New Retro Arcade: Neon (NRAN) is the type of thing you’ll either install and play for a few hours, or something you’ll go DEEP on.

What is NRAN? It’s an arcade machine emulator, with 35 empty arcade machines ready to accept ROMs, set in a neon-80’s/90’s arcade that’s probably way cooler than (but just as filthy as) any arcade that actually really existed. It’s basically MAME but modeled in 3D space, which I think ads to the arcade experience, but more on that later.

As you might imagine, since it’s a product for sale on Steam, NRAN doesn’t come with any actual arcade ROMs. Luckily, dozens of people have made their NRAN configurations available, and it’s really easy to end up with a fully-functioning arcade without putting any work into it. I suspect that if you’re 100% satisfied with someone else’s arcade configuration, your time with NRAN might be short lived, or at least shorter lived than my time will be. I had fun trying out games for the first time, like Final Fight, Street Fighter 2, or OutRun, but I wanted my arcade to be a collection of my favorites -- not just the classics.

The great thing about this game, and it’s dark side, is that you are the arcade manager -- everything is customizable to your whim, and the moment you change one thing; one arcade machine, one poster, one VHS or cassette tape, I think you’ll be drawn down the rabbit hole.

After trying lots of arcade games for the first time I made a list of the machines I felt no love for, and was eager to replace them. I’ve mostly removed side-scrolling beat’em’ups from my arcade in favor of puzzle games like Puyo Puyo Sun and Puzzle Bobble, or Neo Geo classics like Windjammers and Neo Turf Masters. This is the easy part; with an internet full of ROM dumps you’ll have no problems finding the games you’re looking for. Problem is, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself also spending hours obtaining assets like cabinet art, and fine-tuning it in Photoshop just to make sure the texture maps onto the arcade cabinet the way you want it to. Games like Puyo Puyo never had stand-up arcade cabinet art, so I had to invent cabinet art using box art from various Puyo Puyo releases, and scans of arcade flyers advertising Puyo Puyo.

Even if your desires are less esoteric, and you’re just hunting down the art assets for Donkey Kong, you’ll have a few steps to complete before the cabinet is perfect. You’ll want to set up the attract mode -- the video that plays on the arcade cabinet before you actually interact with it and “insert coins.” Only it’s not as easy as uploading an MP4 ripped from YouTube, because you have to use video editing tools to render a 35 video grid, which corresponds to each of your 35 arcade cabinets. Luckily, tools exist out there made just for NRAN that makes this process easier, but you’ll have to re-render the attract screens any time you introduce a new arcade machine, or rearrange the order of your arcade.

And yeah, after spending 25+ hours customizing it, it will take on the personality of being YOUR arcade. How long you spend inside of it is completely up to your patience I suppose. I personally can spend an hour playing straight through the Puyo Puyo Sun campaign (using 40 continues, so anywhere from $10-20 in credits) or a dozen minutes playing OutRun before giving up out of frustration and taking that frustration out on a much more relaxing round of golf with Neo Turf Masters. This ability to storm off from one arcade game to the next is exactly what makes NRAN a superior arcade emulation experience than MAME. While great for video game preservation, having a list of practically all arcade games ever, MAME always felt like a clinical way to play arcade ROMs -- which never bothered me with emulators for SNES or Gameboy ROMs. NRAN takes the MAME technology and brings it into this 3D space, where you can look at the cabinet art, your buttons and joystick, and be slightly overwhelmed by the sounds of all the other machines going on in the background. When you’re tired or frustrated with one game, you can walk onto the next, or you can obsessively pump in quarters until you’ve beaten the game, all the while having a debate with yourself like “I really should turn the attract volume down on Street Fighter 2, those damn elephants are so annoying… but if that’s the way Street Fighter 2 was, I have to keep it that way.”

