SteveW

My mom and dad generally stuck to Video Pinball. I sometimes talked my dad into playing Home Run, though. That was always a special time.

Nice one! I like to hear these kinds of interviews. It'll give me something to listen to on the drive to OVGE!

Before the PSP came out, there were a lot of people talking about portable movie playing MP3 players and such, and it seemed like the hot idea of the moment. Even Apple broke down and created a video playing iPod. But Sony overestimated how many people really wanted that kind of function. And Sony might have been thinking about how the PS2 sold really well in Japan not as a game console but as people's first DVD player. They thought they could get on the ground floor of a portable movie format that would take off like DVD did, and instead UMD petered out like Beta.

I was only being partially sarcastic. I think negative reinforcement is good for kids. Babies don't pop out of the womb with a predefined notion of good and bad, they have to be taught. And a lot of parents nowadays don't want to be the bad guy and punish their kids. When I was a kid and I did something wrong, I got my ass beat. I didn't get a time-out, I got a good old fashioned whoopin'. It taught me right and wrong. So I say whack the little bastards. A crack over the butt with a leather belt isn't punishment, it's guidance. And it's fun to watch when some parent snaps and spanks the hell out of their screeching kid.

I live within spitting distance of Irving, so i'm ticked off at myself since I managed to miss the shows for the past couple of years. It's not like I have to do a lot of planning ahead of time like the Oklahoma Game Expo, this show would literally be a 15 minute drive from me depending on how many red lights I hit! But it's flown under my radar twice so far. I've got to make sure to go to the upcoming one.

Less than a week after the DS came out, I went to an EB Games and attempted to try one out. I said 'attempted', because some kid had used a set of keys or something to scratch the touchscreen up so badly that you couldn't see anything on it anymore. Why does this kind of thing keep happening? Because parents don't hit their kids enough, to teach them the concepts of right and wrong. That's why I am a staunch advocate for child abuse. I think beating kids should be mandatory.

I rolled over Asteroids three times in one sitting, which happened to be on my birthday around 1983 if I recall. I don't recall rolling over Berzerk specifically, I just remember having a massive amount of extra lives. I walked away while leaving it running, and I still had extra lives a good while later.

I'd love to see Forbidden Forest running on the C-One. I haven't played that one since 1985! And i've gotten interested in playing it again since reading the nice article on it in Retro Gamer Magazine.

The collision detection was always a real problem with me and Kung Food. The bad guys could hit you easily, but you had to be exactly lined up with them to hit them, and sometimes that was difficult. Then you had cheap shots like the ice spikes stabbing upward with no warning, and then those little tomatoes that roll towards you and you can only stop them with a kick that was difficult to pull off with the Lynx's D-Pad. Kung Food had a lot of potential, but in the end the difficulty of the game and control issues soured me early on. I think I managed to get out of the freezer once and onto the kitchen floor, and died fairly quickly.

How about Rez? It's fairly hard to get ahold of now.

Nice find on the GameCube! At garage sales, I usually only find SNES consoles for $50 or something.

I see something wrong with it.... it's got a TI-99/4A joystick with it. And strangely enough, there's only one, when the TI joysticks were always paired together like paddle controllers.

In the past, every time i've tried to get to the end of Rygar, my batteries end up dying. I think the farthest i've gotten was around level 17 or 18.

I thought the only place where porn UMDs were available was Japan. And knowing how freaky the Japanese are, I can only imagine what kind of bizarre porn that kid got...

It seems like Sony's doing everything wrong in the launch of the PS3. Their pride is going to end up dooming them. They insist in putting out the PS3 with an expensive optical drive that only a small percentage of televisions can get the best picture with. How many people are willing to spend $600 for their children for Christmas? Especially knowing that Sony game hardware doesn't have the build longevity that other game companies have, judging by the last two generations of Sony consoles. The thing is, every time there's a new transition of consoles, a lot of guesses are made beforehand, and most of the time things turn out completely different. If we believed all the early hype, the PSP would be a world beater and the DS would be off the market by now. So i'll sit back and wait, and see what happens after all the dust settles from the launch.

