Until I start my new position on Monday, my work time commute has been around 5 minutes. So it takes me about a week to work my way through a podcast.

Few weeks ago I made a purchase from Japan. And it was co-incidental cause right around then Pog Fever burned it's way through Giant Bomb. Now on the most recent Bombcast, Jeff invokes Top Trumps which means I can't remain silent.

My purchase was old ass Menko cards. What's Menko? Well, it's basically just slabs of cardboard that can be played like Japanese Pogs, Japanese Top Trumps and many other games.

Much like dominos or marbles, Menko cards are really just items that can facilitate play. They can be use a variety of ways, but what was often interesting about them is the artwork. Much like pogs, they'll put anything on a menko card. I bought a stack of Famicom-era menko cards:

So how it's like pogs is straight forward, and Menko might be the proto-pog. Stack it, hit it with a card, whatever flips you keep.

How it's like Top Trumps is cool. So on the back of every card you just have a crazy noise box of icons. Bottom left corner is Rock-Paper-Scissors, then you have a "Fighting Number", then you have pips from a 6 sided die, and baseball and moon language... So if we were on a playground and just wanted to quickly figure out who had to run to the store and buy pocky, or whatever, we'd pick a stat and draw a card. Say "Lowest third digit on the fighting number" and you and your friends would throw a card and see who loses.

I'm really just into it for the artwork. They were cheap and they'll be a good conversation piece and I can have a little bit of video game in my increasing adult styled home.

The artwork ranges from unique illustrations, like these of our favorite general contractor:

to artwork from the Famicom label...

all the way to blurry ass screenshots of City Connection*, that really look like someone took a Polaroid of a fuzzy RCA...

Like many things in life, it seems like the time of menko has come and gone. Strong through the 50's and tapering off into the 80's, I came across them while looking for a Saduhara Oh t-shirt...and... that's not important.

But, there you go... the connection between Pogs, Top Trumps and video games goes deeper than just Jeff Gerstman.

That gorgeous screenshot you see before you is from Sega's Dottori-Kun. Those of you who are old enough (or who watched enough Game Room Quicklooks) will recognize this lay-out to be similar to many games. Dodge 'Em for the 2600, for instance.

Who cares? Two games look a like! And you'd be right, until this point. Dodge 'Em came out in 1980. Dottori-Kun came out a full decade later in 1990. And in many ways it's inferior to Dodge 'Em as there's no color and no real sound effects to speak of. Should you be especially young or naive and think that all video games made before 2004 were just colored blocks chasing each other around... This is the same year that Golden Axe was released in arcades. And as far as technology was concerned, Golden Axe was made by the same company at the same time using the exact same processor as Dottori-Kun. And much like Golden Axe, if you were an arcade operator, you'd be shelling out thousands of dollars to get your hands on it.

What gives?

Like all good stories, this one begins with Japan's Electrical Appliance and Material Control Law. The magic and specific regulations that governs all the electric wonderment that land has to offer. Like many laws, it's not necessarily perfect on it's face and can have unintended consequences. In this case, it adversely affected the sale of JAMMA cabinets.

JAMMA was and is a uniform standard for arcade cabinets. Standard voltage, standard buttons, standard video, standard connections. Before JAMMA you couldn't really change arcade games. Have a Pac-Man? Want a Donkey Kong? Well, you're buying a whole new cabinet.

With games and cabinets built to a JAMMA standard, you can just yank out the game specific hardware and swap it out. Kids on your route not playing DJ Boy like they used to? Well, take that cabinet and convert it to a Street Fighter II!

And that's how you'd wind up with arcade machines that say "Sunset Riders" but really it's playing "Battletoads".

But let's say you don't want to sacrifice one game for another. You can buy generic cabinets. Famously the Irem Madonna, Namco Consolette and the Sega Astro City to name a few. Then your Japanese OCD will be satisfied with nice, uniform cabinets.