In New Retro Arcade: Neon nothing is easy, but everything is worth it. I might never be done fine-tuning my arcade. I’ll want all of the cassette tapes lying around to have music I want to listen to, I’ll want all of the VHS tapes in the cinema to have videos I want to watch, and I’ll want all of the posters to correspond with my personal nostalgic feelings. NRAN is so worth the effort that I put this together just in the hopes that it might reach other people who have a secret, untapped arcade curator inside them, that’s just waiting to put together their own personal arcade.

I'm marathoning the Rooster Teeth machinima Red vs. Blue and recording how I feel about it. Do the first five seasons hold up to my nostalgic expectations? Do the latest five seasons maintain the quality of the show that I remember so fondly? Join me. Love it or hate it, let's watch Red vs. Blue.

Previous Entries:

Red vs. Blue: A Retrospective [Part One]

Red vs. Blue: A Retrospective [Part Two]

Red vs. Blue: A Retrospective [Part Three]

Anybody who’s ever said Red vs. Blue Season Four is the funniest of the First Five, has it right. Rooster Teeth is on a roll in Season Four, with most episodes having at least one killer line that really makes me laugh out loud, or at least want to laugh if I’m hesitant to show how amused I am. Hesitant to laugh? Uh… well yeah, I hate to say it but… I really like the Blarg-Honk alien. Yeah, you’d think that a character who only goes “Blarg” and “Honk” would get real annoying, real fast – but the enthusiasm with which the blargs and honks are delivered is priceless. I think it’s fucking hysterical, but the nature of the gag does make me a little embarrassed at how much I like it. There’s loads of situational humor to be had in Season Four that isn’t embarrassing though! Simmons going “crazy” and joining the Blues, Tucker’s Quest, Griff’s Pronoun Club, and probably my favorite moment of Season Four – where Donut exclaims “How does Vic have kids? I thought he had a vasectomy!” in Episode 75.

I feel like breaking down the Season any further may be trivial. Season Four is the funniest of the First Five (I’ll get to explaining why Season Five falls short in Part Five) and if you’ve watched it you know why – the character interactions and situations are fresh, interesting, and revitalized from the lengthy Season Three.

A quick note on the Tex-Focused Short-Series “Out of Mind” that interludes Seasons Four and Five: The first piece of Red vs. Blue content from Rooster Teeth that feels serious, Out of Mind is at least interesting in the ways it develops Tex as a character, and it’s a fairly well-made piece of action machinima, but boy does it get corny. It’s harmless, and watching it or skipping it has no real significant effect on one’s enjoyment of Season Five.

I'm marathoning the Rooster Teeth machinima Red vs. Blue and recording how I feel about it. Do the first five seasons hold up to my nostalgic expectations? Do the latest five seasons maintain the quality of the show that I remember so fondly? Join me. Love it or hate it, let's watch Red vs. Blue.

Previous Entries:

Red vs. Blue: A Retrospective [Part One]

Red vs. Blue: A Retrospective [Part Two]

Ah, Season Three; the time-travel season, or at least, the first instance of time-travel. (If I recall, we’ll get back into time-travel in Season 5). Anyways, my fear that Season Three wouldn’t be able to strive due to the complicated circumstances the gang found themselves in at the end of Season Two were completely unfounded. Everybody was split up, and you know what? That led to some really great moments. Sarge and Caboose’s episode in Battle Creek is a timelessly funny reenactment of nearly every game I’ve ever played on Xbox Live. Church and Griff’s prison banter is also worth a chuckle or two.

The real highlight of Season Three though, is the three-episode Time Travel Arc, where Church is faced with the opportunity to go back in time and fix all of things that went wrong during Seasons One and Two. A bit of personal bias comes into play here: I love time travel stories where people trying to change the past are the ones responsible for creating the trouble in the first place. Does Red vs. Blue take a little bit too much time to show how Church is behind every little thing that took place in the last Two Seasons? Maybe, but at some point the redundancy is what makes it funny. Watching the arc is worth it just to hear Church’s “Oh no! I’m the team-killing fucktard!” The arc also ends with this Season’s most clever joke, which was totally underappreciated by the me of six years ago. When the Blue Team argues about whether or not Church tells the short version, or the long version of his time travel adventures, Tucker exclaims “I want to hear the long version, but could you tell me in three parts?” Priceless.

