SteveW

Here's a picture that I found a couple days ago.

I want to try the Channel F out. I've always been interested in it, ever since finding one on a storage shelf at the school my mom taught at around 1980 or 1981. I liked the look of the machine, and the 8-track looking cartridges. So i'd like to get a Fairchild, just out of curiosity's sake. I've listened to interviews with Jerry Lawson, the creator of the Channel F, which gives me a good appreciation for the machine. Even if I play it about as much as I do the Odyssey2 (virtually never), it'll still be a nice addition to my collection.

The DINA started out life as a pirate machine, and Telegames had the copyright to the Colecovision by then. So instead of suing them and putting the manufacturer out of business, Telegames had them stick their own name on it. Since the SG-1000 console never came out in the US, Telegames didn't bother telling the stateside DINA purchasers that it could play those carts in the top cartridge slot. I hope that I can find an SG-1000 cart at OVGE. I'd like to try that function out.

I'd like a Neo-Geo unit, either the arcade cab, or the home version. Either that, or a copy of the unreleased Activision game Dead Heat. It was supposed to be released for PS2/Xbox/GameCube/GBA, but got the axe fairly far along. I love the idea of a driving game/zombie survival horror game combination. Then Activision killed off development, because they said that it didn't look like it would be a big enough seller. In other words, if it's not going to sell as well as Halo, they don't want to bother.

I know this is a tough one, considering the platform, but does anyone have some suggestions for halfway decent Channel F games? A co-worker has one in his attic, still with it's original box and a dozen games, and he's going to give it to me soon. I don't know all that much about Fairchild/Zircon games, so if anyone has some experience with good games for it, i'd like to know. Anyone?

I'm ecstatically happy to find out that Vintage Stock has just bought out the Movie Trading Company here in Dallas, and are planning on converting them into Vintage Stocks! Whooo hoooo! Finally a classic gaming store in the area. The closest thing to a classic game store would be the collector guy's booth out at the local flea market. I've heard from a regular customer to the Movie Trading Company that it's supposed to be up to a year before the stores get converted. I can't wait!

At the time that Pong units were popular, the technology to make a decent handheld really wasn't good enough to make a portable.

Well, i'm not a sports game player, but Cannon Fodder is an interesting choice for a plug and play unit. And Mega Lo Mania is a really weird choice.

Shadow the Hedgehog had an obscenity in it. My sister bought it for her kids, thinking it would be safe, since the box didn't say anything about bad language on the rating label. At some point, Shadow (I guess when he gets defeated) says "Damn!" My niece is autistic, and has the tendency to repeat things she shouldn't. She would watch the boys play, and when he'd say "damn", she'd repeat it for some time. It really ticked my sister off that they would include a word like that in a children's game.

I remember reading somewhere that SG-1000 carts could be played on a SMS, but since i've never even seen what a Sega SG-1000 cartridge looks like, let alone played one, I really couldn't tell you. It's just something i'd like to eventually try. I finally decided to bust out my ol' Telegames DINA today, and for some reason, i'm getting a clear picture now (with a RCA-to-coax connector), but the sound is barely coming through. And some games are next to impossible to play with that controller, like Q*Bert. I forgot all about a totally blank cartridge that I bought at the same time as the DINA, that's an Activision shell but with Xonox's Motocross inside it. Anyone know if Xonox used identical cart shells for their Coleco games?

Nope, not just yours. Mine too. Mine's sitting in a storage tub, covered in dust, because it was so lousy to use. I think the only reason i'd dig it out would be if I could locate some Sega SG-1000 cartridges to play on it. But even then, having to play the games on channel 13 (if I remember correctly) makes the screen all snowy, and hard to make out details. It was a weird piece of tech that's hard to find nowadays, so I don't regret getting it at all, it's just I wish it had a better picture quality. Replacing the CV's goofy joystick with an NES style gamepad isn't a bad idea (it isn't a great one, either) and having two built-in games is okay too. The fact that they're more reliable hardware-wise would make them ideal replacements. It's just that the whole thing sucks just a little too much to bother using over a real CV.

There's a certain feeling of sadness when you shop in some thrift stores. It's a strange sensation that you can't quite put into words, you just feel it in your gut. Maybe it's the old fixtures and stuff left over from whatever defunct store used to inhabit that location, maybe it's because a lot of thrifts have bad lighting that makes the place feel dreary, maybe it's the people who are shopping there. Whatever it is, I felt it today, more than i've ever felt it before. I went on a hardcore thrift hunt, and I stopped at this little store in a really grungy neighborhood. The place was going out of business, so everything in the store, no matter what, was 88¢ each. It was the kind of place that not only has thrift stuff, but five and dime store and closeout store type stuff. The whole store looked grey. Dim lighting, loads of empty shelves, and a feeling of impending doom. The people working there looked like someone on death row. It was a truly creepy experience, made doubly creepy by the location it was in, among countless closed down fast food restaurants re-opened as some generic cafe and a dead shopping mall a few miles down the road. Anyway, to try to be more upbeat, I did find some quasi-interesting things at that thrift. I bought a Tiger R-Zone game-Batman & Robin, a couple Game.Com cartridges-Batman & Robin (again!) and Jurassic Park, an RF switch for a Sega Saturn, an Interact Eclipse Gamepad for the Saturn, some PenCap Stylus thingies (turns any disposible pen into a PDA stylus), two Performance Mega Memory Cards for the Sega Dreamcast, and two Bocce Lawn Ball sets (for my sister's kids). Everything was new, and 88¢ each. The only other thing I picked up of interest was a Famiclone that's shaped like a Dreamcast. I came across several Atari 2600 and Intellivision carts, and even an Atari 800 Star Raiders cart. But they were all commons, and some were in incredibly bad shape. Some of the Intellivision carts had corrosion on the connectors like old batteries leave. Can't imagine what the previous owners did to them.

