I absolutely do!! I got priced out of modern gaming consoles unfortunately but there's plenty of Steam and older games that I gotta get through at some point anyway (did you know I still haven't played Undertale? No reason, I just can have a hard time working on a backlog).

Favorite games, Tomba! is up there for sure, then there's stuff like Pokemon Crystal, Super Mario Bros. 3, Metroid and Super Metroid, NBA Jam, WWF No Mercy, Super Mario RPG/Paper Mario, Mega Man 8 (BEST SOUNDTRACK OF ANY MEGA MAN BTW), Sweet Home, Einhander, Super Mario Land 2, Scooby-Doo Night of 100 Frights (the best licensed collectathon ever), Toy Story 2 (tired with Scooby-Doo actually), Kirby Super Star, and a lot more stuff but you get the picture. Of recent games I got really into UFO 50 for awhile (Party House was my GOTY in 2025) and I need to get back into playing The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance. Also the City Hunter game I just bought on Steam awhile back...

I love condiments on hot dogs and have plenty of them that I will list shortly but first I'm gonna drop a food hot take: chargrilled hot dogs are so good on their own that they really don't need any sort of condiments or toppings. Sometimes for a chargrilled dog I will maybe put something on one of them on a whim but otherwise those are 95% of the time eaten plain because a chargrilled all beef natural snap casing hot dog is food of the gods kind of stuff to me.

That being said, hot dogs are one of my favorite foods in the entire world so I have plenty of condiment choices. In fact I'll be honest with you, I like most all options on a hot dog. Even sauerkraut can be good depending on my mood. Some of my favorite hot dog condiment options include of course mustard, chili and cheese, bacon and cheese, onions, relish, and hell I don't even hate ketchup. It's totally fine on a hot dog. And then there's the Chicago Dog with all sort of fixings. Sometimes you just need a hot dog with so much stuff on it that you can't even see the hot dog. Some of the weirdest stuff I've had on a hot dog is cheesesteak (20 year old me was a disaster but I knew what I was doing that was good) or even like, bacon cheese fries. The kind of shit that makes you need to knife and fork your hot dog. Hot dogs kick ass.

My all-time #1 favorite Tats song will always be "Paper Doll". It's about someone stuck in an incredibly toxic relationship with someone they can't get over their feelings for, so they're content with being a paper doll whose feelings are discarded away like a child's toy. It's a sleeper song of his that I never see anyone talk about and I absolutely adore it. It helps that it's got some really awesome keyboard playing in it. And then of course I love all of the obvious ones like "Ride on Time" (inarguably his magnum opus and yes it's very annoying that it's the one song anyone ever really talks about wrt him but man it's just really fucking good I don't know what to tell you. The album version is far superior to the single version though. It kind of drives me nuts how the inferior single version is the one you hear in most places), "Love Space", "Morning Glory", "Magic Ways", "Christmas Eve", etc. But for not as known Tatsuro songs I've got some choices that I really love and get a lot of repeat listening:

• Merry-go-Round
• Windy Lady
• Solid Slider
• Music Book
• Dancer
• Funky Flushin'
• Bomber
• Silent Screamer
• Groovin' (a version of this song appears in the soundtrack for Almost Transparent Blue that I love and gets a lot of frequent listening)
• The Door Into Summer
• Sparkle
• he has an absolutely fucking DYNAMITE cover of Teddy Pendergrass's "Love T.K.O." that's randomly on his third album of covers, On the Street Corner 3. Secretly one of the best performances he's ever done
• Love Talkin' (Honey It's You)
• Mermaid
• The Theme from Big Wave
• Recipe

I'm sure there's other standouts that I'm missing off this list but honestly you cannot go wrong with any of his albums. Come Along II is the greatest "Greatest Hits" album ever created and it's the one that I am most likely to stream in hangout calls over Discord or things like that. Otherwise, For You is probably the one non-compilation/greatest hits album I'd pick as his best overall work. I could honestly keep talking about Tats I love his stuff so much. I was a hipster listening to stuff of his during my college days in like 2008/9!! I had a Ride on Time 45!! and the album!! Granted my city pop knowledge was not anywhere near as good back then because I was experimenting with everything music genre-wise but I was a fan lol. I actually sold my crappy shape copy of the album (didn't even have the obi!! gotta have the obi) to a local record shop a few years ago and used the money towards a proper nicer quality upgraded copy. I could keep babbling about Tatsuro and his music ("Down Town" from Sugar Babe is a fucking BANGER) but I should probably end it here because I'll just be talking in circles.

