https://iainplays.com/feed/feed.xml

I’m not a Creep. I belong here. #

If you’ve just joined us, welcome to my series: Wristwatch Roulette, where I furnish my forearm with two fancy finds a fortnight, from fan-favourite Ali Express, market of choice for my 2023 series Shenzhen Safari, and 2024 series Shenzhen Sojourn.

Your Skin Makes Me Cry #

Synoke: Face Pusher #

There are four ways to press my face.
And many ways to push my buttons.
Throw me to the wolves and I will return leading the pack.

This watch is the epitome of IDGAF energy: the courage to be disliked, with a veneer of restraint.

The rounded rectilinear one-piece satin-black case-come-strap enrobes a portion of your wrist with a respectfully proportioned buckle and chunky strap clip.

(Bind the device to your wrist securely.)

Wait, Who Said That? #

…Anyway…where was I?

Ah.

Okay. So a carefree ‘80s typeface bleeds silver beyond the edges of each character inside and out, giving a grunge spread. The positioning is inconsistent and hasty, with the button

(ahem…“pusher”)

labels being cut and distorted by the glass

(ahem…plastic)

bezel. The glass

(*seriously, Iain, it's not glass or crystal, it's plastic*)

is set with enough of a gap to allow embedding of dirt and lint deep within the circumferential crevice, further consternating the pusher labels.

(Are you…are you kidding me right now?)

Pushers are of ruby, white, mustard, and greige.

(an on-trend 2024 blend of green, grey, and beige)

Such an interesting Web 2.0+ palette that pairs well with most menswear;

(Mens? Wear? I, the parathetical, metaphorical device am taking over if you don't buck up your ideas.)

meaning this watch, worn on a suitably girthsome wrist, looks appropriate.

(Are you fucking serious right now, Iain? Really?! Fucking, what? "Girthsome?" I'm dry-heaving here. Giving me the ick. I'm never going to touch a clock again in my life.)

(Like, what are you even doing here, writing about watches and how that's some kind of mirror of your grandiose inner-life. Pretentious bullshit. Why aren't you adding value somewhere in reality. Want a trophy for blogging in 2024, grandad?)

(I can see right up the disgusting untended crevices of your nostrils. Gah! You've poisoned me with your purple prose: "Crevice?" "Crevice?" Rrrreeeee)

(Urgh! Use words much? You're so verbose. Grarraaarghhh. "Verbose" isn't even a word. Who says that?)

Hurting No One #

Hush now, dear Apple-watch wearing parenthetical pixie.

I enjoy my hobby as a good use of life's freedom.

“I scream, I scream, I scream so much
You know what I mean, this electric stream
And my tears in league with the wires and energy
And my machine, this is my beautiful dream
I'm hurting no one, hurting no one
Hurting no one, hurting no one
I wanna give you everything, I wanna give you energy
I wanna give a good thing, I wanna give you everything
Everything, everything, everything, everything, everything
―Lyrics from Cowgirl (1994), by British electronic music group Underworld (Music Video, atop this page).

If your wrist wasn’t so small #

Don’t let genetics hold you back. There are many ways to increase your girth. Isolate those muscles and overload them gradually. Then come back here and get your own Synoke Face Pusher through my non-affiliate link here. You can also use my CASIO affiliate link for 20% off CASIO and G-SHOCK, and even straight-up push donations into my tip-jar (pending setup).

Thanks for reading Wristwatch Roulette V of Ⅻ.

Two weeks (or months), two watches, two reviews, to you. 2024-H2 side-mission: Wristwatch Roulette.

1. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ: R-Shock
2. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅱ: Synoke “Robocwatch”
3. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅲ: Synoke “DS”
4. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅳ: Skmee “Pip-boy”
5. Wristwatch Roulette V: Synoke “Face Pusher”

Watches. Watches never change us. #

If you’ve just joined us, welcome to my series: Wristwatch Roulette, where I furnish my forearm with two fancy finds a fortnight, from fan-favourite Ali Express, market of choice for my 2023 series Shenzhen Safari, and 2024 series Shenzhen Sojourn.

Ghoulish Behaviour #

Remember when games were good?
Ahahaha.
No.
Things keep getting better.

The possibilities of what can be accomplished are built on a mass of prior culture. Some will be standing on the shoulders of giants; while others will be standing on the shoulders of rotting corpses. Dead-ends are a part of evolution. Experimentation is vital to revitalise. We stagnate, we die. Just keep swimming.

Almost a hundred years ago now (it doesn't matter, just know that it would've started in your great-grandfather's time), Isaac Asimov wrote a whole series of books with this lament. I've read them all because I'm smart, and that's what smart people do. They read books. Write?

Asimov explored the death of empires and society through a sci-fi lens. His main character (Seldon) produced a mathematical theorem called psychohistory that could predict human behaviour, but only at galaxy/humankind scale, with the the odd dip into a finer resolution of crisis. Seldon tried to warn that the empire (thousands of settled planets), was rapidly decaying, and doomed to 10,000 years of Barbarism, unless drastic action was taken, and soon!

But I'm Smart #

A group of elite academics were granted permission to travel far, far away to store the seeds of all human knowledge (to lessen the 10,000 years of Barbarism) in a new "Foundation". What followed was several books in this universe contemplating power, warfare, commerce, religion, human nature, robots, aliens, tribes, communities, love, life, evolution of human mental and psychic powers, and cosmic super-organisms.

Violent Delinquency #

Near the end of the series, there's a courtroom scene where a delinquent youth had attacked our hero in a park, and almost nullified all his achievements (see also: cancel culture), however the power of a mentalist coerced the youth to truth.

Magical Mental Powers: Abra-ka-HA-Brah! #

Is this ancient fiction any different to our current reality? Well, yes. We don't have magical mental powers to fix all we have broken. And the amplification of all that is wrong through mass-media, immediate gratification, and in the year of writing this (pre-halloween 2024), human-designed digital dopamine traps continue to catch and not release a third generation exposed.

Is there any hope?

Yes #

Of course there is. The inter-generational comparisons have stood since time immemorial.

Humans are little more than beasts. Morality an selfish invention for everyone's benefit, like agreeing a side of the road to drive multi-ton steel death machines. Entropy and decay allows rotting for fresh growth and renewal.

When we hold on to tightly to the past, we cut the belly of our snake, on the saw that we slither over. Feel the pain and accept it. Reflect on it then move on. You can't learn any other way, where fear and anger will kill your mind.

Keep it simple. A blossom in joy is only as far away as your inner peace. And you are the only one who can stumble, trip, rip, tear, leap, float, or melt into it.

Protecting your peace is not a tower-defense game. It's picking up your toys, your life, and playing in your spaces, with people who can share this enjoyment, bringing light.

For some you are light, and others shadow. Compatibility is not universal or mathematical. You'll have to kiss some toads to find a prince/ss. And you'll have to endure pain and betrayal to keep growing into an ever more shining being, with the kind of vibes that feel good to you and compatible others. Spend quality-time fulfilling your potential TO YOURSELF and FOR YOURSELF. Light comes. Shadows that were once full of your worst nightmares fade into absurdity.

Your life consists mainly of what you tolerate. So walk towards the light, and leave the shadows, taking only the marks of the lessons where scar-tissue glistens.

I am the Light. I am Love. I am Peace. #

Remember when games were good?
Ahahahaha.
Yes.
I do.

Narrow our focus now, from the Asimovian Psycho-historic to the here and now.

Steep decay. Colin McRae Rally (Sony PlayStation, 1998) had better physics applying morse-code to a digital on/off left or right switch than games nearly thirty years on.

Later, read my review of Burnout 3 (Sony PlayStation 2, 2004), which was the absolute pinnacle of fun in a driving game, and has yet never been matched. Because we have peaked. Our societies have peaked. Humanity is doomed, and the evidence piles up, exponential sin rate. Because we are ALL beasts, wearing moral masks, some appearing more human than others.

Personal Post-apocalypse #

Everyone has their own personal apocalypse. Some call it midlife crisis. The accumulation of all our experiences, some we perceive as successes, some as failures. Embarrassments, emboldenments. Good times. Shit times.

Here or before we choose Victimhood or accountability.

Only one path leads to meaningful change and redemption.
Because our life consists of what we tolerate, and this includes our own bullshit, our own cancerous thoughts, our own self-inflicted spiralling thoughts, values, ideas, and limitations.

Who is to blame?
YOU ARE. NOBODY ELSE.

Someone hurt you? Yes? No? Were you truly unable to stop them? Beastly if so. Or did you let them? Either way, you're still alive. Stay mad or heal from what they/you have done or said. Heal by your deeds. Heal by your focus on the light.

Remember: Your life consists of what you tolerate and what you do. Leave the shadows, taking only the marks of the lessons where scar-tissue glistens. You are beautiful and true. Don't waste your life picking [at] scabs.

Where were We? #

Another peak lens of humanity was the "Fallout" metaverse. It began with a gritty, well-written 1997 video-game looking at life hundreds of years following a nuclear apocalypse, with a 1930's-1950's retro-futuristic golden-oldie chrome aesthetic.

The luckier/wealthier humans made it to vast self-sustaining underground bunkers called Vaults. The game begins with our hero being forced to leave the vault in search of a computer part called a "water chip", and has 100 days to return to the vault, lest all the dwellers inside die. The nuclear wasteland is, predictably a kind of hell on earth, with warring factions, mutated humans and animals, and a kind of zombie-like irradiated human that can live for hundreds of years called a ghoul. Some are feral, others have retained their humanity (or at least, human communication skills, with a tendency towards cannibalism.

My personal favourite was Fallout 3 (2008), which followed the same theme of the established Fallout universe. In this case, we leave the vault in search of our father. The game switched from a 2D isometric, pixel-art, turn-based affair to a first-person 3D real-time living and breathing world. Exploring was a delight. There was always something to scratch the nomadic itch so deeply woven into our biology. And wherever you would go, your trusty Pip-boy would be stuck onto your arm with you.

Pip-Boy #

The Pip-Boy is a personal computing device (not unlike the "smart" phones that spelled out the innerification and death of our social society). A glowing green-screen stores all your information, maps, inventory, objectives, and has sensory functions such as detecting radiation levels (geiger-counter), visualising enemy bearings, and includes a Pip-Boy light to illuminate dark areas.

Here's a life-like replica by The Wand Company that is no longer for sale. (https://www.thewandcompany.com/pip-boy-kit/)

Light 'em up! #

So what do we have here?
This is Wristwatch Roulette after all.
I haven't forgotten.

We have another wild Skmei wrist-watch that for me at least, is reminiscent of a Pip-Boy.

And yes, that's a very bright LED torch angled outwards with a dedicated button to activate. It also has day/date, stopwatch, dual-time mode, and a programmable countdown timer seconds and minutes, reverting to last-programmed time when complete. Switching between screens, there's a higher-pitched beep for the "home" screen. And the electro-luminescent backlight is gorgeously even and bright across the surface.

Another watch to cherish from Skmei! I am truly a Fan-Boy of this Pip-Boy (and all of their wacky watches).

Be the envy of your post-apocalytic Neighbourhood Watch #

Now it's your turn. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so you know how you can help fund my vices, friend?

Well, buy your own Skmei “Pip-Boy” through my onion affiliate link here. Definitely don't use the non-affiliate link here. You can also use my CASIO affiliate link for 20% off CASIO and G-SHOCK, and even straight-up push donations into my tip-jar (pending setup).

