'He's On Fire': The True Story Behind 'NBA Jam'

Honestly I thought this video was going to be much longer. I assumed the "True Story" behind the making of NBA Jam would involve more than mailing a couple video tapes to the NBA. Still, I was super rad at this game and had the record for longest winning streak at the arcade near me, 15-0!

Jessie's Links

Love playing old school games? You need this tiny arcade Machine! You have got to be kidding me, what is this an Arcade machine for ants? How on earth would you use that tiny little controller much less be able to see anything on the tiny little screen. This is a fantastic waste of time.

5 Things I Learned Trying To Get Laid In 'Skyrim'. OMG you guys this is the most fantastic/disturbed thing you'll read today. Basically its story of one lonely schlub that just wants to enact out one weird sex fantasy using Skyrim and his trials and tribulations along the way. Now I've known for a while now that you can MOD in a bunch of nudity into Skyrim but I had no idea some of the depraved nonsense you can add to the game. God bless this guy for being as open and candid about the whole thing as he was.

This is my stone cold lock of the week of the century of links today.

See Rick Springfield's Massive 'Star Wars' Toy Collection. Turns out Rick Springfield is a huge Star Wars nerd and has a HUGE toy collection. Good for him, what's the point of having Jessie's Girl money if you don't spend it all on something rad?

8 bits, 8 players, 8 projectors, and one Nintendo Entertainment System. I have a hard time wrapping my head around what these guys and gals did but it's pretty cool looking. Essentially their playing Mario Bros 3 in the round.

Taxpayer Links

Inside the Redman MTV Cribs Episode. Stop what you are doing and read this wonderfully written article on one of the seminal moments of MTV. I haven't been this as excited to link to something since the oral history of Baywatch a couple years ago. They even interview Sugar Bear. SUGAR BEAR!

Chris Christie Spent $82,594 Of Taxpayer Money At An NFL Stadium. HOLY SHITSNACKS that's a lot of cotton candy. It's roughly $5,000 a game. What are you buying that's costing that kind of money? Is the Old Milwaukee being personally delivered by the Swedish Bikini team? Man, American politics are crazy crooked. Maybe not Italian level crooked but still super crooked.

Black Widow Absent From A Toy Based On One Of Her Coolest AoU Moments. Of course she is. I've mentioned this before but holy crap is it hard to find female representation in kids toys. I've actually been sort of happy with the Skylanders videogame/toys in this aspect. There are quite a few cool female Skylanders and miracle of all miracles, my son doesn't have a problem playing them at all. Now if they could just lower the price of Swap Force guys a bit...

The top ten arcade racing games of the 1980s. This article is hella old but I don't care. Hard Driving was the bomb yo. I swear I learned how to drive a stick on that thing. I mean I didn't of course. All I learned about was how to dump the clutch in a tremendously dangerous fashion but who cares? Did you see those 3-D graphics?

Successful Links

What Does Your “Street Fighter 2” Character Say About You? As loathe as I am to post anything from buzzfeed this article has some truth to it. Also E. Honda is the best. If you time it properly (and you're playing SF2: Tournament Edition) you can destroy an enemy with a single combo. Jumping strong kick, strong kick, throw, hundred hand slap, drink your slurpee while your opponent cries.

12 Successful Kickstarters That Never Delivered. Here's why I would never give money to Kickstarter, there's no guarantee that your dollars will turn into the product you want. Don't get me wrong, I like that Kickstarter exists, I'm sure it's been quite the boon to people who couldn't get money through traditional venture capital means but It's not for me. If I'm going to spend 10 bucks on a video game It's going to be on steam and I'm going to be playing it immediately.

Leveling up the barcade: A visit to Chicago’s Pac-Man themed Level 257. Whooo Daddy, this Chicago barcade looks pretty sweet. I'm a big fan of Dorky's down in Tacoma but it's not exactly the classiest joint in the world.

Farewell, Bro: How Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye changed Marvel Comics. I'm not sure I'm down with saying Hawkeye changed Marvel Comics, I think it was more of the result of a shift in thinking at Marvel but whatever. Matt Fraction's Hawkeye was rad, if you're ever over at the house ask me to grab you some issues.

