Oh, the 2-pagers. I love these.

Went to Fan Expo in center city Philadelphia on June 3rd with a friend of mine who was after celebrity signatures. I met several, plus comic creators and a lot of cosplayers. 

I found a few of these print ads one day, and then I hit the motherload with a comic called Outlaw Nation. This comic had five or more video game ads per issue. I photographed them all to share here.

I had a friend down the street from my house whose family got the ColecoVision in 1982. The neighborhood kids and I would, with exceeding excitement, go there to play it. I was 15. 

During my temporary work layoff, I've sometimes visited a museum or game store/arcade. Here's the story in pictures. 

I'll relate some recent plays and then get on to my current sickness, High on Life, where I took a bunch of screen shots. 

It used to be my friend Mark and I would go on road trips almost every week. We'd hit a favorite flea market, pawn shop and game store; buy a bunch of cheap old games and consoles, and then have lunch at a Chinese buffet. Since the internet ruined flea market bargains, and Mark became more wheelchair bound, we haven't gone on a road trip in quite a while. Well, health improvements and my discovery of several excellent local independent game stores have led to yesterday's road trip of old. Here's the story. 

I broke out the OG Xbox and played some Halo CE, not without some technical hiccups either. Then I dove into all the Game Pass Quests for the week and month and found myself playing a lot of survival horror games. It was all a barrel of monkey laughs. 

I read part two of the new Bloodborne Lady of the Lanterns comic, played several board games, bought some stuff at the convention I went to, and played a bunch of stuff I'll probably save for another time because this blog is already going to be longish. 

That's RetroCon Philly, PA, in the town of Oaks where there is a large convention center in the suburbs. I actually went to two conventions last saturday, RetroCon and a Sports Card Convention. I tagged along with my friend and his dad to the sports card con, and then my friend and I went to RetroCon right next door. Here's some snaps and stories. 

What goes better with gaming than junk food that makes you giddy like 5 year olds on, well, Ding Dongs and Funnybones. Yeah, it's unhealthy, but it's only 1. . . ok 2. . . fine! 3 days a week. How else am I going to get through hours and hours of Halo mulitplayer. Ok, I don't play Halo multiplayer, but hours and hours of multiplayer Forza Horizon 5. Anyway, I bought some stuff for my retro gaming and played some more board games. 

I'm almost finished with Lego Batman 2. I've gotten all the achievements that I can get but one. This means I've got a dozen or so gold bricks left, a handful of unlocked characters, and a few other oddities like saving the last few "people in peril". I'm still debating with myself whether it's worth the time and effort to go after them, but I have one achievement left I can get easily and that's getting 10 billion in studs. I'm at 3.5 billion and I have all the stud boosters unlocked so that I make about 3600X. Still, 10 billion is a lot and will require going through all the levels again as that's where a lot of the studs can be found in quantity. 

It was last weekend (May 7th) in my area, and I picked up a half dozen or so previews for new or recently released comics. Most of these inside contained excerpts from full comics to come. It got me looking forward to a few. 

Expansion Pass 2 Game #1/Blog a Day #28

Tube-It

Over the years, there have been many different types of cartridge software released. Where music and video media (eventually) became standardized, each game system had its own form of storage media. In addition to carrying interchangeable game software, companies tended to make the design and appearance of the cartridges themselves distinctive as a marketing gimmick. Most of us have memories of having game cartridges in boxes, not to mention blowing on the edge connectors when our games glitched out. So here's a brief overview of various game cartridges throughout history. This is not an exhaustive list.