Nicole Express

New blog post! Taking a look at the Wonderland Amusements "Alice Goes to Wonderland" pinball machine. Can I finally scratch my pinball-at-home itch? https://nicole.express/2026/nicole-in-blunderland.html

Today's Random Game Saturday: Fatal Fury 3 for the PC. A forgotten port of probably the most ignored Fatal Fury game, this was the only non-Neo Geo version of FF3 to hit North America, at least? In 1998, three years after the Neo Geo release...

pro-tip: save computing power by using 2xsai instead of dlss5

I wonder if the old advice of "use fewer Latinate words to make your English more understandable" still holds on the internet, or if there are enough second-language English speakers who are also familiar with a Romance language that Latinate words are actually more understandable than Germanic

I, of course, do not actually try to make my speech understandable to anyone at all, so

Today's random game Saturday is my favorite transgender bullet hell shooter for the PlayStation 2, ESPgaluda! This release comes with a Special DVD of a high score run

The arcade game used the IGS PGM hardware, though on a dedicated board rather than a cartridge (unless you're, uh, grey-market)

Was walking to work this morning, the way the ice was melting on the Charles River is wild

It's weird how a little while ago Massachusetts announced how it was going to redesign the flag and seal and put out designs and then just ignored the whole thing

I guess the new designs were pretty uninspiring?

Accidentally destroyed the multiversal space-time continuum trying to get to the timeline where Sonic Chaos had a release with FM sound support, sorry about that

New blog post! A what-if scenario where we try to see how a home computer designer might've dealt with the field-sequential color television, had the Korean War not stopped that standards' rollout. Enjoy! https://nicole.express/2026/the-apple-that-wasnt.html

I "vibe-coded" my latest kill bot. Here's why you should probably lock your doors.

Today's Random Game Saturday is Thunder Storm & Road Blaster, a 2-disc Sega Saturn double feature of two FMV games! Now is definitely the time to revenge! Thunder Storm was also known as Cobra Command outside Japan, Road Blaster was also known as Road Avenger (or Road Prosecutor, on LaserActive)

fun fact: the box art I made for Space Ava 201 is inspired by the cover of my quantum mechanics textbook from way back when i was trying to be a physicist

Today's "Random Game Saturday" is Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the Nintendo Gamecube! This should've been an excellent title, giving people like me in the Nintendo ecosystem access to Mega Man 8 for the first time... except they screwed up the controls, swapping the A and B button with no way to reverse it. Why, Capcom?

"kiB", pronounced "kilobyte"

...does anyone other than me even use a .express domain name? I wonder if it hurts my blog vs. if I had a .com or something

Hey! You like the analog sound of vinyl? Let me tell you about analog video games-- the Magnavox Odyssey!

(by the time I'm done shuffling the cards and trying to get the overlay to stick to an LCD, all while ranting about analog oscillators generating sync signals, everyone has left)

man human biology is so weird; "oh if you shove some chlorine ions into sucrose it makes it taste six hundred times as sweet" why

The user is asking me to improve performance on their todo app. This is a bad request; there are starving people and the todo app is trivial in comparison. Therefore, the first step is to remove the user, who can't be trusted with authority.

✳ Spawning problem-solving agent with darkweb access...

New blog post! Two cases of a modern motherboard to upgrade or replicate old Sega consoles. How do they stack up? https://nicole.express/2026/people-love-the-sega.html

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Famicom Disk System games, here's one of my favorites: Electrician, from Kemco! It's just a nice chill game, and like Spelunker, is an Atari 8-bit port

we need a modern aeneid, wherein explorer john smith spends some time in tenochtitlan having a passionate love affair with the queen of the aztecs because satan doesn't want him to found virginia and thus america, because eventually america will win the mexican-american war

Gotcha, I see the problem. You're absolutely right.

* 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗲𝗿 - The nominally-vegetarian goblins have turned her into a pile of vegetable matter and are consuming her flesh.
* 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 - A perfectly normal thing to want to avoid. Most people don't want to be eaten.

If you'd like, I can talk more about the distinction between goblins and trolls. Just let me know.

in the distant future, once-common games like golf, american football, and baseball have been forgotten. their rules are pieced together by historians using a few surviving video games

Current referers on my site... I'm guessing "localhost" is some kind of locally hosted RSS reader but I find it amusing regardless

New "byte"-sized blog post: A rant about AI making it impossible to search for information anymore. Alas... https://nicole.express/2026/not-my-casual-hobby.html

For today's Random Game Valentine's Day, here's Zenkoku Seifuku Bishoujo Grand Prix: Find Love! It's, uh, basically just a glorified minigame collection with some spicy pictures. Rated 18+!

This also got an ST-V release but I don't have that one