Well, I guess I’d better hit the sack (well, not literally, but…mumblemumble :). But first. if this shows up you all can see how you can generally tell when Princess Peach has had enough shenanigans in her kingdom…

http://gametyrant.co/storage/0999-post-images/Princess%20Peach%20Brawl%203.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1336674244079

Good night!

I would have loved to have seen the KISS Pinball machine in my hometown of Groveport back when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, closest I could manage was playing a Bicentennial-themed table with “God of Thunder” playing on the jukebox :).

And to be honest, I had never played the Dracula game before I saw it on an ep of AVGN. It looked cool, so I kept an eye out. Thankfully I have it now and can try it.

Yeah, I was a bit surprised to see those discs staring at me from the CD shelf. Given the death of Doors keyboardist/co-founder Ray Manzarek a couple of days ago, I took it as a sign I should buy them. namely, even though they are not c complete set, these DO have several of the songs that were created as demos in 1965, as well as “Whiskey, Mystics and Men”.

HAD to have that.

Way I figure it, there’s a few months at least before the X-1 gets launched. Things could change for the better or for worse. I’ll take a wait-and-see approach.

Besides, there’s a whole lot of games out there that DON’T require always-on internet, extra money for used, etc.

Hell, they don’t even require Blast-Processing :).

I actually did find a Ms Pac-Man, non-functioning, that someone trashed. I took it home, but never found the time to get it working. So I sold it to a guy my friend knew for $100 USD. He got it working too.

Thanks. But when you think about it, I’m kinda surprised KISS DIDN’T have an Atari game out there (or any arcade video game). They certainly had a pinball game out there though.

When I was in HS back in the 70s, I would certainly have bought it if possible :).

http://i.imgur.com/wA9s0bD.jpg

Been a little busy today….

Took a little afternoon walk and at the VoA I found the Donkey Kong 64 (90 cents; already have the expansion pack) and the Timex-Sinclair 2020 “Computer Program Recorder” (hook it up to a T-S 1500 or I think the T-S 1000 and you can play games or back up your work on a cassette!), also 90 cents. A later VoA trip got me the two Doors cds (from an incomplete box set) for 90 cents each.

But the OTHER stuff…came from a used game store up a few miles north of me. Till tomorrow this store is giving twice-up trade credit on NES games, which they seem to be running short of. I’m not getting rid of my regular collection NES games, but I did have 6 duplicate commons I was willing to part with.

So I ran them up. They were SMB 1-3 (SMB 1 with Duck Hunt), Dr. Mario, Double Dragon 2 and Skate or Die 1. I got up there and even with the twice-up I only got $11 USD. Normally I wouldn’t have done it for so low, but they were duplicates, and I had plans.

They came to fruition when I got a look at the Intellivision games prices. I now have 8 Intellivision games, 1 Colecovision game and one Atari 2600 game for that $11 USD trade. They are:

Dracula (Imagic game covered by AVGN)
Scooby Doo’s Maze Chase (had never heard of this one)
Mind Strike (ditto)
Mission X (very early top-down shooter that reminded me of an early 1942, only with crappier controls)
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (I had the box to this; now I have the game to go with it)
B-17 Bomber
Bomb Squad
Space Spartans (these last three work with the Intellivoice device)

Plus Frogger for the Colecovision, and Reactor for the Atari 2600. So despite the low-balling for the NES games, I did well enough to add a goodly number of games I didn’t have.

And the PSP games? I used a coupon they sent me earlier in the week to get the Dynasty Warriors game free, with the Ape Escape game costing $2.70 USD.

So all in all, not a bad day for my consoles.

Oh, if only I were rich…or won the lotto or something :).

Yeah, it’s probably somewhere out there but you’re right. I have more fun doing it myself.

Well, it’s getting late so I guess I’d better head to bed. But I haven’t left a pic in awhile so I’ll leave R. Dorothy Wainwright here…

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v624/der_Old1/WTF/DorothyMotivator.jpg

Hopefully she shows. Apologies if she doesn’t.

