Power Blade (sealed)

I decided to pick up another awesome NES action game: Power Blade.  I actually rented this once before as a kid because it looked similar to Shatterhand.  It was pretty fun as I recall.  Plus it was made by the same developer: Natsume.

I found a sealed copy on eBay, so I picked it up fast.  The seal was broken in places, and the box had some wear, but who can argue with new old stock?

Luckily, the insides were still mint.  I'm glad I got this before the prices could get out of control.  However, I'll be lucky if I ever manage to acquire the sequel.

2015 Gaming Setup

I've made a few changes to my gaming setup since my last post, which I think was in 2012.  Three years sounds like enough time for an update, so here are the changes.

The CRT TV stand on the left is new.  I got tired of my Jerry-rigged TV stand that I was using before (it was just an old-fashioned ice cooler-style wood chest), so I went looking for a real stand and found this cool thing online.  Now the CRT TV is up higher, the DVD recorder is no longer sitting on top of the TV, and I don't have visible cables going everywhere.

The DVD cabinet is the same, but there are some new Wii U games and movies.  I moved the Wii Remotes inside the cabinet since that's better than dealing with the constant dust.

There aren't many retail games coming out this year that I want (it's basically just Project Cars and the Wii U Zelda), but there are several downloadable games that I'll be picking up later on.

The HDTV stand is the same (I love this thing and won't be replacing it).  The Wii U and satellite box are on the top shelf.  The Wii U is now permanently hooked up to the TV via HDMI.  I don't have to swap out the component cable with the Wii anymore, which is much nicer.

The lower shelves have been slightly reorganized.  I no longer have the VCR hooked up since I never use it, and I replaced the DVD player with a Panasonic Blu Ray player.  This allowed me to move the middle shelf down a notch, creating more room above and making it easier to swap games in and out of the GameCube.  The GameCube and Wii are separately hooked up with their official component cables, and the GameCube has a Game Boy Player attached.

My HDTV is a 32LG70.  It's a 1080p, 60 Hz model with 3 HDMI inputs, two component inputs, multiple composite inputs, VGA, S-video... they just don't make TVs like this anymore.  Nowadays you're lucky to get component or composite support at all.  It has a game mode to reduce input lag and it can pass through a Dolby Digital 5.1 signal to the receiver (it seems all LG TVs do this).

The sound system is still the Panasonic HTB-15 sound bar.  But hanging to the right side in the background there is my new Elgato HD60 capture card.  This is why I no longer have to swap the component cables with the Wii.  Every system aside from the Wii U is recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR.

The sound bar supports a variety of 5.1 surround signals (Dolby, DTS, LPCM), and it accepts HDMI inputs directly, so when I want surround sound out of my Wii U, I can just connect the HDMI cable directly to the receiver.  However, since the Elgato doesn't accept LPCM 5.1 (nor does Youtube support it), I just use stereo when recording footage.

The CRT TV is a 25" Philips Magnavox from 2001.  I'm the original owner.  It makes a bit of an annoying humming noise when it's on, but it's great for retro gaming.  I've discovered is that pre-GameCube systems don't work well on HDTVs for two reasons.  The first problem is input lag.  Old games often require fast reflexes, and HDTVs introduce display lag because of how much they process the incoming video signal (deinterlacing, scaling, etc.).  The second problem is frame rate loss.  I've noticed that old 60 fps games get their frame rate cut in half on HDTVs because the TV deinterlaces the 240p signal as if it were 480i, destroying the smooth image.  So I do most of my NES, SNES and N64 gaming on the old TV.

One nice thing about the new CRT TV stand is that the cabinet below is large enough to fit one of my console organizers, as well as the distribution amplifier.  So whenever I hook up a retro system now, I can keep it off the carpet and avoid a lot of dust.  Now that's nice!

I'll be needing to update my pictures of my boxed game collection soon.  There have been all sorts of additions (which I've noted on this blog), but I haven't taken complete pictures of each entire collection for about 3 years now.  One of these days I'll need to upload some videos of the collection as well.

New Stuff

I don't have many games for my Game Boy Advance, so I've been on the lookout for some good titles to add to my collection.

After completing Wolfenstein 3-D for the SNES, I started looking into the SNES port of Doom.  However, I didn't like that version's lack of a save feature or even a password system.  That's just ridiculous when Wolfenstein at least had a password feature.  Also, I read that there are certain glitches in the game that prevent you from getting 100%.

So I passed up on that idea, but I didn't give up on Doom entirely.  I just decided to go with another port: the Game Boy Advance one.  I also picked up the sequel.  Both games have save features.  Hooray!

I got both games off eBay for an affordable amount.  They weren't sealed like some of my other purchases from last year, but they were complete and in fairly good condition.  I hear that the Doom II in particular can be hard to find.  There's no SNES version of that game, so I had to go with the GBA version if I wanted it on a Nintendo system.

I'm hoping to upload the first Doom soon.  Maybe in the coming months.

I don't think anybody really noticed, but I also got a new capture card for the Wii U.  The Elgato HD60.  After Youtube upgraded to 60 fps in October, there was no way I was going to waste money on a 1080p30 capture card like the Hauppauge HD PVR 2 or the prior version of the Elgato.  I would just end up being stuck with 720p60, which the Hauppauge HD PVR can already do.

Luckily though, I didn't have to spend money on this thing at all.  It was a Christmas gift.

I already uploaded some Mario Kart 8 footage and it definitely looks better than my 720p60 Hauppauge captures I was uploading before.

However, this thing doesn't work with my other systems.  I can't feed old systems into the Elgato by routing them through the DVD recorder's HDMI port because that just throws on HDCP protection and blocks the signal.  And I'm not wasting money on component to HDMI converters for the GameCube and Wii when there's absolutely no quality upgrade involved.

Besides, the entire point of my channel is to show what the games look like on the actual hardware without modifications (save for deinterlacing where necessary.  But HDTVs deinterlace footage anyway, so if you play all your old games on an HDTV, my footage will look just like that.).

Some people might point out that I'm upconverting 240p footage to 480i with a DVD recorder so I can record the signal, but the truth is that it's not a true upconversion.  The reason is that 240p always displays at a 480 resolution with half of the lines blank.  The DVD recorder doesn't change that.  It just standardizes the refresh rate so that the capture card can read it as an NTSC signal.

So this will be my new Wii U capture device, but everything else will still be recorded with the Hauppauge.  Both capture cards are high quality, so I have no complaints.