#remaking a year old post of mine that just today got its second note out of nowhere

[bananaquilava]

#meme #pokemon #pokerap #why does he say it like that? #remaking a year old post of mine that just today got its second note out of nowhere

[daleisgreat]

30 Years of Super Nintendo - Flashback Special

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) recently celebrated its 30th anniversary of the North American launch, so it seems the perfect time to post a Flashback Special honoring it! Suppose you have not perused a past Flashback Special of mine (all linked at the bottom of this entry). In that case, they are essentially my history with the platform over the years, with a little bit of history thrown in, and recounting all my favorite games, accessories, memories, and moments with the system.

Odds are for the average gaming enthusiast reading this, and you probably are familiar with the core details of the SNES launch stateside (if not, then I highly recommend CGQ’s video on it for a quick breakdown). The SNES launched in 1991 when I was eight. I did not have a subscription to any gaming magazines yet, so I most likely first found out about the system around that time from classmates at the time at school, the infamous Paul Rudd commercial, and the fourth season of Roseanne that transpired from 1991-92. I vividly remember the Roseanne episode with her son, DJ, pleading with his parents for the brand new SNES for his birthday gift and how his parents dreaded not being able to afford the system. I covered that episode when I did my Roseanne complete series re-watch here in the year leading up to the relaunch of the show several years ago. It brought back memories of how that was the story with my parents also denying me the much sought-after SNES, saying it cost too much and that I already have an NES to tide me over. ”But mommmmm, the SNES is 16-bits!!!!” Yeah….playing that angle got me nowhere. Kiosks & Friends The first couple of years for the SNES, I mostly remember playing at store kiosks. Super Mario World blew me away from the brief time I played it with it being such a leap from the NES installments. I always ate up the precious few minutes I could procure at a store kiosk if no one were playing Super Mario Kart. One last store kiosk memory was eye-gazing over the impressive WWF Royal Rumble. I loved WWF WrestleFest in the arcade, and for a couple of years, it was the only WWF game that offered up WWF’s marquee over-the-top rope elimination match, the Royal Rumble, and it was endlessly fun to play in the arcade. Fast-forward to playing it on console kiosks around its 1993 release, and I could not eat up enough of that game’s Royal Rumble mode either, and at the time, the graphics seemed like a huge step up from the wrestling games on NES. One of my favorite issues of Nintendo Power is the 50th issue that did a several-page spread on WWF Royal Rumble that I must have thoroughly re-read at least a dozen times.

I read this NP spread of WWF Royal Rumble many times, and it was one of my initially most desired SNES games! Around 1993/94, a couple of friends and classmates started to get the Super Nintendo. An early SNES memory that stuck with me all these years is my grade school friend, Jon-Paul, having me over for his birthday where he rented a SNES console and Street Fighter II: Turbo from the video store, and we played it for several hours straight. Another is spending a lot of 1994 at my neighborhood friend’s place, where we played countless sessions of NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat II. Both games were big on codes and secrets and perfect two-player games. I was just regularly getting into video game magazines at this time and ate up issues of Tips & Tricks, Game Players, and Electronic Gaming Monthly to see what kind of hidden character and other much-rumored codes were making the waves each month for both of these games. Mortal Kombat II especially dominated the code-fervor that season with trying to uncover how to face off against secret characters like Jade, Noob Saibot, and Smoke, and trying to memorize all the input sequences for the game’s infamous Fatalities. Fast forward to late 1995/early 1996, and I still did not have a SNES, but a new neighborhood friend, Rich, just got one and the next several months at his place introduced me to so many SNES games. Rich kind of got me somewhat into RPGs at the time, and while it may not sound fun on paper, there were many times I recall just kind of embracing the role of “armchair gamer.” I did this for games like EVO: Search for Eden, and Eye of the Beholder while keeping an eye out during gameplay to offer whatever suggestions seemed viable.

FFVI was eye-opening to me at the time of what video game narratives were capable of, and I devoured the latest secrets for FFVI discovered in the latest issue of my Game Players subscription that was delivered. The RPG I felt like that I contributed something to was the game that was originally released as Final Fantasy III. That game featured two-player support for battles only, so it was refreshing to help Rich with progressing through the game finally. My two favorite characters to use were Sabin and Cyan. That game especially blew me away with its larger-than-life story with two different game worlds, the momentous opera scene with Celes, the dazzling mode-seven graphics when traveling via airship or Chocobo, constantly getting irked at Shadow whenever he deserted the party, and so many other priceless moments. Over the years, I tried restarting the GBA version on a couple of occasions and regrettably have yet to finish it. Finally Owning a SNES….in 1996

Growing up with divorced parents put me in a unique childhood when it came to gaming. I lived with my mom, who provided for us as best as possible for the three siblings I grew up with, so we only had an NES for us for the longest time. However, when visiting my dad on weekends, he would always be big on hitting up as many garage sales and second-hand stores as possible and would acquire whatever he thought seemed like a bargain. Games-wise, this usually meant he lagged behind a generation because everyone was offloading their Atari VCS/2600s at garage sales for cheap when the NES was king, so I could have a great couple of years to become familiar with the pioneering-era of games on Atari. He then got into the NES scene when the SNES hit in 1991. Sure enough, the same month the N64 launched in America in September 1996 was when he bought a Super Nintendo for the family used at our local Premiere Video. The game we picked up with it was Street Fighter II: Turbo. My dad instantly remarked upon booting it up the noticeable jump in graphics. We played nothing but Capcom’s second Street Fighter game on SNES for a few weekends. I could only finish that game by button mashing into a victory against the final boss, M. Bison, once….with M. Bison. I still have a lot of love for this era of Street Fighter - whether it be for the roster, every character’s stage and theme music, and receiving Nintendo Power’s strategy guide for the game for Christmas and studying it regularly to improve.

After a few weeks, we realized we needed something else than a fighting game, and after another trip to Premiere Video, we came home with Super Mario All-Stars. It felt like the easy choice to go with 16-bit remakes of all four 8-bit versions of the core Mario Bros. games. Every game felt like a whole different game with all-new graphics and sound, and more importantly, being able to save progress midgame. This was a bigger hit with the entire family, and it provided many days of taking turns in its alternating two-player mode to see who could get the farthest in the four Mario games included.

Make sure to have some tissues by your side as you witness FFIII/VI's infamous "opera" scene. Seriously, this was mind-blowing stuff to 13-year old Dale in 1996. 16-bit Sportsball Fun

After playing a lot of those first two SNES games, I went into this stretch for the next several years, where most of what I played was sports and wrestling games. I attribute this to many multiplayer sessions with Rich, my brother, Joe, and my dad. I know my dad was not all that into sports other than a passing interest in rooting on hometown Minnesota pro-sports teams. Still, I have to give him credit for spending as much time with us and taking the time to learn and become a pretty solid player at teaming up with me in many sports games. It is worth noting that I feel the 16-bit era is probably the last-gen where most of its library of sports games had a relatively simple pick-up-and-play feel that NES games had. That changed a little bit in the final SNES years, where it was usually EA’s games that started to incorporate more realism in their sports games and make use of most of the buttons of the SNES controller. For football, Madden NFL ‘97 was the one I played the most. I played plenty of the Genesis version at Rich's place, so much so that I noticed too many little differences with the SNES version to make it stand out on its own. For 16-bit sports nuts that want to know, the Genesis version had the better playing version, but the SNES had a better overall presentation and more popping audio and visuals. I was part of a small slice of sports gamers big into NES Play Action Football, and the 16-bit version played almost exactly like the NES version, but with a 16-bit upgrade and also has a nifty feature to play games at the high school, college, or NFL level.

NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime dominated my 16-bit sports lineup. The code scene for these games were so intense at the time I had to keep my own binder of notes on them all that I still have today as seen above! As I alluded to earlier, when it came to hoops, I played way too much NBA Jam the first year it was out at my friend’s place. However, the arcade hoops game I played the most on SNES was NBA Hangtime, which was developed by the same people who made Jam. I got that game new for Christmas in 1996 and must have played it regularly with Rich for nearly a year straight. I do not hear that game receive the same level of praise as Jam, but it added a few new fun layers to freshen up the gameplay, like being able to do co-op dunks and earn “Team Fire,” and being able to create players. For more simulation-focused hoops, I played a lot of NBA Live ’96 with my dad, in addition to Nintendo’s NCAA Basketball which appeared like a technical marvel to me that was ahead of its time with the mode-seven camera allowing constant 3D rotation whenever possession of the ball changed and foreshadowed what would become the go-to camera perspective for the next-gen of basketball games. Finally, I will cherish my time with Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball for it being the only hoops game I ever had to consult a guide to figure out how to shoot the damn ball….and for its surprisingly rocking soundtrack. Find out all about it when I broke that game down with the Your Parents Basement crew on their penultimate podcast.

Nintendo incorporated the same camera style into its hockey game, NHL Stanley Cup. Its graphics also impressed me, but it was rather challenging to score a goal, and I did not have as much fun with it. I played EA’s hockey games more on Genesis than SNES, but EA’s baseball game, MLBPA Baseball, was the hardball game I spent the most time with on Super Nintendo. Many years later, I picked up Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents: Major League Baseball, and had some fun with it, but already played the Game Boy version of it to death by the time I picked up the SNES version, and thus did not invest as much time with it as I did with EA’s game. Wanna Wrassle!?

