Reformed from Jackson's Lighthouse

One of the things you don't know about me is that I love the Elite games. Though I can't get on with the 8 bit original, its follow up Frontier and Elite Dangerous are some of my favourite games of all time.So much so, I dedicated 13 in game years in the original Frontier (had an Imperial Courier) and made it to near the edge of civilization. 

So, you'd be wondering where the title comes from. Well this week I made it to my first neutron star in Elite: Dangerous. For some reason its not ticked off my accomplishment on XBONIO 1 (my codex entry for neutron stars remains unredeemed) but, boy did I get a shock when I dropped from hyperspace. 

Most starts are pretty sedate with the occasional stellar flare to break up monotony, they do not pulse like some kind of spatial graphic equalizer. Oh and my previous destination for just gazing at things in wonder was a white dwarf near the start I dubbed planet splittercore. Its really dubbed BPM 890. but its worth a detour at the start as its staggeringly beautiful. There's also another one near Earth for those in the vicinity.

May return as the first time there I got killed, stupidly, and the second was just to scan a place.

Power Up!

Yesterday I took a trip down to the Science Museum in South Kensington for a long awaited poke around the Power Up! exhibition.  Its a celebration of gaming and game culture through the last 40 years or so of gaming.  Imagine if you will, a bank of old consoles and computers hooked up to televisions, showing off some of their best games and all ready to be played.  This is power up.

Its a brief exhibition for the summer holidays only on for two whole weeks and occurring in 90 minute blocks.  So if you come early, be prepared to kill some time looking around the museum at some of the exhibits, my tip make your way through rocketry to the Imax bit at the back and then upstairs into the memory and humanities bit. There's a tonne of interactive stuff there and some genuinely interesting stuff on the state of who you are, failing that big fuck off rockets.

The Black Arrow the only rocket we built

So what can I see?

As everything is playable, you can make your way down to the back area where all the retro stuff is you'll notice that the first half is mostly themed around genres.  There is a timeline of sorts for Mario, Sonic, Batman and Streetfighter series although in Sonic's case that is mostly a nose dive to mediocracy.  You can relieve being at Boots the Chemist in the early 1990's with a limited play on the original Megadrive Sonic. You can hear grown kids marvelling at how shit the original FIFA was and play the updated versions too.

Me, I got a few retro kicks with some obscure stuff and relieve an old memory of my first ever encounter with Mario in the Index bit of Littlewoods Department store.  Or rather Luigi, as that's what it was (and what I thought it was called) this was the arcade version though with the extra lives dummied out and a re arranged layout pretty sure there's a romhack of this.  Edit yup.

The MAME cabs where the most interesting, with an obscure line up of platformers and puzzlers including Choko from Mitchell Corp, a Shanghai clone against the clock where you have to match pairs before the sides close in and Saboten Bombers a single screen action game like Tumble pop in which you have to clear the screen of enemies without being killed.  Oh and its the only game I know with both cactus as a hero and Huernia flowers as an enemy among other stuff.

The back area was pretty nice, they a load of old consoles with a few playable games in each cases, the Amiga contingent was brought up by James Pond on an Amiga 600, speccy fans were treated to Bombjack form Tekhan and C64 fans could play Toki running from cart.  Amstrad fans had a non playable version of Cybernoid for the 464 which was a shame but still better than the BBC which had basic up and running inviting kids to "code" something.  Atarians of course had a playable ST and the Jaguar with Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 running (and yes the pad was still a nightmare to play with) in fact it reminds me a lot  of what TXK would become 2 decades later.

Played a load of Super Star Soldier for the PC engine before moving on to what I'd missed on the other side.  Didn't get a go on Taiko no Tatsujin or the rhythm action games sections and passed over the big lan party bits for Bomberman, Worms and Minecraft.  Did have a poke at Mickey Mouse for Master System and a ropey Batman game for PS2.  But spent the remainder playing Mario games for the Wii and Wii U.  Still not convinced the world needed motion controls or a big fuck off tablet to play either on or off screen but am convinced that Yoshi's Woolly World is a thing of loveliness.