Thanks for reading Wristwatch Roulette Ⅳ of Ⅻ.

Two weeks, two watches, two reviews, to you. 2024-H2 side-mission: Wristwatch Roulette.

1. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ: R-Shock
2. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅱ: Synoke “Robocwatch”
3. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅲ: Synoke “DS”
4. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅳ: Skmei “Pip-Boy”

What’s this; Now/Then? #

If you’ve just joined us, welcome to my series: Wristwatch Roulette, where I furnish my forearm with two fancy finds a fortnight, from fan-favourite Ali Express, market of choice for my 2023 series Shenzhen Safari, and 2024 series Shenzhen Sojourn.

Hello you//I love you #

The duality inherent in manly, womanly, and beastly endeavours is not lost on Synoke. Perhaps this idea fuelled the spawning of today’s rakish, wrist-ready, retro ripper: a two-tone, two-timing, black, blue, and green monster. A vast array of golden ratio gone awry.

Wringing me dry: post-modern, post-hummus [sic], and post-shower;
I’m left with another non-reactive, jelly-supple strap.

No rash or rasher or ration.
No rise, no fall, no Roman numerals.
Decadent in design, detail, and discordance.

Oh, and regarding rashers, the ratio is a little bacon-esque, no?
With a little hue shift, we can see into the gammon spectrum gamut.

If only this could colour change like the R-SHOCK from WR1!

She’s quirky//He’s unique and curious in expressing himself. #

I’m addicted and perplexed.
This is another bat-shit crazy design decision that works so well.

You can see clearly now Lo-reign has gone: bog-standard internet idiots snort about the asymmetry of yonder American date format: First month, then day, then year:

[MM/DD/YY]

Elsewhere upon Gaia, humanity employs a smallest to largest date notation:

[DD/MM/YY]

Better still for computational record management, we have year, then month, then day, so you can sort chronologically by filename in a folder. A pleasure:

[YY.MM.DD]

To illustrate 13th October 2011 can be written as:

13/10/11 or 13/10/2011

10/13/11 or 10/13/2011

11.10.13 or 2011.10.13

Day Dual Twist #

Come with me as we march on like time…

99.999999% of digital watches display the time as hours, then minutes, then seconds:

[HH:MM:SS]

But here, our heroic Synoke design team subvert expectations.
Why should we be satisfied with the boring, globally accepted time notation format?
Genius and evolution demand drastic creative experimentation.
Mutations that are sometimes dead-ends…yet other times; new beginnings.

Gaze upon all that I have made, ye consummate, conspicuous consumers. Look now, my top screen displays days of the week…and seconds?! My bottom screen displays hours and minutes.

The future is no longer:

[HH:MM:SS]

THE FUTURE IS:

[DDDa:SS:DDDb]
[HH:MM]

Colores, colores! #

The colours are achingly gorgeous!

The perfectly inviting azure lagoon on top, promising exotic encounters and trysts with every 32,768 quivering beats of quartz heart conditioned to leap forward one second; and every 86,400 seconds advancing to the next day.

Below, a lusciously fresh, verdant, positively buxom green reliably wenches round every 60 second AND every 60 minutes, splaying forth new cells and sectional digits as it churns silk into butter.

Lights, Action! #

But wait, there is more.

A uniform light cradles and floods each display to its most delicate extremities. Even and balanced, with tender love and care it sizzles around the edges and electrifies digit cell pool too, exciting them to a glowing fervent clarity in the dark.

Truly, this watch is beyond compare in design and manufacture. Why spend 10,000 dollars to look like almost every other follicly-challenged, champagne-chugging, chum-bucket, garrulous gorilla golfer, when you can look so great with a 10 dollar, dual-screen delight; so effortlessly demoting every other species of watch down the food chain, with its bold design, and democratic pricing?

Bye, buy! #

Tip your hat to me by purchasing with my onion affiliate here, or…use the not so demure (non-affiliate) link here. Be a dear.

Thanks for reading Wristwatch Roulette Ⅲ of Ⅻ.

Two weeks, two watches, two reviews, to you. 2024-H2 side-mission: Wristwatch Roulette.

1. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ: R-Shock
2. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅱ: Synoke “Robocwatch”
3. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅲ: Synoke “DS”

What's this; Now/Then? #

If you've just joined us, welcome to my series: Wristwatch Roulette, where I furnish my forearm with two fancy finds a fortnight, from fan-favourite Ali Express, market of choice for my 2023 series Shenzhen Safari, and 2024 series Shenzhen Sojourn.

I'd buy that for a dollar! #

But, is it even possible to top the regal highlight of Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ?
I should just give up now. There's no way I can better the R[oyal]-Shock.

The regal R-Shock reviewed in Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ

Like pulling a legendary sword sharp from a stone—say Excalibur—after conversing with a lakeside lady…I'd find that hard atop.

What's this, Sven? #

Yield to me. By the pseudo-random selection of fate and weight, I pull another chunky length of corporeal life-slicing lassitude from the tub.

Ah. I…hate it.

Look at the hideous logotype dominating the forehead like an expression of cheapness. The gaudy plastic brushed-metal looking silver body. Water resist, printed in, what is that, Arial? Octothorpe-vomit-emoji.

I have to put this accursed bracelet on my wrist and wear it in public? And expect people to take me seriously? Let alone like the generously caring, tall, dark, and handsome summer Duke that my dominant stance and erect bearing conveys? Pass the hemlock. Woe is me. Deliver this unto my enemies when I am long gone.

Wrist-hugger Attack on Titan Attachment #

Well, I've come this far. Bravely advance to unsheathe it from the warded plastic prison. As I reach to break the containment seal, a thrumming '80s synth surges overhead in the skies. Is this the rapture? Heavenly trumpets are being Brassoed, so the Korg calls instead. What's four decades in the scales of the Universe?

Plastic slit crinkling apart, moaning quietly, the synth cuts out.
Eyes-wide, I've made a huge mistake. I realise that now.

The watch animates itself. Strap writhing and lashing hungrily from the packet.
Slicing into my arm, I grit my teeth. It is at odds.

It shudders and quivers in fear at my restraining grip (no doubt repulsed by my Omega-level orange aura);
Yet it is compelled to live. It senses no other potential hosts in striking distance.

How? I don't know. Mind-link? Has it already bonded to a cluster of my neurons? Was it the opening? Or our first touch?

Is this my caress
Or is it caressing me?

I soften to it. Lost to it. Monotropic focus.

I yield.
It fits well.
It feels so good.
It looks so wrong.

Cut off your nose, despise your face #

What is the deal!?

A rectangular/square case, dates strung along the top with Sunday red-squared and a tall Saturday.
The hours and minutes chimney-stacked (columned) left.
A pointless flashing red-on-black sign in the centre, advertising the watch is multi-function.
And the seconds practically have their own dimension off to the right.
A wavy black banner flows. Midnight slivers encroach the top and bottom of the display.

Even a worm will turn #

Wait. It's actually quite beautiful. The format. The flowing border, reminiscent of what? Wipeout? Ridge Racer Type 4? I can't quite place it, but it makes my brain tingle because it's not a boring, fucking vacant, homogenic, thoughtless empty vassal, like say, the Apple Watch.

Decisions were made. Bad ones? If one purely looks through a lens of functionality, then yes; clear as the waters of denial, fresh from mowing tan's reign. But wristwatches are jewellery too. I can tell the time ably with this one, and the design elements which are awkward, bizarre, or impractical add to the charm; no? A coquette contradiction. Or massive peacocking?

Hold.

There are four cross-head screws on the front of the plastic case.

Let's tinker.

Scraping the Beast from Beauty's Subface #

As I remove the screws, realisation dawns:
This is not a plastic faceplate with speed-bump style ridges to protect the display. This is metal. Real metal tech.

So I resolve to make my own design decision, and rustle up an abrasive sheet of 80 grit sandpaper.

Rubbing, not transversely, but in-line with the timeline. From left to right I grunge-ify the faceplate. Now semi-naked in appearance, de-branded, the melted-penny brown melds with silverish stripes. What have I done?

Keep scrolling to reveal that…

…I've created a monster worthy of legend.

Harkening back and forth to the bronze age, ALIENS, Robocop, Nirvana, Wipeout 2097, Mudhoney, the Bronze Age, Soundgarden, ancient Rome, Starship Troopers, medieval times, Dune, and the advent of quartz LCD driven time machinery. Deus Ex Machina.

Ah. I…love it. I love you. I dub thee Robocwatch.
Shield me now.
None can strike us down.
Together, we'll make our song echo through the ages. That's it, man! Game over, man! Game over! #

Flock. Buy and make your Synoke "Robocwatch" Large Screen Square watch here, or…use the scumbag (non-affiliate) link here. I provide.
Your move, Creep.

Thanks for reading Wristwatch Roulette Ⅱ of Ⅻ.

Two weeks, two watches, two reviews, to you. 2024-H2 side-mission: Wristwatch Roulette.

1. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ: R-Shock
2. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅱ: Synoke "Robocwatch"

Wristwatch Roulette #

As I gazed upon a bustling tub of burgeoning envelopes, my eyes settled on the invitation to a new game.

Welcome to Wristwatch Roulette, where I’ll be furnishing my forearm with two fancy finds a fortnight, from fan-favourite Ali Express, market of choice for my 2023 series Shenzhen Safari, and 2024 series Shenzhen Sojourn.

R-Shock: Proving red and green should never be seen is a terrible rule of style/thumb #

Can you imagine my delight at opening my first Wristwatch Roulette envelope to this bizarre timepiece.

A shiny, jelly-feeling strap that is oh-so comfortable and non-sweat reactive.

A case so large that the display swallows a “Casioak” body.

Diamond-textured push-buttons with tactile, resistant, but pleasingly spongy action.

It looks good and is worth every penny of the less than THREE POUNDS asking price, based on daytime looks alone.

Light up my life #

But what’s this? Long-pressing the light button changes the colour of the backlight!? And there’s seven colours, plus a fast-pulsing Disco mode. Wow.

This has to be seen to be believed, but the photos do a pretty good job. Look at the sharp, legible and gorgeous depth of these greens, ambers, pinks, and blues.

Each so bright, clear, and legible.

Sounds like Assertion #

A pleasant feature of most digital watches is the hourly chime/signal/bee-beeb. From the 14th century, time has been kept by the mechanised chiming bells. Indeed, the hammer and gong was miniaturised into pocket-watch format in the 16th century and wrist-watch format from the late 19th/early 20th century. In the elite world of luxury 1,000+ piece mechanical wrist-watches, hammer and gong persist resoundly, with ear-splittingly luxuiously pitched pricing. Read more about that here

But the bee-beep affordable Casio has been torturing folks for decades. And the R-Shock has an interesting take on the hourly signal repeating chime. No waspy, needy bee-beep here. Just a single, low-timbre, definitive, sweeping monotonic beeeeep.

Regal, Red, Rex, R-SHOCK #

Might is right. And what could be more right than the shining red beacon of horology. A strong double-toothed buckle, secures the R-Shock to your wrist. You know the day and time at a glance. Each hour is gravely and respectfully intoned. Surely the R-SHOCK belongs in every Johnny-come-watch-enthusiasts collection. A priceless artifact of design ingenuity.