The Further Adventures of my Raspberry Pi

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the new Raspberry Pi I bought on a whim and a prayer. Well last Friday I took the day off from work so I could sit down put it together and play with the thing for a while. I mean I didn't take the day off just to play with the Pi, I took the day off because I'd been at work for 11 straight days and I needed a break. It just so happens that I had nothing to do that day other than pick up cookies at the store and play with tiny computers.

Here's what happened, more or less.

Sorry about the poor quality of all these pictures. My camera phone has a scratch on the lens and my basement has horrible lighting. This is the Pi nestled into the case I bought for it. There weren't any screws or anything, it took all of 2 minutes to get it lined up and stick the heatsink on the processor. You're looking at the side with the Power Jack, HDMI out and 1/8th inch jack for RCA outs. The side you can't see on the top left has 4 USB outs and a standard 10/100 network connector.

Three hours of dinking around later here's what it looks like with RetroPie installed. Two big issues tripped me up getting it started. The pre-installed OS the pie came with doesn't include RetroPie the emulation software I wanted to run. The Pi runs it's OS from a microsd card, and my desktop doesn't have anyway to read/write to one even with the micro to standard sd card adapter I have. That meant a bit of swapping files around on a USB stick with my laptop, not a huge deal just time consuming. Then I realized I didn't have a USB keyboard lying around the house, every keyboard I have is a mechanical keyboard with an old PS2 adapter. But wait! My parents gave me their old computer, it's in the garage somewhere... So after an hour of going through the garage and my crawlspace I finally found a wireless USB keyboard my parents gave me. Worked like a champ. So after all that the Pi booted to RetroPie, time to get cookies.

Back home and full of chocolate creme stuffed Tuxedos, I get to work installing my snes knock off controllers and downloading some ROMs (games). Both were a giant pain in the ass. The Raspberry Pi by default boots to a command prompt and guess who doesn't know anything about linux commands? This guy. The RetroPie software I installed changes that and boots the Pi directly to the Emulation Station but to configure the controllers you have to get back to the command prompt and do a bunch of typing. Could I do it now in like 5 minutes? Sure, but when first confronted with it I was super confused. Also loading ROMs on the Pi wasn't the easiest thing in the world. Finding and downloading them was easy but for whatever reason even when I plugged the Pie into my router Windows7 wouldn't recognize it on the network. I tried the things people suggested and gave up after about 20 minutes of tinkering around. I figured I would just copy everything via USB drive again. Oh man was that a nightmare. As it turns out Rasbian (the GUI OS you can load from the command prompt) wouldn't recognize my thumb drive unless it started with the drive already plugged in. Man windows plug and play has spoiled me. Once I figured that out it was easy enough to transfer all my newly downloaded ROMs onto the Pi.

The first game I booted up was Toe Jam and Earl.

I eventually got Windows7 to recognize the Pi on the network. It involved ssh settings and IP addresses. Again, something I could do in 5 minutes now but it took at least an hour to figure out the hard way. Moving files over to the Pi is now a snap. The picture you see above is my son playing Final Fight. So far we've tried about a dozen retro games and his favorites are the side scrolling brawlers like Final Fight, TMNT, Captain America and the Avengers, etc. We've tried some Mario games but he's 5 and gets frustrated with the timing aspects of those games pretty quickly. Sonic was a big hit.

All in all the RetroPie project was a big success. The one thing I was never able to figure out is a way to map some higher-function controls to the USB controllers I have. This means that to exit a game or turn of the Pi you have to use a keyboard. The wireless one my parents gave me is a pretty good option but it's a desktop keyboard, it's huge. I'm thinking at picking up a smaller one, maybe with a built in touchpad, on amazon.

Finding ROMs hasn't been that difficult. I found practically every NES, SNES and Genesis game I could ever want. I haven't had much luck finding Commodore64 or TurboGrafx-16 games yet and the few AppleII games I found didn't load right. Still, when you consider how expensive Retro Gaming has gotten over the last couple years even if I just stick with those 3 systems the RetroPie easily pays for itself.

Star Wars: Battle Pod

How weird is this, the two most exciting video game prospects in my near future are playing Apple II games on my Raspberry Pi and going to a freaking arcade to play Star Wars Battle Pod. What year is this, 1987?

Check out this feature on the new Star Wars: Battle Pod arcade game, this thing looks so baller. I bet you it's going to cost like 5 bucks for 60 seconds of game play and I don't even care. Take all my monies!