Look everything is made of wool, you can collect yarn and unpick the landscape and push things around, its excellent and feels just like a Yoshi game should.  There is no 3DS version sadly but it what there is looks and plays ace so there.

Poking around Mario Galaxy with my first grab at the Wii motion controls, I suspect you'll get used to them  but it didn't grab me like Woolly world did.  We also played New SMB Wii which is more like the DS Mario games, they had (cliche alert) a slippy slidey ice world with a Hammer bro lobbing snowballs and various icicles to dodge.  Did briefly get a penguin suit but then it was time up and had to leave.

Let the games begin.

Final thoughts is this, if there are a family and one or more of you are a gamer you can show your youngsters what you were playing then and how stuff has changed.  Also give them a go on a few old consoles to see how far we have come even play multiplayer I see Mario Kart and Bomberman for some old school fun.

Power up 22nd July - 7th August. £8 to get in Adult and Child tickets available on line and on the door from here.

A few rants and that.

Terra Battle first up.

Had to reinstall this from scratch as the latest update would not download and would just cycle through endless downloading and Google play error codes.  To add much more to the whole pain of it all I forgot my migration password and that so its effectively a reinstall from scratch.  We had to install from an APK in the end as Google Play were being extremely cunty and not letting us download it again.  From the top of my head we had quite a lot of good characters, Kuscah and Lucia at LV35 and a couple of stonefolk Mages as my stand out characters also Echo from a FF promotion they ran. Ochu as a companion and a fuck load of metal Minions yeah I'm not bitter, but its a big kick in the knackers that's all.

This run I'm down to level 3-4 already and have Grace as my main starting character which I've read isn't half bad actually, something to do with dragon killing which makes optional bosses much easier. Also I've taken a screenshot of my login and password so this time I can transfer it over if need be.

So much wrong.

Scan of the week returns.

Who ordered a bizarre feminist tract... anyone?  Didn't think so.  Normally I find Africa Church leaflet, these are usually a mix of Gospel Choirs, abundance prayer whoring and obscure Bible notation worked into a theme such as men of Iron.

There are all the usual feminist tropes here including the "wage gap", rape reporting (Raw data here if you want it) and blaming the credit crunch for gender related redundancies (I think you'll find its everyone being laid off).

Where are all the Feminists.  I'll tell you where, moaning about manspreading and mansplaining on twitter and other inconsequential bollocks.  Its bickering about First world problems of little matter, when it should have to paraphrase the Pet Shop Boys, gone east and added some much needed equality to the middle east and southern Asia.

Pyngas Entertainment

First up we still haven't gotten round to translating those NeoGeoX Stats at the moment, so if anyone is busting a gut to get them done well I can't help you.

Secondly we've be caught up playing Chefville on Facebook.  Like Stan Marsh in South Park we really didn't want to get caught up with the virtual farming biz but we recently added my cousin as mates and she plays them so now we have a big fuck off cafe in Chefville.

Its called Cornholios for obvious reasons and its not that large, and thats also for a reason. Because while this maybe social gaming, its also coming up against the terminally asocial I.E me.

We really do not welcome the frequent status updates with jokey messages posted on your behalf, nor do we like the complete and utter naked greed at the heart of it all.  Our ethos on DLC and in *app purchase is this unless its pretty freaking awesome or free, then its not worth your money at all.  In fact unless its not on disk I'd go as far as saying pirate it or get the game of the year edition with all bonuses and stuff added.

 *and when did apple naming for programs become standard, you don't have an exe store for non apple programs, though the name does sound awesome, X-STORE go on shout it out.

There is our rub with it, like our Freecorder rant (Applian if you are listening get a webpage based version going like certain youtube downloaders for people to record stuff with.) it has the germ of a good idea but adds a load of cock to it no one wants. 

