Sceptre was more of a TV company in the past, but over the last decade or so have definitely moved more into the monitor business. I have actually owned 5 different Sceptre TVs over the last 20 years, but back in the day it was because they were some of the least expensive LCD televisions on the market.

I also bought a Sceptre “dumb TV” within the last year or so and highly recommend it. I had been recommending it over and over, but recently I found that the model I bought was no longer offered. I hope Sceptre didn’t abandon them.

I’m surprised they had to outsource that as they have been producing so much shit for decades.

I oddly enough do have a working floppy drive, but that doesn’t seem like a solid solution lol.

Interesting, I never saw either Thexder or Socerian in local stores at the time, nor I had even heard of them. It doesn’t look like GOG has them listed, but I’ll keep an eye out so I can possibly give them a try.

Come to think of it, I think it was parallax scrolling that Id Software figured out that hadn’t been done properly before. I had never encountered any of the Japanese DOS games in the DOS days. I imagine there just wasn’t distribution of then in the US I guess. I would have loved to see some Nihon Falcom games.

At this point I have a difficult time trusting any tomatoes I don’t grow myself.

I loved both for what they were. There were a bunch of great arcade games ported to NES they were just totally different, but awesome games and both Ninja Gaiden and Double Dragon are on that list. Strider was a notable one too, where the NES was great, but so hard most people couldn’t get to see much of it.

I don’t feel that those ports, or this Ninja Gaiden one, were horrible or “mistakes” (I owned this game and Megaman 3 for DOS). The PCs at the time didn’t have the specialized hardware to do smooth side scrolling, and John Carmack and crew’s novel way to do it without the hardware was still their secret. It was honestly the best side scrolling game you’d find on PC despite the jank.

I made so many mods for Civ 1 and Civ 2. Civ 2 is also my second favorite (4 being my favorite)

I bought one last year and when I need to replace a TV, I will do it again.

I would never consider that BS, so I forgot about that heh

Your description of flying is still accurate.

It can be used to send money to people that don’t have a bank account. These people sadly exist, like some of my family. That said, being pressured to send them money by them lying could definitely be considered a scam :)

I like the way you think.

It doesn’t count as non-violent, but every kid I have played it with has thoroughly enjoyed the TMNT arcade game (as well as the Simpsons game that plays similarly. If you play with them you can essentially carry them through the game and they are just along for the ride, but feel like they are part of the team.

From what I understand there are better dongles now than that they can perform better than the Apple dongle, but the one everyone raves about that was $20 - $30 or so is now hard to come brand is going for closer to $80 (I think it is the Jcally JM20 Max). I don’t see a reason to bother spending more money chasing this crap now that I’ve had to buy both my wife and I standalone music players. What I do know is that the first company that releases a decent phone that has a headphone jack that fits my other needs is getting my Money. If Fairphone has brought it back, it would have been them since they have decent ROM alternatives (though not GrapheneOS).

I’ve used three: one was generic (it was at the time the only way to get one that could charge and have a headphone out in the same dongle), one was from Fiio (surprisingly bad sounding, maybe worse than the generic in some ways, but better build), and one was the official Google dongle (sounded clean, but was super weak. Couldn’t power even my lightest headphones that weren’t IEMs). The only one I still have is the Google dongle because the others broke, but I don’t use it because it still kinda sucks. I ended up being forced to buy a phone without a headphone jack fairly recently because Google more or less killed my Pixel 4a and there were no replacement phones with headphones jacks that I could put GrapheneOS on. I ended up buying myself a portable music player to list to music on. My phone is now only for listening to music in the car and it sucks :(

My wired earbuds cost more than ten times that and will probably last me until I retire. The vast majority of those USB-c to 3.5mm adapters are cheap crap that have a worthless DAC and/or fall apart after a short time. I have purchased my wife three such adapters since she decided it was worth it to get a phone without a headphone jack and none of them have been good.

I ended up having to buy her a separate portable music player to use. So thanks for that Google, Apple, and the rest of the greedy shithead OEMs.

It absolutely does not require too much space. And you can still buy phones with headphone jacks, just not any of the (ironically) higher end models because OEMs know they can push their first party bluetooth headphones to these customers.