Priceless…yet yours for less than £3 ($5).

Fund my expensive taste in watches; get your R-SHOCK here,
or click here to emotionally impoverish me further by non-affiliation link.

Thanks for reading Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ of Ⅻ.

Two weeks, two watches, two reviews, to you. 2024-H2 side-mission: Wristwatch Roulette.

1. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅰ: R-Shock
2. Wristwatch Roulette Ⅱ: Synoke "Robocwatch"

I found a TV on the street. Face down. Cord cut. Bending knees, I squatted down and embraced it in my arms. I took it home. Washed it. Carefully removed its shell, avoiding the lethal high voltage shock. Inspected it for damage before trusting it with mains power.

None visible. I reglanded on a new power cord, and plugged it in. Soft image became sharp. Booming magnetic energy. Life. No way to switch input from static snow. I found a gorgeous original remote control online, but it was incompatible.

I kept it for its beauty and ordered a One For All universal remote. This time it resolved into a fresh bouquet of rich phosphorus colours. Earthy bass sound reproduction from happy speakers.

The tube has thousands of hours yet in it. A unique and unappreciated wonder from a dying breed, given a new lease of life, to be loved for many years to come. Made in the UK by Sanyo. CF21EF55B.

Identical Twins? BOGOF!? #

Just over a year ago, I was dating a gorgeous little keyring polyp. A teeny pink and blue teratoma, now with a bulging back-end thanks to the trio of non-rechargeable LR44 button cells questionable integrity. Yet emblazoned in my fan's memories as the inaugural Shenzhen artifact, immortalised in Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ.

One Ugly Faux-Nugget #

So why do I harken back to Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ's Pocket Multi-Game 99-in-1? What does that have to do with this curiously pleasant to the touch, silky matt oversized clone McDonald's rip-off Chicken Nugget Tetris game machine?

Well, the software and screen is nearly-identical. Sure it's a bigger screen, but all the artifacts are identical. The games are the same, just reordered so Tetris is #1.

Identical games, but being physically much larger, with ergonomically spongy grip and big buttons suits my shovel-like banana hands far more so than the clumsy nail-edge stabbing of the PMG 99-in-1.

What you lose in portability, you gain in playability. Is that a teratoma in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me? Identical twins? More like Schwarzenegger and DeVito's Twins.

Buy your very own hideous but smooth nugget here.

Grimace’s Birthday #

A new Game Boy Color (GBC) game dropping 2023 years after the death of many people's lord and saviour: Jesus Christ. Hard to believe, isn't it? The GBC only had 1998-2001, a paltry innings compared to the original Game Boy's 1989-1998(?) production run. Such is the relentlessly accelerating march of technology.

Remarkable. The graphics and animation are. The overly long intro screens and turgid gameplay are not. Criminal really. Decades of evolution in game design freely available to couch from, and the resulting game is a limp and soggy derivative of the snappy and fresh OlliOlli skateboarding platformer. In fact, it reminds me more of the Commodore Amiga's Soccer Kid; an exciting idea, poorly executed.

Though what's the harm in adding to your personal horde of collectible plastic trash, and contributing further to the death of our liveable earth, as predicted in Asimov's Foundation series of books among other works by authors for thousands of years?

Go on then. Fund then skate to Grimace's counterfeit Birthdayyou sleezy, unthinking capitalist parasite.

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Sojourn Ⅰ of Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2024, I review a choice piece of AliExpress’ hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Sojourn Ⅰ: Akari Paper Lamp
2. Shenzhen Sojourn Ⅱ: Grimace’s Unofficial Birthday (GBC) & Tetris Faux-Nugget

The Future is Now #

In the Virtual Reality game Beat Saber, imaginary light blades emanate from the handles of your baton-like physical controllers. The notes that float directly towards you are represented by alternating coloured cubes.

Along one face of each cube, an arrow points inwards, and only by slicing through each face correctly do you accumulate points and maintain the song meter. Too many consecutive mistakes means game over, while consecutive hits builds up a combination or “combo” multiplier for up to 800% of each note until lost.

Overall song difficulty can be modified by an overall inconsistent difficulty level from Easy to Expert+, and other modifiers such as making the song 25% faster, or ghost notes (the cubes become invisible when they get close to you). And, after a few months of daily 10-30 minute workouts, I can now finish most unfamiliar songs on Expert difficult without much sweat.

However, Sandstorm by Darude is not one of those songs. It has been my Moby Dick, and the tale of completing it is chronicled below.

My Moby Dick # In the Beginning #

Monday, 1st Aprill 2024, 8am

Day 4 of Easter's holidays. Guts immolating in vegetable and fruit oat/soya smoothie. Arms still tight and aching from ripping felt off a garden shed yesterday, and sorer still from the strains of several Saber songs: Daft Punk's Aughtie's Techno delights, and Camellia's alien DNA beam screeching modem warble trap. Just about time to be scorched with fresh-ground, blue-mountain coffee and a superheated shower that always ends in a sadomasochistic freezing finish, with at least 30 seconds on each quarter of my body.

I felt hot and strong and proud. Ready to peel off the VR headset, deglove my sabers, and head through. But something stopped me.

Sandstorm? Could today be the day? Nervously, panting still, I pulled the trigger to select the song. The dance began and my muscles yearned for the initial wave of this map. Gripping twin-headed ropes, four minutes and 400m of anchor to shake and pull. Forty, forty, forty. Continued.

Could it be? #

Midway through now, my body feels differently alive. There’s an unusually long but welcome break in the middle of the song where you can take stock and steel yourself again. My score at this point, normally around 320k is at 350k and rising. At a maximum of 115 points per note/cube times the combination multiplier of 8, I'm soaring higher than before.

When the second half kicks in, so does a multi-sensory explosion of synchronicity with a singular stream of consciousness. A pulsing beat and a choir of voices and noise, meshing with feints and flurries of controlled, rhythmic movement. Here, filing up and down every kinaestheic chain and terminus of my being, generating exothermic waves of heat and energy. A cocoon. An aura. A bubble. Nothing else exists. Continued.

Hate Dissolve Eternally in my Love #

The final, increasingly complex phrases approach.

Melding deeper with the song and the dance. A sense of oneness and connectedness inside; each weave and flick and twist and snap casting itself and telegraphing the next. Mercury rising towards a loss of control. A serene plane within reach; but do not pull towards. Do not to grasp.

Can I let go? Can I trust myself? Without a need to strive or steer?

Then ripping and splitting. Painful. A separation of selves in that moment. A lifetime of waste attached. The miasma of a poison fog, from within me spews out, to choke and smother. Tortured parts. My own protectors threatening to tear me away from this. From myself. From joy. From freedom. From inner togetherness and comfort. From consensus and peace.

Why?
Why would I hurt myself?
Why would I want to hold myself back?
Why…

…Nothing can hurt me.
I fear nothing.
Fear is the mind killer.
And hate disfigures.

So I turned back in with love.
I held the parts that were hurting.

They’re stuck and they’re crying out for help. They need me. Hypervisor. Communicator. Forgiver. Healer.

Tender now. The absence of fear, of dependence, of judgement, of shame, of guilt, of embarrasment.

My hands—all versions—gently soothed and lay over one another. A guiding affection.

And the Sweetest Kiss Forever Lingers #

It ended. Our dance was over.

A swell of relief and joy and pride and accomplishment. The movements left a flame within me. One that can light the way and dispell the ghouls of my imagination through casting light upon shadows, no need for fearful pattern recognition and threat detection. Without need for analysis or regret to stoke the old embers. A warm feeling of contentment with myself.

That synchronicity again. Melancholy. Nostalgia. A link to the past. Love dissolving pain. In that moment a low rumble rose from the deepest, quietest part of me and I uttered the purest, exuberant roar: “Yes!”

A phoenix rising from it's ashes. Old patterns gone. An awakening to new and better patterns. I am complete.

Lights, burning, holy water, turning, in sighs out. Breathe in, sighs out. #

Have you ever tried spraying supplemental magnesium into your skin, only for it to turn to fire on contact. A fire totally unlike Deep Heat.

As your subdermal gremlins desperately inhale through turgid slabs of fat, bisected with strung tendons,clinging to sedentary meat, and layers pale, grey skin. Crying out for nourishment; traces and slivers of precious metals.

The top layer of your skin is putrefying from the radioactive buzz. It soon turns to plasticine. Sucking and scorching deeper; dry now, your muscles sizzle into nothing, like fake, water-injected sausages, leaving a bleached and aching skeletal mass, and limply curled tendon-ends fastening tortured bones.

I am Warning You Now #

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: ONLY CLICK THE BELOW BLURRED IMAGE IF YOU WANT TO SEE A FICTIONAL CHARACTER AFTER TOXIC WASTE EXPOSURE / THOM YORKE WITH A BAD HANGOVER.

There are some people who feel this same sensational progression clawing at their eyeballs…upon seeing artificial lights with different colour temperatures. Competing to illuminate a liminal space, the narcissism of small differences is ignited and given life, repugnant and disharmonious.

Light ‘em up! #

LED technology and affordability has come a long way in the last 10 years. Hell, the last 2 years. Being able to tune the strength and mix of red, green, and blue for £<10 per standard B22 bulb.

Or how about slim, flicker-free squircular panels casting 36W of daylight in a dim room for <£25?

And these two examples are just based on my own Amazon purchases, before even dipping a freshly-washed toe into the murky homogeneous swamp of AliExpress.

I won't let the sun go down on me #

Light and shade. You can get the frequency and temperature just right, but you dare to exhibit a naked bulb? An ugly bulbous bauble, out of sync with every other item in your room, except perhaps the fruit bowl.

Though symmetrical, the B22 silhouette is fugly. A narrow, chafed neck screams against the severity and violence of the arcing bulbous protrusion hanging below. There’s no girthsome muscle or strength upstream of the electric fire. No gravity-simulated gradient, or natural scrotal resemblance. Just a bulky collar that looks as out of place as a fat Windsor knot on a skinny man’s spread-collar.

Samson’s lion sports a lustrous mane. And a mane to a lion is as a shade is to a bulb. Lionesses are of course exempt. Do you have any lioness bulbs? Ha, of course not. So don't go fucking trying any of that shit with me, you hear? Come a cropper counter with me on this? No. Simmer down. We're appreciating light, not metaphorical bullshit.

Rice, rice, baby #

Look yonder to the stoicism of artisanal Japan: Whole lives dedicated to mastery of creating a tiny part of a perfect reality: Specialising in the creation of a single piece, whether that be a samurai sword, a clay pot, or, in Isamu Noguchi’s case: paper lamps.

Shenzhen Sojourn Ⅰ: Orange Isamu Noguchi Akari paper lamp #

Akari paper lamps command an eye-scorching price of £300+. Beautiful sculptures, yes, but at what cost (markup)?

Enter the homage world of replicas to make a more democratically priced Akari lamp, at say a range of £6 to £30 (depending on your colour preference). This is the promise of AliExpress, and much like last year’s Shenzhen Safari, now the mission of Shenzhen Sojourn.

Now, sadly, I don’t have a “genuine” paper lamp for comparison, but this effort, while a bit fiddly to construct, seems robust on the desk, and is equipped with a multi-mode corn cob LED luminaire.