Researching Dottori-Kun you'll see two theories it exists. One says it's for testing purposes only. The other says it's due to the Electrical Appliance and Material Control law. Doing some digging into the subject, I think they're both correct. In order to appease the law and not be selling an item in an 'unfinished state' and also as an easy way to test the hardware that you've received.

Even more digging shows that while produced in 1990, it was decided to make the game as cheap as possible (because you're essentially giving it away), so it was a re-purposed version of a game called Head On, which was developed in 1979 by Gremlins Entertainment for Sega.

So now you know about the shovelware, pack-in, game of the Arcades. Dottori-Kun.

So this is a thing you can buy for $500+

So... should you? Hands-on impressions will be valuable insight in the near future, but if you can read between the lines a little, you might find the Analogue Nt wanting at that price point.

The aesthetic and build and quality, I have nothing to say about. If you're willing to pay $500 for a block of aluminum, go for it.

This is not new or optimized hardware. It's a Famicom, gutted and reboxed.

What I mainly object to, however, is based on the FAQ released, there's some snakes being oiled. I'll get to a few of my points now.

Play NES in glorious 1080p. The HDMI Adapter is an external RGB to HDMI upscaler designed exclusively for the Analogue Nt. It is a true upscaler (no stretching) and outputs 1080p or 720p perserving the original aspect ratio. It even has a built in scanline generator for that retro CRT feel.

We were able to procure a large quantity of HVC-001 Famicom systems that were in cosmetically undesirable unsellable condition. The plastic enclosure of the HVC-001 systems are notoriously yellowed, brittle and damaged. While the poor enclosure quality left these systems undesirable and sitting on a shelf, fortunately the CPU and PPU inside remain untouched and fully functional.

This is a blurb from their site. For starts, a stock NES or Famicom does NOT output RGB. Unlike most game consoles the NES doesn't even process in RGB. All image processing is actually done in NTSC color values, which is actually sort of arbitrary.

When you buy an 'RGB' modded NES, what you're mostly paying for is an RGB PPU that had to be harvested from arcade hardware. Swapping out the PPU for one from a, for example, Nintendo Play Choice 10 would allow you to claim an RGB output. Using a stock Famicom, which the Nt is, you are at best converting a Composite signal to RGB.

Skip over this part if you don't give a rats ass about how video works

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Ultimately the best picture quality comes from preserving the four main signals from a device until they reach a display. Whether it's digital or analog, is honestly not as important.

For a video signal you have four main signals. Red, Green, Blue and Sync.

Normally when you're playing video games, you're gonna have audio too...so for the NES you'll have an Audio signal as well (mono).

So for the most oldest of school connector the RF plug. That one cable screw-in jobby that goes directly into the back of your television?

It combines ALL the video and the audio into one signal. And the signals will co-mingle and interfere and degrade. Then the TV breaks the signals back into their original parts and displays the picture.

With this method you will have the maximum amount of noise and color bleed.

It beats nothing, but it far from an optimal solution.

The NES, and the Famicom, you had your next option. The Composite cable. You'll recognize this as the standard "Yellow, White, Red" plugs that you had on your VCR and maybe coming out of a camcorder before we all started to have HDTVs.

This is an improvement over the RF switch, because it breaks out the audio from the video. Again, keeping the signals separate is a good thing. The issue remains though that 4 out of the 5 signals are still being co-mingled on a single wire. So, there's noise and degradation. How does that look? Well, I'm lazy so I'm ripping off the godfather of videogame RGB Lawerence. GamesX.com. These are captures of Necronomicom Digital Pinball for the Saturn, but it illustrates.

The standard Famicom/NES doesn't even have S-Video, let alone RGB.

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What Analogue is describing though, is basically, an NES run through a video converter. That's never an optimal solution. Every conversion will degrade the image. Scaling it up will only INCREASE the noise.

And this is for $500? Excuse me, $550, the HDMI adapter costs extra.

It might be an AWESOME upscaler. For $50? I doubt it is. Also it only works with the Analogue Nt? A decent upscaler usually runs about $200-$500 and you can use it with anything you'd like. Getting RGB out of an original SNES is actually incredibly easy!