New Star Wars Arcade Game: Battle Pod

Sweet Christmas this game looks rad. It actually hasn't been that long (a couple months) since I've been to a straight up, traditional arcade. I was surprised at how many games actually caught my eye. If I hadn't been with the family I could easily have dropped 20 dollars. In particular there was one flying game with reminded me of Afterburner but like on steroids.

It doesn't look like it does in the video but I hope the chair you sit in moves a little bit. It would be shame to have that big immersive screen and not go the whole ten yards. Maybe when I go to Emerald City next year I'll have to schedule in some time at Gameworks.

Chuck E. Cheese's: The Review

I had a lot of fun at Chuck E. Cheese's this last weekend. You heard me right, Chuck E. Cheese's.

It had been years (around 20) since I had stepped foot inside a Chuck E. Cheese's. I remember I was out of high school and looking to kill some time before a movie started. I also remember being really unimpressed. The games were old, the place was run down and they were still ripping people off with tokens. Honestly who uses tokens these days? I wasn't very excited when my son started asking to have his next birthday there. Instead of blowing a couple hundred dollars on bad pizza and scary animatronics I made a deal with him, if he was good for his first week of pre-school we would go to to Chuck E. Cheese's. He was and we went.

The first thing I noticed when we got there was how clean and new everything seemed. It was bright and open, not at all what I was expecting. The emphasis has clearly been put on "boardwalk" style games that reward kids with tickets. There were a few traditional arcade games like The Fast and the Furious or Guitar Hero but I would say 90% of the games didn't have any sort of screen or monitor. They also had really basic games that catered to smaller kids, which was great. My son gets plenty of video game/screen time at home it was a relief that he spent most of his time there playing physical/boardwalk style games. Quite frankly, I get enough screen time at home. I was more than happy to play skee-ball for a couple hours.

Chuck E. Cheese's still uses the BS token system but this time it paid off for us. A friend of the family gave us a jar full of Tokens so we essentially played for free. Some of the games are a terrible value in that the game is over in 5 seconds and you're left with one ticket but if you were careful you could probably squeeze a half hour out of just a couple bucks. One of their big selling points is that every game costs one token. That seems like a better deal than it is since most of the time you're only getting 3 tokens for a dollar.

Logan's favorite game turned out to be this silly car ride where you get your picture taken with Chuck (as seen above). We left with 5 different pictures of him and Mr Cheese. Ironically he was deathly afraid of the real Chuck E. Cheese who came out every hour to high five everyone and lead all the kids in a song and dance routine.

On a scale of to 1 to Ms Pac-Man Chuck E Cheese's scored a solid B+. The Pizza was MUCH better than I expected but Pepsi at the soda fountain? Who does that?

Public Links

A collection of Seattle public access TV stars. Hey it's that guy, and that other guy. I kinda of remember them!

Full disclosure, I didn't have cable TV growing up. So my entire exposure to the public access channel was relegated to sleep overs and slumber parties at friends houses. Still, I remember watching that guy ramble about Courtney Love murdering Kurt Cobain. Or the guy that would play porn clips every once in a while. Of course they were never porn clips you wanted to see, it was always like middle aged hairy Europeans getting it on. Just terrible stuff.

20 Halloween Costumes That Will Destroy Your Childhood. Destroy my childhood might be a bit of an overstatement. Still, who thought sexy Oscar the Grouch was a good idea?

A Live-Action, Nightwing-Centered ‘Teen Titans’ Show Is Coming, But There’s A Catch. Man, DC really is looking to corner the Superhero to small screen marketplace. Arrow, Flash, Gotham, now rumors of Teen Titans and a Supergirl project? Teen Titans, sorry I mean Titans, seems like an absolute slam dunk. The cartoon from the early aughts was super popular, those kids have grown up and are right in the CW's target demographic. Play down the action so you can make it on the cheap and play up the melodrama and boom you've hit the Smallville sweet spot.

Complete Starcade Episodes Online. Hey kids remember Starcade? No? Hey middle aged adults, remember Starcade? Thought so.

How “Empire Records” Became The Unlikely Film Of A Generation. Ugh... Empire Records is a fun movie but let's get one thing straight it's a stupid movie. Sure, I'll watch the hell out of it Saturday at 10am but "the film of a generation", who honestly thinks that? This is all about the iGenerations's rampant nostalgia. I swear if I read one more article about how something that was incredibly mediocre was AMAZING just because it came out in 1995 I'm going to barf.