Game shows, just like with any genre of television, are cyclic at heart. After dominating in the 1950s, the Quiz Show Scandals did some major damage to their popularity for a little while (with the exception of Goodson-Todman's panel shows, which prided themselves on being unscripted, and endeared themselves to audiences for that along with many other reasons), and then in the 60s daytime game shows with low stakes prizes were chugging along. Not in a runaway popular way, but they still stood out with some notable big names like Password, Jeopardy!, To Tell the Truth, The Dating Game. Then the big CBS Daytime game show renaissance of 1972 happened and daytime television was absolutely smothered (in a good way to me, hell yeah) by the genre, and then things gradually slowed down in the 1980s before daytime game shows hit their collective collapse in 1993 when NBC's last gasp at a daytime game show lineup fizzled out. It took a little show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 1999 to make the genre mainstream relevant again in ways not seen since the 1950s, and then of course shows like Deal or No Deal, 1 vs. 100, Wipeout, etc. all kind of piggybacked off of WWTBAM and became their own giants. And now after the 2010s kinda slowed down a little bit, we're seeing another uptick.

I think for a lot of people game shows tend to be a good comfort food. Something to watch in the background or leave on the TV in the waiting room at the doctor's office (I'm convinced this is why Game Show Network still has an audience anymore). Also their lower budgets tend to make for easier commitments and renewals. Are we overdue for another downswing? Maybe. With the way the television landscape is now-a-days I actually think it's harder to guess at than if you would've asked me like ten years ago. It feels like they're now the "break glass in case of emergency" for when other primetime shows don't do very well, and we are seeing some of the stalwarts finally sunset. But some of them are still chugging along. And that doesn't even count the syndicated fare like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

As for my opinion on the current state... I'll be honest, I haven't been a fan of this concept that I saw someone else so accurately describe as "20 minutes of content stretched out for 40 minutes of television", and modern game shows fit this descriptor to a T for me. The few times I watched the Joel McHale run of Card Sharks, as a long time favorite show of mine, it was excruciating how snail's paced the show was dragged out to. Very much the complete opposite of the Jim Perry/Bob Eubanks/Bill Rafferty runs that I grew up watching reruns of on Game Show Network as a teenager in the mid-00s. I get that they gotta fit in commercial breaks, that's not a big deal to me, but if you're gonna take a half hour concept and try to drag it out to an hour, just get over yourself and put in two more contestants doing a match against each other or something. Or relax with the contestant interviews. Shit, even modern Press Your Luck struggles with this. It's PRESS YOUR LUCK, the hardest possible game show concept you could fuck up, just turn the camera on and play the game. Deal or No Deal absolutely snakebit modern game shows because executives and producers learned the wrong messages from it, because so much of the "the commercial break is coming up, here's a teaser of what's gonna happen when you return" crap that makes game shows feel so fake and artificial now-a-days came from that show.

Also I really hate how contestant coordinators make contestants talk in modern shows. Every single CONTESTANT does this THING where they RANDOMLY ACCENTUATE random parts of SENTENCES like they're shouting FROM A CLIFF and it DRIVES me NUTS. "My name is TONYA and I'm from CLEVELAND and I'm a NAIL SALON TECH and I'm here to win TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS, WOOOOOO!!!!!!" as the crowd claps and whoops and hoots and hollers because game show producers have been unable to get over the year 2010 for 16 years now man. It's ridiculous.

I really hate so so much being "old person yells at cloud" about modern stuff and I assure you I love lots of modern pop culture aspects like movies, music, anime, etc., but I just cannot stand how modern game shows are produced. It's probably my biggest party pooper opinion and I've had people try to recommend modern stuff to me and I've just never been able to do it. I think the only modern stuff I can still sit through are Wheel and Jeopardy! and that's because at their cores they still just Stick To What They Know. The only other modern game show remake I didn't fully dislike was To Tell the Truth (my favorite game show of all time), and even that had some stuff that felt like extraneous junk that wasn't necessary, but at least they kept the core part of the game down.