Nah, the PSP isn't going anywhere for a while. The movie format isn't going to see a lot more releases, but games for the PSP are still coming out, so there's no worry there. Besides, Sony has the tendency to hang on to technologies that the rest of the world has pretty much turned their noses up at (yes, MiniDisc, I'm looking at you) so I don't see them discontinuing it soon. Besides, they're a Japanese company, so they'd lose face if they cancelled the PSP.

Yeah, I can see why you'd be a little uncomfortable going to an arcade with that sign. That guy has a look on his face like "Hey kids, get into my van! I've got candy and video games!" If I were going to have my own arcade, I wouldn't put my face on the sign. I'd put my face on the tokens, in a tasteful pose of me in a toga with a wreath around my head like a Roman emperor.

I like the idea of a 3D version of Dreadnaught Factor, but one of the problems with these outer space shooters is that it's easy to get disoriented because of the omnidirectional nature of 3D space. I keep thinking of a couple of games on the Dreamcast, Bang: Gunship Elite and Starlancer, and both of them had the same problem, that after a while you couldn't tell up from down and which direction you were facing. Some games that I tried later, like Star Trek: Shattered Universe on the PS2, made it easier on the player by 'fudging' the 3D physics and not having you move too quickly off the horizonal plane the main ships are on like real physics say you should. I know it's not authentic, but if they designed a 3D game that you could move on the X, Y, and Z axis but always stayed oriented on the same horizon line all the other ships in the game stayed at, it would be a lot more fun to play.

Man, you got a fantastic deal on that TurboGrafx stuff! That's an incredibly lucky find! Turbo games and consoles don't turn up in the wild too much anymore. Congrats!

I saw in the pages of (I think) Retro Gamer Magazine that there's a new Sega Mega Drive type device that's supposed to come out in England that's got Sensible Soccer, Mega lo mania, and Cannon Fodder built-in. It looks the same as the tiny Mega Drive/Genesis units that came out a year or two ago, except it's got more interesting sounding games on it. For those of you in the UK, I was wondering if it's already been released there.

I hate the battery backups in Sega hardware. The Dreamcast's isn't replaceable, which makes me mad. At least the ones inside the VMU are, but they get run down so fast it's not worth replacing them. At least I can replace the one inside the Saturn, but having to reset the clock and everything when I start the DC up is annoying.

It's always good to have spare Colecovisions, since the build quality on them is so poor that you might go through several bought at thrift stores before you find one that's not worn out. I've got 4 or 5, and only a couple of them work to some degree. The one I just recently bought was still in the box, and seems like it was hardly used. Even though it had no wear and tear on it, it still doesn't work perfectly. Sometimes it takes a few tries before the games work. Now that i've got a fairly reliable machine, I have found that the controllers ergonomically suck, and the Spectravideo controller I bought earlier this year doesn't work too well. I've got around 40 Colecovision games! I didn't realise how many i've picked up over the years until this week, when I tried to locate all my Coleco games that are scattered through my storage tubs. I didn't think I had half as many games until I pooled them all together. Now that i've got a pretty reliable machine to play them on, I need to start working on my Coleco collection.

They're definitely for the Colecovision. I dug out all my Coleco carts yesterday, and i've got those two in the collection. It's always obvious that you've got Colecovision cartridges when you see the indention in the back of the cart that are supposed to store the overlays.

They list the platform as Intellivision, even though a retarded caveman could tell it's a 2600 cart. Nice.

I saw some earlier in the year, at a scummy flea market. Some guy had one of the players and what looked like around 40 movies in a box. I didn't even think to ask him how much he wanted for it. I wouldn't mind picking up one just for the novelty. I wonder if the movies would even play, without being hooked up to a phone line so the company can charge you just for viewing the movie.

In the letters section of one of their earliest issues, they said they were considering writing an article about the TI Home Computer. Issue twenty-something, and I'm still waiting.

INTV went with the original model Intellivision for one reason: cost. The Intellivision II had some custom chips that would cost more to go back into production. The head of INTV just wanted to produce new consoles the cheapest way he could. And all the INTV cartridges were printed with the cheapest labels possible.

I assumed that the huge-ass speeding ticket he picked up in Stringtown, OK made him not want to go into Oklahoma again. You spend a lot of money to go to the Cincinatti game expo, spend money on a hotel, make just enough at the show to break even, then on the way back, you get slapped with a big speeding ticket in an illegal speed trap, putting you in the red for the trip. I can understand why he'd hold a grudge against Oklahoma after that.