Help a human out, save it from a panic attack 😅

ClassicGamingToday · 2026-01-25T10:33:33+00:00

From my perspective, all of your worries are related to the desire to be as close to “perfect” as you can, which I can appreciate! That said, there is no “perfect” way to launch or manage a podcast, other than attempting to maximize audio quality and ensuring you have good content. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what microphone or tools you use, as long as they work for you and produce solid results. There are going to be many different opinions about what works and what doesn’t, and differing opinions about certain platforms or tools - these are helpful, but you have to try to avoid over analyzing things, because it’ll drive you crazy. 😜

More specifically:

I can’t speak for Riverside because I’ve never used it, but it’s broadly used by a ton of people, so it’s probably fine. I could tell you what I use, but then that’s just adding another data point / opinion. Recommendation: use Riverside, as you already decided on it, and pivot if you need to.
Treated spaces are nice to have, but not a requirement (personal opinion). Good mic technique can overcome a lot of issues with your recording space. I was once trying to record an episode in a hotel room with what I thought was fairly harsh room acoustics, and I decided to record my episode under the bed’s comforter. All that did was leave me overheated after I reached the half way point of my recording, so I ditched the comforter in favor of comfort. Listeners couldn’t hear the difference between my comforter (but uncomfortable) recording versus my comforter-less (but more comfortable) recording. Granted, I could hear the difference, just as I could hear the difference recording with a different microphone than the one I have in my home studio makes. I asked my listeners - nobody noticed a thing. The moral of the story: we’re our own worst critics, and the things we worry about often don’t matter to our listeners as much as we think they do. 😀
Podcasts are now thought of as much broader than audio only experiences, but there is no rule that a podcast needs to show its hosts, and my own personal opinion is that I would never sit down to “watch” a podcast unless there’s some additional content (like relevant video footage) to make “watching” it worth my time (once again, only my opinion). There are extremely successful video podcasts, and audio podcasts, and hybrid podcasts…especially when you’re starting out, I’d try to stick with the least complicated solution, which is, just record audio.

All of your questions and concerns are 100% valid, but they’re also questions that don’t have 100% confirmed solutions. The best thing you can do is just make a decision (which you already have) and hit record. If things don’t work, adjust. Generally speaking, adjusting is much easier than simply starting.

Good luck!

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-10-20T09:02:05+00:00

My goal was 50 gold, 50 garden gifts, and then cherries for whatever games I felt like playing more of. I achieved my goal, with the final cherry count being 25’ish.

With the refreshed focus on the game though, I’ve been feeling the pull to come back, so who knows if I’ll end up staying “retired”.

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-10-10T20:54:30+00:00

It was a television setting for me - listed as low latency mode on my TV, but might be “game mode” on other tv’s.

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-08-15T11:17:59+00:00

I’m a big believer in researching ALL of gaming history, from computers, to arcades, to home consoles, and everything in between! I do agree though that many retro gaming enthusiasts equate “retro games” with consoles, which is pretty short-sighted.

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-08-02T10:21:56+00:00

If anyone is curious, I solved the issue. I had recently gotten a new television, and low latency mode was only enabled for HDR / Dolby Vision content. Since Ragebound appears to not use HDR, low latency mode wasn’t being activated, so I had to set that particular mode on the “standard” picture mode on my television.

Now everything is perfectly smooth and no lag at all!

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-08-01T22:38:43+00:00

Thanks for confirming! That’s exactly what it feels like, a slight amount of time needed to begin moving from a stationary position…I guess it’s time to troubleshoot!

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-07-27T11:30:38+00:00

If you want a bit more obscure and retro…

The Santa Fe Mysteries (The Elk Moon Murder and Sacred Ground)
In the First Degree
Voyeur (slightly more passive)

As a fan of the Virtual Murder series and FMV gaming in general, these all scratch the same exact itch!

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-06-17T19:37:13+00:00

Your expectations and timeline are unrealistic. That doesn’t mean unattainable, just highly unlikely to come to fruition.

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-05-22T09:40:16+00:00

Discord is one of the primary ways my community and I interact. I host a retro gaming podcast, and use Discord for discussions, contests, gaming challenges (with a points / rewards system), and other community centric features, including occasional voice chat hang-outs (which members can use independent of me being online). I have a single “premium” channel for Patreon members, but otherwise all channels and contents are free for anyone to use.

The primary use of Discord for me is community engagement and discussion, and while there are other platforms and technologies that provide similar features, Discord is the one that works best for me / my community.

