Year 5: May Update

Mighty Mouse Board Game (1978)

This month had one big day of posts here, on YouTube, and even Instagram which I finally put a few images on. That was Star Wars Day, of course, but since then I've not really done anything and haven't started any new projects. As has been the norm for the past year, I've been somewhat busy with life as the warmer weather requires more yard work and I do a little gardening, plus I'm sorting through more old board games for donation, sale, or the garbage. Unfortunately, too many of those were ruined by a musty basement and I expect the same when I go through my jigsaw puzzles.

Something I had been working on last month and completed early in May is getting all of the game ads onto Google Photos. I also went back through every gaming ads post since the blog began and updated the album links because many still had expired Flickr links that had to be replaced with Facebook and Google Photos. Along the blog header you'll also now see a "Game Ad Links" tab with all of the individual albums listed with links. I'm wondering if I should list the links ahead of the album names to give it a cleaner look? For example: Facebook - Google Photos: Activision rather than Activision: Facebook - Google Photos so that every line would begin Facebook - Google Photos down the whole page. Either way, that page is a convenient way to find the ads. For some reason Google Photos doesn't allow the sharing of a full page of albums as far as I can tell so I can only link to each album individually. Here is an image of what I get to see when I log in and it would be great if anyone could go there and browse all the albums at once but I can't find a way.

Lucasfilm Games and Dotemu are bringing back the 16-bit Zombies Ate My Neighbors (Genesis, SNES) and its sequel Ghoul Patrol (SNES). Both were originally developed by LucasArts but it wasn't publishing console games at that time so Konami published the first game and JVC Musical Industries published the second. The new versions are said to be enhanced with a quick save option and achievements, plus behind-the-scenes bonus content. Digital copies will be available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC on June 29th while Limited Run Games will offer some physical editions later. Xbox.com has both games listed as a single entry for $14.99. E3 isn't happening again, at least not in-person, so I'll probably skip predictions. We should still see a fair amount of game news in June.

   

Last month I ended the update about games for kids or families and I'll do the same here. Lately I've been contemplating yet another YouTube channel. If you recall, last year I launched Video Games 2020 which took a huge amount of my time as I recorded footage of as many physical releases as I could which was around 270 games. The goal there was to try and make a buck but I'm still far from 1,000 subscribers. It does get 25x more minutes viewed than the blog's channel though. Anyway, I'd like to get more recordings done for games designed for younger players, like PAW Patrol. I've played some on the blog channel but feel as if I shouldn't bog the channel down with too much modern game coverage and certainly not a lot of bad games as some of those tend to be. There would also be no commentary, just clips like I did for the VG2020 channel. One last thing to mention is I came across a U.K. website called Family Video Game Database that has some useful information, especially for parents that don't know a lot about gaming.

Thanks again for visiting,

Jonathan