Coronvirus update 4/9: Switch Boxing

So, it's been awhile since the last post and I thought I might as well do an update.

By now most places of work in Virginia have voluntarily shutdown or done work from home where possible.  Our household is fortunate to be in the work from home camp; we don't seem to be in the same immediate danger that so many other Americans are in.  So, count our blessings I guess.

One of our first world problems though is the closure of gyms.  Not a huge problem, I essentially only go to our apartment complex's gym to use the heavy bag, but it's starting to wear.

So, I ordered Fitness Boxing on the Nintendo Switch.  

It is...okay.  It's basically taebo, for those of us who remember Taebo.  You use the two joycons to move your hands.  You have free workouts and daily workouts.  The daily workout is based upon your history, weight, etc.

It'll make you sweat, which is better than just sitting and doing nothing.  The problem is, just like with Wii Sports of yore, if you really wanted to you could sit and do nothing.  The feedback seems to be based on how hard you can jerk the joycon. 

Certain aspects are immensely frustrating, I gave up on trying full body ducks/sways and now just jerk the joycons in that direction when it comes up on the feed.  The process does not reward moving your whole body; you keep on missing it if you try said full body ducking.

Is it worth it?  Well, I basically measure video games the same way I measure movies.  If I end up putting the same number of hours into a video game that I would have in going to the movie theater, it's a good deal, and I've hit it.  Do I think I'll continue to do this daily once the gym opens up again?

No, I don't.  This has been useful for exercise other than rucking around the wilds of suburban Northern Virginia, but that's pretty much it.  Glad I got it, well past the "hours spent" cost, but this seems like only a little above shovelware, especially given the price.  This should have been part of a Wii Sports-like bundle.

Sega Genesis Mini unboxing

We had Nintendo consoles, and only Nintendo consoles, in the house growing up.  But when I was in late grade school/early middle school I lived on base at Camp Lejeune, and down the street was a good friend who lived in a Sega household.  Inbetween getting up super early to watch ExoSquad and wandering around the woods along the New River, a lot of time was spent playing Sega games.

So, when the Genesis Mini dropped to about $50 a few months back, I thought, why not?

The Mini is a gen-1 replica, and the box reflects that.  There are 40 Genesis and Sega CD games on the console, plus two that weren't released in North America(Darius and Tetris).  There are a few notable absences, such as Sonic&Knuckles and Mortal Kombat.  My understanding of the situation is that the hangup is Michael Jackson-composed music on S&K.




Like the Classic Nintendo consoles, the Mini is small.  Sega had put out a Genesis replica a few years back that was full size, and the net effect was a feeling of cheapness with the extremely light for it's size device.  Taking the Nintendo route of shrinking it to fit the smaller mainboard was smart.

As you can see the included controllers are the three button models rather than the six button ones. In my opinion they feel well built, although my wife's opinion was that they felt cheap.  They also fit better in my hands than the classic Nintendo controllers do, no doubt a reflection of Sega targeting an older demographic back in the day.



The gameplay itself is fantastic.  Sonic, Earthworm Jim, Castle of Illusion, etc. All hold up well,a testament to the quality of those first gen 16-bit games.  One that didn't hold up well was Street Fighter II.  I played this all the time on the SNES growing up, and the speed of the action compared to modern fighting games aged poorly. 

All in all, I think that this is a great little console, just like the Nintendo replicas.  I think that if you are going to be playing games that take advantage of the 6 button function, like street fighter, you should consider getting one of the 6-button controllers from Retro-bit's line. 

Coronavirus Commentary: Store situation March 1 2020

Having hiked and camped a great deal in the past, there is a good amount of overlap in stuff I have and "prepping" material needed in an extended emergency.  That said, despite the amount of batteries, hiking stoves, water purification etc. with the ongoing emergency I opt to hit Home Depot, REI, and the supermarket last week to add some cushion.

I headed to Home Depot on Thursday, picking one I knew to be relatively slow.  I had a few goals in mind:

• 5 gal buckets for storage
• Contractor bags
• Disposable gloves
• sanitation wipes
• safety googles
• N95 masks(filed under "would be nice", I already had a box in the closet)

The store was about as empty as I expected it to be on a weekday afternoon, which is good because it's exactly the reason why I picked it; there were a couple 5 miles or so away that always seemed slammed.  The mask/respirator aisle was essentially bare; folks had worked though it beforehand obviously.  Everything else was easy to find, although it looked as if folks had been raiding goggles as well.

Out of curiosity I went over and it looked as if all the tyvek suits had been bought.