Look, it's a pretty case. And you might not care if the video looks muddy. But caveat emptor, for serious.

You can get an NES, with a converter, modded with an RGB PPU (or an RGBNES board) and an really nice multi-purpose upscaler for less than $400. Maybe even less than $300.

But they're popping out a stock Famicom and getting onto your TV through less-than-optimal means for a very high premium.

Update: Don't feel like reading? Here's a handy chart!

Jeff made a brief comment recently about how he has no attachment to Nintendo's hardware.

While I don't think anyone will argue that Nintendo is currently doing much other than churning out gimmicks at the moment, it's really narrow-minded to say you don't care if they make hardware anymore.

Focusing on ideas that were iterated immediately, you can actually put forth a case for Nintendo being the vanguard of video game technology. I'm not going to go "Famicom had a microphone in one of the controllers, so Nintendo invented voice control". The Gameboy Camera has no relation to the Kinect. I don't like motion controls, I'm not going to even get into that stuff. If anyone thinks I'm stretching, let me know.

To start, while it's fallen out of favor for dual-analog sticks, Nintendo is primarily responsible for what we know as 'joypad' controls. Prior to the Game And Watch controls, home consoles would just try to mimic the microswitch joystick of arcades. However they'd usually use cheap pressure contacts. It's like saying "A Car is a box with 4 shapes for wheels... We'll use squares cause circles cost too much". Players in the UK will attest that a shitty joystick is one of the worst things you can try to use. Quality, and expensive, joysticks work great! Go grab an Atari 2600 stick and call me in a hour. It's a nightmare knowing what we now know.

Speaking of analog sticks, the Nintendo 64 was a return of technology you had in the Bally's Astrocade, but applying it to 3D gaming was really monumental. In some regards the Nintendo 64 having two control inputs (granted usually the Analog and the C - Buttons) was the fore-runner for what is now the universal way of controlling modern games. Move with one, camera with the other.

I don't think anyone here would need to be reminded that the Playstation did not ship with analog controls. Only after the Nintendo 64 did Sony release the Dualshock, the structure of which is still used to this day on the PS4. And the 4 button face with shoulder buttons? That's Nintendo.

Sticking with the Nintendo 64, what about the Rumble Pak? Personally I can take or leave force feedback...I don't think it's very important, but it was rapidly and readily emulated.

There was a period of time where the defacto standard was two players for a console. You had multi-taps, sure, and again the Bally's Astrocade was there first, but from the Nintendo 64 until the wireless revolution, your video game console was probably going to have 4 controller ports.

Speaking of wireless, the first wireless controller that was worth a god damned was the Wavebird on the Gamecube. In no uncertain terms.

These are all, good and in many ways now the standard, ideas for game hardware.

Nintendo is FAR from perfect. Failing miserably at 3D once and then foundering the second time. Taking a not-really-useful two screen touch screen from the handheld to the console.

And dragging their feet into optical media and online gaming.

However, Nintendo innovates hardware in a meaningful way that is adapted by the industry. Perhaps more than anyone else.

In what might be the best video game movie yet made, famed gonzo director Takahashi Miike's "Ace Attorney" manages to pay literal tribute to the source material. All the little touches from character reactions, sound cues and even the inexplicable confetti that follows a Not Guilty verdict. The japanese Blu-Ray should play on most US hardware, although English subtitles require some... gray market practices.

It's the stuff dreams are made of!

I give it an S rank out of a possible SSS rank.

Over the past few days I've been digging deep into Xbox Live's Indie Games. As everyone knows, there's an incredible amount of dreck available from calculators to an obscene number of snake clones.

Suffice to say, it's hard to find something worth your time - let alone worth your money. Sometimes you'll find a game that is not perfect, but shows a lot of potential. So that's what I'm focusing on here. Developers with potential. People that with a dollar and some encouragement might be able to turn out something genius.

That said, I came across a few gems and when I found out that several shared a common creator, I poured myself into their back catalog.

