bev! @TonicBH@computerfairi.es

Never really drank any pumpkin spice coffee but this ain't half bad tbh

Also mirrored to the Patreon just for convenience sake: https://www.patreon.com/posts/heres-some-stuff-141810379

New Secret Area post: Here's Some Stuff I Bought, covering 2025's Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

Plus a small rant about the state of retro game collecting.

Shares and comments appreciated, as always: https://asecretarea.com/2025/10/22/some-stuff-i-bought-portland-retro-gaming-expo-2025/

It's weird. We're seeing a small guitar game revival, with Fortnite Festival, the rise of Clone Hero and YARG, and that RedOctane game that's forthcoming

yet this rise could go away just as quickly as it did last time, when RB4 and Guitar Hero Live came out back in 2015.

I hope I'm wrong in this case but I keep feeling that we'll never hit the glory days of Guitar Hero and Rock Band dominating the music game space ever again, no matter how many games we throw at it

After many years of wanting to play it but unable to, I finally get to play Rock Band 4 just as it gets removed from sale and most of its DLC delisted

The latter isn't a big issue as the 5 fret rhythm game community has preserved every scrap of DLC, but it still feels bittersweet.

Decided to randomly hit eject on the disc drive on my recently purchased Xbox One S, and out came a Blu-ray of SeaQuest DSV Season One, Disc 1.

Can't say no to a free Blu-ray!

Wonder if anyone else has also discovered a disc inside a used system that they bought...

I may not be super good at this whole socializing thing, but sharing things to folks in a "saw this and thought of you" sort of way seems to work out pretty well tbh

Mariners vs Blue Jays was a tough one for me because I like both teams and would've been happy no matter which team won, so

TORONTO!!!!

Honestly when I write my "Stuff I Bought" post for PRGE it's probably gonna be half about my purchases and half about how it felt like this was a weak year

This is a convention I've been going to for years and it kinda makes me worry about the future of it

Portland Retro Gaming Expo wiped me out

not just physically, but financially

I am exhausted.

I honestly want to write an essay about reviving TV shows and how a revival needs to do *something* different than the original, rather than act like nothing has changed

That's my general frustration with most revivals nowadays

We watched three episodes and it went from "perfectly fine, average" to "this is unfinished and needed 3-4 more drafts"

At least it got a few chuckles out of me, I guess

Watching one of the new Futurama seasons with a few friends and the first episode is about NFTs

Can't wait for the AI episode in 2030, fellas

help I can't stop listening to this bop on loop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6RcgAgp6Mg

Was looking at a previous article I wrote late last year for something, and saw something that bothered me.

Now I'm editing out every time I referred to gaming generations by Wikipedia's goofy standards and replacing it with the platform or era instead (i.e. "Xbox 360 era" instead of "7th gen")

Honestly the way Wikipedia defines generations of gaming consoles is stupidly convoluted and needs to be changed