NEW LAYOUT!!!

I wanted to spice it up a bit and use some of the CSS tricks I've been learning. I know it has it's issues if you can spot them... but otherwise... what do you think?

The Death of an Icon

Part of my childhood died the other day. A massive part. Captain Lou Albano, former WWF wrestler and the live action personality of Mario on the Super Mario Bros. Super Show as well as the voice of the cartoon character. I grew up watching that show religiously. So much so in fact, that to this day the voice of Mario that I hear in my head is still the voice of Captain Lou. He WAS Mario, and to me he always will be. I'm an American and to me that cartoon was the REAL Mario and Luigi. I was offended when Mario 64 came out and they said that Princess Toadstool was actually named Peach. I was even more upset by the lame "It's ah me... Mario!". What ever happened to PASTA POWER! Granted, I doubt the Super Mario Bros. Super Show was a hit on Japanese TV and if it was it sure as heck didn't have the voices of Lou Albano and Danny Wells. But I always dreamed of Lou doing the voice of Mario in one of the games with Danny as Luigi. It would be a real nod to us Americans who grew up with Nintendo everything. I still wish they would bring the Nintendo Cereal System back LOL.

Arcade Fever!

So I hung out with a few of my friends the other day. I don't really get to do so very often for a myriad of reasons. At any rate, my friend Jack and his brother Bill (also my friend) live together in an apartment with their new roommate Jarred (again... also an old friend of mine) and the other day they were having a get together with Brett and Zack (two more our old friends) for Brett's birthday. Again, it had been quite some time since I had managed to hang out with all the guys. So I had been there for about an hour when I realized, out of the corner of my eye, there was a Dig Dug arcade machine IN THEIR FREAKING KITCHEN!!! I flipped out with retro geeky madness of course. After which they told me that Jarred had bought it for only $200 and that Bill was going to buy a Delorean... but thats another story.

Since that day, all I can think about is how bad I wish I had an arcade machine. Of course, my wife thinks it would be impractical to try to fit one in our small apartment. Note that she said when we get a bigger place I CAN get one. But I have a better idea! When we get a bigger place I could BUILD one!

I've actually seen a lot of info on MAME (multi arcade machine emulator) cabinets that people are building. The problem is that if you buy the pre-built ones they are in the thousands. I don't have that kind of money to put into a project like this. But I did some digging and I think I found a better way. Now, I haven't built it yet, but heres my proposed system tutorial:

Computer: for this I did some looking around in the usual places and found an old motherboard I used to have in my game rig from WAY back. Its the Nforce2 and has (I think) an onboard GeForce 3 video card. I found them for sale on Pricewatch.com for about $18. On the same site I found a processor, ram, hard drive and case/psu for about $100. I know for a fact that a set up like this can run MAME because... I did it.

Monitor: grab a vga-to-rca adapter cable for about $5 online and find an old tv. You could probably find an old tube tv for free on craiglist.org, but if you wanna go all new stuff you can pick one up at Walmart for like $150 for a 27".

Controls: this is a really awesome step. You see, I was always afraid of building a cabinet because of the daunting task of wiring the controls. There are tutorials online for this but they all required technical skills that I never developed nor with to. But then I found this little gem! This tutorial uses a kit called a Cthulhu board that when purchased from HERE comes all ready to just plug in and screw down the joystick and buttons. Get those pieces HERE. My link for the board is different from his because I found a place that sells them $10 cheaper and actually has them in stock! The cost of the board and the other parts will run about $75 x 2 for a 2 player machine so $150 total.

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Here comes the hard part!

So far all the stuff has cost just over $400 give or take as these are rounded figures. If you use an old computer you have laying around and a tv you pick up for free or already have and aren't using you are only looking at about $150 which is dirt cheap. But we have neglected one key aspect of the project. The CABINET! You see, I don't have any tools or skill with wood working. You can buy one from HERE but the cabinet and control top kit together will run you about $650. Indeed you can buy the whole thing already made from them for like $3000 and I guess if you look at it this way, building the innards and buying their empty cabinet and control kit would bring the total cost down to about $1050 if you bought it all new and $800 if you only had to buy the control innards. So I guess this is an OK solution. I guess a cheap, if not ghetto, solution would be to buy a cheap tv cart from Walmart and make the enclosure out of cardboard LOL. If you are handy with power tools and aren't daunted by needing to do some carpentry you can find plans all over the internet. In this case I guess a person with ingenuity could throw one of these together for about $250 - $500! Meaning that for the cost of 1 prebuilt one you could build 6 - 12 of your own. (but if your the kind of person who has 12 old computers and tvs laying around you probably don't need to worry about being thrifty)

Ultra

With the onset of September and the beginning of a new school year building up steam I am left feeling a bit nostalgic. You see, 13 years ago right around this time I had a sense of destiny coursing through my veins. I can remember EXACTLY what I was doing in the early hours of September 29, 1996. I was sitting at the coffee table in our living room with the local phone book sitting in front of me. I was looking through it for the phone numbers of any place that might carry video games. All the stores would be opening soon, and I wanted to get my hands on one of the brand new Nintendo Ultra 64s. I would turn 16 in less than 2 weeks, but nothing I could possibly be getting for my birthday would compare to the Ultra 64. My family was definitely NOT the kind that could afford cars as presents for teenage birthdays. My mother would have never let me camp out overnight for something like this so my only chance was to find a place that had some left after the doors opened.

