While I had wanted to get back into the streaming thing in general once the weather cooled down, I all but sealed the deal of a more immediate return this morning. I had purchased a Retrotink 5X a few months ago for streams. After running some games on composite cables for both the PS1 and Dreamcast, I was left with a very dissatisfied opinion on streaming said consoles with the anemic cables. During my stream break, I was given links to SCART cables and websites to purchase them by our friend warpanda88, but unfortunately not only were they always sold out, but I misread the date of a July resupply date and missed out on the restock. Out of sheer boredom I decided to check one of the sites again, and lo and behold – they have SCART cables in stock!

While I have Dreamcast Mania in mind, I’ve also been toying with the idea of playing through entire franchises in a marathon on stream. On top of that, I’ve been putting down some games from my backlog that I’ve really wanted to either play through for the first time finally, or replay them for streaming purposes. So I have a lot of cool ideas to work off of. I may even pull out PSX Mania again and get some titles done there (knowing full well I’ll be able to realistically finish Dreamcast, but definitely not PS1).

I want to say that this coming week, sometime around 10/27 or so, I want to at least get the Dreamcast Mania portion of streams going. Before that, I would like to get back into things, whether it’s a marathon of a franchise starting there, or doing a game from the backlog. One of the major reasons why it’s taken this long to get going again is due to how obscenely warm it has remained in New York City, up until the last several days, where the highs are finally in the low to mid 60’s, with a very nice chilly temp into the 50’s during stream times. I’ve also been taking midnight naps, which has completely thrown a lot of things off. Hopefully I can get that under control as well.

A quick note for PSX/Dreamcast Mania – I had put a list of games on the Google Doc that I was going to play through when I was planning on working on 365-2. I’m going to leave those games there (mostly fighting games or quick to beat games) and we’ll blitz through them. After about the 15th game, we’ll maybe get viewer polls going again on Dreamcast, and PS1 I’m still planning on my own curated list (if/when I do that project). Channel point redemption is on on hiatus for now. Once the ball is rolling again, we’ll open that back up. Also, the two games we left off with, Road Rash 3D and Shadow Man, will be dropped and picked back up sometime down the line. I don’t want to jump back into anything after that long of a layoff, and I don’t want to restart them right now.

As for the backlog games, here’s a short list of games I have on the wheel:

• The Outer Worlds
• Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
• Culdcept DS
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut
• Dragon Age XI: Echoes of an Illusive Age S Definitive Edition
• Fallout 3
• Alan Wake Remastered
• Final Fantasy VII Remake

The first marathon I had in mind was playing through the Kingdom Hearts franchise via the Al-In-One bundle for PS4 (played on PS5). This is a franchise I’ve wanted to play for the longest time, but was turned off by how absolute garbage the camera was in the first game. We have a lot on our plates though, so we’ll see how/if/when this will be making an appearance. I really would love to get the backlog down some, as it’s ever growing, with certain games awaiting a next gen patch before I take those to task on stream (The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto V, Skyrim). Once the aforementioned get those patches, we’ll likely be playing them right away (maybe not Skyrim). Also just to be upfront – once Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy releases, I’m likely focusing on that for an undetermined number of streams.

With the weather outside getting colder by the day (finally), why not stay inside, drink some hot chocolate and watch some Twitch streams? I don’t think I’ll be making a schedule, at least not immediately. I find that schedules all but make me not follow them for whatever reason. But expect streams to start back up no later than next Wednesday/Thursday, whenever the SCART cables arrive. I’m going to try to, before then, get a stream or two done to be sure everything is still functioning properly.

Follow me on Twitter for more updates. Don’t forget to give my Twitch channel a follow well (obviously)! If/when I get a stream done before the cables come, look for a mostly Wii U stream, as I can test out a lot of what I need with the console, between widow sizes and bitrate.

Hope to see you all on Twitch for the return of Dreamcast Mania & more!