Offering cool, warm, and mixed colour temperatures. A reassuringly well-glanded and thick black cord runs from the base to the plug (requiring an adapter to fit UK sockets).

It gives a lovely warm light, especially diffused through my favourite orange shade.

Quite the steal. So go on,: get your Akari paper lamp now

Sayonara, Wild Heart #

Until next time,
Night night,
Sleep tight,
Don't let thoughts of the coming rapture or bed bugs bite.

Lights out!

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Sojourn Ⅰ of Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2024, I review a choice piece of AliExpress’ hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Sojourn Ⅰ: Akari Paper Lamp
2. Shenzhen Sojourn Ⅱ: Grimace’s Unofficial Birthday (GBC) & Tetris Faux-Nugget

Colour is more important than you could ever imagine # Red is the colour of hatred, anger, power, aggression, adrenaline, worry, jealousy, murder, blood; faux-love, hearts, strawberries, stress, lust; and Mario.

In theory, red is not my colour. My skin is olive undertone. Tall, dark with brooding thoughts, ever cogitating. Autumnal, exuberant and fiercely loyal. I have no raw red. Not mainlining it in any case. My mind is orange and purple.

Orange is… #

Orange is rare in nature. The colour of life in egg yolks, sunsets, and golden hours. Of warmth, love, and waves of slow and low, bass-like energy. A certain type of healing.

Purple is… #

Purple is regal and deep in thought and artistry. Creativity comes from the darkest, richest recesses of my mind. The schisms of neurons. No-clip pinballs gliding trails with phantom traces across regions and hemispheres, making fast connections between senses and memories.

Sometimes, these sparse thoughts and ideas combine beautifully to become nodes of understanding and value. And sometimes I can preempt the course of the pinballs in my head, and steer them to hit droplets within regional clouds. My poor pinballs often get launched into storms, and polarised or lost.

Furthermore, the cleverness of my overlay, my mind-reading the machinery of others, their state of emotion, their motivations, their wavelength; well it can fail completely. Then I am not so clever after all.

Bah, humbug… #

Life is filled with uncertainty. Once I tried to squash it all. I followed a techno-religion with structures and processes. A firm understanding of how the world worked, how I could bring order to chaos, and enlighten others in my wake.

How naïve. To think that humans are robots. Yet, in a way, we are. Slaves to our thoughts, emotions, and the consequences of our actions. By raising the level of our awareness and understanding in ourselves, and in others, we can raise our level of consciousness. And you could argue these are the tools by which we can lift our lives from surviving to thriving: learning new stuff, using it in life, and checking if it works for us or not.

[Redux] Purple is… #

But what if your hormones and emotions become barriers? What if the reins of your focus continually escape your wet, frost-bitten hands? The carriage of learning, of memories, rattles forth through dark woods, infested with demons and treacherous paths, manifested by another part of your own self.

Your beautiful mind at war with the harmful spectral beings and doppelgangers you have projected internally. The theatre in your mind threatening to bale over the next blind summit or fog-obscured cliff.

This is the colour purple. Not orange. Not green. Not yellow. Not red.

Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ: Non-tendo iPhone 12 mini Phone Case #

The material realm lacks proof of such un-graspable horrors. It makes up for it forty-fold, globally and locally, with tangible ones instead.

One of which, I’m holding onto right now. This Non-Nintendo or Non-tendo iPhone 12 mini phone case.

How else can I do a better job of torturing and kill my iPhone battery, than enrobing it in the choking red embrace of another wedge of paper, questionably-soldered batteries, and fish-scented plastic?

The Non-tendo Good? #

It claims to be “HD screen proof”, “explosion proof”, “smudge proof”.

The Non-tendo also has a Micro-USB charging port (and tiny cable), and on/off + reset buttons, in addition to the typical Game Boy layout.

The screen is bright and clear, with sharp pixels. The D-pad is mushy but responsive, as are the face buttons.

There are 168 games, with a few non-licensed curiosities you could return to, such as Billiard and Long Jump.

The Non-tendo Bad? The Non-tendo Ugly? #

The chunky chiptune intro/language screen has a jarring beginning through grating speakers, and on power-on or reset initiates at medium-volume. You have to click through high then off each time.

Oh, and the volume toggle is where the start button usually is (and the Start button is where the select button usually is).

The 168 games are mostly terrible.

Also, there’s no 3.5mm jack. LOL.

Buy-tendo? #

I can’t find the exact Non-tendo I have, though this may turn up identical? Buy your very own > iPhone Non-tendo case < here.

Let’s take a trip inside… #

Here are the guts. Nice and easy to access after pulling off the paper and spider-glue.

Shenzhen Safari: Sad Ending #

Happy rest of your 2023, and; if I don’t see you again:
Enjoy the rest of your pathetic life.

Shenzhen Safari: Happy Ending #

For the rest of you, I’ve got some more tricks and treats in store.
See you in 2024!

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ of Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2023, I reviewed a choice piece of AliExpress’ gaming hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ: Pocket Multi Game (PMG) 99 in 1
2. Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ: NES 143 in 1 Cart
3. Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ: Data Frog SF2000
4. Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ: Wireless PS2 Controller (2.4Ghz | Translucent)
5. Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ: 3D Neon Sign Lamp Headphone Stand
6. Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ: Non-tendo 168-in-1 iPhone 12 mini Phone Case

Are you Toxic, Phalli? #

Mushrooms…A wonder of nature; neither animal, nor plant?
Or a unified alien life-form, angelic and demonic?
With one mis-identification leading to internal organ failure.
Permanent cancellation. Id est: Death.

Mercifully, real-life doesn’t always tend to such terminal extremities, all the time. (Contrary to a modicum of exposure to any online media.) It is the pollution of our being through attending to the worries and voices of sensational others that has brought us here.

Ending Bell Curve #

The phenotypical bell-curve is a knife-edge, and the middle is no smooth ride. It is a micron-wide, teflon-coated cliff. Claws and skin-friction cannot save us. Kneaded and painted into ugly balls of starry dust, we fall onto the edge. Void of agency, flayed of free will, pooling at the bottom of a freezing psychological cesspit.

What is the cure for being cooked alive in the bile of a billion vitriolic bots? #

Fashion is mutation. An ongoing experiment, combining, testing, and playing with prior knowledge, in the hope of finding some pleasing novelty. A short-lived means of expression of self. We wear masks and costumes with varying degrees of conscious effort. Sometimes thoughtlessly applying other's sensibilities. Sometimes taking ownership of how we project and impress ourselves into the hierarchy of friends and enemies, and indeterminable others.

Textual Tension #

Much like the clothes we wear, and the constructed personality we share (with others), the technology enabling global human consciousness is subject to the whims of fashion.

My own interest and knowledge of this dominating matrix casts back to 1993. With a magical spell, and binary screeching banshee modem, you could explore text-based communication with strangers.

Loosely topic-based chat-rooms, like bars, populated with regulars and curious visitors. Forming new cultures with new etiquette and manners, or the absence thereof.

Ethereal, and anonymous play #

Users coined there own "handles" (names hinting at their assumed identity). One could fathom multiple names and identities, so when another asked "A/S/L?", we could respond with whatever age, sex, and location we were actively inhabiting.

For me this form of play was gradually phased out by my emerging adolescence and a desire for the sensory and egoic experiences only available in the highest plane: basic received reality.

Earth(l)ing: Basic Received Reality #

My eyes disconnected from the internet, and fixated on the fairer sex and fellowships. At times, a hybrid existence through late-night MSN Messenger sessions with multiple peers: 1-to-1 exchanges. Building bonds in the first open window, marinating an attraction in another, and clumsily groping in a third.

Having the good fortune, perhaps, to have grown-up in a time where human mycelium networks were hyper-local, with occasional voyages of far-flung discovery. Teenage years transitioned from landline telephones, to 160 character green matrix mobile phone text messages and private calls. From ethereal chat-rooms to a hotmail.com anchored MSN-identity.

Humanity can cooperate at a massive scale. But it is yet early days of mutating mindsets and toolsets for the scale we are experiencing now, let alone the exponential acceleration of technology away from human identity and capability.

The Dimmest and Darkest Net Age #

Some may find it hard to compartmentalise the extreme, spiky feelings of nihilism and Epicureanism at play here. The possibility that I and my generation—a plague of locusts—have eaten up the crop of the Golden Wonder Age, leaving barren fields. I do not.

The dawning Dark Technological Age is barely resistible. How many barbs and leeches cut and suckle at you now? Short bursts of hormones, expertly realised by human-constructed algorithms, solely-aimed at harvesting eyeballs, to accumulate and reinforce imaginary values and fashionable ethics, serving faceless imagined monsters. Not humankind. Not human progress. Not any human individual. Not any noble goal. But another matrix we meekly allow to drain our imagination and creativity in exchange for a pittance of easy pleasure, drip-fed.

Sleeper Awaken #

I ask again.
How much do you attend to the voices of others?
And what is the cure for being cooked alive in the bile of a billion robot slaves?

Throw away your sword. It has as much power as the tiniest mote of dust against the weakest summer breeze or curdled instant coffee breath admonishment. Salvation is through a multi-layered shield that only you can smith, in time.

A Prototype Mycelic/Onion Shield, aka Self-help Halitosis # 1. Agency, Vision, Purposeful Movement (Batteries not Included) #

If we accept that meaning is not included in life, then we must make our own.
Motivate us to do anything. External force? Internal fire.
Minute to month to millennia, success can snowball, break, and snowball again.

2. Information Need and Load #

How much new data do you actually need to move now?
Can you organise and manage tiny personal goals among the miasma of societal pressure, without succumbing to victim-hood in the bile bathtub?

Not always. You're human, not perfect.

Recognising that you've put yourself in the bathtub, and you might need to exercise mental and physical muscles to get back out is the first step.

3. Critical Reflection, Now #

Okay, you're out the tub and making progress.
Here's a gold star.
Get back in the tub.
No. You gullible fool. Get on with it. Be useful to yourself, and if you've built the capacity and have it to spare, be useful to others.

Stay away from the wallowing tub, and make it to the mirror. Look your now-self in the eye and course-correct the path your past-self earnestly made for your future-self. Now get moving again.

4. Get the Fake Offline & Get the Hello Outside #

You must see your brain is jacked-in and amped-up to experience the micro-fluctuations in the thousand flattening shades of online beige? You must.

Yes, you must. Achieve a healthy balance of nature and neture. That is almost entirely nature, with breath-holding sojourns into the cloying, murky filth that is our sad, current human matrix.

Being outside. Jostling your crystallised, jellified carcass into locomotion should recharge your shield and the lume in your subtly handsome quartz analogue wristwatch (if you have one).

Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ: Personalised Headphone Stand #

When I'm outside, I'm outside.
But when I'm inside, I'm inside my inside my inside my inside.

I lift high my trusty old, cushioned Logitech G Pro X Gaming-headset, stretch wide the supple cups to straddle my massive cranium, and immerse myself in a symphonic choir of strutting saw waves, and synthetic in utero basal…warmth.

What better resting temple for this embracing band of pacification, and safe reflection, a halo in metaphor, than a beacon, emblazoned with my brand, heralding my name?

My Halo Slips #

Thus my halo slumbers upon this imperfect shrine.
The font was not of my choosing.
The plastic monolith flares at the base, yet the base stone's not width-matched.
Looking more like a rocket, or Christmas tree, I'll retroactively claim this to be playful sprezzatura.

