PixlBit

Until they got called out on it, EA used to pull this crap where they would suspend people's Origin accounts for trolling on EA's forums (especially the Mass Effect forums), and the people whose accounts got banned ended up losing access to any games that were tied to their Origin accounts, even if those games were physical copies. I think they fixed it after people started calling them out publicly for it, but it was still a shitty thing to do. Being a jerk on a message board should never be an excuse to lose access to games you've paid hundreds of dollars for.

And companies are charging the same amount of money for digital games as they do for physical copies of the same game. Sometimes digital ends up being more expensive.

I remember a point in the first Gears of War. There was a checkpoint right before a boss that was giving me major problems, and every time I got killed by the boss, I'd have to listen to the dialogue over and over again. I really got sick of it after the first two or three times.

Nena was the original artist behind "99 Luftballons." That song, incidentally, was a protest song released during the 1983 nuclear standoff in Eastern Europe. I

West of Phoenix is Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, which is purported to be the largest nuclear power plant in the United States. I guess it supplies Phoenix and a lot of Southern California with power. It doesn't look like a stereotypical nuclear power plant, and since water is a limited commodity in the desert, it uses waste water, i.e. sewage as a coolant.

It looks a bit like Magician Lord, a game I saw on a lot of Neo-Geo arcade machines and is available as an ACA Neo-Geo game on current systems.

Japan launched several thousand balloon bombs over North America in 1945. Almost none them exploded. Unfortunately, one of them did explode in Oregon, killing five people. It had been there for several weeks according to the authorities and the group had discovered it and accidentally detonated it.

I drove by Three Mile Island a few years ago and took pictures. I kind of have a morbid fascination with some of these environmental disasters. Some day I'd like to visit Love Canal.

I'm familiar with a couple of the Arcade Archives titles that Taito made, like Legend of Kage and The Ninja Warriors, but other than Bubble Bobble, I don't see any of Taito's better known classics on there.

I buy cartridges for retail games and digital for small games like arcade games and indies.

Too bad Square Enix doesn't make Taito collections for consoles. I liked quite a few Taito games like Space Invaders, Space Dungeon, Qix, Arkanoid, Bubble Bobble, and Jungle King (Hunt).

I never saw this in the wild, though I read about it in an old book of video game cheats.

Fun fact(?): Phoenix was possibly licensed to Centuri from a company based in.... Phoenix. That's from the game's Wikipedia page.