1 – I had a really bad day at work where I cut the end of a finger on each hand.  Messed up hands means I can’t play.

2 – Those work promotions that I’ve said are going to happen are finally happening.  More hours means less time to play.

3 – The school year is over so my wife is actually home at the same time as me.  Seeing her while she’s awake is a really good thing.

4 – Star Voyager was really bad and the rest of the month doesn’t look to get much better.

See, I told you the reasons weren’t very good.  But I have started playing Lode Runner for next time so look forward to seeing that pretty soon.

Tshirt Laundry has decided that Juggle Chainsaws is cool enough share a couple of $20 gift certificates with.  I’m passing on the love and sharing those gift certificates with 2 random lucky people.

From now, 2:30pm EST on the 28th of March 2011 until around 9am EST on the 12th of April every comment left on this site by a real human person that doesn’t also write for this blog or live in my apartment¹ is an entry to win a gift certificate.

Pretty cool, isn’t it?  But it gets better.

I’ve also set up a mailing list so that I can let people who really care about this sort of thing to get news early.  Signing up for the list will allow me to give you a chance to enter contests earlier than the general public and to share any really important Juggle Chainsaws related news. Once a month is probably as frequent as things will be.  Maybe twice, but never more than that.

I promise not to abuse this list.  Partly because I don’t like it when I sign up for a mailing list and get something every day.  Mostly because it would be stupid of me to waste my time writing emails instead of playing games.

Since this mailing list is new and you’re just going to have to trust that I’ll treat your information with respect I will reward your trust by doubling the entries of every comment whose email address is signed up for the mailing list.

So let’s sum things up with a nice list.

1 – You have a chance to win a free $20 from Tshirt Laundry just by reading this blog and leaving a comment on anything here that will actually let you leave comments.

2 – I can’t win, and neither can my wife, even though the randomizer at random.org wouldn’t know who we are anyway and couldn’t have any sort of bias.

3 – You have from right now until 9am on the 12th of April to leave comments for a contest entry.  If I don’t check until after 9am, then anyone who made a comment before I saw things will have that counted as well.

4 – Spam comments and comments made by anything other than a real human person don’t count.  That means trackbacks from linking to stuff don’t count.

5 – Joining the mailing list doubles the number of entries you have.

Be sure to check out Tshirt Laundry to see what they have available.  And be sure to start leaving comments and signing up for the mailing list.  It’s what the cool kids are doing.

1. In other words, my wife and I can’t win.

But now, Juggle Chainsaws has its own fan page. Go visit it.  Be a fan.

The next time you see an update here, we’ll be starting August 1987.  There are some great games that month, including a game forever linked to Kid Icaris. I won’t ruin the surprise for you, but head over to The Games if you just can’t wait until I officially write about it.

Until then, share this site with a friend.  It will make both of you happy.

One of the things that I’ve been giving games crap for lately is for introducing elements that just seem unnatural.  I’ve been playing the games by just grabbing my controller, firing the thing up, and having at it.

Really, how irresponsible is that?  I’ll bet that a lot of my confusion would have been cleared up about things if I had just read the manual before playing.

To be fair, I hardly ever read the manual before playing.  The manual is for answering questions that come up, not for giving me information beforehand.  It’s almost cheating to read it first.

I’m just going to have to get over that thought process though.  Maybe I’ll switch to playing first and reading second but for everything from here on out I will have the manual available in case I run into anything weird.  Like collecting hearts that don’t refill your energy or something counter intuitive like that.

The internet should be fixed tomorrow¹.  Which means we should have an update tomorrow.  I have been playing the games in the meantime, so update should be coming in a bit faster for a little while.

In the meantime, take a look at this tattoo.  I wish I had the balls to do something like that.  And the money, but that’s another issue entirely.  Or maybe check out the newest episode of Chrontendo if you haven’t done that yet.

If neither of those tickles your fancy, you should head on over to Retro Gaming Times Monthly and read some of the back issues. And know that starting with the November issue I’ll be helping to edit it. That should be fun.

1. I’m writing this post from my wife’s computer at her parent’s house while we’re taking care of the dogs.

This will be great, but it also means there might be a period of silence.  I just want to make sure that you don’t think I’ve given up on this project.  I love it too much to do that.

This isn’t to say that I won’t update before the move.  I’m going to.  I just want to have things ready in case a go a few weeks between posts.

What I am here to say is that it’s been a week since the last game and you’ll only have to wait until tomorrow at the most for the next game.

Things have gotten crazy around here.  I’m in the process of moving so not only do I have something else taking up time, it’s something pretty important that can’t be ignored.

In the mean time, go check out Retrogaming Times Monthly’s newest issue.  It’s a good read, including why PS2 could be considered retro now.

Why does Japan get cover art that's so much better than ours?

Today is a very important day.  25 years ago Super Mario Bros. came out for the Famicom in Japan.  This helped to make the Famicom profitable, which made the NES possible, which changed history for the better.

Normally I would throw a bunch of random cool Mario stuff at you.  But MetaFilter has a thread dedicated to the party.  Most likely I would have found a lot of the cool stuff for you to check out from that thread anyway.  So instead of acting like I knew about all of this stuff already, I invite you to go check out that thread and all of Mario wonders that will ensue.

Or better yet, go play the game.  It’s waiting for you.

Instead, we’ll have an end of the year wrap up.  I’ll probably mention what I think are the best and worst games anyway just because that kind of thing tends to happen.  But with this new way of capping off the year I can add some more random information.

One thing I’m thinking right now is a running look at what companies make good games.  A very subjective thing for sure since I’d be basing that on my own thumbs up/thumbs down system, but good is a subjective term anyway.  I’m considering breaking it down by months as well. There are a lot of ways I can tweak the methods a bit and come up with what I think are some interesting statistics.   What year had the best games or the best ratio of good to bad games perhaps?

If nothing else it could make my psychology degree useful.

Since I don’t have real release dates I can’t really go every X number of games without some kind of safety net.  So unless there are any objections, I’ll be doing awards every roughly 20 games or so.  That number isn’t exact because when I get to 20 games I’m going to finish the month and start over in counting when the next month begins.

Of course it would work out that after March of 1987 it would be exactly 20 games since the last set of awards.  That’s just how things work out I guess.

What I do have is a list of games that at least gets it down to the month and year.  I was going to try using Wikipedia to get some exact dates, but they can’t even decide if Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985 or 1986 in the US.  Nintendo says 1985.  With that in mind, I’m going to just randomize the list in each month unless I have a reason to do otherwise.  We’re actually going to get one of those this month.  But let’s take a general look at things first.

It’s been about 8 months since the last US release.  8 months of playing these games and shooting stuff with the light gun and not having new stuff to bug parents about.  Then we get 8 games relatively all at once.  These games are

• Balloon Fight
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong 3
• Donkey Kong Jr.
• Gumshoe
• Mario Brothers
• Popeye
• Urban Champion

As for the order, I have no idea what it will be except that Donkey Kong will happen before Donkey Kong Jr. which will happen before Donkey Kong 3.  Other than that, it’s up to the randomizer.

The titles to be found in this batch are as follows:

• 10-Yard Fight
• Baseball
• Clu Clu Land
• Donkey Kong Jr. Math
• Duck Hunt
• Excitebike
• Golf
• Gyromite
• Hogan’s Alley
• Ice Climber
• Kung Fu
• Mach Rider
• Pinball
• Stack-Up
• Super Mario Bros.
• Tennis
• Wild Gunman
• Wrecking Crew