{"id":1158,"date":"2016-04-13T08:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/?p=1158"},"modified":"2019-06-27T10:19:48","modified_gmt":"2019-06-27T14:19:48","slug":"a-packrat-moves-you-wont-believe-what-happens-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.legeekretrogaming.com\/geekblog\/?p=1158","title":{"rendered":"A Packrat Moves. You Won\u2019t Believe What Happens Next!"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may, or may not, have wondered why I have not blogged in over six months.\u00a0 Well\u2026 it has involved the buying and selling of houses, it has involved moving, and \u2013 more relevant to you, dear reader \u2013 it has involved the sorting and packing of lots upon lots of nerd crap.<\/p>\n

\"stack<\/a>There\u2019s a running joke among videogame collectors comparing the hobby to compulsive hoarding, or simply calling it \u201cthe disease\u201d.\u00a0 Now, there is<\/em> a difference.\u00a0 Collectors are genuinely exciting about their collections and are proud to show them off, while hoarders hold onto things indiscriminately \u2013 regardless of value \u2013 and are often not aware of their behavior.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re not magpies, and we may be off-the-hook in terms of this particular medical disorder, but the fact remains that too much stuff can quickly become a burden, and when you have to sort and pack said \u201cstuff\u201d, the thin line between collector and hoarder becomes null and void.<\/p>\n

So, I sorted and labeled and packed the lots of crap into boxes.<\/p>\n

Call it what you will, a man cave, a room of doom, but my previous rec room was filled with old videogames, and later \u2013 after my sons were born \u2013 included Legos.\u00a0 As nerd rooms go it was a fine one, if a little cramped and little too much like a comic book store with everything on display.\u00a0 The space was not exactly inviting and it was never much of a room for the whole family.<\/p>\n

For the new rec room, I was determined to create a friendlier environment.\u00a0 Games and consoles would be out of the way, unless in use, and not everything needed to hooked up.\u00a0 Stuff I rarely used, like old magazines, would be chucked or stored elsewhere.\u00a0 It helped that it\u2019s just a nicer space, and after laying the room out, I settled on sticking with a standard def set and I hooked up the Wii U, along with a PlayStation, a Saturn and a Dreamcast via a switcher.\u00a0 An Atari 2600 is at the ready for coaxial delights. \u00a0To be fair, the whole room is primarily a dedicated Super Mario Maker station for my youngest \u2026 with the occasional garnish of Nintendoland or The Wonderful 101, but that\u2019s as it should be.<\/p>\n

\"new-rec-room\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One happy accident of sorting through my junk is that I rediscovered my Saturn Arcade Racing Wheel.\u00a0 I had held on to it mainly to play the import of Race Drivin\u2019, which plays very close to the arcade when combined with the wheel.\u00a0 This led to remembering how much I enjoyed the Sega Saturn, which led to tracking down some additional racing wheel compatible games<\/a>, which led to Virtua Racing.<\/p>\n

Virtua Racing Deluxe was one of my favorite games on the 32X when I had that system, yet I had steered clear of the Saturn version due to the mediocre reviews at the time.\u00a0 Reviewers must have found the port to be primitive compared to Daytona or Ridge Racer, because playing it now, I have to say that Saturn Virtua Racing is great.\u00a0 It may not have quite the coding polish of the 32X version, but the detail and draw distances definitely benefit from the more powerful hardware.\u00a0 It also has twice as many tracks and a career mode.\u00a0 The only rub is that I can\u2019t quite decide if it plays better with the wheel or with the standard gamepad.<\/p>\n

Other racing games I\u2019ve since tried with the racing wheel include:<\/p>\n