Ree’s musings

• The NES joystick makes old school games really fun...
• ...but it makes Metroid just about impossible.
• Taking NES cartridges from a cold place (shelf on an exterior wall, during a South Dakota November) and popping them into a warmed-up console will glitch your game. Badly. But not irrevocably. Yay!
• Apparently certain Final Fantasy enemies can be killed in a flash if you make a counterintuitive move. I intend to test this; it sounds really cool if it works as advertised.
• I suck at Final Fantasy Tactics. I mean hard. I'm just not a war games person and my idea of strategy is usually "Trounce 'em!" Tactics is not that kind of game. At all. Boo.

Sue me, my brother found the joystick at a secondhand store and that got me pawing through my vintage games collection for likely candidates to try it on.

I love these novelty controllers though. Civilization works well with the SNES mouse, better than with the default controller. That's probably because Civ was originally a computer game. The NES joystick makes jumping in Castlevania even harder, which I would not have believed possible if I hadn't failed it myself. And Tomb Raider with a DDR mat is every bit as unwieldy as it sounds. The tutorial mode is impossible except for the final room. I haven't dared to try the game.

I probably shouldn't try the DDR mat on FF Tactics. I know this, but...