My GameCube's Platinum. Classic look. I think that one of the problems with UMD movies was that there were too many of them. They flooded the market with them, they did well at first when there wasn't a whole lot of software available for the PSP, and now that the handheld's been around for a while, people have become disinterested. I know a couple people who have sold their PSPs because there aren't many good games for it. I've read here on the forums a lot of people planning on selling their PSPs too. People seem to be abandoning the platform, and with it, the movies. I don't think the idea behind UMD movies is bad. The idea of having a flick to watch anywhere I happen to be at the moment is a good one. The real problem is that there are heaps of movies on the shelves, nearly all of which suck. The UMD platform is the new place for shovelware. I've looked over the UMD movie selection a few times before, and almost none of the titles interested me. Not all of the movies available are suited for portable watching. You can't get immersive quality with a little LCD screen. If they calmed down a bit in the beginning and didn't burn people out on UMDs, things could have been different. Nobody likes to go to a game store and find 20 movie titles for every one game title.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=90487 This is what he's laughing at. Me too.

I love finding Pong consoles in the wild. I've never been lucky to find one boxed. That's a fantastic score! Quick edit: That's not true, I actually did find one boxed. I got into Tulsa a little early for OVGE, so I stopped at a church sale and bought a neat little boxed pong unit that was also filled with dead beetles.

Wow, that brings back memories. I remember typing that one in. And picking up a few magazines with a bunch of type-in programs and putting my high school typing class skills to good use. That's what I remember about the TI, a lot more type-in magazines for other computers than the TI. And I remember having to upgrade to TI Extended Basic to do anything really interesting. To learn Basic on your computer of choice, I suggest tracking down some of those old computer magazines with type-in programs. It'll get you familiar with Basic commands, and it'll teach you how to debug and later adapt the program to make it better.

I've got an old dye sublimation printer that could print transparencies that would look as good as the originals. The problem is, i'm out of a couple colors of ink carts, and they stopped making them long ago. My good ol' Alps 4000 printer (with built-in photo scanner) was a nice little machine, but it's gone the way of the Dodo. I really appreciated ink carts that don't dry out if you don't use them every week. I haven't seen a new Alps printer in a store in years. If I could pop over to CompUSA and buy new carts, I'd still have that sucker hooked up through a SCSI adapter.

I'm really paranoid about giving out personal information on the internet, especially where I live. But this is a fairly large town, so it's not likely anyone will figure out where precisely I live just from my screen name.

I came across more than I expected today. Bought a couple USB cables (one regular, one designed for recharging Nokia phones like my N-Gage) for 99¢ and $2.99 respectively at the Irving, TX Goodwill. Second thrift had nothing, neither did the third. But on the way back, I stopped at my beloved DAV Thrift. I picked up a couple EPYX joysticks and an Atari 7800 stick that for some reason sounds like it's got microswitches inside it. Either that, or the little dome switches inside are really noisy. $2.92 each. After I rang up, I noticed that behind the counter they had a boxed Colecovision console, for $19.95. One half of the box looks great, the other looks like hell. Got it home, opened it up, and the console looks fantastic. I can't see any wear and tear on it. There wasn't the pack-in Donkey Kong cartridge inside it, but there were a bunch of Coleco catalogs (including one for their line of desktop arcade games and handhelds!), a couple Coleco game manuals, a few assorted Atari 2600 catalogs and manuals, and an Atari Logbook. I've never seen the Logbook before. It looks like something that was mailed out to customers. The box back for the Colecovision lists Spectar as an available title, although it was never released until this year when Scott Huggins made it. I think Scott's version looks better than the one on the box, though.

Yeah, there's the Booma and Gobooma's Claws, Rappy's Wing, Delsaber Shield and Delsaber's Buster, just to name a few out of my own inventory. But still, they aren't as funny as a bear's head on a stick!

There's an Atari 800 version of the game which is in all likelihood identical to the 5200 game, and there's a Vectrex version of the game, if I remember. And it looks like it came out for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, too. It seems that an Intellivision version was in development, but didn't make it out before the market collapse.

I had a copy of Demons to Diamonds go bad on me less than 6 months after buying it. That's the only new cartridge that i've ever had die on me. I believe I also have a bad 2600 cart or two that I picked up second hand. I also recall having a bad Intellivision cart. That's about it for me, from what I can remember offhand. It seems that cart builds have gotten better over time. Wouldn't it suck to spend three hundred bucks on a Neo-Geo cartridge, just to have it go bad a year later?