I must have read through this review of WWF RAW countless times in my youth, and seeing how this essentially is a bigger and better version of Royal Rumble only increased my desire to one day own a SNES! The North American wrestling library was a significant step up from the bottom of the stairwell where most of the NES games hung out….but on the SNES, it only made it roughly halfway up the stairs. The aforementioned WWF Royal Rumble provided many hours of fun for its day, but it has not stood the test of time with the button-mashing grapple meter it featured that will obliterate thumbs on the normal difficulty level! Its sequel, WWF RAW, was noteworthy for having more match types available and being one of the first games to have a selectable female wrestler in Luna Vachon, but it too used that same ill-fated grapple meter that has not aged well. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game is a fun little hybrid of Mortal Kombat and wrestling, but the SNES version is notorious for lacking two wrestlers compared to all other home versions.

For non-WWF games, WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling is rather unremarkable….except for its exceptional wrestler select screen.There were a few interesting unlicensed wrestling games in America. Natsume Championship Wrestling featured a solid wrestling engine but removed/altered the AJPW wrestlers from the Japanese version of the game. Hammerlock had a promising concept of having part of the screen dedicated to nonstop Tecmo-esque cinematics. In contrast, the other half of the screen featured 2D gameplay, but the cameras constantly flipped on screen, to which half was dedicated to cinematics or gameplay. It resulted in it being a jarring mess. Saturday Night Slam Masters is no such mess, however, and is a better hybrid of fighting game meets wrestling game, with this one done by Capcom. It features larger-than-life character sprites, full-on ring entrances with laser lights, and is a fun-playing combination of wrestling and Street Fighter. To top it off, Slam Masters has Final Fight’s Mike Haggar on the roster to boot!

Joey Pink does a fine job detailing why Capcom's "Street Fighter" in a wrestling ring should not be missed! Ensuring RPGs are here to Stay Aside from watching Rich play some of the RPGs I listed above, and of course, playing Final Fantasy VI with him, I did get a chance to play a few other RPGs on the SNES over the years, and it was not until the last few years that I finally finished a couple of them. In the late 1990s I first started two RPGs that stood out to me at the time because they broke out of the medieval fantasy mold most other RPGs at the time took place in. Shadowrun on the SNES was drastically different from the Genesis version I first encountered at Rich’s. This one still had the same futuristic cyberpunk world setting and terminology, but there were many more dialog options with NPCs that were pivotal in asking the right questions to progress the story. Additionally, the hacking games played out differently and had more of a puzzle theme to them than the action-oriented ones in the Genesis version, and the combat had kind a PC interface where a cursor had to be dragged across the screen on which target to aim at. I still wound up being totally into it and became stuck in the back half of the game before my save data became corrupted. I thought that would end my days with Shadowrun…

SNES Shadowrun remains one of my all-time favorite RPGs as of this writing! The final gauntlet tower was an ordeal and a half to work through, only to face off against a dragon as the final boss! …until nearly two decades later in 2016. I mentioned on past flashback specials how I occasionally guest host on the Your Parents Basement podcast, where they cover a random retro game per episode. In 2016 they asked me if there were any games I had in mind to cover, and Shadowrun felt like worth revisiting and possibly knocking off the “must beat this game” bucket list. I progressed until about a little over halfway through by the time we all met to record and broke down the game, but by that point, I just started to make further progress than my last effort and was determined to see this one through! I was playing on actual SNES hardware and was surprised that the battery still held a save but ran into trouble in the final tower with a gauntlet of enemies on each floor to overcome before the final boss. I looked up a walkthrough and discovered an exploit to grind experience to beef up my character. Eventually, I managed to persevere and finally conquer the final boss, a fire-breathing dragon, to cross finishing Shadowrun off my bucket list! I had a riot podcasting with the YPB crew about it too, so please click or press here to give it a listen if you want to know more about this under-the-radar 16-bit RPG.

Fast forward three years later in 2019, and the awesome YPB hosts of Steve, Huell, and Todd helped me once again restart and finish another SNES RPG that I came close to finishing in the late 1990s before evil corrupt save data reared its ugly head again. This time the game of choice is the uber-expensive Earthbound. Like Shadowrun, that game stood out to me because its setting went against the grain of fantasy settings and instead took place in modern times as grade school kids. The opening levels felt like getting lost in your neighborhood and using childlike items as weapons like Yo-Yos and baseball bats. I do not own that ridiculously expensive game, but by 2019 I did own a SNES Mini (more on that in a bit) that I made sure to abuse the save state and the rewind functions it provided to overcome some troubling bosses in the back half of the game. That final act of the game certainly goes places with its sci-fi twists and feels like an entirely different game, but I still loved it all the same! It felt exhilarating to finally knock this one off my “to do” list as well, and I had just as much fun dissecting it to pieces with the YPB crew that you can check out by click or pressing here. Unfortunately, this is where my extensive hands-on time with SNES RPGs comes to an end. I played a lot of FFIII/VI, and finished Earthbound, and Shadowrun. Sure, I dabbled in several other games but did not put more than an hour or two into them. One of those games is the much-heralded, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and I have no excuse for never sticking with it because I loved the NES original. It was the GBA re-release I played, and I think I was spreading myself thin while playing and reviewing too many games simultaneously. Lufia and Breath of Fire II were another pair of RPGs I put a couple of hours into that both left me with promising first impressions, but there was a whole other reason why I did not go back to those again, and that is because then I was waist-deep at the time in….. Discovering Emulation Right around the time my family acquired its first computer in the fall of 1997 was when I found out about emulation. It seemed way too good to be true to easily download and play games right on the computer, especially when factoring in the SNES was at the tail end of its lifecycle, and there were still new games releasing for it. As an unemployed 9th grader at the time, I sampled countless 8- and 16-bit ROMs with the SNES games I was the most curious about. A few of the RPGs in the previous paragraph being prime examples of the ones I invested the most time into. It proved to be overwhelming with so many choices, but I took a long sabbatical after a year or so of taking in the emulation scene after the family computer crashed and I lost all the save data I had amassed in so many games.

It has been interesting to see how emulation has evolved over the years from programs like SNES9X and Retroarch to being incorporated into machines like the MISTer, RetroPi, and Retron 5. Nintendo has learned to embrace official, legal emulation over the years with purchasable digital classic games on systems such as the Wii, WiiU, and 3DS. Having a stable income as an adult now many years later, I feel guilty for embracing the emulation scene so hard in my teenage years, so much so that whenever Nintendo re-releases one of its classic hits several times over, I choose to purchase it again (well…usually at a sale price) to redeem myself. Keeping SNES Alive Today

Over the years, I find myself diving into retro games versus the latest and greatest coming out. I am a fan of the various SNES hardware updates/clones, both officially from Nintendo and unofficially from other companies, which has kept my SNES and other retro game fandom blood flowing over the decades. I am unsure if it feels right to lump it in here, but the Super Game Boy lead to me getting a lot of extra life out of my SNES. Playing Game Boy games on the big screen was a big deal to me back then, considering it was always a pain to make out what was happening on the non-backlit handheld. For some reason, those special border screens that would eventually have funny animations after being left idle for so long made an impression on me. Game Boy games with the “Super Game Boy Enhanced” logo on the front of the box usually have their own exclusive border and special color palette. I loved the Mole Mania and Donkey Kong Land borders the most! I thought it was rad that around 15-20 special enhanced Super Game Boy titles featured multiplayer support with two SNES controllers. They consisted almost entirely of Bomberman and fighting games, but it was still a cool feature nonetheless. The handheld Hyperkin SupaBoy is the unauthorized SNES take on the Sega Nomad by having a portable SNES. It is a bit on the bulky side, but it has a rechargeable battery, and its support has been flawless with my entire SNES library. Another Hyperkin product I got a lot of use out of is the Retron 5. I know that particular clone system is controversial with retro game enthusiasts based on the unauthorized emulators it implements. However, the user interface and emulation support made it possible for me to make record progress in many SNES games by taking advantage of save states and its optional Game Genie-esque cheats library. The SNES Classic Edition is an excellent official piece of hardware from Nintendo that has the pint-sized SNES pre-installed with 21 SNES games, one of which is previously unreleased Star Fox 2. It has an adorably intuitive interface and supports game rewinding and save states, which made it the way I was finally able to finish Earthbound. It was also surprisingly not-so-difficult to plug into a PC and import a bunch of SNES ROMs into. Other companies like 8bitdo made that system extra convenient by making their recommended wireless controllers compatible with it!

