ABOUT ME? ABOUT ME!
HIT IT DIDDY!! THIS ONE'S FOR THE PRETZEL
You've entered a cave that had a door open for you...how else would you have ended up in such a remote place like this?
Good night, morning, afernoon, evening, whatever the sun and moon are doing when you are looking, have a comfy greeting!
- If you somehow don't know already, this is ArcadeStriker talking at you here! -
Man, it is funny to be able to mess around with writing stuff here! It must be the music enhancing the Diddy Kong groove B)
I'm just another human being as any other, as you are whoever you are that's reading this. But perhaps a peculiar one with the amount of things and tastes you might be able to see out of the palace inside my brain that is going to cut loose (footloose) in this corner of the web; the "Web 1.0" corner of the web if you will (I reiterate once again that I ended up doing this because of that LOVEWEB video about Neocities...and damn right it is fun to just do stuff here).
I grew up with Nintendo consoles, vaguely remembering my brother's Game Boy Color, and playing a lot with a real Nintendo 64 consoles and Game Boy Advance onwards until the Wii and 3DS, since I never got a Wii U back in the day (nowadays it seems great to homebrew the living ship out of it) and by the time the Switch rolled out, I've been in anything but in the position or capacity to get one. Or emulate it for that matter; read the specs on the quick profile card.
Even then, I still got hooked with SEGA stuff ever since I had Sonic Advance 2 Battle for the Gamecube, Sonic Advance + Pinball Party for the GBA, and DEFINITELY after the first time I went to the local arcade that used to be at the mall where I live and they had two deluxe Daytona USA 2 Power Edition cabinets; love at first sight and one of the main reasons I got so hooked since I was a kid to emulate stuff: I tried a lot to get that on my old PC, succesfully achieved after a while, and since then, configuring emulators is kind of a second-nature process for me.
Which is great because there's A LOT of cool games that have never been re-released.
So yeah, I like video games, often racing games, platformers, puzzle games, shooters...I still have to gel well with an RPG that isn't Paper Mario (the only one I've completed to this day), strategy games that aren't Age of Empires (though I also sucked at that) and horror games. But you never know what kind of variety you can stumble upon something new you discover or get recommended, right? You can probably also get a bit of a good taste of stuff I've tried if you at least scroll through my Youtube channel videos since most of that is obviously stuff that I liked to play at one point or another.
A briefing of my work
My currently most noteworthy work out there is related to the fangame SRB2Kart, also known as Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart by dictionaries, and the handful of projects I've done for it or connected to it.
Namely, my the titular ArcadePak mappack for the game which has a whopping 11 maps (12 if you know and decide to play the Jungle Fort Long map which is hidden by default), my SRB2Kart The Documentary article project that so far has 3 parts documenting a good chunk of the predecessors, development and release of the game; and having the pleasure of celebrating both the fourth and fifth anniversary of the game with unofficial special videos (both done fashionably started and finished days before those arrived lol).
On the note of having mentioned videos I've done, I occasionally also edit videos and montages on my Youtube channel; most of the time I've done silly montages but I have often wanted to do more grounded stuff, covering games I've played in video essays like you could find in many other channels...only that I still have to balance my motivation to actually keep my head into that, having the script work with the text on screen format, and how said format is what I keep thinking as a choice since I know people wouldn't take it as seriously with TTS voices, while narrating with my own voice is something that I'm...not exactly the most confident on with how I'm not a native english speaker to have clear cut English pronunciation for what I would like those kind of videos from me to be.
My online footprint
There were a handful of usernames I used to have in the past before settling to the "ArcadeStriker" you know today, which had started as "TheArcadeStriker" and was shortened later on for a good while to just "ACStriker" (which you can still use). The ones I remember the most are DaytonaFan as that's how I used to go as in the Supermodel forums back when I was a 10/11 year old kid wanting to emulate Daytona USA 2 on my PC (and I still had that account for years until the original forums had went down or something, and the current ones have a fresh set of accounts; there's a backup of the older forums with my old posts from back then still there...but that's all what remains now of that), TheRobloxianHedgehog which was the original name of my current channel as I had started it back then as a channel for uploading Roblox and Sonic stuff- hence the name, and you can still find my oldest videos under that name if you sort by Oldest on my channel, and ZeroZankuro...which honestly is just something I remember using for the original Tetris Friends before that shut down and I had got the "Zankuro" from the Samurai Shodown boss character.
Tales from TiZ
I used to frequent a lot a site called TheIsoZone back in the day, mainly because...as you might guess, it was a place to download old games; notably old Windows games in their full disc forms and Xbox and Dreamcast homebrew, and some stuff you might have not found from the commonplace sites of back then like EP. I have fond memories of the few years I was there even if I wasn't around that much on the forums, but I also remember clearly how the site went down after the EP incident and apparently the plan was for the owner to keep the site low to relaunch it with a different name...and then something weird had happened with that.
Basically, the original new site that was being done for that got shot down too out of nowhere with all the backed up stuff there was from the old site, and the owner had also wiped the backups for previous stuff for some reason. They seemingly intended to make their own new site, which had been on a waiting page for years, but that never materialized. And the people that remained that still wanted to redo their old home eventually did it under the name of RetroZone; except for not offering any game downloads or anything like it.
It is still kind of sad to think that piece of history vanished like that because of the owner's meddling, and I'd say that even if RZ was still a place for abandonware sharing, it still wouldn't be anywhere near the height of what TiZ used to be. But I guess that in the grander scale of things, its just another footnote to remember for those that were there.
If you are reading this right now, it probably means that I still want to write more soon or in the future, but my hands are getting tired or I want/need to so something else...so until then, have a mighty fine day, mi pana! [reminder to self for next time: Talk about the now lost TiZ that I used to frequent, school stories(?), more stuff I like in a list, who knows what else I'll come up with when I'm back- okay I actually haven't got around to this page since the 5th, but did some few formatting tweaks atm]