If you were Sega, and you were at the top of the video game console market in the early 1990s, and you wanted to perform a stunning “ditch” that would send your company spiraling down to the bottom as calamitously as possible… how would you go about doing it? Well, do what the real Sega […]
The Super Nintendo sure did arrive late to the 16-bit party, didn’t it? As the last of the main players to be released, it might seem a bit underpowered. But Nintendo found many ways to make it succeed, and scores upon scores of games released for the system are considered to be classics. Many game […]
Those of us past a certain age can remember ads that would promise to bring an arcade gaming experience into our homes. God knows, there were all kinds of goofy commercials playing on the impracticality of cramming several different 250 pound arcade cabinets into someone’s living room just so they could play a pixel-perfect version […]
Not many people remember the TurboGrafx-16. And it’s been justly forgotten, I think. I lived through the 16-bit console wars in the early 90s, and I don’t ever remember seeing ads for the system on TV. Then again, I live in Canada, so maybe Hudson Soft and NEC didn’t see any point in bothering with […]
When the Game Boy came out in 1989, it was the first truly successful hand-held video game console. There had been other hand-held and portable video games on the market before, and some even had multiple selectable games built into them. But the Game Boy was one of the first that took cartridges. It was […]
To continue my review of golf games for this console, I shall talk about five games in the same series – “PGA Tour Golf”. That box is for the first one of these that I played, and in my opinion the best of them all. It’s also what I consider the finest golf video game […]
SEGA! The Genesis was Sega’s finest moment. Sadly, after this they took a chapter or two out of the Commodore and Atari playbook for surefire failure which is why you don’t see them making consoles any more… but that’s a story for another post. But in the early 90s, Nintendo had to work damn hard […]
Oh, Atari. If Commodore jumped off a cliff, would you? In an effort to prove that stupid and disastrous business decisions would not be monopolized by its competitors, Atari decided to inflict 1000 paper cuts upon itself over the course of the mid 80s and 90s and thus die that slow, agonizing death that had […]
The Commodore Amiga. The Amiga came out of nowhere in the mid 1980s and proved to be the most capable and fully powered multimedia machine of its time. Hell, it was the only multimedia computer you could buy unless you were a Hollywood studio, and it was the first home computer with an OS that […]
How is it that the Sega Master System – which was technically a better game console than the NES in many ways – failed to make much of a dent in Nintendo’s sales, and failed to even have a fraction of the amount of decent games made for it? Why are there just a handful […]
The crash of 1983 made Video Game a bad word in North America. Thanks to a deluge of cheap and shitty titles for the Atari 2600, and a glut of “me-too” consoles and games and knock-offs and peripherals and accessories, the home console market reached a saturation point and was no longer sustainable. Quality suffered […]
Remember when I said that Commodore took a lead in the home computer market and turned it into bankruptcy in a rather short time? 1984. Exhibit A in this “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” strategy is The Commodore 16. Also the Commodore 116: And the Commodore Plus/4: Confused? Commodore sure was. The original […]
The Sega what? Why, the SG-1000 – Sega’s first entry into the video game home console hardware market that almost nobody remembers because it soled poorly. It sold only (legitimately) in Asia, though clones sold in other countries. One of the clones really took off in Taiwan, so there’s that. The hardware for this console […]
I adore my 64, my Commodore 64. Considering how I use (and am typing this on) a replica Commodore 64… and how both my Linux desktop and the virtual Windows XP desktop I run inside it are themed to have a Commodore/Amiga look… You could say I’m a fanboy. And as you might have guessed, […]
This console was a bad idea that brought lots of bad ideas to the market. Where to begin? First of all, it has stopgap written all over it. When the Atari 5200 was released, the ColecoVision console had already come out, and it had immediately become the number one seller in the market due to […]
Ah, the Apple II. That good old beast of a computer built by Steve Wozniak when Apple was just a wee company. I never owned one of these, but my elementary school had about a dozen of them back in the early 80s. From them, I learned the joys of waiting your turn, “no, we […]
Oh my god, did I want an Intellivision when I was a kid. I was quite young when the system was in its prime, but the TV advertisements were everywhere. One of the slogans they used was “the closest thing to the real thing”. Well, that was certainly true when you’re only comparing it to the […]
Bring me the head of Nolan Bushnell! I have fond memories of the Odyssey². As I mentioned below, I was a poor-ass kid growing up. My father bought me and my brothers an Odyssey² for Christmas one year, I believe in 1984. The system itself was released originally in 1978, so we’re talking bargain-bin, unload-it-fast […]
Ah, the Atari 2600. The video game system from 1977. Even though I have plenty of games for the Atari, I never play any of them regularly. The graphics and especially the sound are just too primitive for me to enjoy anything on this thing. In fact, some of the games that were released for […]