The Season ends with a brief glimpse at an alien, and the only thing I remember about him is that he only goes “Blarg” and “Honk”. I absolutely loved that as a kid, but I’m a little worried I’m going to find that to be embarrassing during Season Four. You know what though? Every time I’ve worried that Red vs. Blue wasn’t going to stay as funny as I remembered it, I was wrong. Season One held up to my nostalgic expectations, Season Two was funnier than I remembered, and Season Three juggled a more complex plot and the transition from Halo to Halo 2 perfectly well. So you know what? I’m just going to forget any reservations or worries I might have about moving forwards. Every step of the way I’ve enjoyed this rewatch of Red vs. Blue, and I’m looking forward to more.

I'm marathoning the Rooster Teeth machinima Red vs. Blue and recording how I feel about it. Do the first five seasons hold up to my nostalgic expectations? Do the latest five seasons maintain the quality of the show that I remember so fondly? Join me. Love it or hate it, let's watch Red vs. Blue.

Previous Entries:

Red vs. Blue: A Retrospective [Part One]

I remembered much less about Red vs. Blue Season Two than I did Season One. The result of that being that I found Red vs. Blue Season Two much funnier than Season One, though that doesn’t really speak to the quality of the humor. Most of Season One is burned into my memory, and so I was usually remembering the jokes as they happened, Season Two was just less sentimental to me, and its jokes caught me off-guard. I paused once to laugh out loud for a minute straight at Griff’s “Track Sucks” comment, which is something the Middle-School version of me didn’t find the humor in.

I’m glad I’m rewatching the series now, though I really enjoyed watching Season One again, Season Two is what assured me that the process wouldn’t be tedious. Season Two keeps the spirit of Season One alive while introducing and developing the characters of Doc, O’Malley, and Lopez. The plot grows ever so slightly, but is still light and dumb enough to not cut into the humor – but actually add to it. The dumb reasons concocted by the end of the Season to force Red and Blue to work together are totally okay, although whether or not they pay off is up to Season Three to prove.

Season Two of Red vs. Blue maintains the quality of the series established in Season One, and arguably raises the bar on how complicated the set-ups can get while still delivering on the humor. It’s not the touchstone in Machinima that Season One is, but nostalgia shouldn’t really factor into an evaluation of quality. I can wholeheartedly recommend Season Two to anyone who enjoyed Season One, though I have reservations about whether or not Season Three can maintain the quality of the humor considering where the characters end up by the end of Season Two.

It’s been five years since I’ve really cared about anything Rooster Teeth has made. Five years ago Red vs. Blue Season Five concluded, and I was under the impression that Red vs. Blue was over for good. Since then, the occasional Achievement Hunter video was all I would watch from Rooster Teeth. I only recently found out that Red vs. Blue Season Ten had been released in 2012, and I was interested if the quality of the show had been maintained all these years. I got mixed responses from Reddit; some people claimed that what the show gained in production quality it lost in humor, others assured me that Red vs. Blue is as funny as it has ever been – and others said that the show became more serious and it just wasn’t for them anymore. Either way I got the idea to go back to the First Season, and do a re-watch of Red vs. Blue.

Red vs. Blue Season One still holds up, it’s still funny, and it’s surprisingly not-cringeworthy. All too often I go back and experience things from the internet’s past to only find that what I once thought was funny was now embarrassing to watch. Not the case with Red vs. Blue Season One. I mean, it wasn’t “ha-ha” funny like it used to be, but I smiled, chuckled in my head, and moved on. I appreciated it a whole lot more than I probably used to, the whole thing feels like a labor of love – and the humor is timeless, non-dependent on topical references and jokes – just your typical sitcom archetypes (but in the most endearing ways).

If you’re like me and haven’t seen Red vs. Blue in a really, really long time – don’t be afraid to check it out again, it hasn’t depreciated in quality. And well, if you’ve never seen it before – Red vs. Blue Season One doesn’t take very long to watch and even if you don’t find it very funny, I do think it’s an important part of internet history to at least be familiar with.

