Cheerful Ghost: An Awesome Community For Gamers

The Commodore 64 Mini Launches on March 29th

Retro game console re-releases have been a really popular market in the last few years and everyone is getting in on the action. The latest entrant, the Commodore 64 Mini will now release on March 29th featuring 64 licensed games, a USB connectable joystick and the ability to use it as a C64 family computer including the ability to write Commodore BASIC programs. They've also said the C64 Mini will be up-gradable via USB firmware updates and I imagine will be somewhat hackable as well.

The keyboard on the unit itself isn't functional but it does come with two USB ports so you can plug in your own keyboard. Depending on the price and how much of a functional C64 system... Read All

Listen To This Epic Two Hour Interview With Rian Johnson The Director of The Last Jedi

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If you are interested in knowing more about how Rian Johnson came to direct Star Wars The Last Jedi you absolutely must listen to this epic two hour interview with him about The Last Jedi. Firstly, the whole interview is incredible and you should listen to it all but Rian mentioned a few things I thought were interesting based on some of the feedback for The Last Jedi. One interesting bit is that Rian was writing The Last Jedi as The Force Awakens was filming and, at that point, he had the script and dailies to help him write The Last Jedi. He notes that he had no idea what aspects of The Force Awakens would resonate with fans. Rian also mentioned that Snoke seemed to... Read All

Project Octopath Traveler Developer Update

Project Octopath Traveler is a upcoming Switch game that looks to bring back some of the best parts of classic JRPG's from the 16bit era to modern gaming with a 3D flavor. The demo launched on the Switch last year and it showed a ton of promise but many people had issues with some of it. Looks like the developers of the game have addressed many of these concerns and talk about how they've updated the game in the developer update video above. Specifically they improved movement in terms of speeding up the character and allowing them to run much faster than before. They bumped up the encounter rate when running at full speed but that seems a fine trade off to get around... Read All

John Riggs Reviews The Retro-bit Super Retro Trio+

John Riggs reviews the new Retro-Bit Super Retro Trio+ that melds the Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Genesis together in an interesting way. Not only can you play nearly all of the game karts of those systems with it but it allows you to switch between the different regions as well as provides composite video/audio out as well as HDMI at 720p. Like all X in one systems it supports the controller ports from all the systems so all your controllers work as well as provides a fair NES & SNES Controller out of the box. I have the Hyperkin RetreoN 3 which works really well for composite video/audio but I am looking at picking something up that will do HDMI out and this... Read All

Awesome Games Done Quick Roundup 2: Mega Man Race & More!

Continuing the Awesome Games Done Quick 2018 wrap up series with another set of amazing speedruns starting with the Mega Man 1, 2 & 3 relay race with Team Auto, Team Beat, Team Roll and Team Rush in 1:26:59. 4 teams all racing through the three Mega Man games in under an hour and thirty. If you are interested in getting some tips on running these games, this is the run to watch.

Hyper Light Drifter by simplyfir in 31:16 - Hyper Light Drifter is a new Indie game that melds the classic Zelda formula with the soothing music of Disasterpiece. It's an expert run by simplyfir and if you want to soak in this game it's a quick way to do it.

... Read All

Cheerful Ghost Games Club: Excitebike

Cheerful Ghost Games Club is back with Excitebike!

You may remember this semi-regular CG event where we pick a game and invite everyone to come play it with us and discuss what we think. This time, we're changing things up a bit. We will do one game a month (or maybe more!) and tying the events into a Cheerful Ghost Radio series about classic games.

We'll review the games in an episode following the event, and include opinions and commentary from people who joined and chatted with us about it.

This month's game is Excitebike! Excitebike is an NES racing game that has been a fan favorite since its launch with the NES. In addition to the main tracks, Excitebike lets you... Read All

My Pickups From The 4th Annual PRGE/NWCGE Swap Meet

The local retro game collector community is pretty strong and as such we have a lot of local events strung through the year that are well worth attending even if you are lightly into the retro scene. In October Cheerful Ghost runs a booth at Portland Retro Game Expo and in January some of the same folks host the PRGE/NWCGE Swap Meet. It's hosted at the Portland Double Tree and it's much smaller and more focused on buying, selling and trading retro games. Will and I hit it up this year and were some of the first people in line to peruse the crazy amount of amazing retro games and collectables. One of my yearly goals is to limit myself to only buying 5 games this year... Read All The local retro game collector community is pretty strong and as such we have a lot of local events strung through the year that are well worth attending even if you are lightly into the retro scene. In October Cheerful Ghost runs a booth at Portland Retro Game Expo and in January some of the same folks host the PRGE/NWCGE Swap Meet. It's hosted at the Portland Double Tree and it's much smaller and more focused on buying, selling and trading retro games. Will and I hit it up this year and were some of the first people in line to peruse the crazy amount of amazing retro games and collectables. One of my yearly goals is to limit myself to only buying 5 games this year and that makes going to a retro game expo tough but I had a game in mind I've wanted to get for a long time. One of my favorite games on the Super Nintendo is King Arthur's World and it's one of the more obscure games on the platform. I never thought the game got the recognition it deserved as a kind of Lemmings inspired knights and wizards RTS. Since the game doesn't have a huge following it doesn't sell for a lot so I picked it up for a good price.

