Month of Mario 5 The Free One.

This is perhaps the one that will never get fulfilled and such, being that it goes back to the 1970's, aka the earliest Nintendo vidya stuff ever made.  We saw on twitter a tweet dedicated to all things Disk Kun. the little mascot from Nintendo's Japan only disk system add on, which thinking about this, is possibly what this series should be thought of.  i.e.

A small pack of small games for a small price. No DLC, sprites only and emulation only when its really obscure, and yep we do amend the rules over time.

What I'm talking about is the various pong consoles that Nintendo produced in the late 70's wrapped up in one handy resource.

Though this and a remake / demake of Wii fit with Princess Peach, Samus Aran and Rosalia could have easily been in my last post about sports games based on early NES and Gameboy titles.  They are actually more like variations on Pong, like the old Binatone consoles back in the day.  The last ones are actually a break out variant and two player Othello game that was essentially an arcade board stuffed into a home console.  Oh and one is a car racing game with a really big steering wheel.

I  would love to see the pong games  as one entry, with extensive liner notes on what they cost, making of's and promo artwork. All "sports variants" colour and black and white modes and even cellophane overlays as a nod to old arcade games like Space Invaders.

Split racing 112 into its own part with classic and updated graphics (yes it can be the bike from Mach Rider if you so wish) and modes as well. You can add promo stuff and liner notes here too.

The Block Kuzushii can be its own entry too with an emulated version of Monkey Magic thrown in for good measure too.

Othello has to be its own entry too and have both emulated and remade modes too.

I'd like a small card game such as solitaire or Hanafuda with Murasamejo or Shin Onigashima designs as a tribute to their card making past.

A rework of Gyromite that uses two analogue sticks to simulate R.O.B. spinning the gyroscope and some extended level designs.

Finally have the love tester and ultra hand as bonus toys.  I'd love to see some sort of Ultra Hand grabbing game where you pick up stuff and grab items.

Sky Plus Lego

We have a second hand Sky Box and its rather better than what we previously have, this is due to the fact its a Sky plus box rather than a normal sky box.  We picked it up a few weeks back and it required a bit doing to it where a bit stands for adding cables and a remote.  The cables are easy we just switch it over from the regular Sky box we have and it'll work no problem, card is more problematic as it seems to deny us the right to view Sky Movies and Sports (not that I care about movies and sports), but regular stuff and the odd sky channel its ok.  You know I can't remember the last time I cared about Sky one (oh yeah Touch and they cancelled that) unlike when I was young and showed stuff worth a lick.  The remote we picked up at the Meridian bootsale for the princely sum of £10 as opposed to the £25 or so they wanted in store, it sort of works (no subs no sky EPG) so I'm proud of that, all I have to do is deal with Sky and get recording added.

On other news I found my old Lego in a sweet jar in the cupboard, ominously titled stick insects on the lid (we did have them, they were a gift from a neighbour and they fed on Privet).  Tipping it out we found these things.

A mass of weird blocky trees.
A collection of dismembered lego men not including several firemen mostly missing hands, heads and legs.
A chef excellence who's main body was replaced with a set of wheels.
Various ladders (from the fire station set)
Various space thrustery bits (from the lunar landscape set)

Oh and these two characters.

Percy Pig is on your right.

Percy Pig comes with his own wheelbarrow which I still have, the other guy well I don't know who he is only that its the only thing left from my duplo set as a kid.  I love his cheeky grin and porkpie hat and seems to be part of a tugboat toy (thus making him a sailor.)

Holiday part 2 The Televisioning

So there was quite a bit of stuff going on whilst I was away and that, its a little stale in my mind right now and after detailing all the trips out I made last time it only seems fair that I give you a run down on what else was happening.

We stayed at the Golden Hotel Taurus Park in Pineda De Mar, an excellent complex dealing in fine food and drink (seriously I put on about 2 pounds having pancakes for breakfast alone) and entertainment.  My room was pokey but did at least have a flat screen TV and had a niceish view of some satellite dishes and the main road.  They had a small zoo in the grounds comprising mainly of Pheasants and a lairy Peacock that predictibly we called Captain.  They also had ducks and as I love ducks this made them go up about 25% in my estimation.

These are royal ducks in spanish.

Going out of resort, Pineda de mar itself seems to have a lot of ducks as well including various places bedecked with china ducks.  The main resort was dominated by the train line running paralell to the beach providing a regular service to Blanes and in the other direction Barcelona Hospital.  The beach itself wasn't that much, dominated by coarse sand that is the near equivalent of top dressing and a sharply shelving seashore means swimming was not on the menu.

However the real meat of course is that big flat screen TV and thanks to a bastard bout of insomnia you'll get a load of stuff on channels and content. 