USB, see? #

Micro-USB inserted, touching the power base (avoiding fingerprints to the clear plastic) brings the totem to life, cycling slowly between rainbow colours, or tapping to fix on a particular red, green, strong blue, white, yellow, pale blue, or pink.

Want one? #

You can email me before 31 December 2023 for the chance to win my spare iainplays heaphone rest , or order your own custom one from here: 3D Neon Sign Lamp Headphone Stand With Wood Base

Now…Play safe, play happy, and GTFO.

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ of Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2023, I reviewed a choice piece of AliExpress’ gaming hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ: Pocket Multi Game (PMG) 99 in 1
2. Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ: NES 143 in 1 Cart
3. Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ: Data Frog SF2000
4. Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ: Wireless PS2 Controller (2.4Ghz | Translucent)
5. Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ: 3D Neon Sign Lamp Headphone Stand
6. Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ: Non-tendo 168-in-1 iPhone 12 mini Phone Case

Sir, your desire is translucent #

What the hell happened to us? Do you have any idea how beautiful nineties electronics were? In an era a decade prior to the demise of the vastly superior CRT TV, companies were experimenting with materials, design, and aesthetics. A peekaboo trend of translucent hardware peaked at the same time as British lad mags.

The Clear Craze inspired Nintendo’s Game Boy and N64 line, with “Atomic Purple”, “Watermelon Red”, “Sun Orange”, “Jungle Green”. Not to mention my darling Apple iBook G3 Tangerine.

Then the PlayStation 2 landed. An obsidian black boxy monolith, evoking the opposite of fun. No more gonzo journalism, bat shit crazy curves, and see-through peekaboo.

This was the dawn of a new era. Of seriousness. Striving for photorealism in textures, lighting technology, and casting enough polygons to realise the cancelled lad mags advertised promise: A simulacrum of nature’s finest softer protrusions.

Why then, did Sony’s onyxian box fail to embrace my attention?

Perfect Dark #

Perhaps it coincided with my own coming of age. With the phenomenal sales of FHM, Nuts, and Loaded, a platter of PlayStation [1] magazines followed suit. Thirteen year old me lapped them up.

Unabashedly, I still have a Final Fantasy Ⅷ guide book called “Miss Bea’s Final Fantasies”.

It was…well-written, and one of the few pieces of gaming ephemera I’ve sentimentally held on to for more than twenty years (alongside the more respectable Sim City 2000 and Sim Tower instruction manuals).

Gulp...Press any button to get cancelled #

Now…now…don’t judge a book by it’s cover; overleaf lies a foreword:

Blame the Internet for Everything #

Glazing over the lewd imagery was a heaving chest of treasure. We crawled and evolved through a sketchy internet connection era. We’re talking 5 Kilobytes per second on a good day in the year 2000AD, versus the current UK average of 6,250 Kilobytes per second.

Having a physical book of tips, tricks, cheats, and selective walkthroughs, covering a game’s secret bits was precious. Perusable at one’s leisure. No need to tie-up the residence’s landline, endure multiple collection attempts of screeching binary pulses.

Truly, Miss Bea’s Final Fantasies was a sacred tome. Even now, as I carefully part each yellowed sheave of parchment, I am in awe of the concisely edited and useful guidance, enrobed in a bizarrely anti-anachronistic authorial avatar.

Hence my saving it from the great fire of Alexandria boring descent into adulthood, and preserving it beyond the limit-breaking point of whatever the hell this grim age in world culture be anointed a decade—or modern time-slice equivalent— from now .

Digital Rights Management or Die Reclining Meekly (DRM) #

My gaming dearth followed shortly after Final Fantasy Ⅷ, brooking the PS2 era, through to building a gaming PC in 2005, to be stung once more by internet issues.

By then, I was all grown-up (Ha!), the proud occupant of a one-bed city flat. I bought Half-Life 2 from Virgin Megastores and took it home. On inserting the disc, it demanded I install a piece of software called Steam, before I could play the game?

Okay, not the first time a piece of software has been bundled with needless surprise leeches and eels to suckle upon my life-force. I reluctantly proceeded.

Then it said it wouldn’t let me play the fully-installed game until I connected my computer to the internet (an event several weeks in the future).

Imagine my 2005 vexed scream of angst and frustration. Having paid big bucks for a disc (and perhaps a T-shirt) in a lovely big carboard box, and sitting down, ready to slide in and play for countless hours; to then be slapped across the face, spat at, shat upon, and laughed at instead.

Locked out, downtrodden and bleak, already yearning for the destruction of this golden path.

It’ll be 2025 soon. What’s new?

Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ #

Wireless and translucent in 2023?

Get a filthy, cheap PS2. Then get some dirt-cheap game discs. With a source of electricity, you could live from a cave with no internet and still experience a lifetime of joy from the immense and often experimental library of PS2 games; and don’t forget, it plays PS1 game too!

Now, what’s the perfect gift for a friend or loved one who has proclaimed to all their followers, peeps, and creeps that they are taking a “digital sabbatical” (taking a break from ingesting the pipeline of shit that is social media and internet use in general).

This is! A wireless PS2 Controller (2.4Ghz | Translucent), straight from AliExpress. If the link isn’t intercepted by your ad-blocker, you can buy it here: (Wireless PS2 Controller AliExpress affiliate link).

And it even passes the Hadouken test!
What are you waiting for?
STOP SCROLLING UP! SCROLL DOWN!

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ of Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2023, I reviewed a choice piece of AliExpress’ gaming hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ: Pocket Multi Game (PMG) 99 in 1
2. Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ: NES 143 in 1 Cart
3. Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ: Data Frog SF2000
4. Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ: Wireless PS2 Controller (2.4Ghz | Translucent)
5. Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ: 3D Neon Sign Lamp Headphone Stand
6. Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ: Non-tendo 168-in-1 iPhone 12 mini Phone Case

Zero Tolerance
(Mega Drive, 1994) #

◑ Chilling strings
◓ Not chilled
◑ Highly-strung
◓ Ready to snap

A nauseous thrum circles the melody, predating it.
Stalking these, the bowels of hell stir and bristle.
Alarm bells ring; too late.

Dum-dee-dee-dee-dee-dum-dum #

☀ Regurgitating a horrific atmosphere, the dark, slick, demo-scene quality lights and parallax scrolling shafts of light blind are paralyze onlookers.
☯ It is the perfect introduction. And it is for a little-known DOOM clone that somehow was given life in 1994 on the Sega Mega Drive. Spiting all constraints, especially the twee little Yamaha sound chip that rarely sang a good tune (ECCO: The Dolphin, Streets of Rage, and this are the only stand-outs for me).

Given Flesh #

☢ So Feast and gorge; Rip and tear;
your eyes and ears must beware. ☢

Bouncy Castle Ocean: The Game (Twine, 2023) #

“A rambunctiously silly 5–10 minutes of fun!”
—an experienced Text Adventurer.

Play Bouncy Castle Ocean over at itch.io. or ☟ play it full-screen right here. #

• Scroll down to the bottom-right of the game’s frame.
• Click the expand button you find there
• (It looks like four arrows).
• Press ‘Escape’ key to exit full-screen mode.

Frankly, Data Frog #

Well? Do you really want to buy a chuntering, spluttering, late ’90s SNES Pentium II era emulation experience, in stick form, that plugs directly into your TV and comes with two wireless controllers that feel nice but are about as surgically precise as cutting a Mars bar with brittle plastic cutlery while wearing winter gloves, scarves and coats—of many colours—, and a wooly hat; inside; surrounded by sugar-addled peers cheering you on?!

Of course you do…for fifteen bangers.
It’s not like they’re asking for, say, forty quid(see SSⅡ).
You can buy it here.

What! No-Intro? #

Quentin Tarantino liked to chop up his movies in the ’90s, and shuffle the scenes so they weren’t in chronological order. We all thought it was very clever, and I’ve just done that here now. Impressed?

Well, neither was I when I slipped into my dirty white Gi and tried to summon a fireball from my palms, solely with willpower and chi.

Whereas the Street Fighter 2 “Hadouken!” (fireball) requires only an adroit rolling of the left thumb across the direction-pad arrows: from down, to down-towards, then towards…and punch.

That is, unless you’re using the Data Frog SF2000.

Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ: Data Frog SF2000 #

You see, the controller looks like fantastic plastic. It feels luxurious in surface texture, grip, and temperature. The size is just right for me, with large face buttons, satisfyingly skeletal click-click shoulders, and ergonomic angles all round.

Of course, this all falls apart when you attempt to use it for its intended purpose: to play games with.

I submit the following Hadouken Attempts evidence, to you, dear reader:

Exhibit A - Data Frog SF2000 Street Fighter 2 Hadouken Attempts # Exhibit B - Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNEZ mini) Street Fighter 2 Hadouken Attempts #

A fair comparison? Yes, but for the price.
The SNEZ mini was ~£80 on release in 2017.
It is now discontinued and scalpers are asking £250–450 for it.

The Data Frog SF2000 is fifteen bangers, delivered (maybe).
See for yourself.

And if you rule out action games and action RPGs, there is still a wealth of turn-based games where the abysmally clumsy eight-direction detection doesn’t immediately piss you off.

Frog Real? #

Oh, who am I kidding. It’s hard to see past the intermittent dropping of diagonals. Even the FastROM hack of Sid Meier’s Civilization is crushed by the unresponsive direction pad.

In despair, I even opened up a controller. See:

Snug shoulder buttons, passable face buttons, and a flat, mushy D. Perhaps a mod-worthy mini-project? Certainly using card and Blu Tak shims to add pressure behind the ball mount was ineffective. But it felt good, dammit!

Compromise / Conclusion #

Okay, real talk. I’ve mentioned this whole package is £15 a few times now. It comes with a whole bunch of games on a little MicroSD card, and you can even add your own to the “Download” playlist.

• It auto-switches between PAL and NTSC.
• It has save-states and aspect ratio settings.
• It produces a fairly clean picture, and the audio can be a bit wonky.

But here’s the thing. Janky sometimes equals charming. And the Data Frog SF2000 exudes this, evoking nostalgia in it’s execution and without intention. I will enjoy it for years to come, as a little plug and play toy.

If only the d-pad worked well, I’d give it all my love AND five stars.

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ of Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2023, I reviewed a choice piece of AliExpress’ gaming hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ: Pocket Multi Game (PMG) 99 in 1
2. Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ: NES 143 in 1 Cart
3. Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ: Data Frog SF2000
4. Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ: Wireless PS2 Controller (2.4Ghz | Translucent)
5. Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ: 3D Neon Sign Lamp Headphone Stand
6. Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ: Non-tendo 168-in-1 iPhone 12 mini Phone Case

Peek at Peak, ah… #

“On this day 22 years ago, Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance console, and Nintendo’s web design was so great back then.”
― @Web Design Museum Tweet from 3:55pm Jun 11, 2023.

This is it. The peak of web-design is in this image:

You can even click here to visit the June 2001 Nintendo homepage, served by Internet Archive (archive.org) via their wonderful Wayback Machine (web.archive.org).

June 2001 Versus June 2023. #

Now compare 2001’s fun, information-rich, dense, fluffy, brioche of a mind-map (with Mario in action, explaining each section of the main navbar) to 2023’s bland monstrosity; churned out by machines and committees 22 years later: A Zelda ad, dull, boring text haunting a top navbar. Every single part of the site de-emphasised to funnel you into buying Zelda. Nothing else. Go buy Zelda. 10/10. I agree. Zelda is 10/10, but your website is 0/10 fun to explore and play with now.

