Not loaded

Having just found a copy of loaded and a new Saturn (boxed, 4 other games) i decided to play through the first few levels if only to listen to the excellent sound track by Pop will eat itself.

I put in the disk and heard it spin up, start to load and.......nothing!!

I took the disk out and gave it a whiz on the disk cleaner, still nothing, thats odd i thought so i tried it on my other Saturn (also a pal system) and it booted fine.

Okay so it must be the console, i put in tunnel B1, this loaded fine, put in Independence day (i know, i know. this was a test not to actually play the pile of dross) and it played fine , as did all my games.....whats going on? why is loaded not loading on this one Saturn that pays all my other games? any suggestions?

Saturn games ahoy!

Just got back from a car boot sale on the roof of the NCP at Brighton Marina, the only free parking in Brighton!

Lots of game stuff but nothing matching my new "sega only" policy , was about to give up and go bowling (another reason to catch the number 7 bus out of town) when i saw a corner stall selling snes, nes and Saturn games, JOY!

Got a perfect copy of tunnel B1 by Ocean games for £4, and it even had the flyer for up and coming games from sega 1997, bonus!

Loaded it up and it is just as fast and slick as i remember (well as fast a a 3d saturn games is going to run) so am very happy with the purchase.

SFII champion edition, PC engine

Having just got a PC engine by NEC, i went about getting as many of the best releases i could find on ebay, some import sites and several connections i have who can lay their hands on some rare titles.

So far i have B.C. Kid and street fighter II, and ive spent some time comparing the them to the other versions.

I started with SFII , having owned this title on the snes and the mega drive i was surprised that the older PC engine still managed to keep up with both consoles, the sound is a bit muffled and the graphics are patchy in place, the actual game play is superbly fast.

There are a few extras as well, you get all the bonus stages including the barrel stage missing from the SNES version, and several other items such as an extra stone in the Chun-li level.

You also get to play as the four bosses that you don't get in the SNES or Mega Drive games, this adds allot to the game in 2 player vs mode.

But the only problem is that to play vs mode you need the 2 player adaptor and two six button pads, the pad is easy to find but the adaptors are like hens teeth, I've found some but have been unable to locate one fro less than £50, i may have to cough up the cash for one.

So in summing this is a great version of a classic game, its got features not included in the other consoles and this almost makes up for the sound standard and lack of graphical polish.

A new start takes AGES, it takes SEGA

After March and Aprils console cull I've changed a few things in my collection.

I always liked SEGA consoles and games. Sure, Nintendo had the NES and SNES, they had the N64 and the game cube, but somewhere they lost touch with the common man, they strayed away from hardcore3 and the people who put them where they were and have embraced the "casual gamer" or "game chaves" as i like to call them.

That group of people who think waving an 80's TV remote around in their front room to play an ugly game with all the finesse of PONG (yes I'm talking about WII sports) is a gaming evolution and look like prats while doing so.

Atari bit the dust after their last console the Jaguar, it was outdated (and i don't care how many times they told the gaming press, two 32 bit chips do not make a 64 bit console!) and under powered mess with bad styling and a very odd controller.

So in my view, Sega is the only one of the many retro console manufacturers who never really put a foot too badly wrong (yes the ps1 out sold the Saturn and the dreamcast was ditched as everyone had their heads so far up sony's arse to notice it over the PS2 (the fools!!!).

What I'm leading to to with this ramble is that for the time being i will be mostly collecting sega.

Ive just got a Saturn with 12 games, boxed and with a memory cart for £17!!! this led me to go through the boxes in my store room and find a boxed dreamcast and a Meagadrive with CD and 32X plus a load of games, and a master system one and two.

All i need now is a better game gear (mine is scratched to hell) and the rare than rocking horse manure Nomad and i will be on my way!

Caveat emptor

I,m not public school educated, i never took Latin classes or did any studies of dead languages, how ever even i know this one.

Caveat emptor, or "let the buyer beware".

I recently sold some old gaming items at a car boot in my local area, i wont say which one in case the man in question is reading.

I had an N64 with 12 games, a super gamboy adaptor and an old snes with 15 games including Mario cart and Mario world 2.

This man comes up to the stall and asks how much for the SNES, i say £5 for the great games and £3 for the others and £20 for the snes, 2x controllers and the gameboy thingy.

He then asked me if it worked and was it complete? Now i had no idea if it worked, it was in my spare room in a plastic box with the rest of my old stuff, i told him this and that i was selling it as seen, so he purchased the lot for £35 (the games alone were worth £50 if i sold em on eBay) he took the lot.

i sold the rest for a good price and started to pack up, that's when he cam back, the RF cable was not in the box and he wanted £10 back, well i told him to take a hike, i had told him it was all that was in the box and that if had not checked it was not my problem.

Now he stormed off using allot of blue language and hand signals, stick and stones, always check what your buying, I'm not a con man and had no idea the RF was not in there, u can by on on the next stall for £1, its the principle

Pointless ipod app number 23

3D gallery, it's a 3d art gallery that shows your pics and vids on the walls like works or art.

