After scraping together all my Club Nintendo stars loyalty points at the end of last year (some were due to expire on the 31st of December), I had a look through the Club Nintendo Stars Catalogue for things to spend them all on.
Of course, it had to be this:
It’s three old Game & Watch games – Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House – all for the DS. Which is oooh shiny enough in itself, but becomes even more oooh shiny when you realise it isn’t available for sale anywhere. Excellent.
I think with Issue 03, our retro issue, we really hit the big time. The ugvm site got slashdotted, the bandwidth costs spiralled to £244 for just one weekend, and we were swamped with emails.
Mostly complaints about Tim saying interaction fiction was dead, which he didn’t quite say, but still – the publicity took us to over 10,000 subscribers. 10,000! Thats more than many print-based magazines!
EDIT: Oh, and look at my anti-prediction there on Page 2. “You wouldn’t see any high street magazines devoting a whole issue to old games, would you?”. Soon after, there was a Retro Edge, Retro GamesTM, and then Retro Gamer! We started it all, folks.
I got a parcel in the post today. I thought it was going to be some Xbox 360 game and faceplate I won in a competition a few weeks ago, as I wasn’t expecting anything else (besides my 360, of course, but that was coming via UPS not Royal Fail).
Anyway, somehow, I managed to guess what it was simply by rattling it. And what was it? This!
It was a slightly belated birthday present from my sister. Told you it was amazing!
Play Asia started selling these recently. They look like a Megadrive variant of the many Famicom “famiclones” out there, but they’re not – they’re officially licenced by Sega! And they’re really cheap too, coming in at under ¬¨¬£20. You get 20 games built into the unit, but it also has a cartridge slot to play original (and forthcoming re-released) cartridges. I tested it with quite a few games of varying geographic origin, and aside from the UK version of Street Fighter II SCE crashing, I didn’t have any problems.
This is Dunny and Woody (wot who rite Spectrum emulators and stuff) at ORSAM a few years ago. It was a Sinclair-based retro geek show. I, uh, went for the food.
It would seem that the Wii Homebrew “scene” has now matured to the point where not only are fully working games, apps and emulators now available, but there’s a modchip-free way of installing them. You stick a hacked Zelda save game on your Wii, load the game, and it crashes allowing some code to run. This installs the amazing “Homebrew Channel” on your Wii.
There are loads of things you can do with it, but, as is my “thing”, the most obvious was to get a Spectrum emulator up and running. FUSE, the emulator I tend to use on my Mac, has a Wii port. So I installed it… Read the rest of this entry »
OK, so I’m having a Geek Day today. Sorry about that. But “Siggi”, from the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair has done something quite amazing. Whilst the rest of us on the group have often giggled about the possibility of creating a webserver that runs on a Sinclair Spectrum, this guy has gone one better – by creating one for the ZX81.
Amazing. Assuming the thing is still running (and Siggi says it could go down at any time), you can see it in action here. You can also find the original c.s.s. announcement here.
Amazing. You can now play the classic text adventure (or “interactive fiction” as they seem to be called these days) game version of Douglas Adams’ book via an instant messenger client. It uses the Jabber network, but Google Talk is compatible so if you have that (or even just the Google homepage gadget, as shown below) you can play!
Just send a message to “prakbot [at] jabber.org”, and once connected, type !startgame to, uh, well, you can guess.
