I enjoy ranking things. It probably stems from my childhood love of sports, puzzles, and card collecting. I remember sorting my baseball cards according to teams, won-loss records, batting averages, and home runs. During basketball season I would also recreate a March Madness playoff bracket on poster board, paying close attention to the seeding and ranking of every team. Recently, I was introduced to the website ranker.com, a list of nearly every subjective ranking imaginable.

For the past fifty years, I have been avoiding The Byrds. The reasons are unclear to me; maybe it's because they came from Los Angeles as a band, and as a teen, I was devoted to those who drank tea and ate bangers. Also, David Crosby was an annoying figure through the decades. It wasn’t his politics, but his mixture of ego and arrogance, plus his tendency to lecture down to you.

Hudson Soft, founded in the 70s, did just about everything a studio and publisher could do in the video game industry before it was fully absorbed into Konami on March 1, 2012. For the next month here at Retro XP, the focus will be on the roles the studio played, the games they developed, the games they published, the consoles they were attached to, and the legacy they left behind. After all, someone has to remember them, since Konami doesn’t always seem to.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. Jungle Strike — and the entire Strike series, really — don’t feel like shoot-em-ups in the way most people consider that term, and yet, that’s what we’re supposed to call these games.

I’m definitely a people person. (Shocker, I know.) What I mean is that I generally like people. I’m fascinated by what motivates them, love discovering (and sharing with them) their special spark, and enjoy learning what makes them tick. But I especially like my people. You know someone is your kinda people when you feel better after spending time together rather than depleted. (No thanks, energy vampires!) And I hadn’t realized how much I missed being around my people until recently when I was fortunate enough to get several doses in close succession.