Thoughts?  Comments?  Questions?  Anything?  Feel free to drop me a line, thecubist@butthole.nerdbacon.com or use our contact page.

Curious about how I review games and what my ratings mean?  Visit “How Do I Rate Games?”

Who is The Cubist?

The Cubist, better known as Patrick outside of The Bacon, is a 29 year old from Wake Forest, as of June 2014.  He’s also going to stop talking in the third person starting now.  I get a lot of multiplayer done with my 7 year old son, and because of me he’ll have a healthy appreciation for older games that’ll be even older by the time he and his friends are obsessing over them.  I’m definitely a gaming enthusiast, but I probably don’t spend as much time glued to the TV as one might I expect.  In fact, I spend a great deal of time reading about, shopping for, and cataloging games and equipment.  I enjoy collecting as much as I enjoy playing, and my passion for hardware probably edges out my interest in the games themselves by just a hair.

How Did Nerd Bacon Get Started?

It’s a pretty short story really; David (NerdBerry) got in touch with me one day saying he’d got all the particulars in place for a website and wanted my help.  The rest is history!

What Else Are You Into?

Take a look at something arguably more nerdy than my video game collection – my CUBE collection!

I’ve collected video games and gaming equipment off and on for years, but they aren’t the only things I’ve amassed piles of.  I got into zombie flicks a few years before the fad hit full force (seriously, there were like 8 zombie movies out on DVD when I started gathering them up) and from there my collection went to Frankenstein, followed by the Universal Monsters of the 30s and 40s.  After that I dug into some the vaunted horror and sci-fi films of the silent era, then jumped to the late 50s and 60s to Hammer’s respectable library of horror films.  The next step was clear: franchises.  I got all the Jasons (Friday the 13th), the Freddys (A Nightmare on Elm Street), the Hellraisers, the Chuckys (Child’s Play), the Leatherfaces (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), the Halloweens, and pretty much any other long-running series, no matter how bad.  From there my collection of horror movies spun off in multiple directions.  I scooped up assorted classics cited by mainstream critics, but I also sought out the sickest, goriest stuff I could get my hands on.  I spent some time with a pronounced interest in films featuring cannibals, and over time developed a soft spot for C and Z-grade horror.  What’s funny is that horror used to be my least favorite genre.  But something about mainstream cinema changed as the century rolled over.  Films got boring, pretentious, pointless.  Not all, but most.  And so somehow I saw horror as its own sort of pure cinematic art form.  My absolute favorite is Dawn of the Dead from 1979, though the 2004 remake wasn’t too shabby.

I also like rotational puzzles, like the Rubik’s Cube, hence The Cubist.  With maybe 50 total, I love playing around with these things.  Most people don’t think of much beyond the 3x3x3, but it goes way, way further.  I won’t bore you with a long list of puzzle names, but my most prized puzzles are the Teraminx, a 7-layer deep dodecahedron, and the Tuttminx, a face-turning puzzle with 32 faces.

A Little More About My Interest in Video Games

I didn’t have much in the way of video games in my childhood, in fact I only ever had 3 consoles until I was old enough to go out and procure them on my own.  (NES, Genesis, and PlayStation)  I’ve liked video games as long as I can remember, but my real burst of interest came during a time when the 16-bit color scales gave way to choppy “3-D” games, lots of muddy, murky colors in an attempt to look realistic, and of course the dreaded FMV sequences.  It was during this frustration with many of the games for the PS that I began to revisit my NES.  Now that I was a little bit older, I suddenly had the patience and intelligence to make appreciable progress in relatively complex games such as The Legend of Zelda and Metroid.  This period also coincided with a time where video game stores began to unload tons of NES carts for usually no more than $5.00.  In fact, I purchased some of my very favorite NES games during this time, many for only $1.00.

I soon found myself spending summer vacations conquering NES titles like Faxanadu and Metal Gear and distancing myself from the popular movement towards life-like, quasi-3-D games.  By the time I went to college I was finally in a position to hunt down consoles such as the N64 and SNES that existed only as fond memories from time spent at friends’ houses.  Gradually I gained an appreciation for the newer games as well, but I still prefer my video games to exist in a realm of fantasy with bright colors and upbeat electronic music.  Thankfully for the past few years video games have striven for ease of gameplay and enjoyability rather than the 32-bit era where nearly all developers were obsessed with how much pixelated video they could cram on a disc.

My obsession has naturally led me down the path of hunting down obscure consoles and games.  It’s interesting to see why some of these systems failed, speculate on how they may have been magnificent (in some cases, at least), and play some of the most universally criticized games.  There are some diamonds in the rough to occasionally be discovered, but half of the joy lies in knowing I have something that many people have never played, don’t remember, or perhaps have never even heard of.  I get a certain satisfaction when, during the course of browsing used games, I overhear someone blabbing on about how unbelievable it is that a Game Gear is for sale and knowing that I have a 3DO at my disposal.  I don’t consider myself a snob, but I am proud of what I’ve attained.

I have a massive collection that I would eventually like to place somewhere on the site for those interested but this is a project for future times.  I do have quite a number of consoles and handhelds, listed below.

To the right is a picture of some of these systems, taken quite awhile prior to obtaining everything on the above list.  And yes, I accidentally swapped the 3DO and Atari Jaguar controllers.