What’s the only thing worse than wasting CD-R’s on an emulator for the Dreamcast which won’t work? When you’re down to your last 4 or 5. So screw it, until I see someone else get it to work I’m done with burning DC emulators.

So picture this. You’re Nintendo. In the late 1980’s you single-handedly revived the dead video game industry. In 1989 your market share was 90% with your first system, the NES. With your second system the SNES, you still captured over half the 16-bit game market. Your handheld console, the Game Boy, is over 11 years old. However, in the 32/64-bit race you placed second. You’re seen as a big bully with bean counters running the show, and since your new rival Sony, is seen as neato and friendly, everyone develops for them and almost no one develops for you.

Now notice how Sony is starting to look and act the same way you did when you started losing developers. Also notice how a software giant with deep pockets is starting to eye your market .In addition, you have this neat new system that can do lots of stuff, but because you feel that bragging about undemonstrated and unrealistic system power is hurting the industry, you announce modest capabilities – which gets you a lambasting in the press. What do you do?

First, you make one hell of a showing at E3. Be sure to help LucasArts whenever and however you can, so that they can make the best Star Wars game ever, Rogue Squadron 2, and make it playable at the show.

Next, you strip the unnecessary DVD playback capabilities from your game console. The PS2 showed us how useless a console is when you can’t even feed it through your VCR. Besides, a dedicated DVD player is better anyway.

Then you announce that your console is coming three days sooner and $100 cheaper than that software giant’s system.

Finally, you remind everyone one more time that you are Nintendo and if everyone wants their Zelda, Mario and Metroid fix then you’re their man.

Alrightythen. Seems NameZero didn’t take too kindly to my forwarding schnapple.com to this tripod page, so they cancelled my account. Well, not really – I can still log in, but schnapple.com no longer goes here, it goes to an “our member screwed up” page. They’re more than happy to sell me the right to have the URL back with no ad frame for $30 a year, which I’ll probably go ahead and fork over as soon as I can find $30 not already promised to someone else. In the meantime, http://go.to/schnapple.com/ will go here. I was almost paranoid that someone was going to buy Schnapple.com before I could, but then I realized that no one ever goes there. In any event, please don’t buy it. Or if you do, forward it to here please.

No URL means no incentive to update, but now that I’ve gotten all settled into my jobby-job, I find I miss updating this page, so one way or another I’m back.

I would just love to tell you how cool bleem! for Dreamcast: Gran Turismo 2 is. I would delight in telling you how awesome my copy is. Problem is, while I have a copy of BC, I don’t have GT2. Please see the aforementioned money woes. I’m getting a copy on Wednesday, come hell or high water. Yeah, I know I could just rent it from Blockbuster and copy it, but I want to disavow myself from game piracy. Well, Non-Dreamcast piracy anyway.

What is cool about bleem!, LLC, however, is that they always respond to my email, almost like they’re not an amazingly bust company fighting like two or three Sony lawsuits. I wanted to buy BC from my local Babbage’s, since I feel a bizarre loyalty to that store (I used to work there), but they kept pushing the date back. I email bleem! and ask them what’s up with Babbage’s Etc. and they tell me that while they have the BC discs in stock, they “weren’t sure if they would make it to shelves”, so I was best off buying from EBGames.com. Then it came out that Sony had “requested” that no one sell BC, so that’s why Babbage’s won’t carry it, and even Electronics Boutique quit carrying it for a few days. Since Babbage’s, Etc. is a big time chain, bleem! is now suing Sony. Good for them.

Anywho, more later (as always).