

  • Battery life is… negotiable. Playing a high-end game? Congrats, you have about 90 minutes before your Deck turns into an expensive paperweight.

  • It’s big. Like, big big. Holding one is like gripping a sci-fi weapon from a movie where The Rock has to save the world.

  • Linux-based OS, which is great if you love tinkering, but if you’re just trying to play games, you’ll occasionally feel like you’ve been thrown into IT Tech Support mode.

Final Verdict?

The Steam Deck is a glorious, slightly impractical marvel—perfect for anyone who wants to game anywhere, anytime, and develop forearms like a Greek statue in the process. It’s the closest thing we have to a true portable gaming PC, and for that, we salute Valve. Now if only they’d make Half-Life 3…

Featured, System Reviews, Mobile & Handhelds, PC Games

OneXPlayer G1 Gaming PC – It’s Powerful…but WEIRD

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The OneXPlayer G1 is like a gaming laptop and a Steam Deck had a wild night out and accidentally created a boxy, overpowered handheld that can run Cyberpunk 2077 and give you a forearm workout. It’s the device for people who think, “Sure, I want portability—but I also want all the frames, a full keyboard, and a controller that cramps.” MORE INFO: https://bit.ly/43qnp59

Featured, Metal Jesus Likes

Sega Neptune Project – a Sega Genesis and 32X onto a single board

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The Neptune Project: ► Project Github: https://github.com/Board-Folk/Neptune ► Follow COSAM: https://x.com/cosam_the_great?lang=en

The Sega Neptune, the Bigfoot of gaming consoles—some say it existed in prototype form, others claim it was just a fever dream brought on by Sega’s caffeine-fueled brainstorming sessions in the ‘90s. Either way, this mythical beast was supposed to be a Sega Genesis and 32X hybrid, combining two things that Sega fans already had separately into one convenient package…

Why Was It Special?

  • It would have saved gamers the hassle of duct-taping their Genesis and 32X together like a Frankenstein creation.

  • No need for extra cables! (A big deal in the era where Sega consoles needed more wires than a ‘90s home office.)

  • It had a cool name! Seriously, “Neptune” made it sound like it could survive in deep space… unlike the Saturn, which actually launched and promptly sank like a gas giant in quicksand.

Why Did It Never Come Out?

By the time Sega was maybe, possibly, sort of ready to release it, the Sega Saturn was already on the horizon. Sega realized that selling a console that was technically two years outdated was probably not the best strategy—although, let’s be honest, that never stopped them before.

Thus, the Neptune was unceremoniously abandoned, joining the ranks of lost Sega hardware like the Sega Pluto and the Dreamcast’s dignity post-2001. Today, it remains a legend, whispered about in retro gaming circles—the console that could have been, but probably would have been a bad idea anyway.