Recently I went to the Portland Retro Games Expo & Northwest Classic Games Enthusiasts Retro Game Swap Meet. It was a pretty special time as this was the first full fledged video game event I took my son Finley to. He's seven months old and I had him attached to me in a baby carrier the whole time, but i'd like to think he was impressed with all the old retro games and systems. The swap meet was fun and I didn't have as much time as I wanted to due to heading in a bit late because earlier we were at the Portland Women's March. That said, I arrived in the events final hour which was enough time to check out each table and pickup a few games that i've wanted for some time.

I picked up NBA Jam on Sega, Super Mario Land on Gameboy and a box for New Super Mario Land DS to put my game pak inside so I can set it next to the other DS games I own.

Super Mario Land Is a Strange Mario Game

Super Mario Land was one of the launch titles when the Gameboy hit the market in 1989. I remember it fondly because my brother bought a Gameboy and Super Mario Land was one of the first games he had. If you are familiar with Mario games, Super Mario Land is very similar but contains some strange elements that haven't been repeated in modern Mario games. First off the traditional fire Mario super ability is replaced with a super ball variant. Mario shoots the superball and if it doesn't hit an enemy it bounces off walls until it hits an enemy or gives out. This allows you to collect coins in hard to reach areas and occasionally you can bounce a shot to hit a bad guy but most of the time it's just weird. I like that they tried something different and it's possible the super ball power was easier to program back then but I prefer the traditional fire flower power as it's easier to rely on and time the shots of.

Super Mario Land contains the same tight platforming of nearly any Mario game except, at times, I missed certain jumps by falling through a platform. It's rare but since i've never seen it in a Mario game, when I happened I was surprised. Again, I imagine this is due to the early nature of this Gameboy title and it's lack of horsepower even compared to the NES but it's something I noticed.

Super Mario Land keeps up the strangeness in that it also contains auto scrolling levels. You can control Mario in a Submarine and Airplane and beyond the levels being a bit easy they are also pretty fun. Auto-scrollers aren't something you see in a Mario game and having them here is so odd it feels like some kind of extra bonus game.

Even though Super Mario Land contains some gameplay elements not seen in any other Mario game the strangest part of all is the story written in the game manual.

"Once upon a time, there was a peaceful world called Sarasaland. In this world there were 4 kingdoms named Birabuto, Muda, Easton and Chai. One day, the skies of Sarasaland were suddenly covered by a huge black cloud. From a crack in this cloud, the unknown space monster Tatanga emerged to try to conquer Sarasaland. Tatanga hypnotized the people of all the kingdoms so that he could control them in any way he liked. In this way he took over Sarasaland. Now, he wants to marry Princess Daisy of Sarasaland and make her his queen. Mario came to know of these events, and he has started on a journey to the Chai Kingdom where Princess Daisy is held captive, in order to restore peace to Sarasaland. Can Mario defeat Tatanga, release people from his interstellar hypnosis, and rescue Princess Daisy? It's all up to you and Mario's skill. Go for it Mario!"

I picked up the Super Mario Land game manual at this years Portland Retro Game Expo and laughed as I read the games backstory. At the time I did wonder why Bowser and Princess Peach weren't in the game but I figured Mario went on other adventures and maybe this happened while Mario was on vacation? The story seems so arbitrary and whipped up it borders on parody but as someone that loves campy stuff, I also love it.

Super Mario Land is a really unique entry in the Mario-verse and one I don't mind coming back to. I think my most beloved Mario games are some of the strangest and i'd put Super Mario Land up there with Mario 2 as some of the ones I enjoy coming back to reliving over again.

Bethesda is shipping a couple updates to Fallout 4 next week. PC users are getting a 58 gig download option in the form of a HD high resolution texture pack. If this is anything like the Skyrim update, this should offer up an incredible visual upgrade to Fallout 4! Bethesda has released the recommended specs on the HD pack and i'm not sure I know someone that meets the minimum spec GPU wise.

• Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
  
• Intel Core i7-5820K or better


• GTX 1080 8GB


• 8GB+ Ram

Love to hear how well this texture pack works for you on your current rig so make sure to come back and let us know your specs and how it runs. Bethesda is also dropping an update to Fallout 4 on the PS4 Pro with native 1440p resolution, enhanced draw distance for trees, grass, objects and NPCs and enhanced Godray effects. This is a nice bonus PS4 Pro users might enjoy but I wonder how well this sits for people with the normal ol PS4? I wonder how PC-like consoles will get before the next generation or will we simply just make incremental upgrades to this current generation? As seen with Nintendos handhelds it's not a bad strategy and might turn out well for Sony and Microsoft.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/52I2HyPCAowWG2ye8MKGU2/fallout-4-free-updates-high-resolution-texture-pack-and-ps4-pro-support

As the wait for the new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Netflix continues(i've heard rumors of a March release) I am continuing my journey of watching each original episode in order. I just finished season 6, which to date is my least favorite season. All that said it does contains some great episodes like Code Name: Diamond Head, Kitten with a Whip and High School Big Shot. The season 6 finale is Samson VS The Vampire Women and is the last episode to feature Dr Forresters assistant TV's Frank. Samson VS The Vampire Women is a crazy movie and Frank leaving the show adds a more somber tone to the episode. In the MST3K timeline MST3K The Movie came after season 6 which makes sense considering TV's Frank isn't featured in it(always wondered why it was just Dr. Forrester as the single Mad). I just started season 7 which features Dr. Forresters Mom Pearl who later takes over sole Mad duties after Trace Beaulieu(the actor that plays Dr. Forrester) leaves at the end of Season 7.

I doubt i'll finish watching all 10 seasons of MST3K before season 11 drops but I still want to have finished all the seasons this year, which is a quite a feat considering each episode is an hour and a half long.

