Since August 1st of this year, I’ve been building and selling custom joysticks through Twitter. This small venture has been an unexpected success.

People love them, and that makes me very happy. I’ve sold about 140 so far, and I’ve built and shipped about 100 all around the world.

The past few months have been a wild ride, and I’d like to tell you some about it.

The Highest Quality Parts

The basic concept behind every joystick I’ve made so far is simple: bring the best quality arcade parts to home consoles and computers.

I’ve been using Japanese arcade joysticks and buttons from Sanwa Denshi, a firm that makes some of the best arcade assemblies in the world.

The results have been incredible. Games I thought previously unplayable are suddenly rendered fun, like lifting some kind of fog.

Mushy, worn out control pads have come between me and gaming for too long, and I had no idea. When you push a button or move the lever on one of my sticks, something happens. Every time. There is no blaming the controller for gaming failures.

That extra level of accuracy brings new life to older games. Especially on platforms that didn’t have great controllers to begin with. Figuring this out has made me want to share these joysticks with everybody. But let’s take a step back and see how this all got started.

[ Continue reading I’ve Been Building Joysticks » ]

Side 1: Grunge fonts galore

1994 was a very good year for the Super NES. It’s around the time when US Super NES sales began to exceed those of the Genesis again, and of course, the release year of some of the games listed on this large fold-out poster. Chief among them, of course, is Super Metroid, which I consider to be one of the greatest video games of all time.

Some people like Donkey Kong Country as well.

This poster came packed with first-party Super NES games sold around 1994 — and I quite possibly got it from inside the Super Metroid box itself. (I wish I hadn’t separated all those documents out long ago, but I did it mainly to focus on scanning them for this very column.)

I’ve talked about Nintendo’s Play it Loud campaign before (especially here and here, and here), so I won’t go into it again. But it was a very effective campaign that found back against Sega’s assault on Nintendo’s kiddie image.

The back side of this fold-out poster contained the obligatory Nintendo Power magazine ad, coupled with a non-obligatory Star Fox graphic. Neat.

Side 2: While you’re at it, subscribe to Nintendo Power

Discussion Topic: What’s the most underrated Super NES game?

This is really bizarre.

News hit a couple days ago that “iam8bit,” a boutique retailer of video game nostalgia products, is releasing a limited edition Street Fighter II cartridge for the Super NES.

It is part of a Street Fighter 30th Anniversary package for US $100 (plus $24 shipping, inexplicably) that includes trinket bonuses designed to lure cash out of a video game collector’s wallet.

The cartridge looks and supposedly plays like a real Super NES cartridge on a real Super NES console. There’s only one catch: iam8bit says it might catch on fire while you play it.

I am not making this up. Here’s a quote of the actual product page:

WARNING: Use of this reproduction game cartridge (the “Product”) on the SNES gaming hardware may cause the SNES console to overheat or catch fire. The SNES hardware is deemed a vintage collectible, so please exercise extreme caution when using the Product and make sure there is fire extinguishment equipment nearby. Use of the Product is at the sole risk of the user. The Product is sold “as is”. Neither iam8bit, Inc. nor Capcom Co, Ltd. make any representation or warranty, express or implied, of any kind, including any warranty of merchantability of fitness for a particular use, or that the Product is safe to use, and iam8bit, Inc. or Capcom Co, Ltd. shall have no liability for damage to property or persons arising from use of the Product. Nintendo of America is in no way associated with the release of this Product.

[ Continue reading New Limited Edition Street Fighter II Cartridge Could Literally Burst Into Flames — or Just Ruin your SNES » ]

By now, all of you have probably heard about Nintendo’s upcoming Super NES Classic Edition, which the firm announced on June 26. It’s a tiny HDMI-capable Super NES that plays 21 built-in games and will retail for $79.99 US. And it’s due for release on September 29, 2017.

It is also, quite possibly, intended to be a huge publicity stunt.

You guys may remember the absolute fiasco that was the NES Classic Edition — Nintendo’s miniature HDMI NES with built-in games. The NES Classic edition was announced on July 16, 2016 and launched on November 11th of that year for $59.99.

Of course, when November 11th, came around, shoppers snapped up the limited supply Nintendo produced within seconds on Amazon.com and at other retailers, leaving many thousands of NES fans frustrated and unable to ever buy the tiny wonder console for a reasonable price.

Yes, that included me. Scalpers on eBay turned around and immediately sold the NES Classic Edition for 200% the retail price, and today they go for around $200-$300 unopened on eBay. (I did eventually buy one on eBay for around $250.)

I’m tempted to ask: Will the Super NES Classic Edition suffer the same fate? But this isn’t the right question. The question should be: Is the launch and availability of this new product going to make a mockery of Nintendo’s cultural legacy?

