Something funny I noticed while playing Jeopardy! Teen Tournament on the Game Boy.

What? That's not a question about China! Well, it's not a question at all, but you know what I mean. This... is... Jeopardy! Even the question I put in isn't Chinese!

Then they did it again! Half the clues (2.5 out of 5; rounding up for stupidity) in the "China" category aren't even about China!

Yeah, it has Metal Slug 1-6. Complete with the bizarre loading times that the review warns about. But it doesn't have a few other features that the review and the manual indicate it does.

 The manual does warn that it was prepared using a preliminary version of the game that may differ from the finished product. And differ it does. I know this is fairly common, but one of the features I would have bought the game for was not included: saving during a game. If you exit a game, you have to start all over, and as far as I know, there's no way around this. Certainly no "save" option anywhere like the manual depicts. What's worse, the game doesn't even save your high scores! What is the point of this being anything other than a rental without at least a save scores feature? I don't see it, and that's why I'm glad I decided to rent this game before buying it.

About the only thing you can unlock is art, and none of it was all that exciting for me. I finished each and every game in the collection and ended up paying an extra day's rental fee because I slept through most of the last day I had it and couldn't get it back before 7, and all I got were some lousy pictures. I did get to play as Ralf and Clark in Metal Slug 6, and that and some of the prisoners you get to rescue in that last game are worth the price of a rental admission, but once again I'm so glad I didn't buy the game new. I might actually consider it very carefully if I see it in a $5 bargain bin at some point.

Not just Hyper Street Fighter Alpha (which would have been a lot better if all or at least a few more of the backgrounds had been in it), which they mention slightly in the manual and the game tells you when you unlock it, but there's a lot of other stuff they don't mention at all. Like "Arrange" Arcade Mode, which lets you fight Bison in Street Fighter Alpha (if he's not already your final boss), "EX" characters in Alpha 2, "EX" characters and Cammy in Alpha 2 Gold, Balrog (and Juli and Juni, I guess) in Alpha 3, and the console-exclusive characters in Alpha 3 Upper. Or Battle Mode, which picks random characters for you and the computer and lets you fight as long as you want (you can turn off characters and styles for each player if you don't want them to appear). Or color edit, which lets you change the default colors of any character in any game, because God knows we're all sick of seeing those same default colors. I think this collection would have gotten better reviews if more reviewers had known about this stuff.

So I'm a Rad Racer now. It took a while.

I also see I have a new emblem for bad taste. I believe a lot more people would have these if they were more honest about their collections instead of just adding things that have good reviews. Besides, even reviewers have bad days and end up giving stuff like Mario Kart 64 a 6. 

Last time I was here, I posted a blog about how I was back and planning to stay that way. That was in November

So I won't say it this time. I have something else to say though. I got a bunch of Playstation 1 games really cheap because my local game store is phasing out anything before PS2. I believe they've already sold out their Dreamcast games, and now they have PS1 and N64 games for 1/4 price. And they were priced mostly less than $5 anyway, so that's like $1 a game.

A couple of months. I can't really explain why. Sometimes I'm a heavy user of a certain website, then I don't come back for several weeks, if ever. But this one I kind of have a reason to come back to, if only to update my games list.

I've been playing a lot of Virtua Fighter 4 and Evolution lately, so I thought it would be fun to go back to Fighters Megamix for a while. And it has been.

Today's fighting game designers could learn a lot from this game. There's like 32 characters, and 9 different paths through the arcade mode. That's tons of replay value considering how the game keeps track of which characters you've beaten all 9 paths with (I've got over 100 hours on the game, and I've only finished all paths with 17 characters so far). Plus you have survival and my personal favorite, Team Battle.

I think I'll keep myself busy with this until KOF 2006 comes out later this week (unless they've delayed it again).

I was playing "Alex Kidd in Shinobi World" on the Master System, and thought it was funny when I ran into this in stage 3.

I also noticed you can set categories for GameSpot blogs now. It's always been my practice to limit my blog here to just gaming, which is why I don't post new ones that often. But with the new category system, who knows, I might start mixing it up.

It's a Playstation controller. I got a PSX-to-USB adaptor on clearance.

My old controller had the same number of buttons as a PSX pad, but it was kind of bulky compared to an actual one. Plus one of the right shoulder buttons didn't work and the select button didn't either, so it wasn't at all the same.

I still have it connected to my computer, just in case I have a friend over who wants to play a game on the computer. But the one I'LL use is the Playstation controller.

It's not every day I get to hack a code for "Infinite Nipples." But that's just what I did for "Ren & Stimpy: Quest for the Shaven Yak." In fact, I made TWO Infinite Nipples codes, one for Ren and one for Stimpy.

For a game that uses rubber nipples as energy bars, this game sure is long. The second stage must have had like 10 levels before I finally got to the end. I also like the way it uses old public domain music for most of the stages too, much like the actual cartoon.