In my ongoing quest to find a decent USB capture device for my old consoles that doesn't cost a fortune (although, once I've tested a bunch of these, I might end up spending as much as I would have on one of the expensive ones, so I have that going for me), I decided to try the AverMedia ET111. I figured that since I was already using an AverMedia product that they should work together in harmony and everything would be wonderful.

I was almost right.

You know how computer upgrades go: the new gaming machine displaces the old gaming machine, the old gaming machine becomes the new capture machine, and the old capture machine gets parted out and sold piecemeal to finance the initial purchase. It's a story as old as time.

It's a little bit slow on the video front right now since I'm in the middle of a massive set of self-inflicted computer issues on my home network, and the computer I was using to capture video is currently sitting in pieces (I've tried capturing video with it anyway, but it's being stubborn).

In the meantime, I thought I'd talk a little bit about a book I came across recently, the attention-grabbing Press Start To Play.

My backlog is huge. I stopped counting a while ago because it was getting kind of depressing seeing the number of games that I had bought, but had done nothing with. I tried all kinds of methods to slow its growth, too. I registered an account at the Backloggery (and then never checked it again), I made myself a deal that I couldn't buy a new game until I had finished at least one of my old ones (which lasted all of six months), and so on. But none of them stuck (sales on digital storefronts are a heckuva thing).

I'm terrible at Palamedes. It's one of those games that I hadn't even really heard of in the NES's heyday, but it kept popping up in lists of Nintendo games that I'd see once in a while. Not that it was ever a Top X game or an X Worst game or anything, it just sort of was there on rarity guides and such, and I never really gave it much thought.

When you play Blaster Master, you start to notice that a lot of the powerups have letters on them that roughly correspond to what they do: pickups that increase your Power have a P on them, pickups that increase your Hover meter have an H on them, homing missiles also have an H on them, et cetera. But one of the ones that always perplexed me was the powerup for your gun in the overhead scenes. It had a little F on it for some reason.

Blaster Master is one of my favorite games for the ol' NES, and I still like to break it out on occasion. For the play session below I decided that I would set a few rules for myself: I would use the 'pause trick', but I would not use turbo on my controller. Sounded like a reasonable compromise to me.

Since yesterday's warm up went so well, I decided to pit my skill against two computer opponents. But not just any computer opponents. I used max difficulty opponents. Was this a mistake?

You bet it was!

Since I'm known in some circles (including my grandmother's kitchen) as a bit of a Wheel of Fortune aficionado, I figured I'd try my luck at Wheel of Fortune Junior Edition.

I warmed up by playing single player mode and... it didn't go as well as I hoped it might. It turns out that Wheel of Fortune is harder when someone else isn't calling the letters.

Sometimes it can be hard deciding which game you want to play next. Thankfully, I have some help.

Unfortunately, she chose Star Voyager.