This is a triumph!

 

After years of wanting my very own Aperture labs portable sentry turret I have the next best thing.... a small Aperture labs sentry turret LED flashlight.....well it's the best I could get without endangering the lives of my family and friends.

 

 

 

 

The turret stands at about 3" tall and has an LED that lights up at the front. The best thing about it however is the random sound effects it plays, nothing freaks out a gamer like entering a room to see what the red glow is and hearing "target acquired" and "are you still there...? coming out of the dark, where is your weighted companion cube when you need it?


The other awesome thing about it is the box art- It's taken straight from the Aperture science production line.

The Box also has more warning tiles than a GLaDOS designed test chamber!

 

 

 

 

 

 



There are stills taken directly from the spoof turret
sales adds featuring Cave Johnson that Valve software ran as
part of the promotion for Portal 2.

Even though this is not the fully functioning home defence turret I dreamed of it is still a really nice desk Knick Knack. LED flashlight turret "I don't hate you" :)

Enter stranger....

“I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.”
― Groucho Marx

Nostalgia is an odd thing, we all long to return to the past, the films, music, people and places we loved in our youth.
It's great to think of these things fondly and reminisce with others about them, however you can't go back, you can't do it all again and get the same feelings back, you can never go home.

Someone really should have told the jerks who just remade Knightmare!

Knightmare, if you didn't watch it when you were a kid (which, if you didn't is a form of child abuse, you should report this to the Daily Mail at once so your parental units can be strung up in the town square)  is a kids TV show from the late 80's.
The show premise is a dungeon master called Treguard must defeat an evil overlord who is plotting to take over the realm. To do this Treguard takes the logical step of summoning a group of posh school kids, 3 of which will sit next to a magic viewing port (a 14" colour telly with a rug over it) and guide the 4th member of their team while he stumbles around a blue room full of Z list actors and bumps into the furniture.
The blue screen was there, so early CGI could be super imposed over it and give the illusion of the dark creepy dungeons and crypts the dungeoneer (the blind 4th members of the party I mentioned earlier) was supposedly exploring.

The team would work together to avoid pit traps, giant spiders and all kinds of fantasy creatures to gain clues in the form of objects such as food to replenish health, scrolls that contain spells and other items like keys and the like.

Spells are cast in a kind of mini game where the pre pubescent pricks have to spell (clever) the words of the spell in order for it to work- this was kids TV at it's zenith!

As the show was 30 mins long and there were only a certain number of episodes per season the chances of anyone actually getting to the end was almost nonexistent especially since the teams would get killed every other show, " go right...no your right...there's a pit! run.. no walk no go....oh shit you're dead! 

We now jump forward to present day and the abomination that is "Knighmare returns".

The first thing to note is that they have ditched the school kids and have gone for the mass market appeal of the emo teen.

Look at them!!! With their hair and their clothes. good god in heaven he's wearing a retro gaming T-shirt!! You're in a remake of an 80's kids game show, did your really think that was needed??

These cocky style monkeys actually think they are funny. They have lines prepared for the situation, I can only imagine that these were force fed to them before the cameras started rolling by the guys who used to write for the contestants on blind date.



The format seems to remain the same with no added extras and no improvements made. I know that this is a remake but there have been so many advances in CGI and virtual reality, surly some of these could have been implemented with great effect.

The CGI itself has had the res upped a bit for the HD era but remains flat and cartoony. Once again I know this is a shameless nostalgia fest but still, it could have looked so much better.

All in all this is knightmare with all the 80's charm and fun sucked out of it. What's next?  Funhouse with an ageing Pat Sharpe shouting at my chemical romance lookalikes as they get hit in the face by foam pillars and dropped into gunge tanks........hang on...I'm just off to call ITV.....imagine what Melanie and Martina look like now!!!! 



 

Shield your eyes!! Its another new handheld.

So I was on my nexus 7 tab the other night and I booted up the Nvidia app. After some surfing I found a feature on a new bit of of hardware called project shield.

Said gaming gadget is a cross between a streaming service for PC content and a hand held games console with full tegra 4 support.

Having watched several videos of it playing harken (a mech run and gun for the PC ) and several top PC titles I am now of the opinion that this is the greatest thing since sliced horse (like sliced bread but from tesco) and I must have one !!!.

Once I have more details I will post again, or I might just buy a PC engine and post about retro stuff like usual, I'm in two minds.

Go away now.

One from the vaults....

One from the vaults....well..... from a dusty box in the second bedroom actually, but you get the idea.

 

It's snowing outside and as is the UK tradition all the trains stop running and people jump in their cars and crash them into each other, and that's what makes Britain great!

 

As I live in the back end of beyond I cannot get into work, so I thought I would tidy my houses version of a refuse centre, the second bedroom.

 

every one has a room in the house that they slowly and almost without realising it fill with junk. Stuff like dolls houses from when the kids were young, desks or ikea furniture that you thought would look great in your lounge but turned out to be cheap flat packed crap, and in my case boxes and boxes of cables and old gaming junk.

 

After about an hour of choking on dust and nearly being killed by a falling halo head box set (still cant get the cat to put its head in it :( ) I found a sealed box marked Ben's stuff from when I moved house 3 years ago. It's snowing outside, there is an unopened box of unknown treasures and I don't have to go to work, oh this is better than xmas!

 

So I went and got my Stanley knife (other lethal cutting blade are available)  and cut off the package tape.

Inside was the first 5 "Johnny the homicidal maniac" comics, they are going on eBay! a set of screwdrivers, two note books and my old warhammer fantasy battle box set from back in the early 90's.