If you did not grow up with the SNES, then both of these options are great entry points for those looking to move on beyond emulators. The Analogue Super NT may have been pushing it too much price-wise. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of emulation tech, I am not a wizard by any means, except that by all sources, it sounds like the Super NT offers the best hardware emulation with its FPGA technology. It makes SNES games appear as pristine as possible on an HD/4KTV without any or as minimal of the fuzziness that happens whenever I try plugging in the composite/RCA cables from a base SNES system into a 4K/HDTV. For those unfamiliar with the Super NT, this video from the My Life in Gaming crew does a thorough dissection of everything it has to offer. The list of options in there is intimidating to mess around with, but this sounds like the way to go if one wants to keep playing their cartridges……although I have to admit I am pretty satisfied currently with the Retron 5 and SNES Classic Edition.

Odds are some of you are quite a bit younger than me and grew up post-SNES lifecycle. Not interested in going down the pricey road of hunting down old cartridges and hardware, and do not want to dabble on the dark side of illegal emulation? Then a terrific alternative is if you have a Switch with Nintendo’s $20/year online service membership and taking advantage of the Nintendo Switch Online and Super Nintendo Switch Online digital game portals. It has unlimited access to the slate of games on there, along with save points as long as your membership remains active. The implementation of save states and the user interface has also improved noticeably over the emulation used for NES & SNES Classic Editions. More importantly, it adds the feature to play online with a friend. Last year I played online SNES games with my nephew, who was wrapping up 6th grade at the time, and this was his first time playing SNES games. He loves Mario Kart 8 on Switch, and so when the first game we played was the original Super Mario Kart, I could not help but crack up when he instantly remarked, “Dale, this looks old!” He eventually came around, and then we had some fun playing co-op , Joe & Mac . A couple of years ago, on my Genesis Flashback Special, I made sure to reminisce of my fond memories of the summer I spent playing nonstop Sega Channel. These NES/SNES Switch portals are essentially the Sega Channel, but far better because it does not cost $15 a month (in 1994 dollars which equals $27.63 today per Google), offers multiple save states, and ability to play online for only $20 a year!!! Kids, get your parents to hook you up now!!! Miscellaneous Quick Hits

SNES games were the most common denominator on six of the 13 episodes I guest hosted on the retro game podcast, Your Parents Basement. Check out their full archives by click or pressing here. -Turns out I did quite a few guest hosting spots on Your Parents Basement Podcast for SNES games. For those that are podcasting fiends and dug the three episodes I linked to already, then I will link you to three more SNES themed episodes I appeared on where I breathed in the Mode 7 skies of Pilotwings, embraced Capcom’s action-platformer prowess in X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, and made sure not to miss any Gatorade and Wheaties health pick-ups in Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City.

-The SNES controller is my favorite pre-disc console era controller. It kept the similar button layout of the NES controller but rounded off the edges into its iconic “dog bone” feel so the controller no longer cramped in your hands! Throw in the two extra face buttons and two additional shoulder buttons, and it opened up all kinds of deeper gameplay possibilities! It made it perfect for most fighting games that used almost all the face and shoulder buttons. I found the shoulder buttons were also smartly implemented in NBA Jam/Hangtime for being assigned to use for turbo speed functionality. As far as other SNES controllers/peripherals go, since I loved the NES Zapper, I always wanted to try the Super Scope, but as a kiddo, its bazooka-sized proportions were kind of intimidating. It still kind of bums me out all these years I never got to experience it with epics like Yoshi’s Safari, T2: The Arcade Game, and Tin Star. I never had an opportunity to use the SNES mouse either, which I kind of regret all these years later after seeing all the marvelous creations from experts at Mario Paint, and it was cool to see some PC ports like Civilization, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D take advantage of SNES Mouse compatibility.

-The 16-bit era was when fighting games exploded, and as you can tell above, I spent a lot of time with Street Fighter II: Turbo, and the first two Mortal Kombat games. Other than that, though, the only other fighting game on SNES I put significant time into was TMNT Tournament Fighters. It was released at the tail end of the TMNT-mania when the cartoon peaked at its popularity. The game itself was a surprisingly competent licensed fighting game from Konami, and tried its best to feel like a solid Street Fighter-clone. Speaking of them pesky turtles… -…TMNT IV: Turtles in Time was the only beat-em-up brawler I put considerable time into on the SNES. I have vague memories of trying others out once or twice like The Peace Keepers, and Super Double Dragon, but Turtles in Time was the one I frequently revisited over the years. It is a superb rendition of the arcade game, with SNES-exclusive levels like the Technodrome that had a fantastic first-person boss fight against Shredder, where lowly Foot Soldiers had to be chucked right at him to defeat Shredder. The soundtrack is one of my favorite SNES scores, so much so that I went all-in to get the for it! I have so many great memories of this game, with the highlight being my friend Matt and I revisiting this for complete runs of it once every year or two for about a dozen years.

Turtles in Time and FFIII/VI are my favorite SNES soundtracks, but Turtles in Time I own on vinyl so I will embed it here in all its glory for you to enjoy as well!

-The SNES library had a quality slate of racing games. Super Mario Kart quickly rose to the top of the ranks and was always fun to bust through a GP with a friend. Street Racer was one of the first kart-clones to hit in 1994, and for some reason, that one always stuck with me. As did it being one of the few games to have four-player split-screen support with all four screens being horizontal! Rock ‘n Roll Racing is another killer arcade racer on SNES; think of a more beefed up RC Pro-AM, but with a good dose of heavy metal mixed in. This past year saw it re-released as part of the Blizzard Arcade Collection for everyone to experience it! I remember trying out F-Zero at a store kiosk around SNES launch, but was too young at eight years old at the time to fully grasp its style of futuristic racing (or that the name was a riff on F1 racing until a couple of years ago). I was more into a game similar to its style that was the trilogy of Top Gear titles. Uniracers was a quirky racer I enjoyed with its unique aesthetic and one-wheeled racers taking advantage of their nature in races filled with jumps and loop-de-loops….too bad about Pixar holding a grudge against Nintendo and legally forcing them to yank it off shelves. Nintendo’s other racer, Stunt Race FX, was ahead of its time with the polygonal FX-based graphics running pretty chunky on the SNES. Still, it is a commendable piece of 16-bit tech they were just barely able to keep running at a passable-enough framerate. Another FX-chip game that did not originally gel with me was…

-…the original Star Fox. Being 10 when it released in 1993, I thought those polygonal graphics looked blocky and horrendous and would have none of it! Many years later, I would revisit it and rightfully come around on it! -Another Nintendo-published game that received a lot of hype was Donkey Kong Country with its cutting-edge 3D models. They were plastered all over gaming mags at the time. I briefly recall trying out the first and second of the three Donkey Kong Country games on SNES. However, I did not put more time into them because I beat Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy before our family got a SNES, which was just a watered-down port with some remixed levels for the handheld. I enjoyed my time with it, but its disappointingly blunt “congratulations” ending left a bad impression on me, and I never felt like giving the other entries a serious go all these years.

-Some may be wondering why there has yet not been anything dedicated to the pair of Super Mario World titles and Super Mario RPG? Super Mario World was probably one of the first SNES games I tried when I visited my older brother at his first apartment in the early 90s. I think the heavy-duty graphics and trying to comprehend attacking with Yoshi proved to be too much for eight or nine-year-old me at the time. I played it a few other times in my 20s, hanging out with coworkers on retro game nights, and had fun with it, but I think since I was exposed to the NES trilogy more and played the hell out of All-Stars, that those were the versions I preferred more. I appreciated how Nintendo stepped up to Sega’s edgier marketing at the time with Nintendo’s “Play it Loud” marketing campaign. Unfortunately, I think their ad for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was a bit too extreme for 12-year old Dale at the time. That ad (click here for it if you are feeling daring)was forever planted in my subconscious and always crossed my mind and indirectly caused me to avoid Yoshi’s Island for all these years. I did pick up Super Mario RPG and it is on my “bucket list” of games to play as well. I am holding off on it all these years because I was hanging out with Matt one day, and he explained how he was having a tough time with the final boss, Smithy. Well, he wanted to give me a quick demo to show how unforgiving of a challenge the boss was….but for some reason his clutch gaming skills kicked in right then, and he beat Smithy and was exposed to the ending right then and there!

-As far as other tough SNES games go, the two most challenging for me are easily Contra III: The Alien Wars and Zombie Ate My Neighbors. Contra III is like the first two games on steroids. I love the boss battles and intense walk-n-shoot chaos, but do not love constantly dying in one shot! Zombies Ate My Neighbors is another fun action-platformer that is also equally tough to make it farther than a few levels in unless you seriously dedicate yourself to it. Hey, both of these games also saw re-releases this past year on current consoles with the Contra Anniversary Collection and Zombies Ate My Neighbors & Ghoul Patrol set for those wanting to experience 16-bit nail-biting difficulty (but with save state support!).

I hope this excellent video review from the quintessential retro video game source, Jeremy Parish, suffices for my lack of any meaningful Super Mario World memories here. -In 1997, I was hyped for a late SNES release, the original Harvest Moon. The farm/life/dating-sim series is still around today from publisher Natsume (as well as the original developers parting ways with Natsume and delivering their own competing Story of Seasons series). During the SNES era, I spent several summers out on a farm. I appreciated rural life's solitude and free spirit lifestyle, and that first Harvest Moon game perfectly encapsulated that. Trying to determine the best way to spend the day tending to the fields, livestock and managing a social/family life was surprisingly fun and engaging! Harvest Moon remain one of two games that I submitted a blurry Polaroid photo to Nintendo Power’s “Arena” high score section. I cannot recall if my score got posted or not.