After Home Depot I swung by the vet to buy up some kibble for the animals, it was still well stocked.  Then I headed to Safeway.  The goals at Safeway were:

• Rice
• beans
• lentils
• crackers
• multivitamins
• more toilet paper
• (generic)sudafed
• knorr packs 
• dehydrated mash potatoes

The last two are sort of an influence of planning for long distance section hiking; cheap easy to make calorie dense food.  I was able to get everything but Sudafed there.  I also got some kielbasa and stuck it in the back of the freezer.  Interestingly, the rice and beans in the regular "white people" section has clearly been worked over, but not on the international foods aisle.

All of this was done on Thursday, and the places were fairly empty of customers.  

At REI the list was shorter; 

• Butane
• water storage

We were able to get both.  We also ended up getting a Harmony house backpacker's kit as well, think a mix of dehydrated veggies you can toss in Ramen or something to add to it. While the place was empty of customers at the time and fairly well stocked, the cashier reported that there had been a steady flow of folks buying in preparation of a pandemic. We then proceeded to the ABC store, which was about as busy as you would excpect on a Friday.

Today(Sunday) we went to Harris Teeter and, again, it was about what we expected for a mid-Sunday afternoon.  The rice & beans had been really worked over, interestingly the bottom shelf of 5+lbs bags were the least touched. I went ahead and grabbed another bag and more mash potatoes, as well as some dehydrated beef & chicken bouillon and instant ramen.

The main take away is that, in the DC area, regular supermarkets do not seem to be seeing the traffic the news is reporting on the West Coast or at plkaces like CostCo.  That isn't to say people aren't doing anything about it; we saw evidence that more dried goods were being grabbed than usual,  but it may be we're in a spot where not as many people are yet panicking.

At home out our "quarantine pack" looks something like this:



Not very Doomsday Prepperish, but just fine if there is a two week quarantine.

A lot of people are finding even this to be crazy talk, which I find odd.  If you can afford it, a few hundred bucks now is better than dealing with it later.  Don't forget your animal friends in your prepping.

Refurbished Treasures: NES and SNES classic unboxings.

I missed it when the NES and SNES Classics, small ROM-boxes produced by Nintendo of their Famicom-platformed consoles, hit the market a few years back.  With a limited run, the systems are difficult to find new-in-box, and for most you have to scour eBay or similar websites.

Well as it turns out Nintendo of America sells refurbs on their website.  I have heard excellent things about their refurbished products, and going into some sort of nostalgia stage I decided to go ahead and order them.  I chose the cheapest shipping option and the arrived from Redmond after about 2 weeks.

The box came with anti-tamper tape

The shipping box came with anti-tamper tape, and had two smaller boxes inside-one for each system.  They were well backed with individual wrapping for all the components.  You'll note that the boxes themselves are just cardboard with stickers on them; you won't find retail packaging with these.

The first thing I noticed after opening the packages is that the consoles themselves are small.  I had known that they were going to be mini-sized, but the included controllers are about the width of the consoles.  My tiny, gnome-like hands hold them just fine.

The NES only comes with one controller.  This is perhaps not as unreasonable as it sounds; the majority of NES games, when they were two player, tended to be sequentially rather than concurrently.  In addition I was surprised to see that the port was not the original controller ports.  For some reason I had thought that they were going to be, even at the point where I was scouring the Internet for a NES Advantage.  The cables are stupid short, something that I hadn't noticed back when I was in middle school and this was in a TV in my bedroom.  Picking up controller for the first time in going on 30 years was shocking; the controller was tiny compared to modern consoles which seem to have older gamer sensibilities in mind.

The SNES uses the same ports as the NES, although those are hidden behind actual faux-SNES controller ports.  I'll be sure to see if I can use a SNES controller on the NES.  Again, the cables are short but the controller feels a lot better.  Could be because I  played it in high school more, and muscle memory is more forgiving.  As with the NES controller, the build quality was high.  These replicate an early SNES controller without the engraved top.

Looking over the consoles and controllers, the quality is astonishing.  It seems as if the Internet Stories about the quality of Nintendo refurbed products are true, if I didn't know they came returned I wouldn't have known they were pre-owned.  I searched for blemishes and scratches and couldn't find any, and the build quality was very high.  I'm a little reminded of Internet Stories were someone orders a blemished firearm from someone like Palmetto and they can't find any visible blemishes.

So far I have to give a big thumbs up to Nintendo of America for their work at their refurbishment center.  I realize it could be that these were returned un-opened, but I gotta wonder if NOA wouldn't have sold them as new if it were the case.