[ Continue reading Nintendo is Playing Risky Games With Its Cultural Legacy » ]

“A VAST RPG WORLD IN STUNNING GRAPHICS!”

Discussion Topic: What’s your favorite RPG on the Super NES?

This keychain looks like it would hurt in your pocket

Here we see an ad for the Super NES version of Ultima VII: The Black Gate. Apparently, when VII received its port to Nintendo’s console, its Roman numeral designation got the axe. As a result, the title became merely Ultima: The Black Gate.

I’m not a big fan of the SNES ports of the Ultima games (VI and VII). In the process of chopping things down to fit in a reasonably-sized ROM cartridge, a lot of content and features were lost (including the Roman numeral in this case). But at the same time, those ports likely gave console fans a taste of the Ultima universe that they would not have had otherwise.

As for me, I was lucky enough to originally play the Ultima games on the PC (and the Atari ST, in the case of Ultima III), so I guess I am spoiled.

Discussion Topic of the Week: In your opinion, what’s the best console port of any Ultima game?

—
See Also:

Ultima VII Immortality Contest (RSOTW, 2007)
Ultima VI (RSOTW, 2009)
Ultima V (RSOTW, 2009)
The Savage Empire (RSOTW, 2010)
Tiny Pocket Ultima (RSOTW, 2013)

Before the Sega Scream, there was the Sega Insult

This is a rather famous early ad for the Sega Genesis that I have never featured until now. It played upon the dramatic graphical differences between the Genesis and the NES, claiming “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t.”

It’s worth emphasizing that Sega is comparing its console to the 8-bit NES here, and not the Super NES — Nintendo’s 16-bit machine had not yet been released in the US, allowing Sega to get a jump on the next generation in the American market.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What year did you first get a Sega Genesis? What were your first games for it?

How Video Games Are Designed

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite Tetris spin-off game?

Man, that basketball player is pissed.

The Super NES / Genesis era coincided with a second golden age of third-party video game controllers and peripherals (the first golden age being the Atari 2600 era). If you browse through the Retro Scan archives, I’m sure you’ll see quite a few.

One of the stand-out gimmicks of this era arrived courtesy of Triax Technologies: the Turbo Touch 360. Representing a series of controllers for various platforms (SNES, Genesis, and NES with IBM planned, but I’m uncertain if it launched), the Turbo Touch line relied on a touch-sensitive pad in lieu of a traditional D-pad.

Using the touch pad, you didn’t have to physically push down on the D-pad to register movements; instead, you lightly slid your finger over the cross-shaped touch pad, sort of like a laptop touch pad. Ideally, this should result in quicker movements, but it could also result in more errors.

There was another supposed benefit to the touch pad technology as well. This 1993 Chicago Tribune article positions the Turbo Touch as a cure for game-induced thumb blisters (at the suggestion of Triax’s marketing staff, as the article suggests).

I’ve heard a lot about people getting thumb blisters over the years while playing video games, but I’ve never actually seen it happen. That’s because I’ve only heard about it through game peripheral advertisements. Such blisters are plausible, of course, but you’d have to push down on the D-pad very hard and rub it around over a long period of time. Maybe my thumb skin is just tough or something, but it’s never been a problem for me.

(Full disclosure: I did get a blister in the middle palm of my hand by rapidly rotating a Suncom Slik Stick over and over for about an hour while playing Decathlon for the Atari 2600 in the early 1990s)

I’m not saying that no one ever got a thumb blister from playing a video game, of course (do a Google search) — just that it wasn’t the epidemic that companies like Triax have led us to believe.

Call me skeptical, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the the video game thumb blister meme originated as a marketing angle in an era that aimed to be loud, raw, and edgy (think “Play it Loud“, Sega scream, etc.). What could be edgier than actually getting physically injured while playing video games? That’s intense!

I actually own a Turbo Touch 360 pad for the Genesis that I never got around to trying for some reason (I bought it at a thrift store when my Genesis was packed away). Right now I have no idea where it is. Perhaps I should dig it out and put the promise of touch-fueled gameplay to the test.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever gotten a blister from playing video games? Tell us how it happened.

Dare ye gaze into the sacred gems of immortality?

Here we have an ad for the Super NES port of Obitus (1994), a Psygnosis RPG for the Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS originally released in 1991.

I’d like to say I’ve played this one, but I can’t for the life of me remember if I actually liked it. I know I tried it, especially after first scanning this ad some years ago. Is anyone out there a fan of either the PC or SNES versions of Obitus? It sure looks cool.

Discussion Topic of the Week: In your opinion, what’s the best PC to video game console RPG port of the 1980s or 90s?