NES 42 in 1

March 21st, 2013

Oh, knock-off carts. Where would we be without you? Probably off somewhere doing whatever with a few more dollars in our pockets, but without your unique experiences.

Like this cartridge that has 42(!) games on it. Wow! That’s a lot. Check out this totally bodacious cartridge, too.

42in1_1

Well, I’m in, obviously. So, let’s check out some of the games on tap here (click to enlarge)

42in1_2

Oh yeah, Dig Dug, Lode Runner, and… Millipecle? Ramio Brother? Super Mari Bros? Penguin Adventure? Hrm, these aren’t quite the games I was expecting.

And, it turns out that this is the story with these weird multi-carts. A lot of pirated games with the copyright information removed, and a lot of small, simple games to pad out the numbers. I mean, check out some of this stuff

It turns out that some of the smaller, weirder games aren’t too bad. And the games like Super Mario Bros with all references to Mario subtly removed play like they should, so it’s just kind of a fun curiosity. Especially since these things have no official collectible value. And that means that when you do run across one, it’s either really cheap or way too expensive. But they’re a pretty fun way to spend a couple of bucks on, since playing one is kind of like a treasure hunt to find a good game.

Unless you find an Action 52. That just had bad games on it, so I wouldn’t bother with that.

MONEYCNT

Posted in Nintendo, Ruined Cartridge | No Comments »

King James Bible

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.

BIBLE1

Posted in Artifacts, Game Boy, Ruined Cartridge | No Comments »

Frogger

March 14th, 2013

Right, I still don’t have an Intellivision, but I do have this.

Intellivision Frogger 1

That’s right, a copy of Frogger. A game that people who don’t even like video games have heard of.

Awkward sentence aside, it’s pretty great that I found a copy of this, in its original box, with all the trimmings, 30 years after it was released. It’s the actual reason I have Bomb Squad the other day. I saw this thing and jumped at it, and the guy threw in Bomb Squad for $1. How could I refuse?

No, really, I’m asking because I have a hard time refusing things.

But check out the innards of this box. This thing even smells like the 1980′s. Apparently the 1980′s smelled a lot like old books.

Intellivision Frogger 2

And if that doesn’t get you excited, maybe this excerpt from the manual will:

Each time you bring 5 frogs home, you’ll hear a short tune. The game will continue at a more difficult game level with your remaining frogs. The speed of the cars and trucks will vary from lane to lane. Traffic patterns will change. There will be fewer floating objects on the river, and the speed of the objects will vary from fast to slow. Frogger-eating snakes will appear on the riverbank and otters will swim around in the river.

Great stuff, right? The excerpt also talks about the music, and I did kind of want to bring that up, too. Check out the first song that plays when you start a new game of Frogger.

Pretty catchy, right?

Now check out this Japanese kids’ song called “犬のおまわりさん – Inu No Omawarisan” (literally, The Dog Policeman)

What’s that? They sound the same? You’re darn right they do.

And who says that finding old video games can’t be fun?

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Bomb Squad

March 12th, 2013

While growing up, I never had an Intellivision, and I never was friends with anyone that had one (or if they did, they kept their mouths shut about it). But, I happened across this gem at a yard sale, and the price was right, so I jumped on it. No, that’s not why the box is flattened.

Bomb Squad Box

But why would I get a game for a console that I don’t have? Well, I might get one some day, but that’s a pretty flimsy excuse. The bigger reason is that it was bundled in free with the game I actually wanted… which we’ll talk about later this week. A third reason is because I really like the package art of a lot of the older titles.

But there’s not really a lot of art to be had here, either.

Bomb Squad Box Innards

I was intrigued to find that this was a game that talks (or so the box says). I didn’t think that this capability came into use much later, especially for home entertainment devices. And even then we were restricted to a word or two, at maximum, compressed so much that it sounded like the clip was recorded by putting a microphone against the wall of an apartment and hoping your neighbors said something you could use in your game.

But this one was different. It uses a synthesized voice, of course, but it actually sounds decent.

Now I feel like I need to find an Intellivision system, and an Intellivoice module.

Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

VOLTMTR

Posted in Intellivision, Ruined Cartridge | No Comments »

Asciiware Game Boy Portable Carry-All

March 7th, 2013

So, let’s just suppose that it’s 1990, you’re 11 years old, and you have this snazzy handheld gaming device that you want to take everywhere because you’re 11 years old and video games are rad to the max. Sure, you could just carry the thing around with you, but that gets old fast for a lot of reasons:

  • You can only carry one game with you unless you have giganto-pockets
  • You have to keep it in your hands at all times, lest you lay it down and forget about it somewhere. Or if you have the aforementioned giganto-pockets
  • Link cable? Giganto-Pockets
  • Spare batteries? Giganto-pockets

Yeah, this is going to get out of hand really fast. Wouldn’t it be so much better if some company made a thing that you could use to hold your Game Boy, a few games, and some accessories?

