TMNT via NES emulation

TMNT via NES emulation (I do own the cart legit however…): This damn game, this damn sinister game. Even with save states, the best I could do is make it a few screens away from Shredder.. down that final treacherous gauntlet of flying laser shooty dudes. All my turtles were so low on health, I couldn’t even come close and I lacked the patience to learn the pattern of enemy spawning to a “T”. After loading my save state at the precipice of the gauntlet for the 30th time, I threw in the towel. 

This challenge will have to wait again for another day… 

NES Collection Photolog: Sessions I & II

I have been absent for awhile. Being a new dad (She is 15 months now, but every day is still an adventure!) has shifted my priorities a wee bit. I'm still generating new works and playing games, but I have had significantly less time (all for the best reason of course!).

I've also been maintaining a tumblr blog as well. (http://vongerstenberg.tumblr.com/) I'll be soon posting some backlogged pieces here as well, and will begin to get back into hopefully a more regular cadence of sharing my work & play on his blog.

I've continued to expand upon my collection keeping my focus on the Nintendo Entertainment System for the time being. I've added a few DS games here and there, but with the NES lies my primary focus for gaming collecting currently.

I am working on photo logging the most near and dear pieces of my collection. These three images represent the start of this personal project. Hope you enjoy!

Kings of War: Magic Item Cards

A brief deviation from video games! A small group of friends and I semi regularly enjoy thrashing each other in head to head matches of tabletop war gaming. Our current go to is Kings of War. The ruleset for KoW was built by Mantic Games. The beauty of this game and many other games they produce is that the core rule sets are 100% free! Talk about good guy game companies! They do produce entire lines of miniature models as well as boxed sets for their games, but all you really need to enjoy most of their titles are representative scale minis and you are ready to rock.

One aspect of KoW that can make matches more interesting is the ability to "purchase" magic items. When you are setting up your roster, you have a set quantity of points to be allocated towards units based on the match size. Each unit costs a set number of points. Modifiers can be applied to units to make them more robust, but this also costs points. In place of spending points on units, you can pick up magic items to be used by units.

In a match or campaign, only one instance of a magic item can exist per army. Sure, this can be tracked on a roster sheet, but that isn't a fun or beautifully visual way to do so. My friend Bill (who runs www.diy-terrain.com, a fantastic tabletop gaming blog) asked me if I wanted to partner on a project to make a custom set of magic item cards that we could use for matches. I saw what a fan-freaking-tastic idea this was and went to work!

SLALOM: Nostalgia & Color Palettes

In my youth, there were a series of NES games I experienced not because I had immediate access to them, but because I had family that owned them. I think most consoles players can relate to this experience. You never had to own all of the carts if you had friends or family you could swap with from time to time.

I never personally owned Slalom, but it resided with a mighty collection of NES carts at my Grandma's house. My Grandma didn't jam much on this game, but she had her three go to games: Kid Icarus, Gauntlet, and Legend of Zelda. How hardcore of a gamer was my Grandmother taking on titles of this difficulty? The hardest of the hardcore of course! At one point, my Grandma had the entire over world from Legend of Zelda mapped and gridded out with all secret and dungeon locations revealed. She even mastered the second quest unaided. It's also fair to mention, she didn't sleep much either.

I digress.. Slalom is one of the many titles that when I fire it up, the smells of long spent menthol cigarettes, acrylic paint, and the old wood floors of my Grandma's hobby room come back to me for just a flicker of a moment as if I'm back in 1988. Briefly in my mind, I'm back in that room playing NES with my Grandma. Some games are more than just fun to play, the are a window into my own youth that reverberate so powerfully I can fully recall those moments. These games in many ways, are like my own personal flux capacitor, they make mental time travel possible. The visual stimulus that stays with me from this cart is the color palette from this game. The palette isn't deep, but it's a strong visual mix. The color themes can be seen throughout each of the screen caps in this post, I have a breakout of these at the bottom of the post.

Nintendo Comics System No. 2: Photo Gallery

While reorganizing my basement, I yet again stumbled across this old gem. Issue No. 2 of Nintendo Comics System. This divine tome was originally acquired circa 1990, barely cooled off the presses prior to a long road trip with my family. I was 7 years old at the time, and this book kept me entertained to no end. Cherished then, still cherished now. 

Growing up a Nintendo fan boy, this comic collection had it all! I was a huge fan of all the Nintendo franchise cartoons airing around the same time this was birthed off of a printing press, so this was merely another awesome extension of the franchise for my young video game anything and everything hungry eyes.

The cover is tattered, the adhesive in the binding has lost it's grip on the pages within. No more perfect time than now to snap some shots of some of my favorite panels and pages before I tuck it away to be once again discovered by my future self.

Enjoy.