That being said.. Liv Tyler in this movie cangetit

Galloping Links

Posters for Sin City 2. I almost forgot this was coming out this year. I've already seen Captain America 2 and X-Men: Days of Future Continuity Errors and I have strong plans to see Guardians of the Galaxy. Will this be the first summer since having kids that I see 4 movies? Dare I dream?

Also Rosario Dawson, not unattractive.

Has Marvel Found its Ms. Marvel? What the hell is going on here Marvel. Eden Sher from the Middle, tweeted a few things about visiting Marvel studios and leaving with a stackload of Ms Marvel comics that has set the internet abuzz. Eden Sher is fine on the middle, she's probably a great actress but Ms Marvel is either a 15 year old Muslim Girl or a 30 year old super badass ex-navy fighter pilot and head of NASA security that received super powers from the alien race known as the Kree. I don't mean to get all nerdy on you but she hardly seems right for either character. Maybe they're working on an Avengers Babies movie?

Whoop Dreams Is Now Available Online For Free. If you're going to watch one 40 minute documentary on the Gathering of the Juggalos on Hulu today make it this one. Seriously, this is really really good. Juggalos really fascinate me, the guy near the beginning that talks about how the family has saved his life was super sincere and compelling yet 10 minutes later it's time for hot oil wrestling! I don't know man, one day I'd love to go to The Gathering but I'm pretty sure if I went I'd either end up bored for 3 days or I'd end up having the time of my life and end up on heroin. I'm pretty sure there's not middle ground.

A visit to Galloping Ghost, the largest video game arcade in the USA. Next bachelor party I go to had better be in Chicago so we can hit up Galloping Ghost. Wait a minute, I forgot the burglars stole my jar of quarters. DAMN IT YOU DIRTY THIEVES I WAS GOING TO PLAY DIG DUG!

These Futuristic Buildings Reveal the Soviets' Vision for Tomorrow. I always imagined Soviet architecture falling into two different categories. Drab and utilitarian and overly ornate and baroque. A lot of these old "buildings from the future" are pretty cool looking. If half of them weren't abandoned I think they'd fit pretty well into most modern cities.

Surface Tension Arcade Table is a thing I must have

Quick someone get me three to six thousand dollars stat. I need one of these Surface Tension Arcade Tables. Seriously, look at how gosh dang beautiful that thing is... and it plays Donkey Kong? Finally, this is the future we were promised in the Jetsons.

Mega Sized Friday Links

Xbox One: All the Nerdy Details You Don't Know Yet. This is maybe one of the best pro Xbox One articles I've read. It's practically a love letter to the technical specs of the system. Don't get me wrong, it's an impressive piece of hardware. I'm just not convinced it's a piece of hardware people will actually buy. Then again I thought the Wii would be a giant failure and look how that turned out.

Seafaring Must-Reads for a Swashbuckling Summer. I've been debating whether or not I want to re-read all the Game of Thrones books maybe I'll check out something off this list instead. I've heard great things about Master and Commander.

The internet reacts hilariously to the Xbox One event. There's something about Big Redmond that really brings out the best in the internet.

Guy builds awesome basement Arcade with his father. Welp, now I know what I want to do when I grow up. This is easily the most impressive home arcade I've ever seen. If I owned this I would never leave the house. I mean I never leave the house now, but I'd be way better at Pacman.

Xboned! Indies can't self-publish on Xbox One. This is a non story as far as I'm concerned but I had already favorited it so I thought I'd include it on the links. The gist is that Microsoft kinda sucks when it comes to publishing independent games on Xbox live and they're going to continue that tradition. Supposedly that could give Sony and Nintendo a leg up in the console wars but I kind of doubt it.

How social media created and destroyed Tila Tequila. What ever happened to those awesome VH1 dating shows? Oh yeah, that one guy killed someone. This is really a fantastic piece about fame on the internet. Can you believe Myspace was just like 7 years ago? It seems like FOREVER.

Xbox One is a desperate prayer to stop time. Good article with a slightly flawed premise. People that have cut the cable cord are quick to point out that no one watches traditional TV anymore, which just isn't true. Yes, there are more people who consume their TV via internet appliances but that doesn't mean they're the majority. Far from it.

The truth is Microsoft has been trying to get a windows based internet appliance in every living room since the late 90s. They've already lost most of the mobile battle to Google and Apple, there's no way they're losing the living room without a fight. For years people have been talking about this mythical Apple TV (not the little black box) that is some how supposed to solve the TV "problem". Well, too slow Apple. Here comes Microsoft TV.