Kohei Gallery has released several Xbox Indie games to date. Up front I'll tell you that they are all, at best, 70% towards being amazing games. The concepts are solid, but could use a little additional work. Graphics are charming pixel art, but I could do with less cheesy 3D CGI. All are playable, but feel mini-game style limited. The ideas, however, are strong. Japanese Dreamcast strong. Crazy strong. We need this.

Shooting Chicken Revenge

I've tried my best to distill Shooting Chicken Revenge into a single McBite. The best I've come up with is Japanese Deathmetal Chicken Horde Mode.

The game plays a surprising amount like a closed-off Abuse. Combat is familiar to anyone who's recently played Shoot Many Robots. What makes the game unique, is the light cooking mechanics. You're actually able to use the background microwaves to cook up health items. Additionally, killing a chicken with a shotgun (which removes the feathers) followed up by a flamethrower (which roasts the chicken) and then a headshot will generate delicious yakitori!

The only flaw, for me, is I think they could have leaned a lot heavier into that form of item creation. I mean, you have cabbage and other vegetables laying around. What if, when you went to the microwave you could put 4 items in, the recipe of which generates a different power up? Opportunity missed, in my mind.

That said, you also have a persistant upgrade system where you can exchange Chicken Points for weapon upgrades. Just like real life.

I didn't mention the guttural Japanese Death Metal, but... now I have.

Do not trust the auto-save. You must manually save. Demo is free, paid version is 80 MSP.

The Houchi Play

Finally, a video game where you play a perverted old man who wants to sneak up on young girls. Oh, wait...

Taro Heibon is an awesome character. He's a masochist who wants to be mistreated and maneuvers around the stage with a sideways ass-walking. The Houchi Play has you assist him with his perversion, periodically chugging alcohol. And it's a dating game...? Sorta? Think Green Light, Yellow Light, Red Light, STOP but in video game form with a little bit of Punch Out mixed in as all the girls have different 'tells' and ways of responding to sound. At it's most basic, it's alternating button presses but the creepy trappings make it a whole lot more appealing. You can even flirt with Ai The Maid who stars in her own game...

Maid-San's Caving Adventure

Starting off with all the Hatsune Miku generated music you can take, Maid-San's Caving Adventure is on the surface a straight forward platformer.

That's not say it's not without it's depth. The first few times you play though, you'll find yourself wondering why you're not getting any points. It's not enough to simply avoid the CHUD-like Bennars. Scoring of the game requires you to move quickly, avoid being seen and taking as few steps and jumps as possible. In that regard, it has a little bit of the appeal of Track-Mania. Anyone who's played a game in the past 10 years will be able to clear the level, but it'll take practice and planning to get the coveted S-Rank!

Of course, there's a little more to the game that makes it interesting. Namely, Ai's only form of defense is hiding like a 2 year old - namely turtling up and shivering from the "IF I CAN'T SEE YOU YOU CAN'T SEE ME" school of toddler logic. Turns out, though, it works! For whatever reason, the Benars will walk right past you despite your hiding in plain sight. So you add in the risk/reward factor of getting as close to the enemy as you can before 'trembling'.

Additionally, be aware of your sneezing meter. Damp places make Ai sneeze. So do cigarettes. So watch out for smoking enemies.

In Conclusion

None of these games are perfect, but show real potential. I think we need more developers like this, turning out wacky PSX era games. So while my stance on Kohei Gallery is...

I don't actually expect anyone do spend money because I say so. At the very least, download the games. Give them a try. None of these games are the next great thing, but with enough encouragement (monetary and otherwise), who knows what we'll get?

Turns out there's a flash demo of JRAN. Obviously it's a stripped down version of the retail, but it does give you a very good idea of how to utilize the play field to compensate for different character types. It's a timed demo where you only play offense.

I managed to put up 50 points in 60 seconds.

I ask you to stand in judgement of me. Tell me if I am wrong...