Good night!

I can understand that. I have another early console (the Panasonic 3DO) that has built-in memory, but I’ve never heard of a separate memory card for it either.

One of these days I oughtta open both systems to see if it uses a battery to retain memory (the Sega Saturn does, but it’s easy to replace; just pop off the access door in the back).

It was; I thought I heard that the Turbo CD had internal save memory too, but I’ve never had one so I can’t testify to that from personal experience.

I made a reply, but unfortunately I didn’t do it right; it’s just below the next one. Sorry about that.

Yeah, since the Sega CD didn’t have much in the way of internal save memory (enough for a few games, but not much more), Sega put out this thing so you could store a lot more saves for the games. Later on, the Sega Saturn had a similar cart that could save directly onto the cart (the 5-in-1s couldn’t save directly; you had to transfer the saves onto the card from system memory).

I just looked on EBay and noticed a few on there (mostly boxed). Happily for me, there’s a couple of retailers selling the battery replacement with the contacts, ready to be soldered onto the board.

I’ve been tinkering around with some of my stuff today, in between listening to the workmen building a house beside us and running to the stores. I did stop and use some of my trade credit at Game On (used to be Brandon’s, a used game store) to get me a couple of NES carts on a Buy One, Get One Free deal. One was the HAL Vegas game Vegas Dream, and the other is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (brrrr). It’s playable, but some of the things, as the AVGN will loudly point out, make no sense at all.

But a little bit ago I was compiling some cart lists (I put them on my phone so I can remember what I have :)), and I remembered I have a Sega CD Backup cart for, well, the Sega CD. I haven’t used it in awhile, and I bought it on sale from the old Children’s Palace back in the mid-90s. I got curious, and after finishing my lists I opened the sucker up. Here is what it looks like opened:

http://i.imgur.com/VCgB9VL.jpg

Yep, a big ol’ Sony button battery (much bigger than a standard CR-2032 or 2025). It’s used to make the memory retain what is stored on it. Here’s a closer look at the innards…

http://i.imgur.com/glb17s8.jpg

It also showed the year of manufacture: 1993. 20 years ago. So I decided to see if it still held my old saves. First I put it back together and cleaned the contacts, then I fired up my Sega CD ver. 1 with it in the Genesis slot.

First it didn’t read, but after readjusting the cart it read fine.

I tell you, that’s a mighty fine battery to have lasted for 20 years. I may look for another battery so I can keep it going.

When I first started trying to learn the language (badly :), I started by reading various language-learning books I found in the library. One of those was Hadamitzky and Spahn’s Kanji and Kana, which had the syllabary as well as the basic Kanji list you needed to become High School proficient in Japan.

Later I discovered Jack Seward’s Japanese in Action and really had fun with it.

http://mjb.net76.net/images/hiragana_chart.jpg

Hiragana chart…

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Table_katakana.svg/768px-Table_katakana.svg.png

And the katakana equivalent (usually used for words of foreign origin.

Any good basic audio program should re-teach you the “50 Sounds”.

Did anyone mention this video yet?

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/vsbyd5/annoyed-gamer-fishing-for-outrage

Essentially The Annoyed Gamer (who until yesterday, had never watched), ripping a couple of Kotaku’s hit-magnet articles from the last couple of weeks. He starts about the middle of the video or so.

Exactly. In this day and age the Code is pretty worthless. I remember first reading the revised Comics Code that was printed in Maurice Horn’s The World Encyclopedia of Comics, the original version from 1976:

Even with the revisions involving drug use, bad cops and comic titles it was still pretty stringent. Funnily, when the original Daredevil 168 and 169, drawn by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, and written by Roger McKenzie was rejected over shown drug use (a teen was shown getting dusted, which the Code objected to), then EiC Jim Shooter originally yanked the issues and replaced them with Miller’s first writing credit, which was the first appearance of Elektra.