It serves no purpose other than to be an ungainly type of slide show, yet some how it has eaten about 3 hours of my time.

Ive adjusted the the size, dimension and angle of my pics, changed the rooms to show themes and certain artists and even added my own pictures and paintings as well.

the controls are touch screen and you are free to browes in full fp veiw.

its pointless, not online, but i love it!

avalible from app shop for 59p!

What have i done?!?

Having not played warcraft for 3 months i finally canceled my direct debit, this left 1 month of play time left on the account.
Rachel , being the careful money person she is decided to log in and use up the remain credit so it was not wasted.

Now this would have been fine if she was not so susceptible to to the human completest urge.
Having complete creating a new character she started playing at 9am when i left for work.

When i rang home at 12.30 she was still playing and had made it to lvl 8 with her new mage.

This too would be fine if it was not for the fact that i now cannot get on my computer as she is on warcraft all the time! it will wear off eventually just like animal crossing, the game that meant i lost my DS to er for, and Pokemon, the game i lost my SP to her for, it will just take time.

Note to self, never let her use the 360 or PS3 or you might not get those back either!!!

By George! an american in paris.

George Stobart, American, wise cracker, cynic and reluctant point and click hero of the broken sword games by Rebellion.

When George Stobart goes on an extended holiday to Paris little does he know that he will face Templar's, serial killers and explosive clowns in a race round the globe. He finds murder intrigue and a love interest in the form of Nicole Collard, a french photo journalist on the trail of a serial killing clown.

The wit, beauty and insanity that make up this classic adventure are unsurpassed by any other game in the genre (with the possible exception of legend of monkey island), the background art drawn by Dave Gibbons has a rich colourful illustrated style and the animation is very life like.

The first game in the series has been released for the Wii and DS in directors cut with new scenes and an added story arc, if you missed this game the first time round then nows the best time to give it a try.

Box fresh dream turns to package nightmare.

Having just got got a Japanese D/C in cancer research, i decided to sell my mint one on ebay because it was mint i never actually played the thing and it just took up space.

I got the usual questions from about 30 buyers regarding reg and serial numbers, versions and box condition.

Eventually i sold it to a a guy from London, but on contact he had some rather anal packing requests, i list them as follows....

1. he wanted 3 layers of bubble wrap round the system, and make sure that the corners are covered.

2. please wrap the games in layers of bubble wrap, only allowing a max of three games to be wrapped together.

3. A bit of stick tape in each game to attach the disk to the spindle and case for all 16 games.

4. a second lay3r of bubble wrap and 2 layers of brown paper on the outside of a second box that i was to put the whole lot inside.

5. and finally the whole thing should be DHL'ed to him for next day delivery.

This last thing took the item way over postage price and i refused without more money, he eventually accepted normal parcel post with insurance.

And after all that crap the little shit didn't even leave feed back!!!

So if you ever read this you anal freak....F!%K YOU!!!!!!!!

....and relax.....rant over.

Conversion from hell

Doom, the game that launched a thousand FPS cliches, the first shareware game i ever owned for the P.C., the music was awesome, the sound effect for the shotgun is possibly my favorite ever weapon noise and the even the doors have a sinister shriek, how could you possibly mess up such a fantastic formula?

Well Atari and midway managed it, the frame rate is okay and the controllers work nicely with button overlay (see pic) for the weapons switching.

However the res level is far lower than the P.C. version, this leads to blocky visual and blurry back grounds, the visuals are very dark and this leads to confusion, there is no gama or brightness ajustments so you can't ajust the visuals to help with this.

The system link feature is a great idea, it allows you to play death match and co-op modes, however you need two consoles to do this and there are network errors documented on allot of forums.

But the real kicker, the absolute let down is the lack of music, you play this great game with no soundtrack what so ever, this kills any atmosphere that was left .

If your going to play doom i would recomend the PC or mac version over this, although to be fair it runs alot better than the other cartrage based systems doom has appeared on.

Why God? WWWHHHHYYYY!!!!!!

My SNES broke :( she was so young, so full of life, so full of 16 bit joy and fun.

She was okay when i went to work this morning, but on my return she was dead.

What can i do? how will i carry on without her, we were together so long, since 1992 she has sat in the living rooms of my various flats and houses.

How will i continue?

Easy, tear her to bits, use her innards for some conceptional art and buy a second hand one on ebay.

God bless the Internet!

Keep your 3D fighters, 2D is king.

Having just received my dreamcast games via DHL this morning, i delved into the box and took out some old favorites, there was soul caliber, crazy taxi and shadowman.

But also there was guilty gear x, a 2d fighter i have seen but never actually played, how could i have missed it first time around?

Teken and virtual fighter being my favorite 3D fighters i have always been a fan of 2 player one on one beat em ups, and before that i played street fighter 2 and mortal kombat on the Snes,

Not having a system such as the neo geo i missed out on 2d fighters like samurai showdown and king of fighters when they were first released, which is a shame as i only got into them many years later.

