Thing is, I didn’t know that Bouncing Berty and Eskimo Capers were, in fact, two different games. I always referred to the Eskimo game as “Bouncing Berty in Eskimo Capers”, and hated my poor gaming skills as I was seemingly never good enough to get to the “pyramid level”.

Then, one day many years later, Eskimo Capers refused to load. After several attempts, I decided to load the other side of the tape instead – and my eyes were opened wide. How stupid I felt.

Anyway! Here it is for you all to play.

The emulator used is Qaop.

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I also like how they’ve been imagined – Bayonetta as a bullet-hell shooter, and Brutal Legend as a point-and-click adventure game.

I’d like SNES Pikmin and Super Mario Sprint  made first, please!

See the rest here.

In the case of Zolyx, the best Qix clone for the Spectrum, he included an entire Game of Life routine. For no reason. You can play with that if you like (pick Freebie from the menu), but I suggest you get stuck in to the game proper – it’s very good!

Controls: SXOP Space.

The emulator used is Qaop.

Here’s a trailer for the latest Ace Combat game from Namco Bandai. Which does all of the above:

Press release:

Fighter fans, now is your chance to marvel at the latest in the ACE COMBAT series

www.acecombatassaulthorizon.com

‘ACE COMBATTM ASSAULT HORIZON’ PREPARES TO TEAR THE HEAVENS APART

NAMCO BANDAI Games Europe kicks the tires, lights the fires and makes its peace with terra firma for the announcement of ACE COMBAT ASSAULT HORIZON, coming 2011 to Xbox 360® and PlayStation®3. Never before has aerial combat been so fast, so in-your-face and so vicious. It’s time to set the sky on fire.

The demanding Project Aces development team at NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. in Japan weren’t satisfied. They wanted more from the series. They wanted planes that tore apart limb from limb right in front of your face, spewing their oil lifeblood across the sky. They wanted to scrape the streets and dodge the steel skyscrapers of real world cities at blistering speeds, in an enthralling war drama that spanned the globe with a web of intrigue. They wanted players to pick up the controller and become deadly combat pilots in seconds, pulling off breathtaking kills at impossible speeds, and doing battle online in a multiplayer sky littered with fiery supersonic debris. What they wanted was steel carnage in the sky.

The result is not a sequel in the multi-million selling smash hit ACE COMBAT series, but a complete rebirth, a phoenix from the ashes flying at three times the speed of sound. The Project Aces team is building ACE COMBAT ASSAULT HORIZON from the ground up, with new technology fuelling their passionately realised vision of a game that puts players in the dark heart of the fight like no aerial combat game has done before.

“For us, this is a rebirth of the Ace Combat series, and a chance for us to take the series in a completely new direction,” said Kazutoki Kono, Producer at Project Aces, NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. “We’re confident that we’re going to create a new kind of action shooting (high-speed and destruction) experience with ACE COMBAT ASSAULT HORIZON, and we’re pouring passion, vision and skill into making a game like no other. We want to bring players closer than ever to the action so they feel the energy surge through them with every shot fired.”

ACE COMBAT ASSAULT HORIZON for Xbox 360® and PlayStation®3 is scheduled to launch across EMEA and Asia Pacific in 2011.

64-bit 2008, by default, only installs printers with the 64-bit 2008 and (for some printers, it seems, but not others) the 32 and 64-bit Vista/Windows 7 “User Mode” drivers. The old-style 2000/XP/2003 drivers don’t get a look in. There doesn’t seem to be a way to add them on the server either.

Thankfully, someone else has already found a way of sorting it. Basically, you navigate on an XP client to the Printers and Faxes share of the 2008 server, then click File > Server Properties > Drivers > Add, and point it at the XP (and other, if necessary) drivers for the printer.

There are a few issues, particularly if the 2008 and XP drivers have different names, but these can be resolved or worked around.

Here’s the full set of instructions – read the comments there for how to fix the additional problems!

