Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Use your power to open the way

Well, big day today... Tonite I took apart one of the NES's tracy loaned me and fiddled with the contacts in the conector. Low and behold the thing actualy fires up easier, and the greatest thing is i don't have to jam an extra cart in to keep the game working. Still though I can't get the original Zelda working yet. Gonna try some proper cleaner on it. That should do the trick.

Well i had a chance to play another one of the NES gems i have. Crystallis. Awesome game! Just as good as i always remembered it. A true classic. Graphics and sound are pretty good for an Nes game. Looking forward to getting further in it. The best thing is the battery still works. Yay!
Also finaly got Alien syndrome working. Still a fun game. Got to the first boss and couldn't seem to damage him... Musta had the wrong weapon i guess.

Well tomorow I tackle the other NES machine. It would be awesome if I could get both of them working decent. I might actually get to keep one then! Cool...

Been watching way too much Discovery Channel lately. Oh the curse of having cable in my room... Hehehe. They seem to show way too much myth busters... Not that that should be much of a problem. they seem to be doing alot revisits on old myths lately. Pretty cool stuf.

Hmmm... Got some movies to watch soon, including MI III, and Iron giant. Looking forward to that. I'll have to borrow Lary's Bat out of hell III cd and see what it sounds like.

Well thats all folks. I 'll let you all know how it goes with the other NES. Later People.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Rook! it's Go-zera!!

Ok here we are... Got a loan of an NES off of Tracy today. So that means more retro gaming goodness!! Yay!

Well the first game i fired up tonight was Godzilla Monster of Monsters. What a calssic! This game was awesome back in the day and I still think its a fun play. Good graphics and sound for an NES game. After all these years there are a couple of things i got reminded of that were and still are quite anoying. Godzilla is rather easy to die and when you die your monster loses a level. However if you can keep your levels up you shouldn't have too much trouble. I'm only up to the third stage yet so i've only seen the first four oponent monsters. This one is pretty much the same as I remember it, still a blast. Ok next i tried Alien syndrome. Because the system is cantankerous as all hell it wouldn't work long enough for me to play it. Damn Tengen carts! Ok so then i tried Rescue the Embasy Mission. Not as fun as I remember it. Still a half decent game though.

Been listening to Savatage - Edge of Thorns. It's been a while since i've heard this one. One of my favourite Savatage albums. Second half of the cd is full of great tracks and some of the other tracks are more than decent as well. Still a great listen.

I think i might watch a movie tonite... Probably Clash of the Titans. Badly dated but still not a bad watch just the same.

I wish i had more to talk about this time. Well more to come soon.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Hand me the hydro-spanner...

Ok well not much to say at the moment just boredx really...

Over the weekend i saw a bunch of movies on tv. Bandits (for the second time) which i still love. It's got a cool story, the ending is awesome, and Bruce Willis andf Billy Bob Thornton made an awesome team. The whole ten yards, was rather disapointing after seeing the first movie which was a fun flick. The story miandered about without much real direction and the ending was a bit surprising but the lacked the impact that was intended. For a movie that relies on a good ending it came up rasther short. And to be honest the acting sucked even if it was a cheesy comedy. The acting in the first film was much more convincing. And the other one was The Mexican. A decent movie but not really my speed so i'm not getting into it.

I'm dying to get my hands on a NES and also get my Genesis working as well. Really looking forward to getting into Cystallis. Easily one of the best NES games ever. A classic and still a great rpg by any standards.

Hmmm... I was just thinking it would be really cool to have a Comodore 64 again. We had so much fun with those little machines back in the day. You know a lot of people still wonder what happened between the age of Atari and the age of Nintendo. Well the Comodore was it! A computer, and a video game system in one really. It even had a cartridge port on the back, as well as connectors for a floppy drive or believe it or not a hard drive, room for memory expansion, a printer, joy sticks, a mouse, and other periphreals. It's a shame the comodore line died out. I guess the successors to the 64: the 128 and the amiga 500 never found widespread success like the old 64 did. I remember the old 64 was owned by just about everyone i knew. All my cousins had it and most of my friends had it. while this was on the go i knew one person who had an old apple computer, another who had a tandy, and one who had a Vic-20. Sadly though i never knew of anyone who had any of the old atari computers. I think the atari computer i heard of the most of was the old 800. Of course there was the hybrid 5200 which was meant to compete with the early comodores but was bearly even known of at the time.