Well, you’re in luck, because someone did. Well, technically, lots of someones did, but this is what we’re going to take a look at today. The Game Boy Case Thing

gb_carry1

This thing has everything to take care of all of the problems listed above. It swings open and protects your Game Boy from the dangers of being carried around by an 11-year-old, it holds a few games and accessories, and has a convenient shoulder sling so you can do whatever with both hands free.

gb_carry2

It’s amazing!

The only downside is that I didn’t get one of these until much later than when I was 11 years old. In fact, I didn’t get my mitts on one of these until the Nintendo DS was already a thing, so it kind of had limited use to me.

I did, however, use a fanny pack instead for all my Game Boy transportation needs until that thing fell apart. I’m not really going to go into too much more detail than that, because the less we talk about fanny packs the better.

WHEATBAG

Posted in Artifacts, ASCIIWare, Nintendo | No Comments »

Super Mario Collector Pin Set

March 5th, 2013

Chances are, if you’re reading anything on the Internet, you don’t need me to tell you who Mario, Luigi, and Princess Toadstool are (if you somehow just arrived on this planet, now’s a great time to read up).

And for a time (roughly from about 1985 to now) you could get practically anything you wanted with Mario and company on it, including these things.

Super Mario Pins

This is a set of four pins (kind of like lapel pins, I suppose) that featured Mario, Luigi (Fiery Luigi, no less), or the Princess that you could wear. They don’t really do much except look mildly interesting, but, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Super Mario Pins - Closeup

Back when I was in grade school, I actually was friends with a kid who had had a set of these. At least I presume he had a set of these, I only ever saw him wearing the Princess Toadstool pin. And, the Princess Toadstool pin appeared to be oddly weighted, since every time I saw him with that pin on, she was upside down. In fact, it took me a few weeks to realize that he was wearing a Princess Toadstool pin at all, and not a hot-air balloon.

BALOON

And, I guess that’s not really much of a story, but it’s all I’ve got, man.

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Hori EX2 Fighting Stick

February 28th, 2013

Okay, confession time. The other day when I mentioned that I hadn’t bought a joystick from the 1995 to 2011 isn’t quite true. I actually did jump back into the fighting game arena a few months earlier than that, with the Hori EX2 fighting stick.

hp photosmart 720

I was still pretty new at the whole XBox 360 thing (I was a hardcore Nintendo guy for a long time), so I was a little bit behind the times when it came to games and controllers for the thing. But, when Street Fighter IV became a thing, I knew I had to have it. And since it played a lot like Street Fighter II in the arcades, a game I spent hundreds of hours on, I decided that I wanted to try and replicate that experience.

And finding them on clearance at my local Toys ‘R’ Us didn’t hurt, either.

So I had a controller that was better than the Super Advantage (by a long shot), and sort-of arcade-like, but I had a lot of problems with it. My biggest problem was with the ‘gate‘ that the joystick used. The ‘gate’ is the hole that the joystick goes through, and it can be square, circular, octagonal, or something else entirely, I guess. But this one is square, and for some reason, I couldn’t get the hang of it. I’d try to press ‘back’ and my hand would find ‘back-up’ and my character would jump, usually directly into a face-crushing combo. That kind of thing. That’s not too hard to get around. What is harder to get around is the breakaway cable.

This joystick, like a lot of joysticks, has a breakaway cable that keeps your Xbox on the table when someone walks through the room without paying attention and gets his foot wrapped around the cable. This is usually a good thing, but on this one for whatever reason, I had a lot of trouble keeping the thing plugged in. It kind of seemed like the cable would break away just from the weight of itself.

That’s bad.

I fought with it for a while (in every sense of the word) until I just kind of petered out with Street Fighter IV. Since the arcade scene here dried up, it’s tough to find folks who want to play fighting games, and the people on the Internet are way too good for me to have much fun there. So, after a few months, I put this away and didn’t think about it again until I moved a few months later.

AIRCABLE

Posted in Artifacts, Controllers, Xbox 360 | No Comments »

Mad Catz Super Street Fighter IV Arcade FightStick Tournament Edition S

February 26th, 2013

So, in the span of a few years, I went from the best home joystick ever made to the worst home joystick I’ve ever used (and yes, that includes the wacko joystick things that the TI-99/4a used). So, as a result, I kind of fell out of even caring at all about joysticks for home consoles. I would briefly toy around with the idea of building my own joystick out of wood and some arcade parts, but that always seemed to be too much work, and not enough video games.

