I enjoyed Ready Player One at the time even though some of it was just ridiculous. Re-enacting Ferris Buellers Day Off for example.

Armada, Cline’s next book was awful. So many references on every page, I stopped reading. I remember a line that was something like, “my mum wouldn’t let me past, like Gandelf in the mines of Moria.” Sheesh! Let it go!

I fully read Ready Player Two but the guy has no story telling abilities. Every time the main character encounters a problem, e.g. I need a level 49 sword to get past this problem, but there’s no way to get one, it was always solved with the same solution, “oh, I own the game and all Admins have level 1000 swords because we do!”

I think I reached my limit when he managed to shove in a Shaun of the Dead reference just because he mentioned a cricket bat!

CodeMaster religiously hold onto their copyrights. I remember searching for their 8bit games of the 1980s and while copies are out there, the places that do it legally, World of Spectrum for example, don’t host them because CodeMasters refuse permission for these old games to be distributed for free.

I’ll never forget hiding under a table in the corridor with the Alien walking around me in circles. He knew I was there but seemingly couldn’t figure out how to get me. I thought I was safe but maybe I moved a few pixels in the wrong direction as after a long wait, it grabbed me and gave me the deadly kiss.

I only discovered it myself in the last month or so.

For example, I loved X-Wing CD edition back in the day for the real Star Wars soundtrack but I need to try it with MT32 midi emulation. I bet the iMuse system sounds fantastic.

It’s an emulator for playing the entire back catalogue of Lucasarts games. It’s very well documented and ready to use. As I said, if you had some kind of general midi set up or Roland MT32 back in the day, you’d be laughing. The music is awesome.

The program is called Dreamm.

DREAMM is a backronym for:

DOS
Retro-
Emulation
Arena for
Maniac
Mansion (and other LucasArts Games). 

I played the first, maybe not all the way through, on my Atari ST. Later on, I got quite annoyed that the Amiga got the sequel but Lucasfilm Games days it wasn’t coming to the Atari.

I remember getting the PC CD-ROM edition of the original game and the music was lovely.

The next time I played was game three, Curse of Monkey Island. I loved the art style and completed that one.

I plan on playing the latest installment at some point. I downloaded it onto my Xbox.

There’s also a great program for playing old Lucasfilm faces on PC. You can load soundbanks into it because it can emulated different midi interfaces that I dreamed of owning back in the day. The tunes sound amazing.

The problem was Nintendo charged publishers more money for the larger carts. So a lot of publishers simply took the option of the smallest cheaper cards and made you download the rest.

Trying to preserve Switch games by buying the carts has been a bit pointless really. I know Diablo 3 was entirely on the cart, publishers were very pleased with that.

Just a simple kitchen timer.

Living with a friend, in the first place after moving out of our parents places. He smoked weed but that didn’t bother me. However, one night he invited in the local weed dealer and I was really concerned but he assured me it was ok.

We both worked at the same company, so came home at the same time a day or so later to find the front door was open. They smashed the small decorative window which allowed them to reach in and unlock and open the door.

I can’t remember what they stole from my friend but I lost my GameCube, controllers and all the games. Also, my first portable minidisc player and a pair of cheap earphones I used with them which I absolutely loved. The wire was like string and rarely tangled.

I had a few imported US games and I thought they might give me the edge. I rang all the local game shops to see if anyone had tried to bulk sell the lot but I was unlucky.

Reading these replies , I’m going to have to watch some videos on Burnout 3. I played it back in the day but I’d forgotten things like aftertouch to wreck more vehicles.

I played through games 1 & 2 a few years back and I loved the Crash Junctions.

Having been playing Burnout: Paradise recently, I now see what’s missing. Its a fun racer but stripped of a lot of what came before.

When I used to work in a supermarket, I hated the stupid customers. This is a classic example. One of the soft drink companies fairly regularly gave away 50% free.

Therefore, for the same price, the bottle would be 3 litres in size rather than 2.

The amount of people who didn’t like that.

“Excuse me, where’s the 2 litre bottle?” “Oh, it’s the same price miss, you get an extra litre for free.” “But I don’t want 3 litres, I only want two!” Sigh!

Same as. It felt like watching a higher budget Power Rangers.

I don’t understand it, but going through various githubs, the problem has been discovered. Here it is:

YouTube changed their code to make it more difficult to extract the throttling parameter decryption function.

There was some coding demonstrating the problem but it was way over my head. Hopefully fixes are coming soon as the issue was marked as urgent. It looks like they know what needs changing.

I’m currently playing through Rage and really enjoying it.

The races are fine and not that hard to win and I haven’t touched a card game yet. I get enough money from selling all the junk I find as I play.

I’m regards to it’s sequel, I’m very methodical (blame my autism 😁) and I played the game by competing all missions and side quests in one area before starting the next.

This side effect of this was that I upgraded the character so much, when I competed the final mission, it was so easy, I didn’t realise it was the final mission and it took me by surprise!

Back in the early 90s, here in the UK, a company called Cheetah produced licensed joysticks based on Batman, Terminator, Alien³ and The Simpsons. They looked great but they were terrible to use, especially the Alien³ model which I really liked but was incredibly uncomfortable. I never bought one, just tried then on the shops, awful things.

Back in the day, I bought the official Xbox360 steering wheel. It made me laugh because it was called wireless. It was only wireless between itself and the Xbox. It still needed a power brick to drive the motor and another wire to connect it to the pedals.

When I sold it, I almost made my money back because it was in high demand. MS had replaced it with that awful U shaped steering wheel that you held in the air like a Wii controller. It used sensors to tell when it was tilted. I never used one but the reviews weren’t favourable as I remember.

The 8 bit guy. I loved his retro computing channel and then one day, he acquired a rare IBM computer and promptly destroyed the power supply by sticking a screwdriver into it (if I remember correctly).

For some reason, I googled about this and discovered he’s a gun nut. They’re videos of him going grocery shopping with his rifle on his back which apparently he does this knowing it will annoy people.

Unsubscribed from the channel and never looked back.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek. GAME took over EB in the UK. I don’t think they’re any dedicated gaming shops anymore, just independents.

Then basically there’s no point in this shop existing anymore. They’re basically toy stores now.

I occasionally look in Game but can’t remember the last time I actually bought anything. It would’ve been a pre-owned title anyway.

Is Electronics Boutique still going? 😁

I normally listen to heavy metal, rock maybe nerdcore rap. The other night, I was alternating between the albums of Natalie Imbruglia and Melanie Chisholm. There’s some good stuff in there.