It's a little thing that annoys me, but it never fails to make me sneer whenever I see it. Anytime I see a Kickstarter - particularly for something that is essentially a digital good - where you don't actually get a copy of the item, I get pissed.

For a movie or a game, if I donate at the lowest level you set... then the least you can do is gimme one when it's done. There's been more than a few times where I considered donating until I saw that, oh, you need to donate at the $10 tier to get a copy of this game. Well, shit. I guess I'll wait for it to be done, if it will ever be done, and then just buy it on iTunes for $2.

Notch receives a lot of flack, and probably a lot of it justified, for selling his alpha code non-game in a way that the audience is basically funding it's development.

But you at least GET a copy of his alpha code non-game from funding it's development.

If you're kickstarting a hot sauce company, I get it if you need something more than a few dollars to send me a bottle. It's a tangible good, you gotta pay shipping. However if I'm willing to shovel over some sheckels for your Spinja documentary, you need to cntrl+c / cntrl+v me an mkv. It's a huge win/win for you. You get money AND viewership. The whole thing just strikes me as disengenuous where you're all "Look, we're the little guy here. We just want to share our creativity with the world and have our voices heard... please note our voices will be heard by those who donate at the $25 or higher level. $5, $10 and $15 can go fuck themselves".

Wherein I bitch for the sake of bitching. These shirts are less than perfect, waaaah. Now I'll start by saying, they're on sale for $10. Which is why I'm complaining, because I can't resist the urge for commerce like an moron. I had to buy one. On paper, the shirts are mostly unobjectionable. I ignored the Kingdom Hearts shirt, because gross. I ignored the Mario Shirt, because it was horrible artwork. So here's what is left:

Dig Dug. Reasonable design, it's very pixelated. Pookah... Check, Dig Dug... Check, Highly Feminine Lavender that my cellphone doesn't emulate... Checkity Check. Now if you can pull of what is literally a little girl's shirt color (I have no beef with purple, I have purple shirts but this shit should have glitter and kitties on it) could be the best one.

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Pac-Man. Now we're talking! Pac-man love is everywhere and what better than his classic sound effect of... nom? Wait. Awesome, so not only are we taking the bullshit kitty eating meme (birthed from The Cookie Monster) and supplanting the "Wakka Wakka Wakka" that is the Pac-man's birthright but zoom in for some pro-fess-shun-al typography. That's right! "Nom-Nom Nom" because for $10 you're only getting one fucking hyphen, son.

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Pitfall. Now what could i be upset about Pitfall for!? Available in Small and XXXL. Please note this is not an exaggeration. Your options for this shirt are thinner than any video game player is likely to be or obesely housebound. A person could argue that they just ran out of the other sizes. Those people I label 'asshole'.

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Mortal Kombat. Not pictured because sold out. I'm going to pretend there was something wrong with it, though. Like Scorpion has a cowboy hat and lasso and the shirt is made out of two ply paper napkins.

And the winner is? Pac-Man. And the reason? I figure how rarely I wear a t-shirt, odds are this will be at home while playing Pacman CE DX (as well all know, the "don't wear the band shirt to the concert" rule is inverted for video games). There you go. Cheap video game t-shirts at your local Target brand stores. Get one, don't get one, whatever.

So while watching the mockbuster Battle of Los Angeles (not to be confused with the blockbuster Battle: Los Angeles), it became readily apparent that it's just not possible to let stuff this bad slide. You have to be cognoscente of how ridiculous it is. I stopped mid movie to upload this to youtube...

I mean... is anyone else saving a bullet for a jap* who thinks he is the re-in-car-na-tion of Adolph Hitler? And when in bootcamp do you learn that awesome stair parkour?

So a handful of cameras, some basic video editing tools and anyone can whip out an invasion flick? I guess what I'm getting at is, a Whiskey Media remake of ID4 starring the GB crew with special guest Will Smith (welcome to erf). With Vinny and the Tricaster can't no body hold them down. I'd even be willing to forego my membership t-shirt for that.

*I'm 90% sure he said 'chap' but... who knows.