But something happened in 2011. In 2011 I started trying to dig up some information about the upcoming Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (since I had already bought and really liked the first MvC3 game), and I saw a few videos where people were using this enormous fighting stick that looked like someone chopped off the front panel from an arcade cabinet and then jammed a USB cable on it.

Look at all of that arcadey goodness.

Look at all of that arcadey goodness.

Which, apparently, that’s exactly what it is. Which means two things:

  1. These things are kind of expensive. Around $100 or more. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anyone who’s kicked around the idea of having an arcade cabinet in their home (some day…). Equipment that needs to stand up to the rigors of arcade life aren’t cheap.
  2. You’re going to get as accurate an experience as possible if you’re trying to replicate the arcade experience at home. Which, apart from taking one more reason away from going to your local arcade (assuming one even exists), ensures that you’ll have very little trouble going from your home joystick to the arcade joystick since they’re exactly the same. Finally, I can keep my muscle memory!

MUSCLE

Now all I need to do is to find an arcade version of either Street Fighter IV or Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (since that’s what I mostly played with this thing) so that I can put my skills to use.

Some day…

Posted in Artifacts, Controllers, Xbox 360 | 1 Comment »

Super Advantage

February 21st, 2013

The other day, I kind of gushed about the best controller ever made, the NES Advantage. So, it kind of stood to reason that when there was an Advantage controller that was for the Super NES, that I would have to have it. I mean, an updated version of my favorite controller ever for what was then my current favorite video game system? It’s got Super NES styling? Insta-sale!

Super Advantage

But, somehow, this controller ranks near the bottom for any controller I’ve ever used. How? Well, let’s see here.

The button layout is terrible. The two grey buttons on the stick are for the L and R buttons, a.k.a. the ‘shoulder buttons’, that are on the top of the controller. So, naturally, these were moved to the bottom of the control panel.

Even more aggravating is that fighting games were pretty popular around that time, and I would have loved to use this thing to replicate the arcade experience, but the buttons weren’t laid out in the classic ‘two rows of three’ layout that made fighting games work. I tried to make the ‘two rows of three’ happen by assigning the ‘L’ button to the top row and the ‘R’ button to the bottom row, but it was a fairly poor substitute.

The buttons themselves also seemed to stick in the ‘depressed’ position if you didn’t hit them dead-center, and since the controller is so huge, there’s a lot of travel between the buttons, and a lot of mis-hits.

The slowmo button is relocated to a giant button in the center of the controller where it’s super-easy to accidentally hit.

The LED’s that show how fast the autofire is firing have been removed, so it’s kind of a guess now. Sure, there are sliders, but they’re not particularly easy to gauge.

And, at least on mine, the stick doesn’t always recenter itself properly. Mine liked to hang out in the down-left position. That’s probably a defect in my controller, but I was so disappointed in every other aspect of this thing that I never bothered to replace it, and I wouldn’t buy another joystick until 2011, which we’ll get into another day.

About the only good thing I have to say about this controller is that it helped be to finish Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. Mostly because whoever made that game reversed the most common assignments for buttons, and I could only make anything resembling progress by using the stick’s bizarro layout.

Still, it’s a bad controller, one that I wouldn’t even wish on someone I didn’t like.

ALBATRS2

Posted in Artifacts, Controllers, Nintendo | No Comments »

NES Advantage

February 19th, 2013

I’ve mentioned a few times around the Internet that I like the NES Advantage. It’s true, it’s one of my favorite controllers of all time. I mean, just take a look at this thing.

Advantage, NES

It’s perfect in almost every way. It’s a good size, it fits my hands, it’s got a comfortable button layout, it’s got lights so I can see how fast the autofire is pushing the button for me, it can switch from player 1 to player 2 with the flick of a switch, and so on. It’s the next best thing to having an arcade stick in your home to play all of those arcade-quality games on your NES. I could go on, but then this would turn into some kind of gushing, fawning article, and I’m not sure I want to go down that path… again.

What’s pictured above is not my first NES Advantage. I’m actually on my second one. The first one I had lasted me through the end of the NES’s life, and then met an unfortunate end courtesy of the sharp legs of an easy chair some time in 1995.

MANCHAIR

I was so disappointed that I kind of stopped playing NES games for a while. I moved on to the Super NES and then to the N64, and then one day in 2000 I went to my local Toys R Us, and they had an entire aisle lined with NES Advantage controllers. I couldn’t believe my luck, so I grabbed one (rather shortsighted, I guess) and took it to the counter to pay. The lady looked at it and asked me with a hint of disbelief in her voice, “You know this is for the regular, old NES, right?”. I assured her that I knew that and that’s why I wanted it.

Posted in Artifacts, Controllers, Nintendo | 1 Comment »

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