Elspeth for the Win

  Raptor: Call of the Shadows was one of my favorite PC games growing up. It was a top-down vertical scrolling shooter by Apogee Software & Cygnus Studios from 1994, running on DOS. It ’ s similar to another classic shooter PC game called Major Stryker, which I also enjoyed immensely as a kid. For whatever reason, Raptor has lived on, unlike many of its contemporaries.   Heck, I even found a YouTube streamer who played it on livestream in October 2017 ! This Raptor longplay on stream by cs188creations is super awesome. It ’ s 2 1/2 hours long, so don ’ t feel pressured to watch the whole thing. But, you can get the whole experience by watching it. He played it on Elite difficulty, the highest setting, WITHOUT SAVING! He died a couple of times, but that ’ s what you get from going hardcore!   Like many older games, there were some cheats that made the game easier. These included skipping levels and a “ god mode.” But, I always preferred to play the old fash...

  Moraff's World was an obscure, yet classic PC role-playing game developed by Steve Moraff and first released in 1991 for DOS. It was a follow-up to a very basic dungeon crawler called Moraff’s Revenge in 1988. The version of Moraff’s World that was widely disseminated was a shareware version that was a bit limited in its features. There would be another more advanced version, which you could purchase from Moraff himself, released in 1993. This is the version with which I’m most familiar.   The game was a top-down dungeon crawler with 3D renderings of north, south, east, and west, combined elements of role-playing games and puzzle-solving. It was available on IBM-compatible PCs running MS-DOS, meaning that it’s still playable on modern systems with the use of an emulator such as DosBox.   The game was set in a fantasy world filled with monsters and treasures. Players controlled a single character, which they could customize with a range of weapons, armor, and sp...

Digging through generally worthless “junk wax” baseball cards of 1987 to 1993, you’ll occasionally find a card released before a great season of a not-so-famous player. One of these is a 1992 Topps Stadium Club card of Bob Tewksbury. As it so happens, 1992 was the journeyman pitcher's finest season, which happens to fall right in the Junk Wax era. Let's take a look at Tewksbury’s 6.4 WAR career season with the 1992 St. Louis Cardinals.   The 1992 Cardinals didn’t do much; at 83-79, they placed 3rd in the National League East Division. Ozzie Smith, Ray Lankford, and even Bernard Gilkey were All-Star level players that year, but it wasn’t quite enough for them to make the playoffs. Tewksbury pitched like an ace that year, and he never again had a season quite like it, although he was decent in 1993 (2.7 WAR) and had two 3+ WAR years with the Minnesota Twins at the end of his career.   Interestingly, FanGraphs measures Tewksbury’s 1993 season more favorably than his 1992 ...

  Once in my young adulthood, I managed a list of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels which covered Magic the Gathering. The list became more work than it was worth, and in 2024, it seems such a list isn ’ t even worth maintaining. But, it turns out, there are still plenty of blogs when it comes to Pokemon. As this is the one major topic that I continue to write about and gain quite a following of readers to this day, it only seemed fair that I share the love to the sites that I frequent as sources for my own article work.   As with all resource posts that I maintain, I will be vigilant in ensuring these links stay up to date every three to six months, shedding broken links as my plugins inform me. As always, if you think a blog should appear on this list, please comment or contact me via my website contact form. I will not be including YouTube channels or podcasts here, simply as it becomes a massive hassle; these days, I prefer to highlight individual channels for ...

Back in the days of Windows 95, PC baseball video games were just starting to come into their own as something more than a simple spin-off of the console versions. As a kid, I wasn’t even that avid of a baseball fan, and I played well with the Nintendo and Sega Genesis console baseball video games.   But, after watching the exploits of Pedro Martinez for the Boston Red Sox, I became fascinated with his dominance as a pitcher. So, I started to gain a lot of interest in the game, and I decided to finally try out a baseball video game for the PC. The first I ever tried, and my first favorite baseball game, was a gem called Hardball 6 released by Accolade in 1998.   At the time, the Hardball series was well documented as being one of the premier baseball video game franchises. Unfortunately, Hardball 6 was not quite up to many critics' standards. I didn’t actually purchase the game until 1999, the year I truly got into baseball after watching Pedro Martinez strike out thre...

    Plus, the Best Games for the Xperia Play Smartphone   The Xperia Play smartphone, released in early 2011, doesn ’ t have anywhere near the specs of today ’ s smartphones , of course. But, at the time, Android phones were still getting their feet wet in the smartphone market. I’d entirely forgotten about this gaming Sony Ericsson smartphone until I came across a YouTube video on the subject.   One of my favorite video gaming history YouTube channels is Lady Decade , who I discovered as a suggestion after watching a video from the Gaming Historian , another great channel. In particular, Lady Decade focuses her content on retro game systems, many of which have been forgotten by today. She also covers why major video gaming systems failed to live up to expectations at their time of release. Lady Decade also covers bootleg “ demakes” of popular Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. While these are amusing, it ’ s th...

  Seal Away is an uncommon enchantment card from Magic the Gathering ’ s Dominaria set. This two mana enchantment spell does something similar to other creature removal spells from the past, such as Journey to Nowhere. It removes the target creature from play as long as Seal Away remains in play.   However, this creature removal enchantment can only target tapped creatures. While this sounds like a major drawback, because Seal Away has Flash, you can play it at instant speed.   Here are three ways to play Seal Away effectively.   Play Seal Away in response to a creature declaring an attack   As long as a creature doesn't have vigilance, it needs to tap in order to declare an attack. This means that you can play Seal Away in response. The enchantment will exile the creature before any combat damage can happen. However, any abilities that activate as that creature declares an attack may still activate. Even still, Seal Away is still a nifty combat t...

  One of the best Yu-Gi-Oh decks in 2003 was Fire Princess Burn . The Old School Expert on YouTube did Old School Yu-Gi-Oh fans a favor by sharing a Fire Princess Burn deck list from 2003. Interestingly enough, a lot of this deck is still playable today. Then again, it’s way too slow for today’s game. Let’s take a look at this classic Yu-Gi-Oh burn deck!   To start this profile off, let’s look back to how the game was in 2003. Around the release of the Labyrinth of Nightmare set, the competitive game was actually based mostly in two archetypes, beat-down and burn. There were various permutations of both, but those were basically the best decks in the format. The competitive game would expand a bit in the next year or so, but the Labyrinth of Nightmare Advanced format is very nostalgic for older Yu-Gi-Oh players such as myself.   So, you can see the appeal of why many old school YuGiOh fans are interested in playing this sort of deck, even if it hasn’t been comp...