Giving Thanks
- Thank you, Japanese keyboards, for being easy to use with Roman characters and convert into kanji. I’m starting to enter alternate Japanese titles and descriptions for JP region users on some of my YouTube videos, which is good typing practice. And if I had to use an old-fashioned kanji keyboard… I would simply give up.
- Thank you, video games with scrolling menu backgrounds, like Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu ’94. Such a simple, nice effect. Sometimes I ask myself if all I really want in video games is a good baseball-themed screensaver.
- Thank you, Konami, for working on a new English-language Power Pros game. By 2025 I’ll probably know enough Japanese to play the Success Modes in all your games anyway, but for now, I could use the help.
- And thank you, YouTube subscribers. I’d love to get over that all-important 1,000 subscriber hump so YouTube will let me have my chunk of the ad revenue it’s collecting from my videos. After that, I can collect my $10/month checks from Google and go back to not caring about subscriber numbers or video impressions.
New in the 30-30.club Collection
Now that I have a PSP component cable, I picked up two PSP games at my local Play N Trade: The Bigs 2 and Major League Baseball 2K6. Did you know 2K6 has a World Baseball Classic mode? If you had asked me to guess when the first WBC took place, I would have been off by at least the length of an Astros rebuild cycle.
YouTube Updates
Speaking of component cables, I’ve been taking advantage of a new Wii component cable to record a buncha Wii games lately: Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu NEXT, The Bigs 2, Little League World Series 2008, Jikkyou Powerful Major League 2009, and based on this pile of white game boxes on the floor next to me, there are a lot left to record.
2K Sports must have some kind of record for the incredible volume of MLB and MLBPA-licensed games they published on the Wii. They got those licenses and they handed them out to every dev who so much as thought of sending them a pitch email.
I know everyone was chasing the party game/minigame collection jackpot on the Wii, but the fact that there are two of them starring MLB players on the Wii, published a year apart… (Baseball Blast! (which I haven’t found cheap enough anywhere yet to add to the collection) and MLB Superstars) Is there a similar game with NFL or NBA players that I just don’t know about? So weird.