The Prey reboot has received a new trailer that showcases a bit of the story as well as the new release date. Apparently you are in a science space station where they are experimenting on aliens and are also a testing subject/scientist. The tone of the game seems very Bioshock, Portal and Alien-esque with a very clean and polished look that is fairly impressive. I'm intrigued by this game but am still not certain i'll be picking this up at launch. To help entice people to pre-order Arkane Studios is offering special DLC bonuses and if you like cosmetic shotguns(oh my!) then you're going to be very happy. I mean, unless you don't like that sort of thing, then it's not a big deal.

But the new Prey might be and if you're going to get this at launch let me know in the comments. Prey comes to PS4, XBone and PC on May 5th.

As I continue watching the many speedruns from Awesome Games Done Quick I have a couple I wanted to share y'all could watch. The first one above is the Fallout New Vegas run by progamingwithed that took 24 minutes! It uses a strat I haven't seen before in that you can exploit a reload animation to travel very fast and jump incredibly high. If you like pacifist runs this is very close to that as progamingwithed needs to only kill a couple people making this one of the most peaceful Fallout runs i've even seen.

Contra Race

This years AGDQ featured a lot of great races and this one is a must watch. Themexicanrunner and toad22484 complete Contra in 10:40 and I don't want to spoil things with whom won but needless to say, it was a very close race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9WsLufaigE

It's now 2017 and the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable is here to ring in the new year! We always start things off talking about what we're playing which is a fun mash of the new Nintendo Classic, Ocarina of Time 3D & Let it Die. Moving quickly into the fresh news of the day being the reveal of the full title of "Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi." What does this new title mean, why is the title red and will Jar-Jar be finally revealed as a Sith? Finally we end things off with our discussion of the Nintendo Switch dropping our thoughts on the new system and if we will be picking it up.

This is a special episode in that Scrypt and I stayed on longer at the end to have a bonus discussion about a 2016 sc-fi film Arrival. This episode went way long because of that and I encourage you to watch Arrival before you listen to our discussion of it because it contains spoilers from the top of beginning.

When Ocarina of Time came out in 1998 it was one of the biggest game worlds i'd ever experienced. As games like Fallout and Skyrim came out Ocarina now seems quaint but Nintendo seems ready to take on the the challenge of building a much larger Zelda game this time around. As you can see in the image above, Breath of the Wild dwarfs previous Zelda games as well as Skyrim. I'm not sure creating a larger game world makes a game better on it's own but having more space to play in will make the game much more immersive.

One cool thing about owning a Steam Controller is the ability to customize it for each game in your Steam library. Say you don't like the standard controller mapping for Terraria? You can change them it your liking or use a popular community control scheme to suit your needs. The native Steam Controller configurator has been a really cool part of Steam and in a recent Steam update Valve finally opened it up to other controllers.

"Added XBox 360, Xbox One, and Generic X-Input controller configurator support. This allows all recognized controller types to use the advanced mapping features of the Steam Controller Configurator. Note that because X-Input currently lacks per-controller means of unique identification, all controllers of that type will share personalization and configuration settings. As they share the same inputs, Xbox 360/One/Generic controllers will all see each-others configurations when browsing. Automatic conversion will be attempted when loading configurations from other controller types."

Besides a ton of Steam Controller updates the Linux client recently got some love making a few really nice enhancements to systems using Open Source graphics drivers.

"Improved interactions between the Steam runtime and host distribution libraries, which should let Steam work out of the box with open-source graphics drivers on modern distributions. If using an older distribution or running into problems, use STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES=0 to revert to previous behavior."

It's nice Valve added this as sometimes the ability to add a proprietary graphics driver isn't obvious to users or not possible using older hardware. This might also be important if Valve is working with partners bringing embedded Steam OS to devices like Televisions or the like where the only available 3D drivers are using an open driver(entirely speculative but a possibility).

http://store.steampowered.com/news/26953/

Punch Club dropped on 3DS recently and publisher Tiny Build was nice enough to gift me a copy so I could try it out. If you haven't played Punch Club or are unfamiliar with the game it's a fighting tycoon game where you train your character and manage his stats such that you improve over time to rise in the ranks of the local boxing and underground fighting scene. Like all tycoon games that focus on core stats you have to science the right numbers to progress through the ranks to level up your abilities to fight increasingly tougher and tougher foes. The story included in the game wraps the whole game up well and gives you a nice incentive to progress. Ultimately if you like tycoon games focusing on a difficult grind and are a big fan of the Fight Club or Rocky films, Punch Club is something you need to look into.

I've played Punch Club on Steam and now 3DS and the game shines on both platforms. Punch Club is very comfortable on PC with mouse controls and has been adapted to near perfection on the 3DS. Instead of click to move your character you can use the analog stick to control his movements and also where to focus attention. Since the in game fighting, working your job for in game money and training are all passive the 3DS works well there too. I found that you need to use the 3DS stylus to select things on the touch screen as tap to touch doesn't work as well as other games like Ocarina of Time 3D. Using the stylus might be a requirement for optimal control but having the it around never felt awkward to me. Bottom line, Punch Club translates incredibly well to the 3DS and if you are looking for a richer PC game experience on your handheld you should should check it out.

Punch Club is out now on 3DS, PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

If you are waiting for Super Mario Run to drop on Android soon you might be a bit disappointed to hear it's coming in March. You can pre-register for it on the Google Play store now to get notified when the game finally ships if you are eager to be notified the moment it is available. The Android launch is somewhat odd timing as March is also the month the Switch launches. I'm curious if Nintendo's mobile apps will come to Switch at some point like Pokemon Go, Super Mario Run and Miitomo? Since the Switch has a touch screen it seem technically possible so it's just a matter of porting.

https://twitter.com/Nintendo/status/821859181435027461