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Sunday 29 August 2010

Irasshai

Heres a bit of an oddity, the ever reliable Snesorama boards have provided possibly one of the oddest Playstation games around a noodle stand simulator.  Not just any old noodle stand simulator but something that plays halfway between a radio play and a noodle sim. Its basically a noodle stand simulator with heavy (and we do mean heavy) amounts of voice acting.  Factor in that it has full Pocketstation support (for a noodle timer and mini game Ki Ki no Ippatsu) and you really must wonder what they have been toking down at Tomy corporation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UB-nhUabwk Check out the intro, that we literally sweated blood to upload.  Thanks to Hugh from WOSforum for pointing out PSXMC for future PSX Str / XA file ripping.

Now for the rant part, we've tried about 3 or so different programs and found that playing Str and XA programs are pretty outdated, not only that but none of them support my DVD / CD drive not PSXMC is the best but still won't play anything without plug ins that we haven't found so we'll make it our mission to at least get this out dated piece of junk working.  I'm surprised the hacking community haven't actually made something to view at least XA or STR files, I'll probably be proved wrong on all counts but, surely an up to date and modern viewer is at least what we can expect.

Sunday 22 August 2010

Everyone talk about... Pop music.

All I ever hear nowadays on the radio R+B.  I'll rephrase that, all I ever hear is hateful 'music' put out by screaming histrionic women and mongoloid rappers.  Thats radio that is and if you sincerely want anything that touches the lower reaches of 200bpm or makes weird sounds then tough, they don't do it.  There's enough interest in rock to keep Radio 2 in buisness for years to come, and I'll be honest its ideal to work too as it makes no demands on its user being the aural equivalent of grey wallpaper.   They can even surprise you by putting out say a live set by an out of sorts Incognito.  {Which makes you wonder what the Brand New Heavies are up to these days... Apparently nothing.}

No the worst thing is this, if you're young, all the programming you have is heavily skewed to Rap and R+B with maybe some Grime or token dance thrown in for good measure.  I'm  approaching my mid thirties and largely put up with this shit the first time round and you know what it sucked then and it sucks now.  Stations like Capital or KISS and many more rely on  playlists to generate songs for broadcast, and in Capitals case rinse and repeat every track so the same 3-4 tracks come up again and again.  No wonder I called it Capital punishment. 

Kiss of course used to be entirely acceptable back in the day, when all they had to lose what their licence when raided by the DTI, however they lost pretty much all that made them unique back in the mid to late 90's with the migration of Solid Steel to BBC London, {Steve Jackson I think} and Colin Favers techno show to the bin of history.  They still run specialist music but only for insomniacs, apparently real dance is to be ghettoised forever into the wee small hours never to engage or interest anyone.

Back in the day they had house with Alex P and Brandon Block (with their Rule Brittania cover jingle.)
A pretty decent show on Sunday where they played underground hits and asked folk to name a mystery song, which was nearly always some kind of 80's soul.  Though one time it was Nexy Lantons You too.  Sadly though it didn't last and by the time speed garage came out Kiss was entirely shit from start to finish, the last time it rocked was Princess Diana died, and they suspended all regular programming for largely house and techno.

The motto if you listen to the mainstream, don't complain when that supply is poisoned forever and ever.

Monday 16 August 2010

Foreign TV on British cable #2 the rest of the world.

Yep we're back a little later but here is part 2.

We covered Germany last time so here is France, Spain and Arabic channels.

France was covered by the venerable TV5, and seemed to show a nonstop diet of Subtitled films, none of them pornography. It was situated on channel 15 just down from the original discovery channel and where I could link to wikipedia and such, to be honest I spent most of my time watching Discovery Channel.

Spain is covered by TVE another seemingly ancient channel, and to be honest the only thing I like watching on there was Precio Justo (Price is right).  Incidentally both TVE and TV5 are still part of your Sky package lurking somewhere in the morass of asian channels in the upper reaches of the EPG.

MBC lurked around the mid thirties on your cable box and to be honest wasn't really watched at all in our house, except when they showed a locust swarm when our Moroccan neighbour came over.
That and MBC Movies from a holiday in Cyprus but we'll casually forget about that.

Sunday 8 August 2010

Foreign TV on British cable #1 Germany.

This is really just some random posting of stuff about foreign channels you got with your cable and where applicable satellite.

We'll start with the most infamous, the German channels everyone remembers these because they had softcore porno at 10pm on a Saturday.

There were two channels you had on cable and an extra one if you had satellite.  These were of course, Sat 1, 3Sat and RTL (satellite only).

3Sat was mostly like BBC4, concentrated highbrow programming on the arts and architecture, when you are a teen these came across as unutterably dull.  Even worse than that the channel was located on channel 21,  sandwiched between MTV and Nickelodeon.  It therefore never stood a chance.