-The original Sim City port on SNES received a lot of love around the SNES launch window, with Nintendo giving it a unique makeover with bonus Nintendo characters in it and an exclusive tutor in the form of Dr. Wright to ease everyone into the simulation gameplay. I never played too much of that version, but one night at Rich’s, the game we decided to rent that night was Sim City 2000. That one was released way late into the SNES lifecycle and lacked any Nintendo extras the first SNES game had. Still, we stayed up all night playing it and looking at our daily news recap and mayor approval ratings and trying to figure out where to stop underwater pipe blockages! It ran slowwww on the SNES, but we tolerated it fine enough at the time because I had yet to play the PC version. Eventually, I would check out the PC version and came away surprised with so much I had to put up within the SNES game. -For those wanting to dare the Super Famicom scene, there are a plethora of great games that never made their way stateside, and better yet, a hearty chunk of them have received English fan translations. I am partial to the FirePro wrestling games that never made it here that are vastly superior to all the American wrestling games I broke down above, BS Out of Bounds Golf is an addicting take on miniature golf, the original Star Ocean, and the Back to the Future platformer that was not a five-star classic by any means, but blew away the poor NES and Genesis games that did release here. If you are not that familiar with the Super Famicom library, this top 50 list from RVG Fanatic is a great place to start your research and very much helped clueing me into a bunch of Super Famicom games I had little-to-no knowledge of. Conclusion

If you are around my age reading this, you may be wondering why I have not gone on about the fabled “16-bit Wars” by now. Rest assured, I experienced it in the lunchroom and at recess and in gaming magazines at the time. I devoured all the side-by-side screenshots in gaming mags of dual-platform releases to see if I could spot which version was better. I want to say back then, I sided with the SNES because I grew up with the NES, but that does not seem like a fair choice since I did not own a SNES until 1996. Reflecting on it, although I experienced a fair amount of RPGs and other games on SNES with Rich, I primarily played endless hours of Genesis games with him back at the time. So whenever I hung out with Rich, I considered myself a Genesis fan, and when I finally got a SNES and grew my SNES library, I considered myself a SNES fan and avoided a lot of the “console wars” trash talk. For younger readers here who want to learn more about the fervor of the 16-bit wars, the book, Console Wars, and its corresponding documentary (which is currently only available on Paramount+/CBS All Access sadly) are my recommended ways to absorb all that hoopla. I will cherish all of the past 30 years of SNES memories and hope you have enjoyed reminiscing with me for the last several thousand words. If you want to hear more of my SNES memories in podcast form, I have a few SNES-centric episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted and have embedded below for your pleasure. They have some of the friends I repeatedly mentioned above as co-hosts that share their SNES experiences and memories, so please load up a random SNES “podcast game” and boot one of these podcasts up for fitting background noise….

10 years ago I did a 20th anniversary SNES special with Matt!

Here is the history of RPG series episode dedicated to the 16-bit era.

Finally, here is Matt and I hosting the 16-bit installment of our history of comic book games series. Bonus Overtime

It would not be a Flashback Special without one random oddball bonus story to wrap it up with. The only Kirby game I ever finished receives that honor. One day, my brother and his friend Jake were over at my place. We were discussing SNES games at some point, and Jake mentioned how Kirby Super Star is his all-time favorite. I said how I never played it and did not think anything of it at the time, but the next time I met up with him and my brother, Jake had the copy of that game with him and insisted on borrowing it to me and said not to give it back until I finished it. I felt this sudden obligation to play through it as a priority, so I did not feel like I was keeping his game hostage. Luckily, Kirby Super Star is a damn fun game, which the front of the box labels as “8 Games in One!” Most of the games are abbreviated-length adventures of only a handful of missions in their unique theme of levels, and a few of the games are mini-games like a race against King DeDeDe. Regardless, almost every game provided that trademark Kirby lighthearted fun and was hard to put down! Kirby’s Dream Course is also a lot of fun on SNES, and is an interesting take of Kirby meets miniature golf! With that anecdote, I will wrap up yet another Flashback Special. Thank you for sticking with me this far, and If you dug reading about my trials and tribulations with Nintendo’s 16-bit machine, please take a look at the other Flashbacks I have linked below!

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th and 32-X 25th Anniversaries Xbox 360 15th Anniversary

#videogames #super nintendo #nintendo #SNES #Super Mario Kart #super mario world #final fantasy vi #final fantasy iii #shadowrun #nba jam #nba hangtime #Mortal Kombat #mortal kombat ii #turtles in time #teenage mutant ninja turtles #sim city #sim city 2000 #wwf royal rumble #saturday night slam masters #donkey kong country #kirby super star #ncaa basketball

[ducktracy]

bob clampett’s porky

porky was the original star of warner brothers after rising to popularity as the stuttering sidekick of beans the cat. we’ll get to porky’s full history when we get to friz freleng, who created him, but today we’re going to talk about bob clampett and his porky. without bob clampett, porky wouldn’t be one of my favorite looney tunes characters to date.

bob clampett’s first directorial credit was co-directing with ub iwerks and chuck jones on 1937’s “porky and gabby”. in it, porky and gabby goat (porky’s hot tempered, surly goat sidekick who got kicked to the curb in 1937 and didn’t come back until 2018 in wabbit/new looney tunes) go camping and (predictably) experience a series of mishaps. porky and gabby is a good short for 1937, highly predictable and low budget, but still entertaining.

porky was a bit of a trouble spot for directors. he was hard to get down. how old is he? some shorts he’s shown with having a mother, working on his father’s farm, etc. what does he do? what are his motivations? everyone struggled to really give him a definitive personality. everyone except bob clampett.

1938-1939 is really when clampett began to solidify porky’s personality. the 1938-1939 title card for looney tunes actually donned a porky drawn by clampett. notice how big his eyes are and how symmetrical and circular he is. clampett was pretty well known for giving characters bigger eyes than other directors.

clampett’s “porky in wackyland” (1938) was a huge hit and is considered one of the greatest cartoons even today. in it, porky travels to darkest africa to find the only existing dodo bird left. he ends up in “wackyland”, population 100 nuts and a squirrel with a slogan expressing that “it CAN happen here”.

porky wanders through wackyland, befuddled and confused. porky finds the ever elusive dodo bird, who harasses him and leads him through all sorts of obstacles: slamming into doors, brick walls, etc. porky finally dons a disguise and bonks the dodo bird on the head with a mallet. he asks “are you really the last of the dodos?” to which the dodo haughtily replies “YES, i’m really the last of the dodos! ...AIN’T THAT RIGHT, FELLAS?”

out of nowhere, an armada of identical dodo birds swoop in around porky and scream in ear-splitting unison, “YEAH MAN! WOOOOOOOOOO!” topped with the trademark iris out.

clampett made porky to seem youthful. before, he was just a prop for impending doom to beat him down, but clampett wanted to change that. he made him cute, appear as a young adult, and give him a lot of naïveté. he was good-hearted, bad things still happened to him, but at least he had some sort of innocence and personality to him. of course, in the same sense, he could occasionally foster a temper, feel frustrated, etc. he wasn’t just a prop. he had emotions, both good and bad.

the black and white shorts are surprisingly entertaining, especially clampett’s. the low budget was rather constricting, but clampett didn’t let that stop him. shown below in 1939’s “porky’s picnic” is an expression that i just LOVE that comes completely out of nowhere.

it doesn’t even have a name, but you can feel it. clampett is renowned for his zaniness and over the top expressions, and we can see that trying to weasel its way out of its egg here.

1940 comes and clampett opens up the decade known as the golden age of cartoons with “porky’s last stand”, the first short released in the 40s.

this is a personal favorite of mine. porky and daffy work at a restaurant together, an angry customer demands he get a hamburger. daffy (you can already smell the trouble) promises he’ll fix him up a hamburger right away, but when he goes to retrieve the meat, he finds a sign left by “the mice” who have beat him to it. daffy, desperate, finds a little calf grazing on some grass and decides to kill it. he follows it into a barn muttering and strutting along happily (and daffily), and when he goes to pull the calf out from inside the barn by the tail, he’s met face to face with an angry bull instead.

basically the rest of the short turns into a prolonged bull chase with porky and daffy. it’s a good one though, with porky’s oblivion as to why daffy is so upset (asking if someone is there to see him and declaring “must be a salesman!”) and daffy’s wacky nature always landing them into trouble (including waving a red cloth and yelling “HEY FERDINAND!”)

i LOVE this porky here. he’s starting to look a bit similar to how he’d continue to look. his head is still a perfect circle, but his ears have gotten more pointed and his eyes don’t take up nearly as much room on his face. this is my favorite iteration of porky, i think it’s a great balance. he looks so charming and adorable, but he has a lot of potential for some great expressions too.

here we have “porky’s pooch” from 1941, what would kick off the charlie dog and porky series—charlie dog winding up on porky’s doorstep begging to be taken in, porky denying him entrance, and a wild goose chase between a dog trying to find a home and a stubborn, oblivious, easily gullible pig. porky is still comprised of mainly circles, but his eyes are certainly a lot bigger than the last picture. his ears are also standing straight up instead of at an angle.