My prospects looked bleak, but the promise of living out my Mushroom Kingdom dreams in full 3D was worth any hardships I might have to suffer. As stores began to open, I began to call. The story was the same everywhere. They had gotten X number of systems and all of them had sold out the moment they opened the doors. I was heartbroken. About an hour later a small glimmer of hope shone through the fog of sadness in my brain. I remembered that Sears had a tiny section in the back of the boys clothing department that had a few games. It might be possible that they had gotten 64s that day! I called expecting the same answer I had gotten multiple times before. When I first called, nobody answered. I waited a few minutes and called back. It rang a bunch of times, then a woman answered. I asked for the games department and she said she didn't know if it was its own line or if the people from boys took those calls. I waited while she searched for someone who would know about that area. After an epic wait I was transfered and received the most ludicrous news I had ever gotten. The woman said that I was the only person who had called for it that day. She said they had gotten six of them in the night before, and that they still had all of them.

Excited beyond reality, I rallied my Aunt to take me because my mom had already left for work. When I got to Sears, one guy was buying one, but all the others were still there. I bought on, and picked up the long awaited copy of Mario 64.

The Ultra (as my friends and I continued to call it long after Nintendo dropped the name) is an interesting part of my gaming history. I remember being upset with its lack of games yet I must admit that I probably logged more hours playing that system than any before or since. It also had more games that hold special places in my heart than any other system. Granted, my favorite game of all time is not for the 64, but more of the games that really meant something to me are on the 64. Like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Mario 64, Starfox 64, Turok, Killer Instinct Gold and many many more.

It is indeed odd, that a system who's lack of games was what forced me for the first time to stray from the path of only owning Nintendo game systems is also the system that I had the most fun playing. For all the ranting I may do about the glory of the 16bit era, it was Nintendo's leap into the 3D world that really did it for me.

Kung Fu Chaos

This is gonna just be a quickie. By show of hands, how many of you love Kung Fu/Samurai movies? I'm talking old-school exploitation type. I've lately found myself watching tons of them. I've always loved them, but lately I've been digging through my old collection and looking for new ones too. I don't know why, but right now I'm going through some sort of martial arts movie madness and its driving my wife and kids nuts.

Just thought I'd see if anybody else suffers from this periodical illness.

Gamer's Thumb

The mark of any true console gamer is the prized merit badge known as Gamer's Thumb. Gamer's Thumb is the callusing of the thumb, usually the left thumb but can develop on both depending. Most gamers who possess it will tell you that it takes years of hard gaming to achieve, but I'm going to let you in on a secret! It doesn't!

Thats right, with only a few days of moderate gaming you too could earn yourself a higher rank among the geek elite. Heres the secret:

1) Start by selecting a 2D fighter like Street Fighter 2 _____(insert random sub-title), Capcom Vs _____(insert random sub-title) or any other amazing arcade-ish fighting game that requires massive amounts of quarter/half circle forward/back rotations on the Dpad to perform the characters special moves.

2) Next, play said game until your thumb begins to hurt from it. This should only take about 2 or 3 hours. This amount of time will seem to fly by if your playing with a bunch of friends. The trick is to keep playing through the pain for a wile longer to make sure you get the desired effect.

3) The next day you should notice that you have discomfort in your thumb when you touch surfaces, this is good. If you have a visible blister you can skip to step four. If you do not, you must play again today for approximately one hour more. You need not play with others as the pain in your thumb would put you at a disadvantage. I would recommend using this time to practice the special moves of some of the characters in your chosen game to raise your gamer stats next time you play with your friends.

4) You should now have a very obvious blister on your thumb. This is good, your almost there. Today, simply do nothing. Let your blister heal a bit.

5) After letting your thumb rest for a day or two(no more) the blister should be a patch of loose skin on your thumb. Peel this skin off. This sounds gross, but should not hurt. Now begin gaming again. I again recommend practicing at this point. Your thumb should feel odd but not hurt. As the skin grows back, which should only take a few days, the callus should replace the soft skin.

AND YOUR DONE!