There was talk of making the issues as a “graphic album” (old vernacular for a graphic novel), which The Comics Journal made a big to-do over, before Marvel published them as issues 183 and 184 with just enough changes to slide by the Code (sad that Shooter in 1980 didn’t have as big a pair as Lee in 1970 where the code was concerned).

But the ORIGINAL Code…hoo-boy. No references to drug use, no depictions of devils/demons, no “Terror”, Horror", “Crime” in the titles of comics (there were a buttload of other publishers who used those titles, not just EC), cops and public officials HAD to always be depicted as good, upstanding individuals, etc.

Borrrriiingggg.

And this is also what Miller was forgetting about. Virtually EVERY publisher, except maybe DC, which was as whitebread as can be in the late 40s-early 50s, had a number of titles that had Terror, Horror, Crime and other later-forbidden words on the cover. When the Code came down on them, all of these companies took heavy financial hits; not just EC. Hell, Marvel (then called Atlas) hired many of the ex-EC people like Jack Davis, John Severin, Al Williamson and Bernie Krigstein and even with the Code, put out stellar stories.

But when the latter half of 1957 hit, Atlas had a RIF that virtually closed the company. According to an interview with Jack Kirby, he said he found Stan Lee in a nearly empty office crying over the nearly-complete shutdown. Nearly all the artists and writers were let go, and in September I think of that year Atlas went from nearly 40 titles to two.

Atlas did continue, but with 8 titles, as per an agreement with DC that allowed Atlas to use their printing facilities (the agreement ended in 1968, when Marvel was fully back on it’s feet financially).

And Atlas/Marvel was one of the luckier outfits. Most of the companies pretty much vanished overnight. Fox, St. John, Holyoke, Ace, Standard, etc., gone immediately or within a year of the Code. So EC certainly was not alone in the pain, as Miller suggests.

But as you point out, it wasn’t censorship since the government pointed out there was no need for it. And the publishers themselves created the Code, not because of the government but because of rabble-rousers being disingenuous with their followers. i09 did an excellent article on Fred Wertham and how he twisted the facts to reflect his point of view for his book Seduction of the Innocent: http://io9.com/5985199/how-one-mans-lies-almost-destroyed-the-comics-industry

But as we’ve seen so many times before (and we’ll certainly see again), logic and reason will always get shouted down by mindless drones driven by rabble-rousing idiots.

http://i445.photobucket.com/albums/qq175/mathewcmills/foul%20play/foulplay7.jpg

That’s something Frank Miller claimed some years back. The main problem with that theory is that EC would have participated in the formation of the CCA as well as the other major players. So William Gaines certainly would not have been operating in a vaccum.

Ultimately, Bill tried to put out a new series of comics (the “New Direction” titles) that met with CCA approval while continuing a couple of the other titles, again with CCA approval. They failed in the marketplace, because while they were good, solid titles they just didn’t have the oomph that EC was known for. EC also tried to put out so-called “Picto-Fiction” magazines like Terror Illustrated that wouldn’t call under the Code. They cancelled after a couple of issues too.

The sole survivor was MAD, which successfully switched to the magazine format. I strongly suspect that if they had switched their horror/crime comics to a straight magazine format (Terror Illustrated and it’s companion magazine was prose stories with their stable of artists providing accompanying artwork) they may have been possibly more successful, at least in the short term.

But ultimately, the comics industry was facing annihilation from the anti-comics forces, and since Gaines signed onto the Code as well (granted, he and the other publishers had little choice), they all were thinking about their survival, and I don’t think they were thinking about just shutting down one offender.

Of course, 1957 would be just around the corner…

Ah, it was less going into obscurity and more “irreconcilable differences” between Worley and Waller. Waller was the artist/creator of the series, and Worley was the writer. They quit working on the book after the breakup. I just checked Wikipedia and apparently Worley and Waller had agreed to finish the hanging story but she died before it was completed.

According to that article Worley’s widower took the notes she had made before her death and the article claimed the series was continuing as of 2005 in a magazine called Sizzle.

Granted, I haven’t seen nor heard of Sizzle, so I have no way of knowing if the chief storyline was finished. . I may look it up though. The place I used to buy them at (Monkey’s Retreat) unfortunately no longer exists, so I guess I’ll have to look around.