1943’s “a corny concerto” is one of the first clampett shorts we see with porky in color. it’s also interesting to note that this is one of 3 appearances he makes together with bugs, the other 2 in frank tashlin’s “porky pig’s feat” (1943) and gerry chiniquy’s “dumb patrol” (1964).

1943 was an interesting year for clampett, it was really when his shorts started to be up and running. he had taken over for tex avery who had left the studio in 1941, and thus clampett got access to iconic animators such as rod scribner and bob mckimson (who would take over for clampett).

here we can see porky looking a lot more like how he’ll continue to look through the years. his head weight isn’t as evenly distributed, instead of being a perfect circle on top of a mass of cheeks, the cheeks and his head sort of connect instead of piling on top of each other. his ears are smaller and less prominent, and bluntly speaking he’s a bit uglier too LOL. i like porky’s ambiguity, he can be REALLY cute and also REALLY ugly. i really like that though. maybe he’s getting wrinkly with age? 🤔

1944 gives us “tick tock tuckered”, a remake of one of clampett’s first cartoons, “porky’s badtime story” (1937). remember gabby goat? you should because he’s at the beginning of this post. since he’s currently in cartoon purgatory at this point, daffy decides to take over in gabby’s place instead.

clampett is known for making daffy live up to his name (which we’ll cover later), but in this short he shows some of his curmudgeon tendencies (lightning striking an umbrella to which he declares “EGADS, I MUST HAVE ENEMIES!”) porky is still mild mannered porky, trying to tell daffy what to do so they don’t make too much noise sneaking late into work, insisting that opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck, etc. this screenshot he’s definitely back to his “cute” stage, his head seems to be more circular again and his eyes are moderately sized.

then we have 1946’s “baby bottleneck”, one of clampett’s last shorts. i love this short so much. porky takes over as the stork and is in charge of delivering babies to expecting mothers across the world, with daffy as his assistant.

this cartoon just shows how flexible and malleable porky’s character is. he’s orderly and tries to get the job done, hard working and committed. he politely asks daffy to sit on an egg and “hatch it out” so they can find out who the expecting mother is. daffy agrees... until he doesn’t, randomly refuses out of nowhere, and walks away singing.

unexpectedly, porky, who was just smiling and batting his eyes at daffy is now grabbing him by his neck, demanding him to sit on the egg, and pushing and fighting and even throwing him to the ground to just sit on that damn egg. it’s rare that we see porky lose his temper since he’s so well known for being the straightman character, so when he DOES get angry it packs such a punch. porky barrels after daffy, not giving up his pursuit, until they both end up running on the conveyer belt that burps, swaddles, and delivers babies to their mothers. porky and daffy end up being merged into a hilariously disturbing baby, with daffy’s head and torso and porky’s stubby legs sticking out of a diaper.

finally, we reach “kitty kornered” (1946), clampett’s last short with porky. a pesky group of cats lock porky out of his house (one of which is a prototype sylvester) and he tries and tries again to get ownership of his house again. another great porky cartoon: he’s extremely gullible (believing the cats who claim that they’re aliens who are invading his house and that he should leave immediately) but at the same time runs for a gun and tries to shoot them, angrily protesting “I’M BEGINNING TO HATE PUSSYCATS!”, etc. the short ends with porky being kicked out of his house one last time.

he turns to the audience and asks “pardon me, but does anyone in the audience know somebody who knows somebody who has a house to rent?” (albeit with a lot more stuttering). i think this is an appropriate end to clampett’s porky. it’s almost as if he’s asking if there are any other directors who could take him under his wing, to give him a new home.

this is a bit discombobulated and disconnected, but i’m hoping that the pictures make up for what my words do not, how you can see his development physically (and hopefully emotionally too). i never expected to like porky, he bored me as a kid and i never thought twice about him, but now i like him more than i do bugs, and it’s all thanks to clampett. he gave porky a wide range, with looks and scenarios. he could be sweet and innocent one second and angry and bitter the next with absolutely no warning. even in a predictable plot you still didn’t know what he would do. he’s a very endearing character and has a ton of funny lines. he’s very hard to dislike.

i hope this was informative! the best way to see for yourself is to watch these shorts yourself and to get a feel for them. studying screenshots and analyses is helpful, but it’s truly something else when seeing everything in motion with sound, dialogue, etc. THANK YOU for sticking with me and i hope you enjoyed this!

#analysis #long post #lt

[thelordfool]

When The Sun Rises - Chapter Three

Non Facias Malum ut Inde Fiat Bonum

“Why don’t you come with me?”

Between the two men sat a long period of silence. Arcade turned the helmet of the riot gear over in his hands a few times, feeling the weight of it, humming at the possibilities presented to him. Aberdeen patiently sat, fingers folded across his torso in a relaxed stance.

“Well,” the doctor finally sighed, “I have a few questions, first.”

“Shoot.”

“One, why do you have a spare set of this armor? Two, where did you keep it to return so quickly? Three, why me?” Arcade had a look of... bewilderment. All of this was happening so quickly. “And I have a fourth, depending on your answers to the previous ones.”

Aberdeen sucked in a breath. “Well,” he sighed out, “it’s always a good idea to have a spare set of armor around in case yours starts to fall apart - which mine has - but I figure, it’s been the best set of armor I’ve ever had and probably will ever have save for a set of power armor, which I’m not even able to use anyway.

“To answer your second question, I had it stored nearby in McCarran. They owed me a few favors so I’ve got a little temporary setup over there since it isn’t exactly easy to travel to and from Novac every night for some decent sleep. Can’t sleep with all the lights and noise of the Strip right on my doorstep, personally, so a short walk is fine by me.

“And third...” The courier paused. Underneath his own mask, his lips were stretched taut. Why did he want to travel with Arcade? “You said I needed a friend. I think we could be friends.”

“Aren’t you blunt.”

“I seem to be getting that a lot today. Are you people not used to honesty, or something?”

Arcade snickered. “Unfortunately, we aren’t. Around here we get a lot of addicts, gamblers, and youth who are always trying to find an excuse for what’s happened to them.” With this, he sighed, finally setting the helmet down. He noticed something carved into the back of it - the word FORGIVE, just like that. He briefly wondered what that meant. 

“You said you had another question,” the courier interrupted his thoughts. “Hopefully I answered you in a way that allows it to be asked.”

“Well, Courier, I’ve heard of what you’ve done. Everyone talks about it - talks about you, I should say. How you found a way to peacefully settle what would have been a bloody battle in Goodsprings, right after you crawled back from death’s grip. How you got Primm back into working shape.” The name of Primm made Aberdeen wince, and it was a good thing Arcade couldn’t see his face. Aberdeen could only think, in that quick moment, of the eyebot that had been in his life so briefly. The doctor continued, “Providing medical relief to various NCR camps, farms, villages, and you’ve gained quite the reputation in the Legion, as well. My question is, with all the help you’ve given to others, do you plan to continue that in Freeside?”

“Of course,” replied the courier without hesitation. “I’ve seen... I’ve seen what war can do to a man. What the wastes can turn people into. The people of Freeside are no different. If the Legion had an ounce of basic human respect in their blood, I would be giving them the same treatment.” He sounded bitter about this, like he had lost an old friend to Caesar's reign. “The NCR has its faults, and quite frankly, if the Followers were in charge of everything... this world would be a better place,” he finished quietly.

“We’re not all that perfect,” Arcade admitted. “Caesar was once one of the Followers. Before my time, of course. He wanted to rebuild a new world in the image of the old. A sad story of good intentions gone bad. In that regard, he’s hardly unique.  If you set aside his leadership capabilities, extensive knowledge, and ruthless cunning... he's just another jerk who steps on people to get his way." He shook his head, rustling the hair that he had managed to relax back down on his head from right-out curly q’s to something a little more manageable. “If the Followers can produce such a man, then-”

“Then you are not at fault,” assured the courier. “As a whole, I mean.”

“We know that, just... abundans cautela non nocet.”

“Fair enough, I suppose. Don’t let that caution get in your way of pursuing what is right, though.”

“You- you speak Latin?” Arcade sputtered.

“Semper paratus,” Aberdeen said with a wink, who then realized that he still had not removed his mask. “It was more out of necessity than anything.”

“What could have possibly- you know what, no,” Arcade slapped a hand down on the table. “Actually, I don’t even care. From your actions alone, I can say - with strength - that I will come with you. I’m not sure what help I’ll be out there, but... Something in my gut tells me this is right.”

Somewhere, in another area of the Fort, Julie Farkas was hit with a sudden and great wave of relief and joy.

“But.. one last question.”

“Hit me.”

“Uh, do I have to wear this?”

“It’d make me happy if you did. It’s a security measure. You won’t be protected from Fiends - or the rain - in that lousy lab coat of yours.”

Arcade looked down at his coat. It hadn’t been washed, in, well, probably a few years, if he had to be honest with himself, and running out into the rain that morning didn’t count. It was actually still a bit moist, as the lone radiator in the room only worked so often, and when it did, it was barely enough to keep one from shivering, much less able to dry anyone. Even so, the doctor felt almost insulted.