An alternate method would be to play one day for several hours, rest the next day and then repeat the cycle. This could take longer but may work more quickly depending on your amount of play and skin type.

Fighters have always been one of my all time favorite types of games. I spent many years of my life huddled around crowded machines in dark, loud, strange smelling arcades and it really did influence the kinds of games that really hit home for me. I was inspired to write this little tutorial the other day when I hung out with some old friends of mine and we rocked out to some old-school 2D fighters. The next day I dug out some of my old favs and played them too. The tell tale discomfort in my thumbs reminded me of how quickly my old Gamer's Thumb could come back when I used to go a while without playing fighters. It really isn't as hard to achieve as some people would have you believe.

So go get your merit badge and enjoy some serious gaming along the way!

How the Mac Mini changed my world

Anyone who has read through my posts will know that I am a Mac user. I am proud to be one too. But, it wasn't always this way...

Long ago, I was a PC fanboy. I would never say that I was a super tech geek, but I built my own computers and had built some for other people as well. The main reason I had gotten into building PCs was money. Not to make it, but to save it. I bought my first computer in 97. I had used computers for years before that point, but for me, a computer was simply out of my reach. My family was far from rich and computers are not cheap. Well, at least they weren't then. I bought it off my Aunt who was going to upgrade to a new one. I wont get into how magnificent its antiquated specs were but it was my first computer, and I loved it. It had Windows 95 Plus.

It died on me in the winter of 2001. I was heart broken. I was in college, living on my own and survived on english muffins, Archway cookies (they were dirt cheap) and free dial-up via K-mart's Bluelight service which required you watched commercials while waiting to connect to the servers and sported a massive advertisement bar at the bottom of the screen. My computer was my world. It was at this time a friend of mine told me that I could save a lot of money if I built a new computer myself. He said that since I had a monitor already it would be really cheap. The next weekend he took me to a computer fair and I bought the parts he said I would need. It all came to about $300. It was about a third of what I thought it would cost me. He then made me put it together myself as he supervised. It was so easy, I was astounded that I had never done it before.

The rest is history I guess. I went on, building machines, upgrading older ones. My roommate and I networked our apartment and had multiple machines of our own as well as a "Guest" computer we would let visitors play with so they couldn't mess up our babies. We threw LAN parties and badmouthed the guy who brought his Mac and couldn't join our games because of protocol differences.

Mac was a dirty word. We laughed at Mac people. We babbled to each other in techno-jargon and swapped crash horror stories and figured out fixes for obscure problems that would come up. We would laugh as we all sat around and shared old war stories of blue screens of death, reformats, and fried boards. We would debate which drivers would work best, first party or third party.

Several years later I was married and had kids. I had the house networked and had built a computer for my wife to use. She had never had one of her own before. I also had a closet full of old computer parts and a few old machines that needed one thing or another to make them whole. It was around this time it all fell apart. My wife's computer wouldn't start up one day. I thought it might be the power supply. The only one that would fit in her machine was in mine so I took it out and popped it in. Still nothing. Swapped it back and it caught on fire. Put hers in mine and nothing happened. Dug through my old stuff to get SOMETHING to use as a computer... didn't have the right stuff to build a full machine. Bought a new power supply, but my board had been fried when the old one caught on fire. My wife's still had the old issue that never got fixed and I didn't have the money to start replacing parts hoping to figure out the one that went bad.

I sank into a deep depression. We didn't have cable, our rabbit ears didn't pick anything up and now I had no computer nor would I have the money to build one until we got our taxes back... 8 months later. I took to reading a lot. Something I never really did much of before that point. To be honest, this period without constant connection to the world was rather enlightening.

It was during this time that apple unveiled the Mac Mini. For the first time, Apple had released a computer that wasn't over a grand. It also had reasonable specs for the time. More time passed. I began to think "Maybe I should give Mac a shot?" More time passed. Apple announced the new Intel Mac Mini... and Boot Camp. It was then that my mind was made up. When I got my taxes back that year I bought a Mac Mini with upgraded RAM and my wife got a laptop.

I never did put Windows on my Mac. Its been years now since then. My wife has gone through a few laptops and is now looking to buy yet another because her current one is starting to fail. My mac hasn't had any issues. The only time I had a problem was when I attempted to boot a Live CD distro of Linux and changed my boot order not realizing that it was a bad idea and that Macs come with a built in boot selector. All I've done is painlessly upgrade the OS. I think part of the reason I never loaded Windows was because I was having fun figuring out the Mac OS and once I had done so, I liked it better. I am bothered by all the Windows only games, but all my favorite PC games are by Blizzard who makes their games dual compatible with Macs as well. So I still get to play my favorite titles anyway.

So here I am. A Mac user who used to be a PC fanboy. And I'll never go back.