As Will and I were rounding the show floor I overheard a vendor saying they wanted to move their issues of Nintendo Power and were selling them for a dollar. They were bagged and boarded and in great condition so I immediately was interested. The guy that the vendor told that to directly nabbed each issue he could find but missed a box so after he left I swooped in and walked away with 18 issues. I'm thinking about slowly working to owning a nearly complete collection and this is a really great first step. The issues I bought were Top Secret Passwords, Super Mario Bros. Inside Out Part 1 & 2, Issue Number 9, 23, 24, 26, 28, 37, 45, 48, 55, 63, 68, 70, 71, 74 & 107. I'm thinking a complete collection up to about issue 70 or so sounds good so i'm fairly well on my way to that.

I also picked up a couple versions of Star Wars on VHS I didn't own yet in The Empire Strikes back 1992 release along with The Making of Star Wars VHS released in 1995. I've nearly completed my Star Wars on VHS collection and all I need to button it up is Empire and Jedi on the original CBS/FOX VHS run and Revenge of the Sith. I'm still not sure if I plan on collection all the versions of Star Wars on Laserdisc or if i'll just go for one version of the trilogy on Laserdisc. It's a really obscure format and like Betamax i'm interested in how hard it might be to find locally.

Get The Amnesia Collection Free On Humble For The Next 24 Hours!

The Humble Store is giving away Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs as a collection right now for the next 24 hours. If you are interested in some of the more well reviewed indie horror games and don't want to spend any money, head over to Humble and grab a free Steam key.

A little taste of what's in store for you in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs...

"The year is 1899

Wealthy industrialist Oswald Mandus awakes in his bed, wracked with fever and haunted by dreams of a dark and hellish engine. Tortured by visions of a disastrous expedition to Mexico, broken on the failing dreams of an industrial utopia, wracked with guilt and tropical disease, he wakes... Read All

Nintendo Is Shutting Down Miitomo May 9th!

It's a sad thing to hear that Nintendo is shutting down Miitomo only two years after it's initial launch in 2016. After it hit the scene Miitomo was pretty huge and most people on Cheerful Ghost and the local PDX indie game scene were playing it. That said, after a couple months, my usage of it faded entirely and it seems that was the same for most people as Nintendo is now shutting it down. It's a pretty epic rise and fall and shows the fragility of some online communities you can spend real money with to buy in game or app items. What happens to all your digital stuff you've payed for when the services goes away? In the case of Miitomo, almost everything is lost... Read All

Minecraft Pro Tip (Getting Mending)

Quick overview on how to easily get Mending in Minecraft 1.14

Mending uses the EXP you gain to repair your gear

Simple method: Put a lectern next to an "unemployed" villager (see videos)

Longer method: Find a good seed with a village near spawn, recreate world until you get a librarian

Quick explanation with video: Sl1pg8r recently created an elaborate way of transporting Villlagers and changing their professions. However if you watch this video (starting at 4:09), you’ll get an extremely quick look at how to get what you want: https://youtu.be/XJrBuKckez0?t=249 For a more detailed explanation, watch the video I’ve embedded in this post. Although xisumavoid shows you... Read All Quick overview on how to easily get Mending in Minecraft 1.14

Mending uses the EXP you gain to repair your gear

Simple method: Put a lectern next to an "unemployed" villager (see videos)

Longer method: Find a good seed with a village near spawn, recreate world until you get a librarian

Quick explanation with video: Sl1pg8r recently created an elaborate way of transporting Villlagers and changing their professions. However if you watch this video (starting at 4:09), you’ll get an extremely quick look at how to get what you want: https://youtu.be/XJrBuKckez0?t=249 For a more detailed explanation, watch the video I’ve embedded in this post. Although xisumavoid shows you how to do this, I think his method is a bit more complicated than the very quick bit of video you should watch of Sl1pg8r changing a Villager’s profession to get the Librarian trade(s) he’s looking for.

Method details: Mending is perhaps one of, if not the, most valuable enchantments in the game. It’s now much easier to get! This is because version 1.14 has made it so that Villagers can now change professions and you can get them to do this easily. A lectern (https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Lectern) is a new block that will turn a Villager into a Librarian. Basically, you just need to place one next to an “unemployed” Villager. If they already have a profession, you may want to trap them and remove any Work Tables. For a full list of these visit https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Villager#Professions. When they become “unemployed,” you can then put a lectern next to them to turn them into a Librarian. Then, look at their trades and see if they’re offering what you want (like Mending). If not, pick the lectern back up and they’ll turn back into “unemployed” and put it back down. Repeat this until you get the trade you’re looking for. And that’s it! It’s incredibly simple to do now.

What is Mending? One of the enchantments recently added is called Mending, which is definitely a game changer. It uses experience gathered and repairs an item with the enchantment. From the wiki, “when an item with the enchantment is held (main hand, offhand, or armor slots), XP orbs collected will repair the item at a rate of 2 durability per XP instead of adding the XP to the player's total. If multiple items have the enchantment, one will be chosen at random for each XP orb collected, and if the chosen item does not need repair, the XP will be added to the player's total as normal, rather than choosing another item to repair.” For more details check the wiki: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Mending

Find a good seed: One way to get Mending is to find a village that has a Librarian. This could take you forever on a normal world with the Java version. You could just create some worlds until you get a village near spawn, but there are some good seeds out there already. Luckily, I found one that contains a village near a ravine. There is also an abandoned mine shaft under the village well (seed# 105899026). For more details check the link: https://minecraftseedhq.com/ravine-village-mineshaft-seed/ *Note* Since seeds can differ between versions, you may want to look online for a seed that contains a village near spawn for the version of the game you’re running.

With a good seed: The trick is to create your new world, go to the Librarian in the village, and see what you can trade. Librarians start off offering a random enchanted book for some emeralds and a book. If the Librarian isn’t offering Mending, recreate that world until Mending is the enchanted book being offered.