Peak Discussion #

Mike: This design reminds me of Console, which shares the same fun spirit.

Iain: How far we’ve fallen since.

Iain: Peak web-design must’ve been around then.

Iain: Artists still experimenting and more focus on UI and aesthetics than A/B testing, workflows, and sales pipelines.

Mike: We’re the artists now, and we’re still experimenting within constraints we set ourselves to encourage creativity.

Mike: We’re among the last of a dying breed: a small cohort who, through circumstance and experience, truly understand and love the web as both a platform and a playground. We lived through its evolution, experimented and learned, and carried forward what we’d learned.

Flash! Wah-oh! #

The web’s creative symbiote was a janky behemoth of a program called Flash. Made by a company called Macromedia (later bought by Adobe, another behemoth suite-maker). It was murdered by no less of a man than Steve Jobs, who signed its death warrant via an open letter called Thoughts on Flash.

Now, Nintendo’s 2001 site didn’t use Flash at its core, but there were some downloadable games you could play with another Macromedia app: Shockwave Player. Another decrepit and defunct technology. Such a massive slice of world culture, inaccessible through obsolescence.

Thankfully, there’s another way to experience Flash animations and games. A heroic non-profit project called BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint preserves these treasures for us to watch and play today.

Games. Cheaper by the Half-Dozen #

Forty pounds, Forty dollars; Forty years ago,
Forty pounds, Forty dollars; Thirty years ago,
Forty pounds, Forty dollars; Twenty years ago,
Forty pounds, Forty dollars; Ten years ago,

Forty pounds.

Forty dollars;

Now.

                                                        Now.

                            Now.

              Now.

Hold your horses there, pilgrim. Disarm and dismiss your “well, actually”, your “in my experience”, your pathethetic, snivelling, nasal whine. Because the above poem about game prices isn’t factual. It isn’t fact-checked. It is in fact, an anecdote. A commentary. A feeling. That price has deflated. What effect has this dilution had? Just you strap in. Let’s just enjoy some spike-free time together here. No tricks. I promise. Honest. Just treats.

Supply and Supply and Supply and Supple and Subverted #

Video games came on cassette tapes, floppy disks, hard disks, shiny discs, and for a good chunk of the ’80s and ’90s, monolithic, gravestone ratio cartridges. These physical yearns, with binary ones and zeroes (bits) chiselled or magnetically polarised into place, would slot firmly into the earth of the machine.

Gorgeous, lying art, enrobing a creamy grey Commodore 64 cassette tape, for example. Printed pink or blue, entombed in clear plastic. A colourful, titled spine. Up front, a hand-painted artist’s impression. An enticing blurb with minute screenshots on the rear. A glorified vision from a better world; a superior version of the game, one generation newer at least.

Why is it so pricey? #

A complete package in 1993, and by that I mean wood, stone, plastic, and bone, was only £3–5 (£6–10 in 2023 money). Cartridge games though, were much dearer. Round about, a-ha, oh, I’d say, a-ha-ha, forty quid. Ahem…

This meant, to enjoy the latest SEGA or Nintendo title, you had to either be rich, have a birthday/Christmas on the way, or save up from your child labour work, in my case, a short-lived career as a paperboy for £13 a week (until my bike was stolen, and I got into washing dishes at a hotel instead.)

Games were a rare treasure indeed then. And like it or lump it, if you got a rotten pile of garbage and faeces, you would still explore it all inside-out, forensically rooting around all it’s ugly design failures, bugs, warts, terrible graphics, abysmal gameplay, laggy, dropped inputs and ear-bleedingly discortant sound-effects and music.

Because, even as a noxious pile of toxic waste, lethal rust and metals, it had great value. It was forty pounds for god’s sake. Suffer the monophonic blocks of stimulation, however jagged, samey, painful, and repetitive. The alternative was nature. Was chaos. Was lack of structure. Lack of control. Lack of certainty. Lack of rules. Lack of constraints and limitations. Unbearable. And it had great value. It was forty pounds.

As you got to know your forty pound game like the backs of your unwashed hands, something strange would happen. You would grow an attachment to it. And your interactions with it would be distorted. Somewhere between the projected reality and your processing of reality, your perception would be re-folded.

The broken melodies and predictable movements would shift from repellant to attractive. You, yourself were being re-programmed, by the game. The forty…pound…game.

Warty Forty #

Consider, not-your-toddler-quality art was sold for the same price as the finest masterpieces, worked on by a team of creative geniuses. Forty pounds, please.

And yes, physical piracy plagued all formats, as it does today. But this all changed with the rise of the internet. Even earlier than 1999, games old and new could be copied and captured in minutes.

One could sneak around virtual museums and shops, dodging AOL chatroom creeps: “A/S/L? A/S/L?”, pop-up adverts, invisible viruses, trojan horses, and worse, to magically duplicate and run off with a perfect duplicate of a game, to then imperfectly emulate through a layer of software, hacks, and latency.

Anything TESticle, NESticle better #

Nineties Ninties emulation bore fruit in 1997. NESticle was a popular (and completely free, paperboy) NES emulator, which featured a severed hand’s pointing index finger as a mouse cursor. It’s name came from the smashing together of testicles with Nintendo Entertainment System. A witty portmanteau. Bloodlust Software also developed a Mega Drive / Genesis emulator named Genecyst, and many other outrageously titled games. Software with personality and quirks. Human software. Better times…

Physical, Digital, Forty Pounds, Free #

“When something is free, how much value can it really have?
When something is forty pounds, how little value can it really have?”
—Iain Plays, 2023

Spoiled for choice.
Spoiled by choice.
Paralysed by selection [choice].

So what if instead of the infinite jest, your chest of games only had one-hundred, and three, and forty?

143 games. Well, forty years ago, that would be a giant collection. More than a lifetime of enjoyment. Today, with our smoother and faster brains, that’s at least an afternoon’s delight.

A curation of welcome and obvious heavy-weights, interspersed with diamonds in the rough and quiet, curious fancies. Well, such an artefact exists and for around £10, you can purchase an AliExpress 143 NES games in 1 cartridge. (Note: not an affiliate link.)

Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ: NES 143 in 1 #

The NES is a fickle creature with a 72-pin connector. Its mating with a cartridge is so fragile and so prone to failure, that contacts must be cleaned regularly. Dust cannot within a mile of it. The amount of friction, the position, the alignment, the weather, cosmic rays, and levels of torpor
must all be perfectly attuned, or else; tough. No happy beginning—or ending— for you.

You may find also that you have to remove and boil the connector for forty minutes. Or order a new one. Or do both. And/Or cut the fourth leg of a specific processing chip underneath the belly of the machine.

But once you’re in, you can enjoy such sweet meats and rare treats as Sweet Home, which I would never have known of or cared about, had I not received for review The 143 in 1 Best Video Games of All Time NES Cartridge.

Really, prior to this, I thought the NES was just another shitty 8-bit pretender. A pale imitation of the arcades. How wrong I was. Robbed of the opportunity due to my birth-year and birthright, deceived by emulation, I am elated to now bask in the variety and richness of the games from this fine console. It really does make my Sega Master System look like crap. (I think. I’ll have to procure one again, since I carelessly donated mine during the PlayStation era. a story for anothe time.)

So, O Hearken Ye, and see for yourself. This fine example is the 1989 precursor to Resident Evil, Sweet Home, being played via RF connection to a Panasonic TX-G10 (10” CRT). Further, under, the full listing of this exquisite mausoleum. I’ll leave it there. Until we meet again.

The 143 in 1 Best Video Games of All Time NES Cartridge Game List #

    
        Title ID
        Title Name
    
    
        1
        Adventure Island 1
    
    
        2
        Adventure Island 2
    
    
        3
        Adventure Island 3
    
    
        4
        Adventure Island 4
    
    
        5
        Adventures of Lolo
    
    
        6
        Adventures of Lolo 2
    
    
        7
        Astyanax
    
    
        8
        Balloon Fight
    
    
        9
        Baseball Stars
    
    
        10
        Batman
    
    
        11
        Batman Returns
    
    
        12
        Bionic Commando
    
    
        13
        Blades of Steel
    
    
        14
        Blaster Master
    
    
        15
        Bomberman 1
    
    
        16
        Bomberman 2
    
    
        17
        Bubble Bobble
    
    
        18
        Bubble Bobble 2
    
    
        19
        Castlevania 1
    
    
        20
        Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest
    
    
        21
        Chip n Dale 2
    
    
        22
        Clu Clu Land
    
    
        23
        Contra
    
    
        24
        Contra Force
    
    
        25
        Super Contra
    
    
        26
        Crystalis
    
    
        27
        Deja vu
    
    
        28
        Devil World
    
    
        29
        Donkey Kong
    
    
        30
        Donkey Kong Jr
    
    
        31
        Double Dragon 1
    
    
        32
        Double Dragon 2
    
    
        33
        Double Dragon 3
    
    
        34
        Double Dragon 4
    
    
        35
        Dr Mario
    
    
        36
        Ducktales 1
    
    
        37
        Ducktales 2
    
    
        38
        Earthbound
    
    
        39
        Excitebike
    
    
        40
        Faxanadu
    
    
        41
        Final Fantasy 1
    
    
        42
        Final Fantasy 2
    
    
        43
        Final Fantasy 3
    
    
        44
        Flintstones 1
    
    
        45
        Flintstones 2
    
    
        46
        Friday the 13th
    
    
        47
        Galaga
    
    
        48
        Gargoyles Quest 2
    
    
        49
        Ghost n Goblins
    
    
        50
        Goonies 1
    
    
        51
        Goonies 2
    
    
        52
        Gradius
    
    
        53
        Guardian Legend, The
    
    
        54
        Ice Climber
    
    
        55
        Ice Hockey
    
    
        56
        Ikari 1
    
    
        57
        Ikari 2
    
    
        58
        Ikari 3
    
    
        59
        Jackal
    
    
        60
        Kickle Cubicle
    
    
        61
        Kid Icarus
    
    
        62
        Kings of the Beach
    
    
        63
        Kirby’s Adventure
    
    
        64
        Kung Fu
    
    
        65
        Legendary Wings
    
    
        66
        Life Force
    
    
        67
        Little Nemo: The Dream Master
    
    
        68
        Little Samson
    
    
        69
        Lode Runner
    
    
        70
        Magician
    
    
        71
        Maniac Mansion
    
    
        72
        Mega Man 1
    
    
        73
        Mega Man 2
    
    
        74
        Mega Man 3
    
    
        75
        Mega Man 4
    
    
        76
        Mega Man 5
    
    
        77
        Mega Man 6
    
    
        78
        Metal Gear
    
    
        79
        Metal Storm
    
    
        80
        Metroid
    
    
        81
        Mickey Mousecapade
    
    
        82
        Might and Magic
    
    
        83
        Mighty Final Fight
    
    
        84
        Millipede
    
    
        85
        Moon Crystal
    
    
        86
        Ninja Gaiden 1
    
    
        87
        Ninja Gaiden 2
    
    
        88
        Ninja Gaiden 3
    
    
        89
        Over Horizon
    
    
        90
        Pac-Man
    
    
        91
        Paperboy
    
    
        92
        Parodius
    
    
        93
        Power Blade 1
    
    
        94
        Power Blade 2
    
    
        95
        Rad Racer
    
    
        96
        Rainbow Islands
    
    
        97
        Rampage
    
    
        98
        Ring King
    
    
        99
        River City Ransom
    
    
        100
        Rush n Attack
    
    
        101
        Rygar
    
    
        102
        Samurai Pizza Cats
    
    
        103
        Sansara Naga
    
    
        104
        Section-Z
    
    
        105
        Shadowgate
    
    
        106
        Silver Surfer
    
    
        107
        Skate or Die
    
    
        108
        Smash T.V.
    
    
        109
        Spider-Man
    
    
        110
        Spy Hunter
    
    
        111
        Super Spy Hunter
    
    
        112
        Star Wars
    
    
        113
        Star Wars Empire Strikes Back
    
    
        114
        Startropics 1
    
    
        115
        Startropics 2
    
    
        116
        Stinger
    
    
        117
        Mario Bros.
    
    
        118
        Super Mario Bros. 1
    
    
        119
        Super Mario Bros. 2
    
    
        120
        Super Mario Bros. 3
    
    
        121
        Sweet Home
    
    
        122
        Tecmo Super Bowl
    
    
        123
        Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 (Japanese Version)
    