“What’s wrong with my lousy lab coat?” He grinned at his childish joke, stripping it away to rest against the back of his chair.

“Yeesh, if I’d known you were that attached, I’d’ve found someone to perform marriage rights for you,” the courier was quick to retort. The two men shared a chuckle. “I’ll get out of your hair to let you change. You’ll want a dry set of clothing underneath that too - it chafes like the devil.”

“Noted.”

*

Aberdeen’s Pip-Boy chimed, signaling noon. He really wished he could figure out how to turn that off, as it’s ruined a number of covert missions. He snorted at the thought of that phrase, thinking back to pre-war spy holotapes. He’d seen a few in the Big Empty, before he ditched that place. Soon he’d have to return on his monthly trip there, though, if not for the fear of the wrath of the Toaster, but to check in on everyone. 

The last three-ish months had been eventful, every day packed with fighting, not sleeping, and a load of things he truly didn’t understand. It was right after the bullet had been lodged in his head that Aberdeen found paths that lead outside the Mojave. A week, at best. He vowed never to listen to another strange radio signal again, because a month and a half each in the Big Empty and dealing with the droning on of a voice he’d come to hate gave him a bitter taste in his mouth. Long had he wished just to taste the copper sands of the Mojave on his tongue again.

Under the cover of a mostly dry overhang, the courier lit a cigarette. He wondered if the good doctors here in the Fort would chastise him for such an activity, but as soon as the nicotine hit his brain, the thought dispelled and flew away in a puff of exhaled smoke. He let the next inhale simmer in his lungs as he stared into the relentless rain. 

What am I going to do today, he thought. More importantly, what is taking him so long?

Arcade should have been finished dressing himself by now. The courier gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking that not as many people would be ready to go as quickly as he would be. For now, the courier sat on the lone, rain-moistened stool, elbow propped on a table. There was an ashtray, a radio, and a few playing cards turned indecipherable by the water. Lightning flashed overhead, followed by the cursing rumble of thunder, and the radio, to the courier’s astonishment, flickered to life. 

Like earlier, he couldn’t really hear it, but he heard the unfamiliar words “Sierra Madre” and reached to turn the volume up. Leaning in, he could make out the broadcast.

“... s inviting you to begin again. Come to a place where wealth, excitement and intrigue await around every corner. Stroll along the winding streets of our beautiful resort, make new friends, or rekindle old flames. Let your eyes take in the luxurious expanse of the open desert under clear star-lit skies. Gaze straight on into the sunset from our villa rooftops. Countless diversions await: Gamble in our casino, take in the theater, or stay in one of our exclusive executive suites that will shelter you and cater to your every whim. So if life's worries have weighed you down, if you need an escape from your troubles, or if you just need an opportunity to begin again, join us, let go, and leave the world behind at the Sierra Madre grand opening this October... We'll be waiting."

There was about thirty seconds of buffer silence before the dialogue repeated.

“Oh, hell naw,” he scoffed, smacking the radio off. 

“Something the matter?” The suddenness of Arcade’s voice made the courier jump with a yelp. Arcade chuckled. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” The doctor now looked nearly identical to the courier in his riot gear, and, Aberdeen noticed, he had a plasma pistol strapped to his side. 

“No, just...” Aberdeen hesitated. “You ever hear of a place called the Sierra Madre?”

“Hm... Yes, on the radio, and in passing some time ago from... someone I used to know.” He was omitting something there on purpose, but Aberdeen didn’t want to pry. “Why do you ask?”

“Just heard it myself on the radio here,” he gestured to the radio with a now-broken switch. 

“Think the signal might be worth checking out?”

“Aren’t you eager to get out and about. No, I’ve had my fun following lost signals. I have other things to do. So, who around here needs some help?”

*

This is part three of ? of a slow-burn Courier Six (Aberdeen)/Arcade Gannon fic. If you like my work, consider buying me a coffee or donating to my PayPal. I am remaking my commissions post, but I also do artwork.

If this is your first time seeing this, you can start here with chapter one on tumblr or on Ao3.

#art blog #asriel writes fanfiction #fnv #fallout new vegas #slow burn #slow burn fic #arcade gannon #courier six #big empty #sierra madre #dead money #old world blues #consistency i dont have it

[bountyofbeads]

The Daily 202: Eight reasons to be skeptical that Trump is serious about his new call for ‘strong background checks’

By James Hohmann | Published August 05 at 10:39 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted August 5, 2019 9:13 PM ET |

THE BIG IDEA: We’ve seen this movie before. Will the remake end differently?

President Trump tweeted this morning that Republicans and Democrats should come together to pass “strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform,” so that those killed over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, will not have died in vain.

In a speech at the White House, Trump called for “red flag” laws, or extreme risk protection orders, to ensure people who “pose a grave risk to public safety” do not have access to guns — or so that their guns can be taken with “rapid due process.” He also directed the Justice Department to flesh out a proposal to ensure that those who commit hate crimes and mass murders face the death penalty — and for capital punishment to be delivered “without needless delay.”

Then Trump opened the door to bigger action. “I am open and ready to discuss all ideas that will actually work,” he said.

Here are eight reasons to take this with a grain of salt. As always, watch what the president does more than what he says:

1. Trump talked a big game about the need to change gun laws after the February 2018 massacre in Parkland, Fla., but he never followed through with anything significant. He held a televised White House meeting with leaders from both parties during which, among other things, he expressed openness to raising the age to buy a gun from 18 to 21. But then he caved to pressure from the National Rifle Association and did an abrupt about-face. Instead, he created a Federal Commission on School Safety. A week before Christmas, the panel led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos quietly released a report that advised against increasing the minimum age required for gun purchases. The Trump administration did, however, move to ban bump stocks through the regulatory process after the Las Vegas massacre in October 2017. That ban went into effect this March.

2. The devil is in the details. Trump’s tweet today is generic and vague. He’s not endorsing any of the many proposals that have been floating around for years.

3. Trump has previously threatened to veto two background check bills that passed the House in February. Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly opposed both measures. “The first bill, receiving 240 votes — with just eight Republicans voting ‘yes’ — would extend existing laws to require background checks for all gun sales and most gun transfers,” Felicia Sonmez and Paul Kane note. “The second bill, which passed with support from three Republicans, aims to close the ‘Charleston loophole,’ a reference to the 2015 shooting in South Carolina. The gunman was able to purchase the weapons after a three-day federal background check failed to turn up a prior conviction, and this proposal would extend that window for completing a background check to at least 10 business days. Trump has threatened to veto both measures.”

4. Both bills are being pigeonholed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), who is up for reelection in Kentucky next year and therefore has little incentive to upset his right flank. McConnell, who fractured his shoulder yesterday in a fall outside his Louisville home, is very unlikely to bow to calls for a special session to take the bills up.

5. Injecting immigration into the already fraught gun debate is a poison pill. Congress has been unable to act on guns or immigration because both are issues full of political land mines. The fact that Trump suggests they should be grouped — when both issues divide both parties — suggests strongly that this is more about messaging than a desire to put points on the board.

6. Time is on the gun lobby’s side. Congress’s summer recess is scheduled to last five more weeks. Five weeks is an eternity in politics, and the passage of time may sap momentum as the public’s attention turns elsewhere.

7. The NRA is weakened by scandal, but the gun lobby is still strong. The NRA played a pivotal role in getting Trump elected in 2016 by spending heavily in the states he flipped and activating conservatives in places such as Pennsylvania. But the group’s strength has always been the passion of its adherents. The Republican Party has grown more dependent on rural voters in recent years, who tend to be more opposed to gun control.

8. Trump’s divisiveness makes it harder for him to bring the country together, even if he’s earnest about wanting to do so. Just 38 minutes after calling for national unity this morning, Trump suggested that the media is to blame for the shootings. “Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years,” he tweeted. “News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!” 

The president’s criticism of the media follows a string of articles that highlight the ways he’s fanned the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment. “After yet another mass slaying, the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as other presidents once did, but whether his words contributed to the carnage,” White House bureau chief Phil Rucker writes on the front page of today’s newspaper.

The manifesto apparently written by the suspected shooter in El Paso closely mirrors Trump’s rhetoric, including language about a Hispanic “invasion” of Texas. “The author’s ideology is so aligned with the president’s that he decided to conclude the manifesto by clarifying that his views predate Trump’s 2016 campaign and arguing that blaming him would amount to ‘fake news,’ another Trump phrase,” Rucker notes.

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, pointed to that part of the manifesto. “People are going to hear what they want to hear,” he said on NBC. “My guess is this guy’s in that parking lot out in El Paso, Texas, in that Walmart doing this even if Hillary Clinton is president.”

-- Why this time could be different: Trump has the power to get something done if he wants. This could be his Nixon-to-China moment. During the brief period last year when Trump was calling for strict gun laws, polls showed Republican support for gun control surging. He’s popular enough with Republicans that he could strong-arm enough senators to pass a bill if he wanted to invest the political capital. Going into an election year, Trump may decide that passing a law strengthening background checks would boost his standing with suburban women and other constituencies he’s struggling with. Unlike last year, there’s a Democratic-controlled House.

