Archive for the ‘Game Boy’ Category

Doc’s Fix-A-System Plus

Thursday, April 18th, 2013

Let’s suppose for a moment that you’re around in the late 80’s / early 90’s. Let’s further assume that you have more than one video game console (I know, that only happens to movie stars and oil barons, but bear with me). Let’s even further assume that you would want to keep your systems clean for some reason, and the thought of buying one kit for each system seems like a gigantic waste of your money. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were some kind of thing you could buy that would allow you to do all of that tedious maintenance on all of your systems?

Well, behold!

docs_kit1

Once again, the third parties come to the rescue.

The solution here is actually pretty ingenious. You have a hunk of plastic that attaches to the end of a cartridge for each of the supported systems. You just attach it to the cartridge of your choice, insert and remove it from your systems a few times, and you’re good to go. It also has something called a ‘detergent-based cleaning solution’ that you add to the ‘cleaning wand’ to scrub the contacts of your games clean. This is a little more involved than the official NES cleaning kit method, and is probably not designed to have you buy refills of the cleaner over and over again.

Probably not.

But this thing definitely doesn’t hurt to use. Unless you leave a ton of the cleaning gunk on your games and it dries up in there, I guess. That could be bad.

So, don’t do that, okay?

TEDBEAR

Posted in Artifacts, Doc's, Game Boy, Genesis, Nintendo, Ruined Cartridge | Comments Closed

King James Bible

Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

I’ve written about this thing before, but I figured I’d retread some of that ground here. Mostly because I just ran across this cartridge again the other day while looking for something else.

Bible Game

This is clearly an unlicensed Game Boy game from our friends at Wisdom Tree, and it’s got the King James version of the Bible on it. How exciting!

When I bought this, it actually had a box and manual, but those are lost to the Mists of Time(tm), but you don’t actually need those to extract the maximum possible amount of enjoyment out of this cartridge. You could, for example, read the Bible. And since the Game Boy screen can only show about 30 words, you’ll be flipping a lot of pages. Kind of like trying to read a book on your smartphone, except much more difficult.

Or you can play a game, like Hangman. Except it’s not really Hangman, it’s the same basic idea, but with sheep in a pen that escape when you get a letter wrong.

I tell you all of this because the first time I played the sheep game the word I got (which is randomly chosen from the Biblical text) was ‘circumcise’. That was exactly one more time than I ever wanted to see that word in the context of a video game.

But this game did come in handy a few years later when my Humanities class in college started to study a few chapters from the Bible. I was able to bring in and use a Game Boy for a college-level class, and the teacher was Ok with it.

And that is awesome, no matter how you slice it.

Posted in Artifacts, Game Boy, Ruined Cartridge | Comments Closed