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I failed pretty spectacularly at Castlevania II the other day, but at least the music was good. I let the system sit on the password screen for a little bit.

You could also put in the password I got and continue where I left off if you wanted. It might save you ten minutes or so.

Those old competition games where you have to mash one or more buttons faster than your opponent are a lot easier with a turbo controller, as I demonstrate below.

I stopped by my local used media shop and picked up a copy of Twin Eagle. I had never played it before, which seems obvious in the clip below, but I needed to try it out to make sure that it actually worked (you'd be surprised how often 30-year-old games that were stored in a damp basement, exposed to air and with no dust cover have problems).

Fortunately for me, it worked! Unfortunately for me, I didn't really know what I was doing.

It's been a long time since I played Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and I think it shows.

I played the first Castlevania a lot, and the second one... I never really played all that much. It was very different, but that wasn't the problem. I liked the adventure-style 2-d games like this and Zelda II (yes, I liked Zelda II).

I recently started using FreeBSD on my computer (again). The 'why' isn't really important.

But, I still love video games, and FreeBSD might seem like an odd choice, because the common misconception is that there aren't any games on FreeBSD. If  you want to play video games, you should use Windows, or maybe Linux so you can use Steam.

Well, I don't want to do either of those things, because lots of other people are doing those things, and there's almost nobody talking about the games available on FreeBSD (and there are lots of them), so I decided to try and fix that.

The Switch's selection of old NES games is pretty small right now, but it's worth it to play some games that I maybe hadn't spent as much time as I would have liked to have when the NES was new, but it's also a good way to play old NES games without having to fiddle around with an old NES (although, I'm still trying to figure out how to hook up my NES Advantage to the Switch for the best possible experience). I saw not too long ago that a game that I almost completely forgot about, Adventures of Lolo, made the cut and was available to play, so I sat down to play it for the first time in...

While walking around my local Goodwill a while back, I stumbled across one of those video game devices that you plug directly into your television. This one, though, was shaped like Pac-Man, had a joystick on the side and two buttons on the bottom (labeled 'A' and 'B'). I'd show you a picture, but I neglected to take one due to... me... forgetting. Just use your imagination here. Or do an image search in your favorite search engine.

"You are not alone, my friend. I dream of pipes, too."

  -Ed (Ed, Edd, n Eddy, 'Ed, Ed and Away')

I was at a yard sale recently and I found a Namco TV Game that was made by Jakks Pacific around 2003. It's a small device that easily fits in my hand, has a joystick and a fire button, and it looks kind of like a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet if you saw off the monitor, the marquee, and everything below the control panel. It also has audio/video cables built-in and runs off battery power, so you can just plug it into any handy television and start playing games.

Hudson's Adventure Island is a strange game to me. It features a guy who lives on an island, which appears to actually be several near-identical islands, he wears a loincloth and a baseball cap, his name is 'Master Higgins', and his legs wobble and gyrate around like he's scrabbling to find footing on a slippery floor (which slidy-physics to match). He has to rescue a girl from an evil witch doctor, which is just enough plot to get the game moving.

And I'm awful at it.