Category: Miscellaneous

Living In The 70s

April 5, 2016

I rediscovered some old photos! I don’t think I’ve blogged any of these ones before. I’m going to try to do these in chronological order but since they’re undated I’ll probably get a few incorrect. I apologize for the small size of these, but image uploading to the blog is a bit wonky so I had to downsize them 🙁

This was obviously taken in PNG, in some sort of sewing workshop? You can see both Bernard and myself being held by two of the women in the front right, as they examine material with a nun. It’s a beautiful shot; I wonder who took it and why?

Mum’s passport photo, taken not long after I was born in 1972. The impression on the lower right is because it was scanned from the passport. Bernard’s titanic head suggests extraterrestrial DNA.

A bit of a curiosity. I recognize the furniture in the background, but don’t know from where. Basically I don’t know where or exactly when this was taken, or the name of the cat Bernard is holding! My body looks creepy, like a child weightlifter. Look at my stubby hands!

Our family, in the mid 70s. Bernard and I look like little Aryan’s don’t we? My hair was a lot lighter when I was young. I’m holding a small rubber animal, one from a set that I still own some from to this very day. Mum’s holding one of the old tin/steel coke cans, and Bernard’s shorts are pulled up way too high.

At the flat in Gateshead, again mid 1970s. We were poor in those days, and the only toys we had were a plastic cup and a pair of scissors. Despite this, mum managed to dress us like a pair of kings. I like my little shoes.

A few years later. I’d graduated from overalls to suspenders, and we’d both moved into our ‘glam rock hairstyle’ phases. The third person in this photo was a very dear friend of ours named Louis, who was a human-sized cat. He was a true urban king; a wild and wirey beast that ruled the neighbourhood for meters around our home. I hope he looks at this photo from cat heaven and purrs with happiness 🙂

An unfortunately blurry photo, but I believe the only one I have of my First Holy Communion. This was probably 1979 or 1980. There’s a lot to love about this shot, not the least that apparently Mr Spock had dropped by to congratulate me. I like my tie, and fondly remember this as the last day I ever wore pressed pants.

Leaping forward ten years now, to about 1990. This is me, dad and Sue. And I’m cooking. Cooking like a boss. Snags I reckon; maybe an onion or two. This is obviously on the lake, possible Valentine or Speer’s Point, and I’m guessing winter judging by the clothing. I don’t remember the event at all, and this seems to be the only photo that was taken. I’d kill for one of those snags right now…

I’ve got more like these. Should I post them?

Review: ‘Game Prince’

March 28, 2016

I bought the above on Amazon for only $14. It’s a handheld self-contained gaming system that promised (as you can see) to contain ‘iPhone, PC and Android’ games.

Here’s the instructions:

That’s quite a screenshot to use for what I suspected it would be just a crappy X-in-1 system (albeit handheld). Let’s turn it on:

And I was correct! 152 games to be specific, and a quick glance through the list suggested this was essentially a handheld NES emulator featuring a small set of NES games repeated over and over as is usual for such devices:

I estimate there’s about 50 unique games on the device. Some (such as Silkworm and Adventure Island) have over ten versions, although they all seem to be simply ‘start at level X’ hacks.

I apologize for the quality of the photos; the screen has a coating that makes it difficult to photograph. It looks better than here, and is very vibrant with s good refresh rate. Since Mario seems to run at native NES resolution, I estimate the postage-stamp-sized screen to be about 256×240.

That’s of course Donkey Kong, Mario, Pac-Man and Ninja Gaiden III, all of which run well and have original sound effects. Based on these the quality of emulation seems to be good.

The buttons of the system however are awful, which makes actually playing the games almost impossible.

The worst offender is the 4 direction buttons which are not linked (and therefore not a d-pad). There is a notable delay when pushing one and holding two down at a time negates both, making diagonals impossible. The fire buttons aren’t much better, and rapidly pushing one seems to result in it not registering at all. It’s inexcusable the device was manufactured with such terrible controls.

What about the claim of iPhone or Android games? Check these out:

Aside from being quite literally criminal I doubt I need to tell you both are abysmally unplayable. Angry birds in particular only has 4 positions at which you can aim and the collision animations seem independent of where the bird hits. PvZ uses a pointer control (!) which on this system means almost no control at all. It’s also comically slow 🙂

Lastly there is this:

‘Fighter Street v1′ aka. ‘Crap Street Fighter’. The player select isn’t so bad:

Note there are only 6 playable characters; the claim of 12 includes palette swaps! So far so bad… but the gameplay:

Absolutely, unquestionably the worst version of SF2 I have ever ‘played’. Glacially slow, you don’t seem to have any actual control over your fighter who just does random kicks and punches as he jerks backwards and forwards. Utterly shameful.

So that’s the Game Prince. An impulse, one-for-the-collection buy that I thought may make a nice tournament device. But it won’t, because it’s awful and almost unplayable and I doubt I’d ever find a soul on this lonely planet with the patience to sit around for hours while I beat them on old NES games 😉

Avoid this trash like the plague!

‘Blessed vs Cursed’ Review

March 26, 2016

It’s time for another MTG duel deck review.

The release of this one surprised me, as did the inclusion of preview cards from the next expansion (Shadows Over Innistrad). The decks match ‘blessed’ humans against ‘cursed’ zombies and turned out to be great fun to play against each other.

The blessed deck is white/blue and heavy on creatures with ‘enter the battlefield’ triggers. Some are tailor made to kill zombies, and overall the deck plays quite quickly.

The cursed deck is blue/black, full of graveyard effects (self-mill, playable from, graveyard triggers) and is even faster than the white deck.

I played eight games in total and the final tally was a draw at 4 wins each! Almost every game was quick and few were easy wins. These are two of the best matched – and most fun to play – duel decks ever.

The pros will talk about the value of the cards as well, including an alternate art Geist (from the original Innistrad) as well as some notable rates. But what I found most charming was that while each deck contains Islands, the card art is unique to the decks they are in, so there are three pairs of the same islands in both cursed and blessed forms:

It’s a nice touch, and another plus in this overall great pair of decks. Highly recommended.

Robot Claw