March 2023 Report (Patreon)

Hello, and for all the new patrons who have joined from the Patreon trailer on my channel, welcome to the monthly report! This is where I'll be doing regular updates on my personal life, project progresses and more.

This month has been quite different for this channel, with multiple small projects one after the other! This month I've worked on the Kirby Pop-Up Store video, a Mario Day short, two videos for the Plus channel, a Patreon trailer and of course, the April Fools special! That's also not counting the public and private art projects I've done on the side and a ton of new pickups! It's probably the most stuff I've done in a month in a long while. A bunch of this month's projects have been covered in the previous report, so here's the rest of the things I've done this month!

The April Fools special

(Spoilers below!)

The first scripted April Fools video since 2020! Who woulda thunk. The initial idea for this year's video was a generic parody of Top 10 videos with Nintendo trivia, while the idea of actually having its contents be actual obscure and/or useless facts came later while I was debating what facts to include. A lot of choices made in the video were deliberate as well, including the constantly shifting aspect ratios and certain music picks, so it's been fun to see the comments pick up on them lol

Of course, I only had 10 facts to pick from for this video, and while there were other potential trivia candidates, I deliberately picked some of the more pointless or incredibly specific ones. So here's some of the facts that didn't make the cut for y'all:

• In an early version of the GameCube's manual, there's a placeholder icon and banner shown for Super Mario 64 on a GameCube menu screenshot
• The infamous Mario 64 DS 'black box' that appears in the final game's file select screen was actually seen in the castle grounds in footage from E3 2004
• Prototype screenshots of Mario 64 can be seen in both early prints of the game's boxart...and a Nintendo-themed Monopoly board from the 2000s
• The 'manual build' of Mario 64 is a specific prototype version whose only documentation is screenshots found in the game's manual, largely the same as the final but with a different coin icon in the HUD
• In Hey! Pikmin, the Onion has white and purple in its colors, despite white and purple Pikmin never appearing in the game

Oh, also, don't tell anyone, but to get the generic trivia video style, around 30% of the script for this video was based on text from ChatGPT. This will hopefully be the last time I blatantly use that when writing a script!

Plus videos

Over on the Plus channel: we finally did the 2023 room tour! Since I covered quite a bit of my room contents last year, I mostly only talked about the stuff that changed since that video, but there were still quite a few major changes! Hopefully this will be the format for future room tours going forward. Sorry for the hold-up on this again as I wasn't able to record right away due to my long COVID cough!

Next, I reminisced about the 3DS eShop on the final day before its closure! The maintenance that took place right before it closed almost scared me because I thought I wouldn't be to able to record a video before it closed tomorrow morning, but thankfully it ended before I went to bed that night lol. In addition to this video, I uploaded an alternate version without commentary as well, in case anyone wants clean direct-feed footage of the final day of the 3DS eShop!

On a slightly different topic, I'm working on something a little different for the Plus channel as well! If you've seen my main channel video about the Famicom Disk System cleaning accessories, you might have seen some documentary clips sprinkled throughout of the Hong Kong Famicom bootleg scene in the late 80s. These clips are from a Japanese documentary episode that was about exactly that, and it was a eye-opening look at the Hong Kong gaming scene in the 80s for myself! Unfortunately, the only other translation I could find of this documentary was in Chinese, and even then it was only partly translated, so I'm trying to work on an English translation of it myself with some possible help from others as I don't know Japanese!

I don't know when this will be completed, but the translation is at least halfway done! I haven't posted any previews officially on Patreon yet, but folks in the Expansion Pack tier can find a 5-minute preview link I previously posted in the #expansion-pack channel of the Discord server. The whole documentary is like 40+ minutes long though, so it might take a bit longer for me to get through it in my spare time!

And finally, what's next

In the last report, I mentioned that after all the projects I talked about above were finished, I would resume work on the Things of Interest video about the GBA TV Tuner and possibly other projects.

I did mention a new review offer in said report, and now that I have actually received it in the mail, I figured I could share it here!

This is the FlashBoy Plus flashcart for the Virtual Boy! You might have heard of this thing from my video on the HyperFlash 32, where I mentioned this was one of the first commercially available Virtual Boy flashcarts. Turns out it's now back in production thanks to the folks at Vintex 64, who offered to send me a review copy along with a slew of customization options to check out like label stickers and different colored cartridge shells. While the HyperFlash 32 is still likely the superior flashcart of the two, I do think it is still worthwhile to talk about a cheaper alternative and dive into the ins and outs of using one, so I took them up on the offer! There's no hard deadline for when this video will be done, but I would still like to give this more priority, so either this or the GBA TV Tuner video will be the ones made next.

Recent pickups

And now time for recent pickups! These things in particular I've collected with the idea to potentially make videos on in the future! Usually they happen a long while after I first obtain them though (cough Famicom 3D System cough), so uhhh don't take these as hard promises of video topics that will 100% be coming up next! Though these would definitely all make for fun small-scale TOI episodes...

These two might just be the most expensive retro controllers I've ever bought. (even at a deal compared to eBay prices!!) These are the SGB Commander and Hori Digital Controller, officially licensed controllers released by Hori for the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player respectively! While they're both designed for playing Game Boy games, they both offer some unique perks of their own compared to their respective vanilla controllers, so this might make for a fun TOI episode down the line!

This is technically not really a recent pickup, but one of the games here is!

A while ago I picked up a copy of Arkanoid DS along with the Taito Paddle Controller for the DS: a GBA-slot accessory that features a honestly pretty dang solid analog paddle for Arkanoid. But it was only brought to my attention recently that this accessory supported multiple Taito DS games, one of which being Space Invaders Extreme! Imagine Space Invaders with an analog paddle. Yeah.

Another game that supports this controller is Space Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble Galaxy, so if I can track down a copy of that as well this could definitely work for a neat TOI or even core video on its own (since I'm covering multiple games!)

And finally...Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS!

...this one I'm less confident I'll make a whole main channel video about. I just sorta picked this up because it was cheap and I've heard about this accessory for a long while. Perhaps a Plus video for Patreon then? 😏

Oh wait, I almost forgot...

👁️

And that's it for this month! I am kinda proud of the stuff I've put out, even if they're not as substantial as a full on core video or anything. It helps me get back into the groove of making things! But for now though, I'm in the middle of a week-long Easter break which I really needed after chugging through all the stuff I needed to put out in late March. Plus the Mario movie releases here tomorrow as I'm writing this! Which is kinda neat. See y'all soon!