Now that i have a dozen or so of them I've spent the bank holiday enjoying discovering a whole new section of retro gaming i was missing out on.

The dark art of the .CDI files

Before i start, please be aware that downloading .CDI files of games you do not own breaks copyright law and is very very bad, you'll go to hell, and you'll go blind...no hang on...thats for somthing else.....

Anyhow, having got a new dreamcast last weekend i wanted to relive 2000ad and play some great games.

Off i went on a little shopping trip (see my last post) only to find the huge number of D/C disks i saw only a few months earlier in every second hand store i went into have suddenly vanished into thin air!

Now not being one to give up i called round my friends and managed to get trick style, sonic adventure and unfortunately, who whants to be a millionaire.

Not i think you will agree, the best selection of tiles (why o why does sonic sound like an American teenage dick!?!), so i had to take some slightly desperate measures to let me enjoy the D/C till the games i bought online last night turn up in the post.

Flaging down a local interweb i was able to find out several useful ways to allow me to play some classics that i had owned in the past.

I turns out that it is not the same as downloading an ISO file, fixing the image and burning to a disk, no, what you need to do is to down load a serise of RAR files, unpack then, use a sopftware app to attach the 7 or 8 uncompressed files into one zip file, unzip it and then use another app to burn it useing 2 sessions onto a CDR disk.

Now all this sounds like hard work, why not use ISOs??? but after 8 corupted disks and allott of southpark level swearing i finally got it to work.

Having done this i was able to run many titles on my D/C with no need for a boot disk or any kind of disk swapping.

My new games should arrive any day now and i plan to dispose of the copies when they do (although i own the tiles so not sure if i actualy did anything wrong) .

The games may play but lets face it, withouth the cases, box art and manuels its missing half the joy of owning the actual games, so by them for real online or from charity shops, its a whole lot better than playing them off tatty cheap CDR copies

doing the rounds

Having spent an hour searching every game, junk and charity shop in Brighton i have still not found a single item of interest.

There were some D/C pads in an old record and tape shop, no VM units though.

I did find several Amiga disks but nothing i didn't have already.

Several shops that sold ps2 and xbox games said they did not stock anything as old as the dreamcast, did not bother telling the Muppets that they were the same generation as both the consoles they did stock, how can you own a shop and know fuck all about the scene.

A new begining

Cancer research has come up trumps again!
After several months my house move has completed and im finaly unpacked and settled.

After having sold a large amount of my retro collection to pay off my blood sucking management agents i have the space to start all over again.

So what better way to start than aq quick charity shop crawl round my new town of Worthing.

Worthing, if you did not know is just outside Brighton, and with the house crash just starting i got my new place for a steal.

There is also a large amount of junk shops. charity shops and car boot sales so its a retro paradise.

It was a good sighn that the first shop i tried had a copy of "out to lunch" fore the snes for 50p!

the next place i tried was empty except clothes and a few xbox disks, but the 3rd one, cancer research (great charity, you should donate to em if you can) had a drean cast for £3 with 2 controlers and cables.

lets hope my luck holds out and i get many more deals like this!

C64 tapes clear out.

After clearing out the attic ive found a load of tapes and disks i should have sold years ago.

I think i might set up my old C64 and give them another play before sticking em on ebay, if i can just find the tape drive that works.

Monkey island 2, le chuck's revenge.

Just won this on ebay.

Great condition item with the mojo code wheel.

My favourite monkey island game of the series, great puzzles and some fantasic humor.

Why don't they release these games for the D/S, the dig by lucas arts would also work great on that as well.

odd 3do questions

I just put a 3d0 for sale on ebay this morning for £50, after about 3 hours i received an email asking the following...

"does the 3DO have the cover on the second controler port?"

The 3DO only has one controller port on the console, a second and third are daisy chained from the one that is actually plugged into the console its self.

This is the second time I've been asked this, is there a 3DO that has 2 ports on the console? ive looked on the net and on my other 3 3do models but they only have one (goldstar and philips).

If anyone reading this knows the answer please leave me a comment.

Boxed Master systen 2 sold on.

Found a boxed master system, i found in cancer research Brighton for £3.50

I have just sold it on ebay for £35, not a bad days work.

Windows 7 Beta, it really is better than Vista!!!!

From the few hours i have spent with it i can confirm that it runs games fast with no noticeable difference from XP.
Crysis war head runs at a good frame rate, with direct x 10 features turned on.

It is nowhere near the system hog that vista was, my memory and cpu monitors show allot less activity when idle.

Media player syncs with my 360 without bother, and my ps3 picks it up as a media server without having to use Tversity or any other software.

I will be trying WOW and WAR mmo's tomorrow and will let you know how it goes.

A sad day :(

Due to space issues and my general lack of cash i am gonna have to sell some of my console collection.

Check out ebay for boxed 3do, a CDI with 20 games and a load of rare mag cuttings and a PC engine :(