Hovercraft Cowfish
Either this is the best name for a fish, ever, or The Oceanarium in Bournemouth is having a laugh and seeing if anyone notices.
Year: 2007
That house wot was on Grand Designs – I sees it!
Yes, I’m in Bournemouth, and in this picture is the house (well, flat) that was on Grand Designs on Channel 4 last week. I suspect it was actually a repeat of the programme, but it was last week that I saw it. The actual flat is the bit at the very top – the dome and the floor directly underneath. It was very exciting seeing it. Then we went and ate pasta in a restaurant a few yards down the …
Sonic Triple Trouble (PlayPal): COMPLETED!
I finally got round to putting some decent batteries in my PlayPal today, meaning the screen was actually bright and the sound volume audiable. I played Alex Kidd In High Tech World for a bit, but somehow managed to get Game Over without warning so played Triple Trouble instead. It isn’t actually very good at all. The main problem (and the problem with most of the Game Gear Sonic titles) is the small area of actual level that you see …
Bomberman Live (360)
Played a few online games, but in every game there was at least one player who was lagging something chronic. This meant he was essentially invincible, as bombs couldn’t hurt his as he wasn’t really where he appeared, and also he magically seemed to drop bombs around you while he was actually somewhere else on screen. It was very frustrating! Despite this, I did manage win a couple of sets-of-2!
Carcassonne (360)
Hurrah! I won my first ranked match this evening. In fact, it was the first ranked match the game has actually let me play, I think – every other time I tried I get disconnected, there’s no-one playing, or my opponent quits before the game starts. But I only won by a single point! I was convinced I was going to win when we were down to about 10 tiles, as even though we had the same number of points, …
Breaking the TB barrier
This is me using gparted to clone and expand the partitions on my old work machine boot drive to my new one. I also upgraded by data drive too, and kept the old drives as backups. So now, I have a staggering 1.5 terabytes of storage on that PC. I remember just ten short years ago when I bought a “cavernous” 4.3 GB hard drive, ad thought that would last me forever.
Bomberman Live (360)
Played several games this evening with my wife and a few bots, with every setting possible set to Random. I won more than her, but then, I am Best. Bomberman is ace, isn’t it?
Super Random Saturn Game Festival Of Strange (Saturn)
I fished out a load more Saturn games this evening. They included 2DO Arukotowa Sandoahru, which is a totally bizarre Wario Ware sort of game. You have to do lots of strange minigames to defeat foes. Things like Match The Easter Island Heads (why to the Japanese love Easter Island heads in their strange games?), Shoot The Meat In Half To Feed Two Lions, and The Fish Game That I Have No Idea How To Play. It’s fantastic, and seems …
Yie Ar Kung-Fu (360) (Demo)
True story: When I was little, I was given a copy of a games magazine (which I think was Computer and Video Games, but I’m not sure). In it, there was a glowing review of the Spectrum version of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and an advert for the same game. In fact, here’s the advert… Amazing scenes, yes? Anyway. I recall pestering my mum for days about this game. Reading her excepts from the review. Saying how great it was. You …
Bomberman Live (360)
No messing with demo mode for this, it’s Bomberman, so was bought straight off. Firstly, the bad: I don’t like the 3D graphics. I much prefer proper sprites, like the Saturn and PCE versions I’ve played recently. Secondly, the not-quite-overhead view is annoying, and although you can click the right stick to flick it back to the way it should be, you have to do this every single game – there’s no option to set it as default. Next, there’s …
Canis Canem Edit (PS2)
Completed Chapter Two today. This involved lots of punching posh kids, egging their house (with the help of Russell), bike racing, and taking some posh girl out on a date and winning her a teddy at the fair. The “boss” was another posh kid who kept hiding behind a bar whilst sending minions out to smack me about, but they were weak and easily brushed aside. Gary had been winding them all up with lies about things I’d said about …
Vista: Worth the wait?
And I don’t mean how long it took to come to market, either. Today, I took delivery of an Acer Aspire 5051AWXMi (yes, all them letters), that comes with Vista Home Basic. It’s a cheap (¬¨¬£255) and cheerful laptop, but it’s only for internet and office use and replaces an older, heavier, less powerful laptop that had an accident involving a flight of concrete steps. I didn’t actually want Vista, but they don’t have any other OS option, so I …
Canis Canem Edit (PS2)
Didn’t progress the story all that much today, mainly just causing havok (well, as much havok as a catapult and some itching powder can, anyway) and attending classes. I’ve completed Art and Chemistry completely now, and managed Shop 2 as well. Still having real issues with the PS2 pad, but then, there’s nothing new about that.
Corrupt kernel32.dll solution
It isn’t all fun and dongles, you know. Sometimes error messages happen and they need to be decyphered before you can even make a start on fixing the problem. Take this Acer desktop I have in for repair. It says “Stop: C0000221” on boot. Then there’s some stuff about “image kernel32.dll is possibly corrupt” and “header checksum does not match”. Thankfully, I found a solution. Kernel32.dll resides (on this XP Home machine at least) in c:\Windows\System32. And, having booted into …
Canis Canem Edit (PS2)
Russell DEFEATED! I think “blockhead” is the correct term for him. He’s a bit stupid, anyway. So I beat him up when Gary went a bit nasty and basically declared war on me (and the school). I’m starting to think Gary might actually be the headteacher’s son or something. There’s bound to be a twist like that somewhere. After that, I ran some errands for the cook (opening up the town outside the school), entered a boxing competition and won …