    
        124
        Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game
    
    
        125
        Turtles 3: The Manhattan Project
    
    
        126
        Turtles Tournament Fighters
    
    
        127
        Terminator 1
    
    
        128
        Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    
    
        129
        Tetris 1
    
    
        130
        Tetris 2
    
    
        131
        Time Diver Eon Man
    
    
        132
        Tiny Toon Adventures 1
    
    
        133
        Tiny Toon Adventures 2
    
    
        134
        Totally Rad
    
    
        135
        Uninvited
    
    
        136
        Vice Project Doom
    
    
        137
        Willow
    
    
        138
        Willy & Right’s Rockboard
    
    
        139
        Zanac
    
    
        140
        Zelda, The Legend of
    
    
        141
        Zelda 2
    
    
        142
        Zen Intergalactic Ninja
    
    
        143
        Zombie Nation
    

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2023, I reviewed a choice piece of AliExpress’ gaming hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ: Pocket Multi Game (PMG) 99 in 1
2. Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ: NES 143 in 1 Cart
3. Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ: Data Frog SF2000
4. Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ: Wireless PS2 Controller (2.4Ghz | Translucent)
5. Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ: 3D Neon Sign Lamp Headphone Stand
6. Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ: Non-tendo 168-in-1 iPhone 12 mini Phone Case

The Best Game Ever, and Jesus #

“The best camera is the one you have with you!”
― Jay Maisel, b. 1931 / Chase Jarvis b. 1971

So they say; and since 2008’s 2MP iPhone 3G, I have traded quality for convenience in this fashion; shedding my hip-holstered 6MP Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01, in favour of an inferior—but ever-present—pocketable fruit.

No, that’s not entirely true.
I flirted with the idea prior to that.
In 2005, I had another…

…camera phone: a VGA (0.3MP) Sony Ericsson K700i.
This phone captured surprisingly good photos in decent light, but paled in comparison to my 3MP Fuji FinePix A303.

A German Choir? #

This Fuji was my first ever digital camera, and I now recall a German choir contacting me to use one of my photos for their album art.
Here it is:

Two Sets of Steps on a Beach #

Loss is Portable #

Sadly that first Fuji o’ mine was lost during a night out, around Halloween 2005~6.

I went through at least three more phones (Motorola MPx220, Nokia N95, HTC Hermes) prior to my first iPhone. The aforementioned Lumix prevailed, even occupying a neighbouring hip-holster to my HTC Hermes; with its sliding QWERTY keyboard, stylus, and Microsoft Windows Mobile OS! I was cos-playing an accountant in their fifties hard, while still in my early twenties.

When I became a man, I set aside the Lumix (but retained my costume), and embraced the forbidden fruit; leaving my childish inverse-snob past-self likely aghast.

With peers mocking and scourging, unabashed, I carved my own unique [with millions of others] path, through a golden age of Apple (Snow Leopard through iOS 6). Year-on-year the excitement of an upgraded camera phone experience kept me rapt. Gleefully, waiting in line for the iPhone 4, 4s, 5, 5s, 6 Plus, 6S Plus.

Right on the Dulling Edge #

When I became a man again, I set aside childish incremental upgrades and revelled in having a long-lasting relationship with a phone. The cutting edge, or curve, depending on Apple’s taste du année, dulled; like stale mould with an acrid core in my mouth.

Holding on
tightly to sensations
long-gone. Scratching. Scrambling.
Nails splintered into shards, to keep clear,
this mine of nostalgia; weeping
warmth, and love, and joy,
retreating, as I
desperately brace the tunnel for my next version of adulthood. A long-held iPhone-ion #

2015 all the way through to 2021 the iPhone 6S Plus was a faithful familiar, tens of thousands of photos, and videos captured, chronicling life, and art, and all between. My 2013 Fujifilm X100S lay neglected, excepting special occasions and flights of fancy.

Yes, I then upgraded to a second-hand scratched-up iPhone SE 2020, (an irresistible eBay bargain), and in 2022 a friend generously gifted me their iPhone 12 mini, which I use with the Halide app when I’m taking “proper” photos nowadays. I aim to keep this phone for at least five more years, barring anything other than monumental updates to Apple’s hardware.

Pudding = Proof #

Having now proven beyond any reasonable doubt;
that the best camera is the one you have with you,
I will now say this:

“The greatest game is the one you have with you.”
—Iain Plays, 2023

Shenzhen Safari #

And so, allow me to introduce you to this hopeful hexad;
a series of six reviews.

Every two months throughout 2023, I’ll be reviewing a choice piece of AliExpress’ hand-held gaming hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles. Here, let us begin…

Pocket Multi Game (PMG) 99 in 1! #

Welcome to Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ of Ⅵ.

We begin with this tiny treat and its titanic name, the:
Mini Handheld Game Player Retro Game Console

NOTE: Henceforth, Mini Handheld Game Player Retro Game Console will be referred to as “Pocket Multi Game” “PMG”.

As you can see, batteries are included, safely caged under a translucent aquamarine shell and short Phillips-head screw.

The speaker-quality is reminiscent of the ’80s and early ’90s PC beepers, cheerily chirping out the same ditty across boot sequences and deaths alike.

Having thoroughly tested each of the 99 included games, I’ll summarise for you, impatient reader, the key games included. But first, speaking of keys, did you notice this 99 in 1 game device is attached to a gunmetal grey keyring? And attached to that is a fetching fuchsia cat bell? Which is seemingly a perfect colour match with Wario’s nose?

Knows Operation #

The twelve teensy face buttons do the following.

D-PAD LEFT:     increases game level (1–10)

D-PAD RIGHT:    increases game speed (1–10)

D-PAD UP/DOWN:  changes the big number displayed (1–99)
                but has no effect?

MUSIC:          silences PMG (that’s handy), 
                even when PMG is turned off and on again

S/P:            starts or pauses the game

RESET:          restores PMG to factory defaults

ROTATE:         changes game letter (A–Z), although L–Z
                are all Tetris.

Wait? PMG is actually a 12 in 1, not a 99 in 1…
…well, that’ll shorten the review. The 12 Games of Pocket Multi Game (99 in 1) # Game Genre Comments A [1] Deathmatch Very tricky to control, thus enjoy. Ships spawn and you travel up, down, left, or right to dodge them and align your front gun to blow them up. B [2] Breakout Should be fun. The rotate buttons fast-forward the game. Destroying a love-heart made of bricks is the first level. Impossible(?) to complete as the ball has a fixed course from its starting point, so you spend all your lives before the heart is broken. Heart-breaking. C [3] Breakout A variation of game B [2], with a paddle and void atop the screen too. Can complete level 1. Level 2 is a dumbbell. Ah, heart to muscle. D [4] Breakout / Space Invaders Level 1 is a dumbbell. How original. The ball is a bomb that kills you. You blast the bricks with your gun, and the rows move down every few seconds. E [5] Breakout / Hockey Try not to fall asleep while netting a goal past a slow-moving paddle. F [6] Endless Runner / Traffic Lanes Race your car up the screen, forever, dodging cars. Cars Look like stick-men, with engine sound high on treble, at a constant drone. G [7] Endless Runner / Tunnel As the narrow tunnel twists and turns, avoid the walls. H [8] Space Invaders / Breakout Zap away the falling bricks as they hurtle downwards towards you. You must be a perfectionist and delete every single brick on every row, or you will die. Blasting a ship-sized hole through is simply not good enough. I [9] Space Invaders / Bust-a-Move This is pretty cool. Definitely my favourite, and surely covers the investment made in the PMG. Worth every penny of the 179 penny cost. You lay one brick at a time by firing it to the top of the screen. A complete row evaporates. The rows are constantly moving down screen, preparing to crush you. J [10] Snake The snake grows as you eat bricks; careful not to eat yourself. This version includes barriers to avoid. The greatest barrier though is the rubber D-PAD which is numb and fickle to the touch, and not in a good way. K [11] Frogger Travel from the bottom to the top of the screen, hitching a ride on the logs. Avoid the water. Seems a bit silly, given frogs are amphibious. L–Z [12] Tetris In some variations the Tetronimoes fall from the bottom-up. Mercifully, D-PAD UP/DOWN fast-forwards each drop. Fine All Thoughts #

I must admit this PMG has grown on me, and I have become quite attached. The translucent blue shell, Wario pink nose, gunmetal grey keyring, and odd typography mesh together to create a real oddity. Being bashed about with keys over the past month or so has given a grungy patina, chamfering the harsh plastic edges to give the illusion of a pleasing light blue piping.

Yes, I think PMG will live on my keyring until the batteries eventually fail. And when that eventuality comes to pass, I shall tenderly unscrew the cage, pry out the two LR44 cells, and replace with shiny new ones. Because, the best game ever is the one you have with you. And in my case, it is Game I [9] on my PMG.

Thanks for reading Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ of Ⅵ.

Every second month throughout 2023, I reviewed a choice piece of AliExpress’ gaming hardware, carefully appraising each gift horse’s mouth, teeth, mane, and muscles.

1. Shenzhen Safari Ⅰ: Pocket Multi Game (PMG) 99 in 1
2. Shenzhen Safari Ⅱ: NES 143 in 1 Cart
3. Shenzhen Safari Ⅲ: Data Frog SF2000
4. Shenzhen Safari Ⅳ: Wireless PS2 Controller (2.4Ghz | Translucent)
5. Shenzhen Safari Ⅴ: 3D Neon Sign Lamp Headphone Stand
6. Shenzhen Safari Ⅵ: Non-tendo 168-in-1 iPhone 12 mini Phone Case

Strewn among the hasty image below (a late response to a friend’s request) is the bulk of my current “every day carry”, or EDC; an idiotic term that requires further explanation to define meaning. It’s the stuff I normally take with me when I leave home.

The next photograph was taken using my trusty old Canon Powershot G10 (circa 2005) at night on full-auto, under a cheap LED bulb with on-camera flash for an authentic candid feel.

I also meant to include my 2020 iPhone SE in the picture—it has a slightly scratched face, proudly purchased for a bargain £270 back in early 2021, eBay be praised—however, I forgot until I’d finished drafting this post.