RTL. You only got this on Satellite and analogue satellite at that.  As a consequence I only really saw this when staying over at my aunts.  The only thing I can remember seeing on there was a dubbed Captain Tsubasa (probably as Campeones or the German equivalent) and the Megaman cartoon, (both of which never made it to the UK).  Its British equivalent would be a non shit ITV.

Sat1. German equivalent to Channel 5 and yes all anyone remembers from this is the porno.
They did other things such as a general sing along a good 15 years before the BBC decided that was all that people needed on a Saturday night. Oh and Man Oh Man, where a woman pushes a guy in a swimming pool before a crowd of screaming women.  The English version contained Chris Tarrant long before Millionaire payed his pension cheques for life.  And yes it was sexist shit.

 Ok we've put this off for as long as I can.  Pornwise they showed a lot of 70's softcore stuff, Largely Schulmadchen report and Elf Tag Elf Nacht with Sarah Asproon, though at one time it was Carry on Emmanuelle with Kenneth Williams, which was a major disappointment, we are not Jacking off to Babs Windsor not then and certainly not now.  Oh and Electric Blue, which was the first ever place I ever saw Custers Revenge for the Atari 2600.

Memory is telling me that they also had Amanda Lamb singing and dancing under a strip light for some unknown reason.  Of course its not the A Place In The Sun star but Amanda Lear, though if Channel 4 ever do Children in need I'll pledge £5 for the privelige especially if they get Kirstie Alsopp in rubber (though to be fair I don't actually have a fetish for rubber) and Phil in short leather pants for the Girls / Gays.

Custers Revenge was part of a special on erotic games, seeing as every Electric Blue was shot in the 1980s we sincerely believed that they were released for ZX Spectrum.  We had a VCS at the time and couldn't quite believe that they would release porn for it.  Only looking at EGM later in a big Seanbaby article on crap games, there was Custers revenge along with a handful of other shit porn games for VCS.  Would love to see this again as due to limits of VCS programming Custers penis was detachable.

Sunday 1 August 2010

Holiday TV round up.

Part 2 of our holiday special see's us not only reminisce about some great holiday TV but something from work.

We normally don't talk about work, not that its forbidden or nowt but simply because its routine and boring, there's only so much you people could take before your eyes glaze over.  However last friday we cleared out the grass bank at Galena.  Its the mother of all slopes at the back of our tea room and largely a dangerous place.
Doing so we managed to find about 6 Slow Worms hidden underneath various bags and stones,  ranging from small coppery coloured youngsters to a large brown adult male, it was heartening to see them there.  Previously we used to collect them from the self same site when we were kids, and kept one for 3 days until it escaped into the garden. 

OK back to holiday tv,  My parents had the room with the TV so if you wanted to see anything you needed to get a hold of the remote and go surfing.  Sadly English channels bottomed out around Channel 17 with half either fuzz or the ominous no signal.  The rest were German TV and were nothing to write home about, sorry Germans.  English was BBC Northern Ireland (previously Ulster), an Intermittent ITV though thats a blessing seeing the shit they put out, and various guest channels, (German Eurosport and Sky News) with rolling coverage of  Raoul Moat "heroically" blasting his wife, her lover, and a blameless Police Officer before doing the world a big favour and shooting his own steroid addled brains out with a shotgun.  As you can see I have little time for the cunt.

No if you wanted different you had to tune into Spanish TV.  A mix of TV news and Telenovela Spain never disappoints, mainly because they're the only people to have decent kids TV in the mornings.  Oh and Doraemon in Catalan.  Its divided up into TVE, Cinco and Siete as main stations, and is based on a mix of dubbed imports (an impressive Stargate Atlantis comes to mind and a patchy Simpsons with Marge and Lisa being spot on but Apu sounding not unlike Mr Burns), home grown Loose Women type shows and crappy lottery game style shows. 

Worse was the TV shopping shows, this includes a Gold for Euro advert, seeing as that pox has reached Europe too.   Psychics, including the old, the fat and someone who worryingly looked like Jo Brand.  All with a mix of contact ads underneath, so if you don't want your palm read you could always ring up for a fat mature (shudders).

Best of all is Aprende Ingles a station dedicated to teaching the Spanish, English.  Run by Richard Vaughan a Texan, who is the spitting image of dead comedian Bill Hicks if he'd lived to his 50's.
Richard Vaughan

Bill, sorry Richard is the host for most of the shows and is largely there to promote English use amongst the Spanish.  However for kids there's Davey the Dog.  Davey is of course no ordinary dog, being host Marcus Giovanni in a dogsuit.  Yugioh! fans may remember Joey in a similar suit, well this dude does it for real, not only that but he sings Old Mac Donald and various songs.  Its utterly funny but for all the wrong reasons, a proper Meme in motion that would only require a dedicated 4Channer to turn into an internet phenomenon.

Last but not least there is an unknown show that
seems to involve either something from Dig dug or  Black and White Minstrels.  Videoclip of course later.
Bill Hicks Uncanny huh.