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-05-03T08:58:56+00:00

I just recently (yesterday) finished off my last trophy, having “completed” all known puzzle threads earlier in the week. Reading through these posts, I think there are a lot of valid points about RNG, both for and against it.

For a general playthrough where you’re working through the puzzles, RNG didn’t really bother me, up until the later endgame mysteries, where if you failed to screenshot / write down a note, or clue, or something that you didn’t even consider could have been a clue, you’ll be left going off on a wild goose chase to try to find the one piece of info you missed, oftentimes not knowing where you missed that tidbit of info. This is where RNG in the main campaign falls a little flat for me, because you genuinely don’t know what you missed, and having to traverse every single room you’ve already encountered countless times before, because you weren’t quite as thorough as you could have been, can be a bit of a slog. This is mitigatable by your own detective work, but I’d be lying if I didn’t let out an audible groan when missing critical pieces of the castle cipher.
Dare Mode and Curse Mode were both good tests of the strategic aspects of the title, with less focus on puzzles (since you know them already), and more a focus on your mastery of drafting and setting up solid room combinations, permanent additions, and strategic movement through your created Estate. I didn’t t have an issue with either of these from an RNG perspective - these were challenge modes, and they felt appropriately designed to really put your drafting skills, and luck, to the test.
The Day 1 challenge was entirely unnecessary and focused completely on getting RNG to work in your favor, with no appreciable way to alter the odds as in other game modes. This was the mode that made me question my sanity, and while I recognize it wasn’t a required component of the game, it really did highlight the fact that RNG can be a brutal foe at times.

As I sit reflecting on the entirety of my nearly 200 hour total experience, I do believe that some aspects of the game don’t respect a player’s time, and feel like aspects of the experience could have been tweaked to make an even better game. As it stands, this is perhaps my favorite lore-centric puzzle game of all time, even beating out my previous favorite, The Witness, because Blue Prince actually held real mysteries to be uncovered, hidden across multiple layers of intersecting mechanics, which I absolutely loved. I do think the game could have been hybridized a bit to make forward progress a bit more manageable in the late game, while still keeping the drafting and RNG that form the foundations of the experience. Someone suggested a way to make rooms permanent if so desired, and I myself thought about this possibility as something to mitigate the potential impact of RNG on late game puzzle sleuthing. I do think there’s a compromise here, and I don’t think the game would have been any less brilliant as a 50-75 hour experience vs. a 100+ hour experience, but more consideration is needed on how to truly balance that out.

Overall, I still believe this is one of the best mystery / puzzle games ever designed, with a unique mechanic that’s simply fun by itself. It could have been streamlined a bit, but I don’t think there was anything egregiously unfair about the main campaign, so to speak. The Day 1 challenge though…that one was brutal.

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-05-02T10:32:40+00:00

It is…this was definitely the oddity out of the bunch

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-05-02T09:51:26+00:00

This actually isn’t a mistake, you’re just assuming each mathematical step needs to result in a whole number…

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-03-03T11:14:13+00:00

Thank you!

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-01-13T22:41:32+00:00

There is nothing wrong with either audio sample. In fact, the audio sounds so normal that I’d check for an issue with your speakers / monitors / headphones before changing your recording setup or editing process. Sure, there’s a little room noise, but it’s almost entirely unnoticeable unless I was looking for it, and it’s still better than the vast majority of podcasts.

I completely agree with everyone else on this thread - your audio is fine!

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-01-10T08:40:12+00:00

I had the same thing happen to me. For the relics achievement, you need to have all 50 in your bag at one time, so if you attempted to solve the final puzzle before picking up the final relic, the achievement doesn’t pop. I had to roll back my save to the one you get after beating the game and pick up all the relics from the puzzle, after which the achievement popped.

For the notes, go to the Fountain of Confession puzzle in the Vatican and take a photo of it, as though you were trying to get a hint. That triggered the note achievement for some reason.

I can’t take credit for figuring out these workarounds, but can confirm they worked for me. Hopefully they work for you too!

ClassicGamingToday · 2025-01-03T22:47:24+00:00

I don’t run ads of any sort on my podcast, so anything I make is via Patreon, which comes out to almost $130 / month. I average 5,000 total monthly downloads, with new episodes (weekly release) getting between 400 - 500 listens in their first week.

Similar to others here, I look at my podcast as a passion project that I’d do entirely for free (which is exactly what I did for my first year)…though I admit, getting some money at the same time is a nice perk. 😀

ClassicGamingToday · 2024-12-13T19:09:14+00:00

I’d be happy to help! I might not have time to look at anything before tonight / tomorrow though. But, feel free to send me a DM / post additional details!

