I heard of game dad club this morning and I can't stop thinking about it. It's basically a fan site for handheld gaming device meant to run emulator around a price point of $100 or lower.

And they are basically small steamdeck. They run linux. They can probably install most game coming out of indipocalypse. They looks like really nice homebrew machine.

haha remember pokemon red/blue? remember when they made a 3DS port of it that had working link emulation?? well I do, and when that remake came out I invented a challenge run idea. I wanted to craft a save file where you could trade a pokemon in, teach it ANY combination of TMs, and trade it out again -- a move tutor, if you will. I'm sure there's hacks and stuff to do this more easily but I had this idea that, what if you collected every single TM legitimately, and then cloned them all with missingno at the very end?

it turns out this is a really interesting puzzle because pokemon 1 has godawful inventory management. you can only hold 20 items in your bag, and a further 50 items in your pc. There are 50 tms in the game, so, that leaves 20 slots for healing items and pokeballs and stuff right? Well, not exactly, because in pokemon 1, there is no "key items" pocket; key items take up the same inventory space as everything else. This means your inventory gradually shrinks over the course of the run.

With our 20 remaining inventory slots, we have to juggle (checks notes)... 19 key items.

But that's okay! A lot of those are skippable. We don't need the town map, we don't need the itemfinder, we can skip talking to the guys who give us the lesser fishing rods, we can even do that poke-doll trick to skip the silph scope... overall I think a reasonably "legit" run only needs to collect about 7 of these. That leaves 13 inventory spaces for all our pokeballs and potions. Easy peasy.

I never finished this run while the 3DS was supported though, and that's because of this one stupid-ass TM: number 15, Hyper Beam Foot Lettuce. Hyper Beam can only be purchased from the Game Corner, which both means we need to pick up the coin purse key item, it also means we need to either grind slot machines, or grind the Elite Four for endgame money, and in that case we also have to exchange cash for chips with the receptionist ten at a time up to a total of 5500 chips. That's a mad amount of grinding.

oh yeah we actually have to do that three times.

I think all told I ended the run with like 21 of the 50 TMs, I'll boot up my 3DS later and check. That grinding just killed it for me.

rate my dead popsicle husband. lol idk why I bothered but it's kind of a fun thought that you can indeed customize this guy who's always gonna get shot in the intro and be dead in the freezer forever. I like that you can just give him long grown out hair and full on beards, which if I know anything about soldiers is they probably wouldn't have that because the military's not a fan of that? I might be mistaken though. I don't think the US military in the fallout universe would be very lenient about that sort of thing, even if you're a war hero of some sort. I forget if Nate was at anchorage or what but at the same time.. I'm not sure I give a shit.

My Nora in this game is just called Nora cause I wasn't feeling creative, she has her hair bleached white because she was undergoing her schizo transformation arc and oops the apocalypse struck this morning when she applied some eyeshadow and eyeliner, so give or take 200 years and a dead husband later, she finally got out of the freezer and had to solve the mystery of her pipboy saying LOOKUP FAILED! by installing some mods and then she found some glasses and a funny hat in front of the museum of freedom. there might've been a guy calling for help but she didn't give a shit, Nora was now fully onboard with the post apocalypse lifestyle and shooting people in the back of the head for loot. that law degree was a waste of time so it's a good thing she also spent some time at the range pre-war, otherwise she'd be fucked. she always enjoyed shooting 10mm, it was a decent cartridge, she enjoyed reading about firearms back when magazines weren't a rare collectible and carried a 10mm colt, which she hopes to find again in the post war world.

ahem stopping the roleplaying, I was curious about survival mode and like an idiot bought some bethesda fun bucks for some creation club mods for fun. I always thought that conceptually survival mode was flawed. invisible hunger, thirst and sleep meters, debuffs, bullshit high damage.. I wanna see if I actually enjoy playing with it on, I have done no fast travel playthroughs in the past and that was neat! but.. the saving restrictions are so annoying I'm not sure I'm on board with those yet, a ghoul can slap you and make you lose half an hour of progress in a second. will come back to it and try to not get slapped or eaten.. later. should work on some art now.