Late to the Game(s) - Retro! Reissued! Remastered! Oh my!

Exploring reports from the Pacific Northwest to the TriState The author pauses by a pool in Area X during a 2009 outing with the NAWAC (nee TBRC) to           check  camera traps.  When you say the word "Bigfoot" most people think of the Pacific Northwest (PNW). After all, that's the area where the phenomenon of big, hairy bipeds was given that particular name, after Californian Jerry Crew began finding large footprints around his road building equipment while constructing logging roads in the remote forests of his state. After taking casts of the prints, and going to the local newspaper with them, the name Bigfoot was coined and interest in the monster spread like wildfire. Soon northern California, Oregon and Washington would become ground zero for the quest to document the elusive creature.  But Bigfoot sightings aren't restricted to the PNW. In fact, there are reports of ape like creatures from every state in the union, with the exception...

 Bigfoot meetup draws witnesses and the curious This cast of a partial footprint was collected  by Tabatha Steagall and Chuck Everman, in  March of 2019, after following up on reports of strange sounds coming from around a Carter  County home. (Photo by Jeremy D. Wells) How many Bigfoot sightings have there been in and around Carter County? More than you might think! It's common enough that one Grahn woman, Tabatha Steagall, has started researching the sightings in her free time, and several dozen witnesses from Carter County – and a few from Greenup, Boyd and Elliott – showed up at her house last month for a get together to share their stories, thoughts, and pet theories on what folks might be seeing.  While it's more common than you might think, there is still some stigma attached to admitting you've seen an animal that mainstream science isn't yet ready to accept. So many of the witnesses, while eager to share their tales, aren't so eager to have their names ...

If you've ever wanted to swim with whales, explore Atlantean style undersea ruins, or try your hand at hide and seek with a shark, this week's free game on the Epic Games store might be right up your alley.  Abzû is an under water exploration adventure game with a gorgeous art style. If you've played Journey or Flower, you're going to recognize the art style of Abzû . That's because it's from the same art director, Matt Nava. After helping create the flowing world of airborne beauty in Flower , and the intense sand sliding desert adventure of Journey for thatgamecompany, Nava started his own studio, Giant Squid. Abzû is Nava's first project from the new developer, and it's in some ways an underwater version of Journey.  If you've played Journey, you know that the game tells the story of a lost civilization, through images and pictographs, as the player makes his way across a starkly beautiful desertscape. Along the way the player has to navigate p...

Right now, in celebrate of Sega's 60th Anniversary, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is free to claim on Steam.   Go claim your copy, fire up your desktop or laptop, and enjoy some high speed retro fun. Rated E for Everyone.  Read more about the history of Sega in our Late to the Game(s) column at Carter County Times .

The word poltergeist comes from the German language and means, literally, noisy ghost. It’s an apt term for the phenomenon. Whereas traditional ghosts might move silently along the ramparts of a castle or down the hallway of an old home, where they can be seen reliving certain moments of their lives with little noise or other interaction with their environment, poltergeists let the inhabitants know when they are there. Not only are poltergeists noisy, causing crashes and bangs and moving items about, they’re more likely to be heard and experienced than seen. In fact, some paranormal researchers don’t consider poltergeist activity to be hauntings at all, at least not in the traditional sense of being the spirit of a deceased entity. Instead they class poltergeist activity as a form of psychokinesis, or the moving of objects without physically touching them. When famed psychic Uri Geller claimed to be bending spoons with nothing more than the power of his mind, this was an example of psy...

  As gamers, we spend a lot of time talking about the difference between one console and another. We complain about PlayStation exclusives and Xbox exclusives, or how Nintendo always does their own thing without taking any feedback from their consumers to heart. Then there are the PC gamers who look down their noses at console gamer plebeians. It’s all well trod territory that’s revisited every time there is a new console generation ready to launch (as happens this holiday with the launch of a new Xbox system and the PlayStation 5, and Nintendo once again doing things on their own timeline with no concern for what the other console manufacturers are planning).  But, lost in the hustle and bustle of Microsoft and Sony drawing battle lines, the smirking laughs of PC gamers and Nintendo out in left field chasing butterflies, is the role of mobile phones and tablet devices in the gaming world. For some time the mobile device was relegated to the world of “casual” gamers. Playing g...