Just Cause 2 is a game that is closing in fast on it's third year, and yet I still love to jump in and devote hours and hours of playtime into it. After 80+ Hours of dicking around Panau I decided to try and make some progress in the game's Mercenary Mode, where really the only goal is to go wipe out/capture every military base and collect every single box that's just lying around the world. I'm at around 42 percent, and I can guarantee you that making it to 50 percent will likely be a 10+ hour endeavor, and not as much fun as just dicking around - but hey, the completionist in me loves it.

Just Cause 2 is a game who's lifespan is also being extended by whomever is behind this incredible multiplayer mod over at https://www.jc-mp.com/

I was made aware of the open beta that was taking place this weekend a good 24 hours into it's 48 hour time limit, and boy - was it incredible. I mean, it's glitchy as hell but - who can care when you consider the scope of what's going on. I don't know if there are a hundred Rico Rodriguez-es running around but it feels like it. Teleport over to the Panau International Airport and absolute mayhem ensues. Airplanes nosediving into the ground, speedboats slamming into the side of 747's, dudes in sweet cars spinning donuts on the runway. I mean, it's just amazing.

I didn't check many details on the development of the mod, but my full thanks go out to them - Just Cause 2 is a game that I'd easily sink over a hundred hours into - and easily over two-hundred if the multiplayer servers go full-time.

1. The Kritzkrieg (Medic)

First released in 2008 during The Gold Rush update, the Kritzkrieg is an alternative to the Medi-Gun that has a faster-building Uber-Charge that grants critical hits instead of invulnerability. The pros and cons of trading invulnerability with deadliness is a tactical choice that makes the Kritzkrieg a must-have and a definite game-changer.

2. The Flare Gun (Pyro)

Released a few months after The Gold Rush update in The Pyro Update, the Flare Gun changed one of the Pyro's core limitations - being a short-range damage dealer. While not an incredibly powerful weapon; the weapon does crit when victims are already on fire, the Flare Gun gave the Pyro the ability to deliver fire-damage across long distances and become a major Sniper deterrent.

3. The Axtinguisher (Pyro)

Another Pyro Update entry, The Axtinguisher immediately became a must-have weapon - and is still a necessary tool for the Pyro. It deals critical damage to enemies who are on fire - 195 HP - enough to kill almost all classes in one blow. This meant that Pyros could set enemies on fire, and then quickly eliminate them with The Axtinguisher - the deadliest tactic for Pyros to-date. It's such a deadly weapon, and that makes The Axtinguisher a game-changer.

4. The Sandvich (Heavy)

The Heavy Update hit in the August of '08 and with it came The Sandvich. Less useful at the time, and better for making Om-Nom-Nom noises - The Sandvich today is an understandable trade-off for the Heavy's trusty shotgun. Bringing the Heavy to full health over the course of a taunt animation - The Sandvich can be risky - but sometimes no less risky than a slow, low-health Heavy looking for a Medic or Health Pack.

5. The Cloak and Dagger (Spy)

The Sniper vs. Spy Update of 2009 brought a lot of new weapons and tools for some of the more notorious classes of the game. The Cloak and Dagger, a new cloaking system for the Spy was one of the more significant changes to how the Spy could played. Instead of relying on picking up metal to stay cloaked - with the Cloak and Dagger a Spy simply had to stand still - and the cloak would last forever - even recharge. The Cloak and Dagger added new deadly Spy tactics and increased the success rate of existing tactics and is my final "game-changer".

So a friend brought over a copy of Mortal Kombat, I maybe got an hour in with it, and played some story - and I'm very hooked. I've read up on all the characters and lore and stuff and, well. Yeah. Hooked is the best way to describe it. 

The mod community for Just Cause 2 has come out in full force and if you own the PC or Xbox 360 versions of Just Cause 2 these are the Top 5 mods you cannot afford to miss.  
 

1. Polite/Friendlies'  Infinite Grapple Mod