A good time to be a retro gamer.

I admit that I like things that are a little different and I love innovation, but there is a part of me that misses the games of the past. Fortunately retro collections are plentiful on all of the consoles. I won’t go into the gray area of emulation only to say at least now you don’t have to for most games. The Midway collections are great and I eagerly await volume 3. I recently picked up Capcom’s latest compilation. Final Fight and Ghouls and Ghosts are as challenging and addictive as ever. Plus this one also has the two best Street Fighters ever. I really like playing Virtua Racer on the Sega disk but the others are kind of poor. They really would have been better off emulating the originals rather than updating them. I’m just glad they didn’t touch Virtua Racer. Now I wish that Sega would give us a Model 2 compilation. How cool would it be to have VF2, Daytona, Sega Rally and House of the Dead on one disk? A Ridge Racer compilation would be cool too. I don’t even want to think of the possibilities of an SNK disk.

It's HD!

Our TV died this weekend. Normally this would be a bad thing but now it gave me and my wife a reason to buy a new widescreen HD set. The choice was plasma or LCD. We knew we wanted a thin screen. We chose the LCD because of its better performance in bright rooms, which is what we have most of the time. After looking at a few places we stopped at the local Best Buy and spotted a 32” Sony XBR LCD. The picture in the store was very impressive and had all the connections we needed. Getting it home revealed that even on satellite signal strength is still a big factor for how good a TV looks. Tweaking it a little for our Direct TV service we then tried out a few games. After replacing all the standard AV connection for our PS2 and Gamecube with component cables, all I can say is believe the hype. This TV did for my eyes what hooking our systems up to the home theater receiver did for my ears. Now we’re ready for the next gen consoles in all their 720p brilliance. Save the Revolution of course but I still can’t wait to get my hands on that controller.