As for the 80s, all I can say about the lunacy of some of our law enforcement is “Reagan”.

Totally agree. Even though I don’t really go after new comics nowadays (would mean less money for my game stuff :), I do still have a fairly large collection of the comics I used to purchase years ago.

One of those was very highly regarded back in the day: Kate Worley and Reed Waller’s Omaha the Cat Dancer. Here is one of the few covers I can show here:

http://images.comiccollectorlive.com/covers/05c/05c23763-d5b0-44ef-b986-4d0fc02a6f4e.jpg

It’s actually really good from both an art and writing standpoint. But ultimately with the passage of time, I think that much of it’s selling points were two things: sex and it’s “championing” of the First Amendment.

Granted, the First Amendment needs to be championed. And during the time this comic came out (80s) there were several high-profile trials of comic store employees, accused of selling “smut” to children (in reality, local authorities would send a “plant” into a comic store to buy comics from a prepared list. If the person came out with the comics then the police would arrest the clerk and bring charges on the owner.

But the way Omaha handled this was, uh, heavy-handed to say the least, and IMO was used largely as an advertising tool. Waller and Worley may have been passionate about readers’ rights and probably were. But if even an anthropomorphic couple had sexual intercourse as many times and in various ways as this couple, then they’d probably be dead of exhaustion after a few months.

Yes, the situations in many cases may have been based on reality (Omaha was a bump-and-grind professional :), but in hindsight I would characterize it as pandering to their readers.

(unfortunately, you’ll never see the series finished, since Worley and Waller broke up during the 2nd series, and Worley sadly died some years back).

Here in the US, the Comics Code Authority only covered the standard comic-sized books. If it was a magazine, typically it wasn’t submitted which was why MAD, Warren and the various clones didn’t need the Code. If it was standard comic format, then if it was published without the code then many retailers would refuse to stock it.

However, as the 60s wore on, the CCA gradually started losing it’s pull among retailers. The first standard comic to skip the Code (albeit for a 3-issue arc) was Amazing Spider-Man issues 96-98. What had happened was that EiC/writer Stan Lee had been asked by a Government body to put out a comic to highlight growing drug abuse (this was around 1969-1970), so Lee decided to do it within the regular ASM, centered around Harry Osborn (the battle in the issues was between Spidey and the original Green Goblin (Norman Osborn version).

I have an original of issue 98 and reprints of all three. Given the times it was fairly heavy stuff in a comic. But anyway, Lee submitted the issues to the CCA (at the time headed by Leonard Darvin I recall), but Darvin refused, pointing out that the CCA rules stated that no representation of illegal drug abuse could be tolerated, even in the context of showing it was wrong.

Lee decided to go ahead and publish them anyway, through normal channels. According to Lee, they sold just as well as a Code-approved issue, no better, no worse.

So the next year, when Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams put out the famous two-parter Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories where GA ward Speedy got hooked, it got Code approval. Later in the 70s, when Direct Market comics started getting popular (these went directly to comic stores, rather than grocery stores, newsstands and drug stores), you started seeing some of those comics go without CCA approval. So-called “Independent” comics, like Eclipse, First, Pacific etc, simply didn’t submit their comics to CCA since they wouldn’t be on the newsstands anyway, and in the early 80s some of Marvel’s newsstand comics, like Ka-Zar and Moon Knight shifted to Direct Market only, and skipped the CCA.

In the face of growing irrelevancy some of DC’s titles started skipping the CCA; some of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing stories shipped without it before it eventually went DM-only. And DC’s Vertigo line (ostensibly starting with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman) was DM-only and no CCA.

I don’t know if the CCA is still around, but frankly, if it is, then it’s just a, uh, relic of the past that needs to close up shop. And the funny thing is, the CCA was created by the comics industry itself, after the Kefauver government hearings found there was no proof that comics caused juvenile delinquency. Since anti-comic crusaders like Fredric Wertham and Gersholm Legman had successfully rabble-roused the public, many retailers refused to carry comics.