 

All this was fine, but it was the item jammed in the side of the box that really stood out, it was my first Nintendo Gameboy advance! This little beauty was bought for me by my wife before she was my wife (she got it for me before we were married, the snow may be affecting my brain).

 

We were in Las Vegas  in September 2001 and having seen the gba (not yet out in the uk) in shop in ceasers palace mall I was excited, however as I had just spent a week playing blackjack and poker at a sub school child level I was broke and had no cash left to purchase said item.

 

To cheer me up Rachel bought me a ride on "race to Atlantis", an awesome 3D imax ride that lasted about 15 mins, she did not go on it herself as she said it would make her sea sick.

 

When I got off the ride I walked to the exit and there she was with a new boxed GBA in her hand plus batteries and a carry case ( god I love that woman :) ).

 

So I'm off to the shops to get some second hand GBA games!!!!......as soon as the bloody snow stops.... 

 

 

 

 

 

 



At school we were told to stay away from odd strangers.

The PS vita is fast becoming my console of choice for older games, not only can you get all the ps1 res evil games on it you can now get classic xbox games as well!

First on the list for me to download was the overlooked classic  "Oddworld, Strangers Wrath HD".

The controls suit the vita really well as xbox games used twin analogue sticks the same as the vita does, the lack of shoulder buttons is made up for with touch screen commands that work surprisingly well (i'm not a fan of touch screen as yet finger prints all over the device while you play) and the game controls feel natural.

The game is from back when the xbox was in it's prime so the visuals have had an overhaul and look very crisp and the colours are bright and striking.

As the res has been upped and the draw distance has been improved on the original it looks fantastic and the living ammo for your crossbow looks crazier than it did the first time round!

It says something about modern shooters on the vita when a 10 year old game can show them up for the hollow and bland run and guns they are.

Strangers wrath is a classic that's been polished and tweaked for the modern age, lets hope that some other Xbox titles are given the same treatment. "Brute force" anyone?  or maybe "mace griffin"?

Comment with your xbox titles to be upgraded.

The same but different, an old draft i found.

I was going over my blog stats and found a part typed blog entry I never published, as I own nether version of the Saturn console was I was blogging about back in the heady days of 2008 I don't know what other variations there were, I was right about Gamestation though wasn't I?

Draft post 2008....

Having just found a new Saturn in gamestation in Crawley (the only one in the south that still sells retro stuff, although not for much longer) I compared it to my faulty model and noticed how different the two were.

The first thing i noticed was the extra logo on the left hand corner,

 

A breed apart

After the last Vita firmware update the store now has a new section, PlayStation mobile.

After filtering through the dross of mini games and IPod cast offs I found Alien Breed.

I remember this team 17 classic from when the Amiga 500 was still king of home computers (users of other formats may dispute that, and it is there right to do so...even if they are wrong) and I loved it and its many add on's.

So, after downloading it via my Wi-Fi connection and realising I should always use the ps3 to do this in the future (why does it take sooo long???) I started it up and saw the familiar loading screen (pictured above).

Much to my delight I saw that it had the classic mode and a new updated HD style mode, Joy!

the only gripe I have is the shop, it is still index systems, but you can now open it at any time and you can even pay actual cash for lives, guns and ammo!! this completely destroys the hard as nails arcade shooter I know and love as you just have to keep shooting non stop and never have to worry about running out or having no life left and being half a level away from the computer terminal shop.

On the plus side the new visuals and the ability to walk backwards while shooting really add to this and I can't really moan, the original was from a time when you could actually die in a computer game and not just hide behind a box till your life recharges (thank you for that one Halo).

It's nice to have a few revamped classic 16 bit computer titles to choose from and not just ps1 games and angry bird clones.

Retrospective

While i was updating my collection log book (a book where i log my collection, surprisingly) i have had the happy realisation that i have in fact made a profit from my hobby over the last 5 years.

I estimate i have spent around £1650 on items and games in the last half decade, and if i add up the amount of money i made on ebay and car boots plus collector fairs, it comes to around two grand, add to this the fact that the nicest items i bought, i have kept it adds up to around 2.5 k.

Now i'm not in it for money, i don't have the time or Patience to run it as anything other than a hobby, i am happy to learn that i can at least justify the £200 i just spent on the second hand 1942 arcade coffee table my mate Phil just sold me (1942 the game, not the age of the table).

Salvation is at hand!!!

I may have found my game life salvation.
I was ready to give up on the whole game thing, throw in the towel on the increasingly casual gamer orientated industry, but then I found the DSI XL.

Its basically the DS gaming handheld, but with a whole load of extra multi media goodies tacked on.

You get the dsi camera and all the alt reality gaming promise it offers, its

Go on now go! walk out the door.....

After getting the PSP from an import shop a year before the UK launch I was always unhappy with the size of the bloody thing, even after the slim and lite and the 3000 came out it was still far to big.

When i saw the PSP Go! i finally thought the psp Go might be worth upgrading my 2000 for, boy was i wrong.

The screen is nice, its a bit smaller, the controls slide out cell phone style from behind the main body so its allot smaller.

It also has 7 gb on board memory, which is good till you realise that there is no UMD drive so you will have to store your games on it and that its not going to hold allot after you have put your music and videos on it as well.

You also cant load you old UMD games on it so you may as well throw the game you already own in the bin.

The main issue i have is the lack of game you can get on it, and the games you can download from the Sony store are a mix of overpriced new releases, old "classic" psp games or shit Disney guff.

All the new games are 8 to 10 quide dearer than gamestation or tescos and you don't even get the box to go with em.