First up the English.  BBC1, ITVs 1-4 but not 3 and CiTV, BBC World service (possibly the worst news in the world) and the obscurites that make life living.

Fashion TV dedicated to catwalk models and modelling clothes, lots of women who could do with a good meal and the associated benders and fag hags that make up the fashion scene. 

God channels 3ABN and Sonshine TV a Filipino based outfit pumping out Jesus 24/7 run by plastinated freaks. 

ITV remains horrible but for Harry Hill doing You've been Frames and Ben Shepard gameshow Tipping point coming on like a real life version of Coindozer.

French TV is boring as fuck. Seemingly endless talk shows that blur into one and homegrown cartoons.  We did see a modern version of Garfield in french but thanks to it voice acting it just made him sound manic depressive.

Germany.
RTL is something I'd heard of from satellite days (I always wanted to see Raumschiff enterprise untill I found out its just Star Trek in German). They had a few variants including SuperRTL (in fact we saw Spirited Away and its still ace even if you can't understand it) and its largely good you can't really go wrong with German stuff.  Also if you ever see Warehouse 13 in German whoever voices Artie has him spot on.

Belgium. BVM is the sole Dutch channel and what I saw of it seemed to be OK. 

Russia. We hit the motherlode with mother Russia.  With a variety of channels and our only other home for Christ in all his works, Russia soon became our favourite for weirdness.

TVRUS. (russian language)
This we readily corrupted to say TViRUS, thanks to Resident Evil.  It was home to a few oddments including a weird morning program with a funny looking old lady.  I deeply regret the one where she was looking over cucumbers and gherkins (I kid you not), if you ever saw Harry Enfields character Jurgen the German she was a dead ringer for him.

Nasch TV (Permanently borked)
This is the other goldmine. It housed some of my favourite things, an old Stories Without Words style cartoon about a Ginger cat in the sea that sank boats, heres a short clip.
Also there was an intensly strange morning television show kind hosted by two women that was deeply erotic though as I don't speak a lick of Russian probably wasn't.  Heres another short clip.
What you didn't see and Sadly I didn't catch was  them feeding each other fruit before hand.

Other stuff included an Armenian station a Macedonian station and a few God spots.  Including Soyuz TV which was Orthodox complete with priests with big bushy paedophile beards.

Finally the greatest variety, Spanish TV.  I can speak a bit of Spanish but the rate its spoken on TV is rapid so basically if you want local news be prepared to read like a bastard.  It was also home to late night porn channels detailed below.

NEOX had Viewtiful Joe anime dubbed into spanish, which I never knew existed. There was shedloads of Doraemon mainly on Kids TV Boing its never ever been translated (along with Captain Tsubasa) but remains entertaining nonetheless.   I saw Big Brother at like 3am and even then it still didn't put me to sleep. 
They have MTV in Spain and even dubbed its a waste of fucking time. They had Welsh fuckwit show The Valleys dubbed and its still cock awful. They also had a spanish original based on Alaska (of Raskayu fame) she / he seems to have been to the same school as Pete Burns as I couldn't make out what sex he / she was.

Finally I promised you teh pron, so here are all the channels that have some adult content as far as I could tell.
BOM / 8TV. Catalan language SFW.
These were largely the same deal some stripping plus onscreen text chat. We have it in the UK but it seems largely for a Gay audience and there is no stripping. 

Martv Catalan Public Access.

Largely stripping in the wee small hours, some women a bit ropey but there were a few stunners there. Seems to be between 12.30 till 5.30, Rest of the time is public access television with parochial ads and at the moment some dumb stage play.

Snap the pieces together...

All shapes and sizes, snap the pieces together Lego blocks.

So sung, Glass domain back in 1991. We had the bigger, Duplo blocks as a child back in the early 80's, along with a Dukes of Hazzard Playset and a Snoopy school bus (complete with Lucy and Charlie Brown figures).  But its Lego that I came back to.  We had a space set as a kid and a fire station set too, complete with astronauts, Lego firefighters and another set which had Percy pig with a wheelbarrow. 

I still have Lego on my main desk, a space plane remade now and again, and added to whenever we have new bricks.  In fact we never had Lego at school though we did have a substitute.  Polydron.

Though their site at the moment seems to be knacked, Polydron was a triangular based  (and looking at other sites, had hexagonal and square pieces too).  You got to play with it at school only on special occasions possibly as part of maths class, we remember making spinning tops out of the triangular pieces (and them falling apart at the slightest touch).  I hadn't thought about it for a good 20 years, till we, talking with my parents over dinner, the topic came round to old toys.

Its funny what you remember and what you choose to forget.