So the comic companies created and signed on to the CCA, as a way to get their product back on store shelves. But time and time again we have seen that if one bows to the ignorant mob, then all thinking people lose.

I remember a debate some years ago (late 80s, actually), when Viz/Eclipse International was just beginning to release translated manga Stateside.

Essentially, Viz (through their partner Eclipse International) released Mai the Psychic Girl (Kazuya Kudo/Ryoichi Ikegami), Kamui (Sanpei Shirato), Area 88 (Kaoru Shintani) and Xenon (Masaomi Kanzaki). All had some degree of editing since American readers had rarely experienced manga outside of Lone Wolf and Cub and the occasional Barefoot Gen release, of which initially there were four from Last Gasp.

Perhaps the most notorious were Mai, which had several panels of story edited which featured the 13-year-old Mai in a tub remarking on her breasts while examining them (no sexual connotations btw). But the most absurd example was in Xenon, where a woman had her shirt shredded in an attack, revealing her breasts. The character was re-touched so that the naked breasts were “disguised” by large volumes of blood.

So hilariously, naked breasts were not okay, but graphic gore was O-TAY! :).

But thankfully, such narrow-mindedness NEVER happens today…

http://cosmicduckling.com/caviar/eye-roll.jpg

I typed in "Game Boy Pocket Battery Cover " there, and a bunch of covers did come up. Unfortunately, while there were several green covers, none were the Extreme style.

Here’s the link for that:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?trksid=p2047675.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0&nkw=Nintendo+Game+Boy+Pocket+battery+cover&sacat=0&from=R40

I had found a GBP in that color a couple of weeks ago for my nephew at a local thrift store, but that was the first GBP I had ever seen at a thrift. So I guess they are not very common.

http://i.imgur.com/6pe9D6M.jpg

The above is one of the 15 results of my stopping at The Salvation Army twice today (half-off day). Actually, a few days ago I noticed a box of old 78 RPM records at the place, but it wasn’t until last night I decided to take a look at them.

I found that they were all a bit older than the ones I typically have in my record collection. So I grabbed the two I most wanted last night (79 cents each), of which the above was one; it is a Victor Monarch record from 1901 (and like the rest, is in not great condition). I went back a couple of times today and grabbed 13 more, of various ages ranging from 1905 to maybe the early 1920s. The earlier ones, especially the 1901 disc, was when there was a format war between Thomas Edison’s cylinder “records” and a newer format that started coming out around the early 1890s, that was disc-based.

But the funny thing was that, while some companies were experimenting with “double-sided” discs, most were still using single-sided discs (since Edison’s cylinders could only hold one song, I guess they thought it was more economical); the ones I have from 1905 had a label on the blank side of the disc with info on copyright, anti-counterfeit messages and the price, which was 60 cents US (I don’t know how to measure for the rate of inflation, but I can imagine over a hundred years of inflation, and that single 2 minute song would be considerably more than a standard ITunes download :).

But over a few years, double-sided discs would become the norm, and Edison would phase out cylinder production (good inventor, but his business sense sucked eggs). But on the above picture, note that the hole in the middle of the disc is bigger than standard, even then (it’s 1/2" in diameter). This was because one company in particular, called “Standard Disc” was making record players, and used the larger size hole in it’s records to assure that only records with the 1/2" hole could play on it’s players. And also, even though 10" was pretty standard on the discs, I have one in this collection that is 10 1/2" inches (for what? two seconds more of music?).

So I am going to be cleaning these discs and soon record them on my hard drive. I may put some on Youtube once I establish that someone else hasn’t done so. Copyright shouldn’t be a problem, since all of these are past 90 years old in the US.

Oh yeah, also found a Sega Dreamcast AV cord at the VoA today for 90 cents. I can always use those.

All I could think of after seeing that :).

I don’t know; I’ll likely ask around. For the record, here’s the other two:

This one has Ms. Argento’s website on it. And the other,