Like Trump, there are Republicans in Congress who are up for reelection next year and might benefit from passing some bill on this issue. “I have long supported closing loopholes in background checks to prevent the sale of firearms to criminals and individuals with serious mental illness,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), whose approval rating has been tanking since she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, referring to the bipartisan measure by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) that failed to get 60 votes after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Conn.

MORE FROM TEXAS:

-- The 21-year-old man accused of slaying 20 people in an El Paso shopping center will be treated as a domestic terrorist, authorities said Sunday, adding that they are seriously considering charging him with federal hate crimes. Annie Gowen, Mark Berman, Tim Craig and Hannah Natanson report: “The suspect, Patrick Crusius, from suburban Dallas, is probably the author of a rambling, hate-filled manifesto posted on the 8chan website shortly before Saturday morning’s shooting, authorities believe, but they are still investigating. … In jail, Crusius has been cooperating with investigators and answering questions, officials said, though they declined to detail what he said. ‘He was forthcoming with information,’ said El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen. ‘He basically didn’t hold anything back.’ ”

John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said the possible charges — including hate crimes and firearms charges — could carry a death sentence.

El Paso County District Attorney Jaime Esparza said the state has filed capital murder charges against Crusius. “We will seek the death penalty,” Esparza said Sunday.

The FBI is looking at a number of possible charges, said Emmerson Buie Jr., the special agent in charge of the bureau’s El Paso division.

-- “Crusius was raised in Allen, Tex., a predominantly white and affluent suburb north of Dallas. His childhood had challenges: His parents divorced in 2011, and his father chronicled a four-decade drug addiction in a self-published memoir. … As a student in Plano High School in 2017, he participated actively in calculus and law enforcement class. … After graduation, Crusius enrolled in Collin College, which he attended from fall 2017 to spring of 2019 … Crusius would often appear zoned-out during class, according to a classmate … During chemistry lab, the classmate said, the classmate noticed that Crusius frequently muttered to himself. After his parents divorced and sold the house in 2018, Allen police said, Crusius would frequently stay at different locations throughout the Dallas region, including with his grandparents, his mother and his father.”

-- Survivors said the shooter was calm and expressionless as he murdered people in a Walmart parking lot and then inside the store. Eli Rosenberg, Heather Long, Griff Witte and Alex Hinojosa report: “It was the second-to-last weekend before the start of school, and 1,000 customers had crammed into the Walmart Supercenter on Gateway Boulevard, where pens, notebooks and crayons were all on sale. Children filled the aisles, trying on new backpacks and clothes. The shoppers had come from both sides of the border that separates this Texas city from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. …

“For Robert Jurado, it began as a regular Saturday. He had taken his car to get washed, then ridden with his 87-year-old mother to the nearby Walmart for groceries. They were coming out of the store around 10:30 a.m. when they heard a loud bang. … There was a shooter in the parking lot, firing on anyone he encountered. As he walked, he fired — with no expression on his face. ‘He was, like, all calm,’ Jurado said. ‘He didn’t show no remorse.’ … Police say the first call about the shooter reached them at 10:39 a.m., and they arrived by 10:45 a.m., meaning the gunman was on the move for at least 15 minutes. …

“After his rampage through the parking lot, the gunman entered the Walmart — with CCTV footage capturing his arrival. … Most of Saturday’s victims were hit inside the Walmart, with a smaller number struck in the parking lot. The shooter kept firing after leaving the store, but then he abruptly stopped and drove away. Police officials said Sunday that they don’t know why. … Crusius was apprehended a short distance from the Walmart at 11:06 a.m.”

-- Mexican officials angrily denounced the shooting and raised the possibility of charging the perpetrator in Mexican courts. Mary Beth Sheridan reports from Mexico City: “President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said seven Mexicans were among the 20 killed in the attack Saturday in the border city, and seven more were wounded. Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the country would take action under international law. ‘Mexico is indignant,’ he told journalists. ‘But we are not proposing to meet hate with hate. We will act with reason and within the law, but with firmness.’ The remarks represented a toughening of Mexico’s official reaction to the shootings. On Saturday, López Obrador appeared to play down the U.S. government’s responsibility for the violence, saying the attack was ‘a product of [societal] decomposition, of problems certain people have. It’s not a generalized issue.’ … López Obrador said Mexico didn’t want to get mixed up in the U.S. presidential campaign.”

-- Mexican authorities released a list identifying five of the Mexican nationals who were slain in El Paso. Among them were Sara Esther Regalado, of Ciudad Juarez, and Adolfo Cerros Hernández, of Aguascalientes: The couple lived in Ciudad Juarez and had been shopping at the Walmart when the shooting began, according to El Sol del Centro. Elsa Mendoza, of Yemopera, was a special ed teacher in Ciudad Juarez who was visiting family in El Paso with her husband and son at the time of the shooting, according to Zacatecas en Imagen. Maria Eugenia Legarreta Rothe, of Chihuahua, was in town to pick up her teenage daughter from the airport. She stopped at the Walmart while she waited for the flight to land, per Milenio.

-- U.S. authorities have not released an official list of victims. Among those identified:

Jordan and Andre Anchondo, of El Paso, had just marked their first wedding anniversary and their oldest daughter was turning 6, Andre’s older brother Tito said. They were preparing to show off their new house and were planning on throwing a big party on Saturday. They didn’t make it. The Anchondos and their infant son were at Walmart shopping for school supplies when the gunman opened fire, killing both parents and sending their baby to the hospital. The baby survived but had several broken bones. Jordan was a stay-at-home mother of three: the 6-year-old and 1-year-old daughters from earlier relationships and her and Andre’s 2-month-old. Leta Jamrowski, Jordan’s sister, said that, based on the baby’s injuries, it appeared that Jordan died while trying to shield the baby from the gunshots. (Rebecca Tan)

Arturo Benavides, of El Paso, was running errands with his wife, Patricia. They were almost out of the Walmart when the shooting began. Patricia was pushed into a bathroom stall and was able to get away unhurt but Arturo, who lived for his family, his dog and upside-down pineapple cake, didn’t make it. The couple had been married for more than 30 years. Jacklin Luna, his great-niece, said Arturo, a former bus driver and an Army veteran, was “always the first person to offer anything he had.” (Hannah Natanson)

Angelina Englisbee was on the phone with one of her sons just before the shooting began, and she told him she had to hang up because she was at the Walmart checkout line. That was the last her family heard from her, said her granddaughter, Mike Peake. Englisbee had seven children and a son who died in infancy, Peake said. She loved watching sports and “General Hospital.” “She was a very strong person, very blunt,” Peake said. (New York Times)

-- Jorge Sainz, a Mexican American pediatrician, described treating El Paso’s victims to the New Yorker: “This was getting close to military trauma. This guy wasn’t shooting a .22 or a little rifle. I was seeing scooped-out flesh. It kept coming. And coming.”

THE LATEST FROM OHIO:

-- The Dayton gunman killed his sister and eight others. Kevin Williams, Hannah Knowles, Hannah Natanson and Peter Whoriskey report: “In the hours before the mass shooting, siblings Connor and Megan Betts drove the family’s 2007 Corolla to visit this city’s historic Oregon District, an area alive on a summer night with restaurants, bars and nightlife. Then, police said, they separated. It is not clear what Megan, 22, did at this point. But Connor, 24, donned a mask, body armor and ear protection. Wielding an AR-15-like assault weapon with magazines containing 100 rounds, he set out on a street rampage that, although it lasted only about 30 seconds, killed nine people and injured 27 others, police said. Among the first to die was Megan Betts. Her male companion was injured, but survived.

“Less than a minute into the barrage, police patrolling the area saw people fleeing and neutralized Connor Betts — he was shot to death — as he was about to enter a bar where dozens of people had run in to hide. … Authorities said that in Dayton, four women and five men were killed. Of the 27 people who were injured, 15 had been discharged from a hospital as of Sunday afternoon. … The guns had been legally purchased, police said. …

“Midway through Betts’s freshman year at Bellbrook High School, the school became aware that he was toting around a ‘hit list,’ including classmates, of people he wanted to take ‘revenge’ on, said Samantha Thomas, 25, who attended Bellbrook at the same time Betts did. … ‘He got kicked out of school for it.’ David Partridge, 26, who also attended Bellbrook with Betts, said the list included a member of his family.”

-- Here’s more information on the victims, as collected by Post reporters:

Megan K. Betts, 22, spent the past couple of months as a tour guide helping visitors explore Montana at the Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center. Her former supervisor, Daniel Cottrell, said she was a “very positive person” and was well-liked by her peers.

Monica E. Brickhouse, 39, who lived in Virginia, was probably visiting family in her old hometown, said her childhood friend, Farren Wilmer. She was a mother of one and ran her own business. “She was always funny and smart and beautiful,” Wilmer said. “You know how kids always say, ‘I’m going to do this’ or ‘I’m going to do that?' Monica grew up and actually did what she said she was going to do. That’s the sort of person she was.”