..it also plays Call of Duty.

Who killed the electric Links?

Beercade replaces arcade coin slots with beer taps. This is a fabulous idea. I hate the fact that it uses some stupid original fighting game set in a bar and not something like Street Fighter II or King of Fighters 98. Still and arcade cabinet that give the victor beer? Put your quarters up!


How Well Do You Know Ferris Bueller's Day Off? This was actually a fun quiz. I got 20 out of 25. I can't believe I blew it on Cameron's last name. I got Alan Ruck's real last name confused with Cameron's last name.


German liquor company pours its alcohol down models’ bare breasts before bottling. That is disgusting. Now allow me to rant off tangent. Blogger/Google in their infinite wisdom has changed the way you upload pictures. It's great for suckers that are uploading from picasa or just accept whatever default sizes blogger thinks you need but for people with a pretty unique skin like mine it's a giant pain in the ass. Seriously google get your act together, don't make me move all this nonsense to wordpress.

The Tesla Model S has terrible battery range. No it doesn't the writer manipulated the test drive. No he didn't the battery range really is as bad as he said. Sorry that's a lot of links, but this story is really interesting. There are a lot of people out there that think Tesla is the future of automobiles. Mostly they're the same people that think GM killed the electric car due to pressure from the oil companies, not because the car itself was kinda awful and super expensive. One day Tesla might actually be the future but they have to make sure that their cars won't die when it's cold out before that happens.

Uncanny Links

Will the X-Men Team up with The Avengers? A producer for the X-Men (movie rights owned by FOX) says he'd be very interested working with Marvel/Disney on a crossover movie that features both the X-Men and the Avengers. Not a huge surprise given that The Avengers made a Billion and a half dollars or that Fox is run by bunch of incompetent boobs.

It's an interesting proposition. In theory it sounds cool, but if you think about it for a second it also sounds like a load of sweet creamery marketing. Uncanny Avengers #1 hits the book shelves today, a book springing from the Events of Avengers vs X-Men that just so happens to have the X-Men and the Avengers teaming up.

I guess what I'm getting at is don't hold your breath nerds. Besides who's even left in the X-Men movie universe? Kelsey Grammar as Beast and Juno as Kitty Pride? Damn it Brett Ratner you ruined everything!

72 Scenes from the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, 2012. This looks AWESOME! Who wants to road trip to Portland with me? I need me some Back to the Future pinball on SNES cartridges on the cheap.

Emily Blunt might play Ms. Marvel in The Avengers 2. So here's a rumor that's probably not true at all. First off, if you put Ms Marvel in the Avengers before The Wasp I will riot. Secondly.. um, I don't think I have a second thing. I'm just really angry about the Wasp getting snubbed again.

The Simpson's 20 greatest Sports Moments. The best part about this list is that they focus on the Simpson episodes that actually mater not the last 10 years worth of dreck. I was yammering away on the web a couple months ago when I realized that there are roughly twice as many "awful" Simpsons episodes as there are "classic" Simpsons (seasons 2-8). I'm not sure I want to be this old.

Impressed Links

How You’ll Watch the Olympics in 2016. Ugh, I swear if I hear more about this mythical Apple TV I'm going to puke. However, The rest of this article is right on track (pun!). By 2016 NBC will have cleaned up it's on-line streaming, monetized the shit out of it (in a way that works this time) and might even open it up for non-cable subscribers. If NBC learned one this this time around it's that they can put events live on-line and still murdalize every other Network in the ratings.

Dick Ebersol Continues NBC’s Stream of Out of Touch Retorts. Of course that doesn't mean the internet as a whole has to stop hating on NBC right now. It's 2012, the fact that they couldn't get a HD stream on-line that worked is pathetic. You would think their online presence would have been enhanced when Kabletown Comcast bought them.

McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, And Kyla Ross Are Not Impressed IRL. Oh McKayla Maroney, I'll miss you most of all.

The surprising, stealth rebirth of the American arcade. Oh man, I want to go to an arcade so bad. Sitting on my couch slogging away at Skyrim side quests just isn't the same as putting your quarter up on Street Fighter II. Maybe Donkey Kong can be an Olympic Event by 2016. Could it really be worse than Dressage?