No – instead, it’s Ed Fries’ Atari 2600 port of Halo. That you can play in your browser here. It’s amazing. Probably.

The Insane Console History Video 2.0 from Elder-Geek on Vimeo.

Unlike the more action-based C64 version, the Speccy game had you visiting houses looking for items to make your bike better. Items that let you drive through the mysterious “Dark Area”, prevent you from skidding on oil, and so on. Oh yeah, and you have to find Marty and take him to the airport on time – meaning you can’t endlessly have cups of tea with friends’ mums, who also occupy some of the houses.

And did I mention this is all in Colin’s dream? Amazing.

Controls are AZNM Space

The emulator used is Qaop.

Anyway, it got me thinking about difficult games, and how they don’t make them any more. Yeah, there are hard games, but compared to difficult 8-bit titles? Pff. Walkovers. All of them.

Take Army Moves, for example. It is quite possibly the hardest game in existence. I can’t even get past the first helicopter.

Controls are redefinable – just choose “1″ from the main menu.

The emulator used is Qaop.

I kept clicking “No Thanks”, but a page change or reload and it was back. This annoyed me a bit. Well, a lot. So I decided to chat with them.

Here’s the transcript (with the “Dell Expert”‘s name replaced). They were an expert indeed.

I am pleased that the Dell Zino can run imovie, and amazed that different colour computers are, as is the way with cars, different speeds! Amazing.

Oh yes, and the best bit was when, during the chat, this happened:

(Oh, and for those of you feeling sorry for the Dell Expert, I gave him/her a glowing customer satisfaction report.)

So, imagine how excited I was when I found it actually existed! Yes, you too can play Happy Mrs Chicken in the comfort of your own home! Gasp!

Simply go to the Peppa Pig site, click Games, click Happy Mrs Chicken, and enjoy!

Why?

Because most of my site is never updated. I don’t get the time to fiddle with PHP and having a CMS instead makes updating much quicker and more likely to happen. It also means I can do it from any machine, and even my phone, so that’ll help. Probably.

What will this mean?

404-tastic! Sort of. I’m going to duplicate the folder structure with permalinks as far as possible, but that’ll only go so far. So to hell with you all, you’ll have to find stuff with the search box or the menus.

A couple of weeks ago, my cheap-and-shoddy iPhone dock (bought from Deal Extreme) died, so I needed another. So back on the site I went to buy another cheap-and-shoddy iPhone dock. And some magnets. You gotta get magnets when you shop with Deal Extreme. Lots of little 5mm balls of incredible magnetty powar. You have to wonder how magnets work. They are ace. I got a pack of 100, to add to the 20 I already had.

I also bought the fabulously named Gyu. I didn’t know it was called Gyu, but I’d been referring to it as “a blob of cleaning goo” so being called “Gyu” was just amazing. I haven’t dared to open the packet yet, as I’m far too excited.

Most exciting is that it says “Germany Formula” on the front. Perhaps this means it can get four goals past the Argentinian defence? (<- World Cup Joke). The ingredients on the back are interesting too, essentially being a mixture of chewing gum and isopropyl alcohol. I suspect it’ll double as teeth whitener. NOTE: Do not use as teeth whitener.

Finally, the Main Event: the iPhone dock itself. It’s the same as my old one, only black, but the packaging is a work of art/genius/a four year old:

Genuine accessories for my iphone 3gs callalar phone. And can also be used as a Media Plager! Amazing scenes.

The Express version of SQL Server 2005 is nice because it’s free, but it does limit database sizes to just 4GB. This may sound huge, but for us, that’s only around 4 months worth of internet logs, and we need to clear some space every so often. I always forget how to do it, so this post is a reminder to me as much as anything.

Before you start, to make things easier, get yourself a copy of Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express. It’s free, and makes managing your SQL databases much easier. Once installed on your SQL Server machine (and connected to it), you can set about fixing WebMarshal.