Nicholas P. Cumer, 25, was a graduate of the cancer care program at Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania and was working in Dayton as an intern for the Maple Tree Cancer Alliance, a treatment center, the organization said on Facebook. On the night of the shooting, he had been celebrating the end of the summer with friends. “He was intelligent, he was extremely caring and kind. He loved his patients, and he always went above and beyond for them,” said Tyler Erwin, one of his co-workers who was at the scene of the shooting. Cumer was one week away from completing his internship.

Derrick R. Fudge, 57, was out with relatives when the shooting began, his sister, Twyla Southall, said. “He was a good man and loved his family,” she said.

Thomas J. McNichols, 25, was a father of four whom an aunt described as a “gentle giant.” “Everybody loved him. He was like a big kid,” the aunt, Donna Johnson, told WHIO-TV. His four children are all between the ages of 2 and 8.

Lois L. Oglesby, 27, was the mother of two, her uncle Joe Oglesby said. The nurse’s aide had just had her second baby last month.

HATE IS CONTAGIOUS:

-- This weekend reflected how American violence — quickly and effortlessly — goes viral. Marc Fisher reports: “Whether the proximate cause was political or personal, whether it grew out of ideological indoctrination, mental illness or some toxic blend of factors that left shooters isolated and damaged, each attack demonstrated a troubling disorder festering in modern America. … ‘These are not single shooters,’ said Daniel Okrent, author of ‘The Guarded Gate,’ a history of anti-immigrant bigotry in the United States. ‘They’re a mob with high-powered rifles, people who feel they’re part of something bigger. The technology has changed: A mob doesn’t have to get together in the street with torches anymore.’ …

“Whatever label is attached to any mass shootings committed by anti-immigrant extremists, they should be viewed not as individual acts but as part of a contagion, said J.M. Berger, a researcher on terrorism and propaganda and author of ‘Extremism.’ ‘Social media allows a lot of people with similar ideological ideas to synchronize their actions,’ Berger said. … The notion that a ‘great replacement’ of whites by some other group is being encouraged by powerful forces is often credited to a French writer, Renaud Camus, who wrote a 2012 book called ‘The Great Replacement.’ … On Sunday, Camus denied responsibility for the El Paso shooting, but endorsed the ideas Crusius may have touted in the manifesto. ‘It is obviously not ‘The Great Replacement,’ the book, which causes the mass massacres,’ Camus wrote on Twitter. ‘It is the great replacement itself.’”

-- “There are no lone wolves,” writes Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security: “White-supremacist terror is rooted in a pack, a community. And its violent strand today is being fed by three distinct, but complementary, creeds. The community has essentially found a mission, kinship and acceptance.”

-- The FBI insists it is fully engaged in combating the threat of violence from white supremacists, but some veteran counterterrorism experts say the bureau has been doing far too little despite internal concerns that have been building up for more than a decade. Devlin Barrett reports: “Dave Gomez, a former FBI supervisor who oversaw terrorism cases, said he thinks FBI officials are wary of pursuing white nationalists aggressively because of the fierce political debates surrounding the issue. ‘I believe Christopher A. Wray is an honorable man, but I think in many ways the FBI is hamstrung in trying to investigate the white supremacist movement like the old FBI would,’ Gomez said. ‘There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base. It’s a no-win situation for the FBI agent or supervisor. … I don’t think there’s any faith by the FBI right now that the Justice Department is an independent law enforcement organization,’ he said. ‘I think the FBI is up to the challenge of investigating white nationalism and white supremacy as a domestic terrorism threat, they just have to be allowed to do it.’”

-- Three of this year’s mass shootings began with a hateful screed on the anonymous message board 8chan, one of the Internet’s most venomous refuges for extremist hate. Drew Harwell reports: “Like after the shootings in Christchurch and the Chabad of Poway synagogue, the El Paso attack was celebrated on 8chan as well: One of the most active threads early Sunday urged people to create memes and original content, or OC, that could make it easier to distribute and ‘celebrate the [gunman’s] heroic action.’ … The message boards tied to mass violence have fueled worries over how to combat a Web-fueled wave of racist bloodshed.

“The El Paso shooting also prompted the site’s founder to urge its owners to ‘do the world a favor and shut it off.’ ‘Once again, a terrorist used 8chan to spread his message as he knew people would save it and spread it,’ Fredrick Brennan, who founded 8chan in 2013 but stopped working with the site’s owners in December, told The Washington Post. ‘The board is a receptive audience for domestic terrorists.’ …

“The site has for years been shielded by U.S. laws that limit websites’ legal liability for what their users post and has been further protected by an Internet infrastructure that makes it difficult to take sites down. Some online researchers also fear that a shutdown of 8chan would only spur hate groups to organize elsewhere. … The site is registered as a property of the Nevada-based company N.T. Technology and owned by Jim Watkins, an American Web entrepreneur living in the Philippines. Asked for comment, Watkins replied with a single sentence: ‘I hope you are well.’”

­-- Cloudflare, the Internet infrastructure company that houses 8chan, announced it will stop hosting the website after this weekend. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, explains why in a blog post: “Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit. We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we’ve considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive — regardless of the content of those websites. … We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line.”

-- Bystanders shared videos of El Paso’s violent aftermath, and strangers online begged them to stop. Abby Ohlheiser reports: “One video posted Saturday, with more than 250,000 views on Facebook, appears to begin outside [the El Paso Walmart]. … A man, whose Facebook name matches that of a witness to the shooting quoted by media outlets, walks inside the store while filming on his phone. He approaches a body, face down in the entrance, in a pool of blood. Another bystander is already there, phone also pointed toward the body. The two nearly collide, both watching their phones. … More than 4,000 people have shared this video, which was streamed live and now carries a graphic content warning from Facebook. But others, in the video’s comments, pushed back. ‘Stop filming,’ one Facebook user wrote as the live video was broadcast.”

DIVIDED AMERICA:

-- Walmart has a complicated history with guns. Derek Hawkins and Morgan Krakow report: “In addition to being the world’s largest retailer, Walmart is often referred to as the world’s largest gun retailer. … But Walmart’s relationship with firearm sales has been fickle in the 26 years since it made the landmark decision to stop carrying handguns. As economic and political winds have shifted, so have Walmart’s gun policies, though the general trend has been toward more restrictions. … Last year, Walmart said it would raise the minimum age to buy a firearm or ammunition from 18 to 21 and remove products resembling assault-style rifles, such as airsoft guns and toys, from its inventory … In 2006, Walmart announced that it would stop selling firearms entirely at all but a third of its U.S. stores, which then numbered around 3,000. … Just two years later, Walmart made it harder to buy firearms at the stores that were still selling them. …

“But when the economic recession took hold in 2009, Walmart’s sales slumped. And after a five-year hiatus at most of its locations, the company started filling up shelves with shotguns, rifles and ammunition. … In 2012, after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., Walmart resisted calls to stop selling assault-style rifles such as the Bushmaster AR-15 … Three years and numerous mass shootings later, however, Walmart did stop selling the AR-15 and similar weapons. … Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who has headed the company since 2014, has stressed that he wants to cater to hunting and sports shooting, the things [founder Sam] Walton enjoyed.”

-- This is what perpetual war looks like in America, writes our art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott: “When we saw images of the war dead from Iraq or Afghanistan, they were surrounded by an architecture that seemed odd, often low-rise buildings made of dun-colored concrete. When a bomb blast tore a hole in the facade of a distant city, we stared into the gaping vacuity at disorderly domestic spaces that were strange and unrecognizable, full of clothes, appliances and shattered dishware that wasn’t like the stuff you find at Walmart. Now the war has come to Walmart. And Hooters. And Sam’s Club and McDonald’s, and an unnamed but homey looking restaurant that has a $7.99 Lunch Special. If this doesn’t look like war, that’s only because we so reflexively resist the idea of a war on American soil that we refuse to see the obvious.”

-- The Navy’s football team in Annapolis apologized and changed its initial motto for the 2019 season: “Load the clip.” Cindy Boren reports: The phrase “was deemed inappropriate and insensitive in a community still recovering from a fatal shooting last year in the Capital Gazette newsroom, only a few miles from Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium. … ‘We sincerely apologize if it upset anyone, but it was not meant to be taken the way it may have been by some,’ said Coach Ken Niumatalolo. ‘We understand that it probably wasn’t appropriate considering the current climate and certain things that are happening in our society.’”

-- It wasn’t just Texas and Ohio: Gun deaths were reported all over the country this weekend. From ABC News:

In Chicago, at least three people were killed and 37 more injured this weekend in shootings within city limits, including 22 people shot Sunday in less than four hours, according to the Chicago-Sun Times.

In Shreveport, La., a 1-month-old girl was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting.

In Charles County, Md., officers responded to a call that a 42-year-old man shot and killed his in-laws. The suspect, police said, then shot at an 11-year-old boy who was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. The man, Mark Hughes, was later found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the sheriff’s office.

In Pinellas County, Fla., deputies shot and killed a 35-year-old man after police said he pointed a 12-guage shotgun at them. The man, the sheriff’s office said, was a suspect in the fatal shooting of his mother.

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