It has been said before that a video game console is only as good as its most prominent golf game. Actually, you know what… nobody has ever said that. Seriously, google it. No results. Same with Golfyssey. No results. Well, let’s play fast and loose with the facts then, shall we? None other than the […]
Just what you’ve always wanted! Now you can re-live the glory days of the late 80s when the Commodore Amiga computer was the most advanced multimedia computer you could get without buying a special effects workstation. Since I use a replica Commodore 64, and since I have the interface themed to look as Commodore/Amiga-like as […]
With concerns in mind about privacy and security, I have often suggested that people use Linux to browse the internet. I think that advice is particularly relevant with the recent news about government spying. I’m also aware that some technosexuals are hesitant to regularly visit Fembot Central or FembotWiki because they don’t want their partners […]
What am I doing up at 4am? I was all done sleeping, I guess. And what better time to regale you with tales of shit which you care not the least! Like the subject of these two partial screenshots I took back in January that I thought were remarkable at the time. The top image […]
One of my hobbies, I guess, is extending the usable lifespan of my first PC. This is a vintage 1998 Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8260 with maxed out RAM (384MB) and a Pentium II clocked at 266 MHz. It has run Windows 98 for most of its existence, and over the last half dozen years or […]
I don’t watch movies. I have this down to the fact that I don’t like fiction. Just ignore the fact that I’ve written a novel, four comic books and then some. But this movie is infamous. I’ve been aware of it’s existence for a few years, and I’ve actually mentally put it on my “I’d […]
W00T! Okay, not actually fun, and not terminal as in deathly. I’m talking about the Terminal Emulator that comes with every Linux distribution. It’s similar to the Command Prompt, for all those Windows users who have seen that. As much as I prefer to never use it, sometimes I do. It appears every time I […]
So I just got an email from my phone service provider. I’m not going to name names, but they operate as virtual monopolies whether you live in the US or Canada, so they’re all about as horrible and I despise them all about as much. Except Telus. Fuck Telus. I hate them the most. And […]
I’ve made another video on Go!Animate. This one is split into two parts because it was too long. Meh. This one was actually scripted out in my mind beforehand, and it’s a lot more complex than the first two videos. But I’m quite pleased with the results. UPDATE (October 27, 2019) GoAnimate got bought by […]
So I’ve made another animation over at Go!Animate. After exhausting all of the possible female Anime characters in the last videos I did, I switched to another set. I also caved in and gave the site $18 so I could even make more than another minute of video and have access to more characters, sets, […]
I am not the world’s biggest Anime fan. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the art form is devoid of good things. I just don’t like all the squeaky voices and crying girls. The many, many, many crying girls. But before I turn this into a “WTF, Japan?” rant, allow […]
I’m not much of a fan of silent autocorrect. That is to say, I like spellcheck and all, but I don’t like the silent and automatic bullshit that has crept into word processors and other software over the years because most people are either too lazy or too stupid to use the tools on their […]
The other day I was creating configuration files for my Amiga emulator. You see, the Amiga emulator is rather complex. Not only must you select which disk image or images you’d like your emulated system to run, but you must also choose which version of the Kickstart rom, which chipset, which RAM configuration, which CPU, […]
Since 2008 when I started commissioning fembot comics from some great artists, I’ve collected many images and sketches related to those projects. I was digging through my archives recently and found some nice artwork that I think others might like to see. So here’s my version of scraping the barrel to release stuff that was […]
I imagine some suit at Microsoft sneering this line after emasculating poor Microsoft Security Essentials for Christmas laughs late last year. This info is a little old now, but since I’m on a “write about Microsoft products” kick on this here crappy blog, I thought I’d mention it anyway. According to a computer lab filled […]
Have I made fun of Microsoft Bob before on this blog? I don’t believe I have. Well, if you’ve ever heard about MS Bob before, you probably didn’t hear anything good. Read that link above to find out what the fuck was going on. To this day, I don’t think anyone really knows why the […]
I’ve been having a delightful time playing old PC video games on my Windows 98 laptop. As described below, it’s a fairly new cheap laptop that runs Lubuntu as its OS and runs Windows 98 in Virtualbox. So I decided to fill up the massive 10GB hard drive I gave it in VB by installing […]
If you were to redefine clusterfuck, how would you go about doing it? About three weeks ago, EA – The Worst Company in America – released a long awaited sequel to one of the best-loved video games of all time. Now, you may already know what SimCity is, and you may have already heard about […]
With Microsoft Works 4.5 for Windows 95!