Firstly, you need to purge a load of old records from the log. Chances are you don’t need to go back more than a few months anyway. If you do, you might want to backup your database, name it as a “snapshot” of today’s date, and then restore it if you need to have a look at old entries. How you purge depends on the version of WebMarshal you have, but for either 3.x or 6.x you start my clicking open the WebMarshal database from the object explorer on the left.

Now, on the pane on the right, you’ll have an empty command window. In here, you need to paste one of the following commands:

For WebMarshal 3.x:

exec dbo.PurgeLogData @NumDays = 'n'

Where n is the number of days to keep. So, if you want to get rid of anything more 60 days old, replace n with 60.

For WebMarshal 6.x:

exec dbo.PurgeLogData @PurgeDate = 'yyyymmdd', @MaxRecords = 0

Where yyyymmdd is the date from which everything older is deleted. So, if you wanted to get rid of everything from before 10th April 2010, enter yyyymmdd as 20100410.

Whichever command you use, after typing it in, click the “! Execute” button to perform the task, which may take some time.

Unfortunately, all this does is remove the data. It doesn’t shrink the data files, so your 4GB database will still be 4GB. Thankfully, there’s an easy way of doing this.

Back on the object explorer pane, right-click the WebMarshal database and choose Tasks > Shrink > Database, then click OK. Again, this may take a while. Once finished, for good measure, choose Tasks > Shrink > Files, then click OK.

Now your database should be much smaller! To check, right-click the database once more and choose Properties. In the General section, there’s an entry for Database Size. If this is way below 4GB, you’re done. If not, you might want to do a bit more purging!

Did I mention it was shiny? Because it is. Very.

The haters are quick to point out that it’s just a big iPod Touch. Which it is, only that’s missing the point. Other haters (or the same ones) say it’s very expensive. Which (again) it is, and (again), that’s missing the point too. Others too say it’s less useful than a laptop. Which it is. Once more, missing the point.

What it actually is, in fact, is something that wasn’t really there before. It’s a simple to use, lovely to operate, sofa-based web browsing device – which does a lot of other things pretty well too. There’s nothing else that does comfy in-front-of-the-tv internetting quite this good. Yeah, this good, as I’m using it now.

And it is very shiny. And now I want one of my own.

The first thing you’ll notice is that, unlike most SD cards, the SanDisk for Wii card is white. Like the Wii. Little known fact: the Wii itself, its power supply, the  SD card shaped. Check yours – I’m right!

Other exciting features include a write protect lock switch – ideal if you’re paranoid about Nintendo’s system updates deleting your Wii’s homebrew stash. This sort of thing is pretty standard for SD cards anyway though, and you could just remove the card when you update…

Anyway! In use, it performs about as well as my usual SanDisk Extreme II card. I couldn’t tell any speed differences when transferring channels and saves to and from it compared to the Extreme II. The Extreme III is supposedly quicker, but I suspect a lot of the speed issues are down to the Wii’s transfer methods and not the cards themselves. Apart from that, it’s an SD card and it works. You can even use it in cameras and stuff – it’s not fussy about only being for the Wii. There’s even a sticker on it declaring DSi compatibility. Wow!

You can get these fine items (and other similar things) from MemoryCardZoo. The 2GB SD Card is £5.99.

Competition!

Now, of course, you want to know how to save yourself £5.99 and win one, right? Of course you are! So what do you need to do?

Simply reply in the comments with Things You’d Put An SD Card Slot In And Why. You can email me pictures (the worse the better) to andyk @ lofi-gaming.org.uk if you’d prefer. Closing date, ooooh, close of day Sunday 4th July. One card each to the two suggestions or pictures I deem best. Or worst. Go!

I hope to play it soon, once BioShock 2 and Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Zelda: Twilight Princess and stuff are finished

For those of you um’ing and ah’ing about it, there’s now a demo of Mass Effect 2! And very nice it looks too: