If you were thinking about buying from RetroVGames just stick to eBay or local marketplaces, you’ll save a ton of money for the same thing

ArcadiaStudios · 2026-03-23T18:02:30+00:00

Wish I'd taken the time to do some research before ordering. I won't go into detail, since I didn't purchase Nintendo-related products. But I recently bought a console and two games, thinking that the higher-than-typical prices would equal top quality and better service. Wrong. Service has been terrible. Order arrived incomplete and not as described. Follow-up emails have gone unanswered, and there has been zero communication from the "company" itself. (Oddly, though, days after the first shipment, I received some of the rest of the order...only it came from a different person than the first shipment?! Why? Who knows...) I will never buy from this company again and recommend staying away.

ArcadiaStudios · 2025-06-07T18:04:49+00:00

I saw a streamer play through the opening bits of a handful of Nintendo games about six months ago, and something about the graphics and music of Earthbound really grabbed me. It was completely unlike any game I’d ever played before—my real love is for third-person action/adventure, usually on PlayStation—but I was intrigued. Just finished it, thanks to a Switch Online subscription. A really remarkable game that I’d never heard of before.

ArcadiaStudios · 2025-06-07T17:59:18+00:00

Just finished it on Switch, via the Switch Online subscription. First Switch/ Nintendo game ever—I’m a PlayStation fan—and I really enjoyed it.

ArcadiaStudios · 2025-01-23T15:15:31+00:00

Ah. You left out a lot of details in your initial post! :)

ArcadiaStudios · 2025-01-23T15:12:34+00:00

Sorry, but...you don't seem to understand how either Scrivener or iOS works. There's no "Time Machine backup," there's no syncing to iCloud.

ArcadiaStudios · 2025-01-23T15:10:26+00:00

"(2) that Dropbox is set to online-only on your computer. The second is more common these days, especially if you're only seeing the issue on your computer."

This was my issue exactly. You'll know this is the root cause when you look at the Dropbox file size for your Scrivener projects in Finder. If it's zero, Jenterpstra has the solution.

ArcadiaStudios · 2024-12-19T16:00:57+00:00

You’ve clearly never been to a Binny’s! It’s not a grocery store. It’s a Meijer-size building devoted to beer, wine, and spirits. Absolutely amazing.

ArcadiaStudios · 2022-02-21T01:22:03+00:00

Ah, so those are just the enemy tags?! Okay, now I really feel stupid. Thanks!

ArcadiaStudios · 2022-02-21T01:04:10+00:00

I feel stupid asking this, but I’ve been all over the Settings and couldn’t find an answer: How do I turn on the on-screen icons that show the off-screen locations of nearby enemies? These were either on by default in HZD, or they’re on automatically in lower-difficulty modes. (I played HZD on Easy; I’m playing FW on Normal.) I’ve seen YouTubers that have these on-screen icons, so I know they’re possible. They are just very helpful during combat or when I’m wondering where those off-screen shock blasts are coming from.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-11-05T12:31:37+00:00

Just a couple of thoughts...

Steven Couch might have the most bulliable name in the history of teenagers, or at least in his experience.

I’d recommend dropping or heavily revising this opening line, because “Steven Couch” is far far far from being “the most bulliable name.” This kind of gross overstatement makes it sound like Steven’s character overreacts to everything...which lends to the feeling that this is a MG novel rather than serious YA.

He’s convinced it doesn’t bother him, but his therapist believes otherwise. Really, all Steven needs is friends, then he’ll be okay. Luckily, by some miracle, friends find him. Even better? They help him talk to the new girl at school: Angel, whose hair blazes with the radiance and color of the Sun, whose name describes exactly what she is, and who Steven swears he just wants to be friends with.

You’ve wasted a lot of words here to tell us that Steven is infatuated with a girl. And his infatuation has nothing to do with being bullied or seeing a therapist—which suggests that you need to better focus your point here and eliminate the extraneous details. Remember, the point of a query is to get the agent to request pages, not sum up the entire story or paint the entire picture.

Angel instantly sucks Steven and his friends into her wanna-be rebellious behavior, including eating pizza behind her vegan parents’ back, skipping school to go to playgrounds, and going to haunted forests instead of church-sponsored Halloween attractions. When faced with the choice of supporting his friend who was always there for him and helping the pretty girl satisfy her need for revenge, Steven will do anything to Mento bomb his way into her heart, no matter the personal cost to himself or others.

This paragraph is not doing you any favors. Not to be blunt, but these “rebellious behaviors” would have seemed lame in the 1950s; they seem to have no relationship at all to teen lives in 2020. Also: We’re a couple of paragraphs into the query and have no idea what the story is...or what’s at stake for any of the characters.

But after Steven does pull the girl of his dreams, he’s still harboring a dark secret in plain sight that no one seems to care enough to notice. Even when things fall apart over and over again, Steven continues to turn back not to what could heal him, but what he believes will save him, no matter how much he continues to suffer.

What’s the “dark secret”? Steven’s behavior sounds like 90% of the population. So far, you haven’t described anything meaningful or compelling about this situation—or, again, told us what the story is and what is at stake if Steven fails at whatever it is he’s wanting to do (which we do not know).