Well over the next while i'm gonna have a look at some more of my video games and will put comentaries up here over the next while.

Well more to come next time. Later on people.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

You've taken your first step into a larger world...

Ok this is the first post on my new pop-culture blog. I will be making regular posts here on any thing relating to my interests in pop-culture, such as movies, tv, games, and literature. Posts may be nastalgic or current. It could be anything at all from my personal opinions, expectations, likes, dislikes, or other peoples' remarks on various things.

Ok for starters I began my retro gaming collection last August. It satarted with a Super Nintendo console and one SNES game cart. And since then has grown to five SNES games, 8 NES games, and the addition of a genesis console and a PSone console, as well as 2 Atari 2600 games (no console yet). Of sigificant note some of the crowning jewels of my collection thus far are Zelda, Zelda II, and Crystallis for NES (hoping to get a loan of a NES tonight) as well as Drackhan for SNES. Also i will be listing some of my wish lists for various things here too.

Ok moving on to anime. Anime has become one of favourite genres in entertainment over the years. Some of my favourite animes were Macross the movie, Macross II, Venus Wars, Ninja Scroll, Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, and Princess Mononoke. Some honorable mentions have to go to X, Spirited away, Golgo 13 The Professional, and Akira. I would like to go back through all of these films and eventualy do reviews here for them.

Next music. Ok over the years some of my favourite music has come from various genres ranging from classic rock and easy listening to hard rock and heavy metal. Some of my favourite artists over the years have been: Iron Maiden, MegaDeth, Savatage, Helloween, Fates Warning, Green Day, Sum 41, Pyogenesis, Amorphis, Sepultura, Motor Head, Alice Cooper, MeatLoaf, Blues Traveler, Slayer, The Tea Party, and Grip Inc. Some other artists of worthy mention would be: OverKill, Metallica, Soundgarden, Faith No More, COC, Danzig, Sheavy, and Iced Earth. I would have to say that my all time favourite has been and probably always will be Iron Maiden. Thier music has been consistantly good at the worst of times and awe inspirining at the best times. I have a number of albums that came out in the last 12 months or so that i have yet to listen to and when i do i will comment on them here.

I'm not a big movie fanatic, so you may hear much about movies here except for the few movies I do watch. Some of the more recent movies I have seen over the past few months are: Silent Hill, Pirates of the Carabean 2, and The Omen (remake). Silent hill was creeepy interpretation of the world created for the video games. It had some of the more interesting monsters from the first two games. It used a unique back story and seemed to be more about the afterlife than the summoning of an other-world. Was a fairly intense ride and once you understood what was really going on it had a satifying ending. Pirates 2 on the other hand was a bit disapointing. The over use of cheesey humour to suplement an otherwise weak story was poorly done at best. It lacked the balance and harmony of the first movie. And the cliff hanger ending was horible. It could've been much better than it was. As for The Omen i'm not really gonna get into it as I'm not a big fan of biblical prophecy movies. That and the fact that the movie was an almost picture perfect redo of the original. Better acting and it lacked the cool music of the original serries.

Ok a little about video games now. I still have to pic up FF12 and an XBox 360 and titles for that. more recent titles i picked up over the last year would be: Dragon Quest 8, Wild Arms 4, and Shadow of the collosus. DQ8 was fun and had good voice acting. Wild arms 4 so far fell a bit short. It's combat system was not nearly so pretty as that in WA3. Haven't played enough of it to comment further on it. Shadow was an awesome game. If you're all about clasic puzzle it out boss fights than this game is for you. It has nice graphics and the sound track is killer. Oh yeah just to let yop know I will only be commenting games that I personally played and not just seen.

Ok well that's it for now. If I happen see, hear or play anything interesting it will all be here. Later.