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.