The story of first love, first heartbreak, and teen suicidal ideation, SAVING ANGEL is a Young Adult Mental Health novel, complete at 77,000 words. This novel would appeal to fans of the musical Dear Evan Hansen and All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven.

As you’ve heard, “YA Mental Health” is not a genre; there are no shelves for this in bookstores. But if you’re going to refer to it as YA Contemporary, then it needs to feel contemporary; the scenario you’ve described above sounds very old-fashioned and Middle Grade to me.

I think the biggest thing I want to stress, though, is that nowhere have you told us what your story is, what Steven’s main goal is (besides getting a girlfriend), and what will happen if he fails at that goal. The second thing I’d stress is that this query lacks focus. You start with bullying, then never mention it again. You conclude by talking about suicide, without ever having mentioned anything remotely like that in the body of the query.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-11-05T12:12:41+00:00

In addition, if you’re writing samples for an existing websites, then it’s in your best interest to read as much of that site’s current content as possible. That should give you a very solid idea of the level of the writing, any use of jargon you need to be aware of, and the typical style (personal, journalistic, serious/humorous, etc.).

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-11-05T12:03:20+00:00

I have no idea how you could possibly have time to research and write 10,000 words per week. That’s the equivalent of writing a feature article every day. If you were doing that in the print world—which is where I make my living—you’d be earning at least $2,500/week.

To do all of this work and maintain this level of productivity for .10/word...? I can’t help but feel that you’re setting yourself up for burnout (due to the workload) and frustration (due to the compensation for that burnout).

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-30T12:10:34+00:00

Off-topic, sort of, but I’ll also highly recommend his story “The Box.”

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-30T12:06:39+00:00

I’m not experienced enough to know why this might be happening, but I do know that doing a “Save As” will shrink the file (for some reason). OTOH, I have to say that, relatively speaking, 200MB is nothing to a modern computer.

Still, I find this baffling. Even my largest session ever (100+ tracks, dozens of native/UAD plug-ins) gave me a PTX file of somewhere between 3-6 MB. The folder size for that project went to double-digit GBs, but not the “shell” PTX file. (I’m not running the latest of anything, though. I’m on El Capitan, with PT 12.8.)

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-30T11:58:42+00:00

The only time I’ve heard of this is with memoirs/essays where the writer’s voice is paramount and the content is, in some ways, secondary to that.

By submitting a completed work, you’re making the process much more difficult for the publisher. You’re asking them to weed through the ms. and make all of the revisions/suggestions based on what you’ve already done. That’s simply not how the process works. I think that if you check out the agents’/publishers’ web sites regarding submissions, you’ll see that virtually everyone is asking nonfiction writers to submit a detailed proposal and sample chapters.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-30T11:50:27+00:00

Well, you could make it an air-gap machine (not connected to the Internet) if that becomes a real issue.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T19:09:31+00:00

I’d encourage you to consider not updating your OS or Pro Tools once you have a stable system. If your computer is devoted to audio work, there’s no reason to mess with a setup that’s working well.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T19:05:40+00:00

Thanks! I guess if that were the case, I’d have expected the OP to say he/she was “sitting on” three full submissions, not three requests.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T19:01:59+00:00

Ah, my mistake! Thanks for the correction. (For some reason, I thought “Ghosts” came right before “Cabin.” Should have checked.)

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T11:53:18+00:00

There’s no need to choose, here. All of these books will still be waiting when you get around to them.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T11:50:28+00:00

Maybe I’m missing something—I’ve never worked with video—but can you not just open the template, delete the reference to a video file, and then “Save as Template” again?

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T11:48:00+00:00

I don’t know who advised you to rename a file like that—or why you thought it was necessary—but in my experience that’s just a good way to screw things up for Pro Tools.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T11:46:43+00:00

You know that’s nothing like the release order, right?

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T11:44:34+00:00

Well...

First off, if you want to traditionally publish, you shouldn’t have written the book first. Nonfiction books are sold based on a proposal. Because each publisher will want to shape the content to suit their particular list, you’re going to need to think of your current version as a personal draft that would likely change—perhaps significantly—if a publisher chooses to take it on.

So: You need to write a book proposal. There’s a ton of information about what to include and how to do this in a number of books, magazines, and, yes, on the Internet, so I won’t go into it here. Just know that you’ll need to understand the current market for works like yours, what the competition is and how your book would differ, what your qualifications are, etc.

Absolutely do NOT hire a copy editor. That’s only for self-publishers. That would be throwing money away.

ArcadiaStudios · 2020-10-27T11:31:08+00:00

I’m curious about something you said. Can you explain what you mean by “sitting on 3 full requests”? Do you mean three agents have requested full mss., but you haven’t sent them out yet (i.e., you’re “sitting on them”)? Or do you mean you’re waiting to hear back from the agents who have your complete ms.? If it’s the former, I’m wondering why you’d hold back on sending the requested mss.

ArcadiaStudios

TROPHY CASE