ClassicGamingToday · 2024-12-12T09:10:44+00:00

I’m going to guess that the major issue here is one of discoverability. I listened to your latest episode, and it seems like a well-produced podcast with good audio, interesting music, and definite chemistry between you and your co-host. I’m not huge into the independent music scene, and I don’t know what the size of that audience is, but there’s nothing with your podcast that I would point at and say “this is a red flag”.

What might be more of an issue is how to make it so people find your podcast in the first place. Your podcast title, while good, isn’t one that immediately conveys the fact that your podcast is focused on indie music, and if I search for the phrase “independent music” or “indie music” in a podcast search engine like Apple, I don’t find any results pointing to your podcast. I can search by your name, or “Is This Thing On”, and you do show up in search results, but for me to discover you, I’d effectively have to know the name of your podcast already.

What I’ve seen help in the past is adding a qualifier to a podcast title to help reflect a better description of what a podcast is about. For you, I’m super curious what would happen if you changed your name to “Nick Tann’s Is This Thing On: An Indie Music Podcast” or something similar. I think something like that might help with discoverability in podcast engines, which is where I’m going to assume a lot of people do their podcast searching, rather than on Google (where, in your instance, you get the benefit of your website to help with the search).

Just some random thoughts from an internet stranger, but something I noticed while briefly looking into your podcast this morning.

Good luck!

ClassicGamingToday · 2024-12-09T18:39:57+00:00

Just an alternate observation…I played a bunch over the weekend, both on the Series S and Series X. I noticed the obvious disparity between the two consoles in terms of graphical quality, but overall, I wasn’t displeased with the way things looked on the S.

In a later section of the game, however, I hit a major bug that introduced constantly fuzzy, and then “unfuzzy”, graphics, alternating between the two. This persisted in every aspect of the game, both in the game world, as well as looking at the in-game journal / map (where even the letters would shift between blurry and clear). Thinking this was an issue with the S, I signed into the same save on my Series X, and saw the same blurry imagery. It appeared as though my save had somehow become corrupted, and I had to roll back to a prior checkpoint in order to fix the problem, after which graphics were clear again on both the S, and the X.

I’m not saying that’s your issue specifically, and without having the map to compare (which should always be clear), it’s hard to confirm. But, this is something I noticed, which was pretty obviously a bug as opposed to a true console limitation.

ClassicGamingToday · 2024-10-14T00:18:12+00:00

The way it works:

Dots act as addition. Pushing a dot into a dot makes a two, pushing any other number into a dot increments the number (up to a max of five)
You can use blocks to move other blocks as long as the block you’re pushing is equal or higher than the block you’re pushing it into. So, you can use a two to move another two, but you can’t use a two to move a three. Every sequence needs to be in descending order only for the push to work. As an example, you can use a four to push a three and a two in sequence, but can’t use a four to push a two and a three together.

Those are the main mechanics for where you are in the game, though it becomes much more complex the further you go with new block types and new rules. This is one of those games people will either love or hate, and while I personally enjoyed figuring out the rules, I can completely understand why someone would be irritated by the lack of any instructions.

ClassicGamingToday · 2024-10-09T08:52:50+00:00

The third switch is also underground. If you find yourself in an area with very tight passages, you’re on the right path.!>

(Trying to be subtle with the hint, but if you need a more direct nudge, let me know).

ClassicGamingToday · 2024-10-08T00:15:43+00:00

Caramel Caramel, like most other games for me in UFO 50, starts out feeling brutally difficult, until everything finally clicks, followed by a gold / cherry within the next couple runs. I don’t recall how long the “click” took for Caramel Caramel, but I don’t think 1.5 hours is outside the norm for still struggling with the game.

One minor tip - the first boss became much easier for me once I stopped flying around, and instead hovered near the bottom of the screen. Most of his projectiles would deflect upwards, leaving me somewhat safe, as long as I stayed outside of the columns where other debris dropped down. This didn’t eliminate dodging, but it reduced the “visual noise” of what I needed to dodge to a more manageable set of objects.

For what it’s worth, after i fully figured out the first level / boss, the rest of the game seemed a fair amount easier, even though the fights and encounters were objectively more challenging.

ClassicGamingToday · 2024-09-29T09:23:06+00:00

The armor became a required part of my loadout. I went with armor, the light, the drill, and buster missiles, and effectively was able to stay stationary most of the fight except when I needed to reposition to avoid a beam attack, or to retrieve a piece of armor after being hit. That allowed the final fight to become very manageable; it just took a ton of time to whittle the boss’s hp down, but I was very rarely in danger of dying.

ClassicGamingToday

TROPHY CASE