Do you really need to buy in added spices with real cash, do you really want to purchase additional items to cook with, with real cash.  Do you really want every little milestone posted up on your facebook page or get real world friends to staff virtual resturants or proxy mates for real cash.  Didn't think so.

Then there is creator Zynga, about as welcome in the industry as Aids to a porn set and just as vicious.
As far as we can tell we think chefville is a totally new idea, although running a restaurant is nothing new for gaming.
As far as we can tell, the basic recipe is a mix of evil, Gusts Atelier series for the crafting bits and sim city for restaurant building and a dumb flash game for all the characters. I'm not sure what it was originally ripping off unlike Farmville (harvest moon but online), but I'm damned sure its not original. 

EDIT.

Cornholios is bust, thanks to Zynga, we have line of cardboard boxes for virtual items that will never be finished due to them requiring either real world cash or stupid asinine posting for items.  Let us build stuff and we'll come you bastards.

The ballad of Kates Tits.

Heres a round up of stuff, including a bit more from the Wisdom Tree, some more info on that handheld Neo Geo and some deeply topical stuff with IM Baciel partys Prophet Muhammad (Caustic Window) film.  Oh and the tits of Kate Middleton.

Wisdom Tree bits.

We decided to not bother hacking anymore of King Of Kings, Spiritual Warfare or Bible Adventures as though I have a shed load of ideas I've got bugger all time to spend learning how to code.  Sad I know, Quitters never win and all that but I have found a few more things that are relevant to the project.  Both Bible Adventures and Spiritual Warfare have a small string of letters that are are used to load in bible quiz questions.  (I did corrupt this by switching a W for an R and may actually do this for King Of Kings which uses the aforementioned huge table of words to build its questions with).  We thought we had this when we found a script with FCEUXs PPU viewer but had our enthusiasm severly curbed when we found out it was just viewing what was in RAM (its RAM nothing stays in RAM). 

On the upside we have found a corrupter that actually works.  Its a custom job from Vinesauce and can be had from their forums, here.  Used in most of their corruption videos and has provided me with a goodly amount of laughs.

NEOGEO Handheld.

Seems that NEO GEO hand held isn't a hoax after all.  Blaze will be punting this out for the European Market so expect this to be in the same vein as their Megadrive Portable. There's full stats in Japanese here and we'll try and get this translated in full, (we know our kana and a few kanji so this won't be too difficult).
We of course will wait untill this is professionally reviewed before casting hard earned brass at this.

Predictable scenes from the Middle East.

MST3K The innocence of the Muslims.

We only learned about this through the excellent Carl Craig facebook feed.  Its a zero budget film adaptation of Muhammads (Mont Sant Michel and St Michaels Mount) life (though originally it was Bin Laden / nameless Egyptian Warlord).  To be honest I would love to see the whole film as it was before it was changed.  Because as it stands now, the film comes across as perfect fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Badly done chroma jobs and hilarious over dubbing make this a scream rather than anything sacreligious.  Needless to say it caused outrage all over the middle east especially when it was subbed into Arabic, even in the UK with the usual crowd of Islamic Neckbeards protesting.

There is a pretty informed article up on wikipaedia for you to look, though I'd still love to hear a rifftrax version of it. 

Kates Tits.

The other controversy inflaming the western world is some paparazzi shots of the Duchess of Cambridges Tits. Published in the French version of Closer (which judging by the content seems to have a more heterosexual male readership than its English couterpart) and the Irish Daily Star (still big brother and bugger all news I'd imagine) they are some of the grainiest pictures of royal jugs I have seen.  Then we saw the actual distance on the news they were snapped from and I'm guessing they used the hubble telescope to get the shots.  Like Britney Spears snatch though I warn you they are a little underwhelming and if you really want to see out of focus images of some tits you can look here instead.