Since I run my shiny new (old) Windows 98 installation inside VirtualBox, there are some things that just don’t work. Like I mentioned below, Midi is one of them. But a lot of DOS functionality seems to be broken too. I’ve noticed that whenever a DOS window opens, my screen goes black and all I […]
Okay, I’m 15 years late in celebrating this operating system. And I think I can only celebrate anything Microsoft or Windows at all because it fills a particular niche for me. This is odd for me to like Windows 98 so much, because it was Windows 95 and Windows 98 that taught me to hate […]
I like to try out different operating systems. This is mainly because I am a geek. I like to see what some group of developers has done with a kernel and a desktop environment and a software ecosystem. Linux is a good example of this. I should actually say GNU-Linux. Technically (those of you who […]
I’ve recently been playing around with a new-ish distro called Bodhi Linux. It’s a light-weight distro, and since I’m a cheap bastard who likes to spend not much money on underpowered hardware, I like to get the most I can out of my OS. That’s why I use primarily Xubuntu and Lubuntu, and even Puppy […]
I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I loves me some old stragety video games. I particularly like Age of Empires and Age of Empires II, as they hit my history geek sweet spot in just the right way. So I was delighted to learn at the end of 2012 that an unofficial expansion pack […]
Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat. If you’re a fan of classic Sab, then no doubt you’re scratching your head and saying to yourself in an outlandish mock cockney accent “Oi sure don’t wumembah dis one, gubbnah!” And to that I say “of course not! You damned fool! Have you […]
Oh how cute, Robotman’s going to bore the fuck out of you by talking about Linux again! Yes, This is a story about a Linux distribution called “Puppy Linux“. I’m not much of a 1337 H4XXÁ˜R when it comes to Linux, so I pretty much stick to distros that I can install and use with […]
The title of this blog post is brought to you by automated means. I’m grumpy and cranky and listening to Italian disco songs from the late 70s and early 80s. I work for people who are crooked liars. But now I’m bringing you down. Sorry about that. Anyway, there is absolutely no reason for me […]
Go ahead and listen to this song right now. Watch the video if you want. That Rob Halford is one entertaining dude. My favourite singer, by the way. He even edges out Dan McCafferty for that honour. But I digest digress. I’m not even going to pretend that this post is about that song you’re […]
Well, I tried to give Linux Mint another try. This time I tried Linux Mint 13 with Cinnamon, 32 Bit. And I tried it on a computer that I’ve never tried to install Mint on before. The live DVD wouldn’t even boot. So as not to make the downloading and burning of that ISO a […]
Cue scientifical music. That’s better. This post is the first post written on my “writing laptop” since I dun reformatted the hard drive since I dun got me a rootkit on it. See below for the horrid, treacherous details of that. Sordid? Yeah, add sordid to that list of adjectives too. Am I making any […]
I really tried to like you, Mint. I really like your philosophy, and the fact that you’re moving away from the clone-Appleâ„¢ policies of Ubuntu. So I was disappointed when I first tried installing you back in 2008. The “Fluxbox” version I booted with a Live CD on my laptop looked so damn seductive, and […]