Fuck it…I’m sure you won’t find it hard to imagine what a boring, thinnish black slab with rounded corners and a cheap yellowing jelly case looks like. A fallen monolith, indeed.

Pictured then, from right to left:

• a Victorinox orange metal keyring penknife, with scissors, tiny blade, and emery board
• Keyring with:
  • Honda Civic ’05 key and separate central-locking fob
  • Mazda3 ’15 sheathed key in fob (both use easily user-replaceable CR2025 batteries)
  • house key underneath, and
  • an ordinarily blank 128Gb USB flash disk
• Unbranded prescription sunglasses for driving (I usually wear a khaki Tilley hat when the sun’s out and I’m not driving)
• A MOTHER×G-Shock GW-M5610UMOT21-1JR watch which is beautifully functional and utilitarian, with tough glass, solar charging, radio signal time-setting, tastefully branded with a Mother logo and the fighting text “Smaaaash!!” from one of my favourite JRPG video games, Mother 3
• a Xiaomi Smart Band 7, face deeply scratched within a week of ownership, scrubbing plaster from a DIY project off my wrists, still a cherished fitness tracker and only £50 with almost two week battery life and a super-bright OLED screen
• a Bellroy Slim Sleeve wallet I’ve had since the early 2010’s, in burnt orange, holding various cards, driving license, and a timeless “Polaroid” (FujiFilm Instax mini 7, I believe) wedding photo from 2009.

I’ll update this post below with some nicer daylight photography. Keep your eyes peeled!

Hey…(hey)…you…(you)…get outta my mind! #

I lost my Burnout virginity at a friend of a friend of a friend’s house.

The reason I beg two degrees of separation is this particular troupe were big into drinking lukewarm super stubbies, mugging their arms around each other’s shoulders, and chanting Oasis lyrics into the salted fish air of my coastal hometown. Teenage kicks, right through the night, indeed.

You see, 2004’s Burnout 3: Takedown, with it’s play-list of edgy alt indie rock tunes had this special feature whereby you could import your own MP3 songs.

And I’m sure you can see where this is going: Barely post-pubescent bawling of “Wonderwall” whilst blistering car paint-jobs against blurring in-game walls.

Satiating a Need for Speed #

Firetrap, grunge, and other post-cool baggy clothed early Aughties aesthetic styling aside, my eyes melted into the deep tube TV in awe at the sheer feeling of speed, the intensity of colours, the sharp focus and soft edges. This racing game—a genre I normally hold little interest in—looked and felt better than real-life.

Drifting around giant swathes of American alpine and urban multi-lane highways (other worldly locales unlocked later); boosting into the side and rear-end of enemy cars; shunting rivals into cars, pillars, trucks, barriers, buses, and blunt concrete faces. Or gunning it through straight tunnelled sections, the THX quality sound-effects whooshing over you.

There is a real sense of inertia, mass, and gravity to the cars. Nitro-boosting to what still feels like 400 MPH in little pocket rocket cars. Blue flames licking out exhaust pipes. Weaving between oncoming cars, planning a route a split-second ahead in early detection of the pin-prick of car-bound headlights.

All at an effortlessly creamy 60 frames per second. Even split-screen at 30 frames per second feels robustly fantastic (and caused frantic hilarity in good company).

The entirety of the driving experience is perfectly encapsulated into these lovely bite-sized levels, each with a clear objective and bronze-silver-gold ranking, whether it be plain racing, head-to-head, time-trials, or my favourite: road rage (destroy a horde of enemy cars in a time-limit).

Even in death, you can cause more damage. A feature called impact time or crash after-touch allows you the god-hand of gently forcing your smouldering wreck in any direction, in slow-motion, as a disturbing and ethereal chorus of smashing glass, metal friction, and a choir of paranormal voices spookily nudges your car into another racer’s, causing them to be “taken out” by you posthumously. (Well, until you re-spawn a millisecond later with a depleted or refreshed nitro boost bar.)

Crashing + Diorama = Crashorama? #

To contrast the meandering curves and looping sprawls of speed, there are static, terminating crash events too. Unique diorama levels where you launch yourself at a junction, grabbing multiplier tokens and speed boosts on your way to destroying as many vehicles you can come into direct contact with, or by proxy, smash other cars into each other in a horrific pile-up.

Video games are an abstract medium, with abstract layers. Much like in military shooting games, you’re essentially playing tag. You’re not imagining the pixels and polygons represent a human being with a loving family at home, keenly awaiting their return. There’s no simulation here of people who will mourn their passing at the hands of your virtual gun, or in the case of Takedown, the missile that is your car versus other driver-less cars.

No humans were harmed in the rampant twisting of fake metal and exploding fuel tanks. It’s not carnal carnage with cars. It doesn’t inspire dangerous driving in real-life. You’re just trying to catch all the vehicles in your drag-net of destruction, towards achieving a shiny gold pixelated medal.

So, rack up millions of dollars in damage to unlock faster and heavier cars, and listen to the Marmite game MC announcer “Striker”, as he welcomes you to yet another event via “Crash FM”, stitching together the soundtrack a la Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf.

Playing Now (Original/Emulation) #

Revisiting this game every year always brings the same pleasure as that love at first sight moment. Enough even to overcome the Oasis-stained, Lynx body spray and hair-gel rooted memories of my youth. Coincidentally, I found a Lynx/Axe billboard within the PS2 version, posted alongside ads for Need For Speed 2: Underground, and Battlefield adverts. A time before targeted ads, EA clearly had a target demographic.

Regardless of anti-aphrodisiacs, I do have the original game disc for PS2, and the XBOX version via an archaic XBOX 360 backwards compatible digital purchase. Through the wonders of technology, you can also emulate using the PS2 game disc on PC via PCSX2. This is the version I’m playing with nowadays on my old i7 3700K / GeForce GTX 980 Ti at 2560×1440 resolution. There’s even a fan-made widescreen patch which I just discovered when capturing screenshots for this article.

If you do emulate via PCSX2, there’s an issue where the sky doesn’t render and leaves a black void (Issue #563). Easy-fix is this: Simply make sure before you choose a course to play, make sure you’re using the software renderer (F9 keyboard shortcut to hot-switch between software and hardware), then once loaded, you can switch back to hardware rendering using the F9 keyboard shortcut.

Apparently there is good XBOX emulation too these days via Xemu. Alas, I don’t yet have the XBOX DVD version to dabble with this.

Downhill… #

The only peculiarity I find is that no other Burnout game I’ve played since has come close to this majestic third title. The PSP entry Legends was an admirable facsimile; I couldn’t get past the agonisingly slow hand-holding tutorial of Dominator (PSP); and 2008’s Paradise felt loose, bloated, and bland in comparison.

Driving between events with a Sat-Nav feels too real and mundane in comparison to the immediacy of Takedown’s neat, large-type menus. A couple of clicks and a few seconds to load. Straight into 2–5 minutes of being in “the zone”, seemingly hard-wired to the brain’s hormonal drip-cycling of adrenaline and dopamine.

How did it all go so wrong in the 4 years following Takedown? Too slow, too fast, too dull. Never feeling natural or connected again.

The recent 4K HDR conversion of Paradise even makes it frustratingly hard to visually decode at speed (on my OLED at least), with far too much contrast and shadow. As the game wasn’t designed for it, changing gamma/brightness/contrast settings just washes it out. Ultimately, I was almost immediately bored with the free-roaming, unfocused road network of Paradise, and that’s the death-knell of any game for me these days. Hook me in twenty minutes or I’m bouncing off elsewhere (unless there’s some seriously strong recommendations from trusted friends to persevere, as was the case for me and Nier: Automata; another story for another day).

And so, the sense of fun and velocity escaped the Burnout series in such a rush. Perhaps the timeless, zen-like state of flow that is 3 can be captured once more in a reincarnation? I should really try Dangerous Driving, the spiritual successor to Takedown from members of the original Criterion development team. They even have a sequel on the way: Dangerous Driving 2. Could it really surpass Takedown in its purity and simplicity, sound, and motion?

Oh the times, they are a-changing. Except, they’re not. At least, not yet. The now 17 year-old Burnout 3 is still my favourite driving game ever, and remains as excellent as it ever was. If you’ve never had the pleasure, there are very few games I can recommend as highly as this one, regardless of your tastes: Burnout 3: Takedown is a must play.

This review was originally featured as a guest post over at Super Chart Island.

A CRT Story # Call me Ray, Cathode Ray [Tube TV] #

Note: Most images in this post link to much higher resolution versions. Just click/tap an image to see the higher resolution version. Try it with Dracula’s true-form in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1)

Let us begin #

Recent articles (1,2) covering the boons of cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions in gaming have given me pause. Pause to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of an abandoned technology that is in many ways superior to the flat-screens we so willingly adopted from the mid-Aughties. In a blind, frenzied quest for demonstrating status with the excuse of “High Definition” picture, and the thinness that Apple has pursued relentlessly this past decade.

Well, thinner isn’t always better, as Apple found with its butterfly [fragile as] keyboard, and those early ghosty, blurred LCD TVs. (As an aside, I’d happily have a thicker iPhone for increased battery-life, and still consider the 4S to be peak iPhone.)

I originally filled my game shed with CRT TVs for the sole purpose of playing light-gun games, which require a “fat-back” TV. By complete serendipitous good fortune, one day before picking up a friend from the train station, I decided to combine the car journey with a skip [recycling centre] run to offload glass bottles (around Christmas time, many years ago).

A diamond in the rough / State of the dying art #

Passenger boarded, we rounded the corner into the skip. In a container adjacent the glass bins, we spied a glorious Panasonic CRT TV, model no. TX-36PF10.

A massive 36″ screen (bear in mind most family sets were 20″–28″), top of the line “Tau 2000” spec. Original remote control sitting atop it. And no idea if it was broken or not. Well, that was risk I was willing to take, as we could always bring it back later. The staff kindly looked the other way while we lugged what turned out to be 78 kg (172 lb) into the back of my pride and joy. There’s no way this would fit in a normal car, but I luckily had a Japanese-import Mitsubishi Delica at the time (oh, how I miss you, Misty).

Delica boot, without rear bench folded up #

I’ve had a 6′2″ double wardrobe in the Delica before!

Delica side-view, with boot open #

Delica top-view #

A hundred hurts #

Enough vehicular reminiscence. On arriving home, another big lift from car to shed, and we set about connecting cables. Sadly, the 100Hz nature of this advanced flat-screened CRT meant it was impossible to play light-gun games, which are tuned only to 50Hz/60Hz sets. Some of the later PlayStation 2 games can detect 100Hz, alas there is oddly no component inputs for this TV, only SCART, S-VHS, and composite.

And so, this beautifully cursed set sat dormant, with occasional use for retro consoles, especially Sega Rally on the Sega Saturn with the official steering wheel. My quest for the perfect light-gun CRT continued, and along the way I’ve acquired various LGs, Sonys, all with different issues, e.g., fuzzy screen, green cast, dim lighting. If it wasn’t for the risk of death by electric shock, I’d tinker with the internals to service them.

A million hurts #

How deep the sadness scans and scratches. Screaming unheard, and unfired within a choked, dim, and dusty electron gun prison. That beam of potentia. Electro-life. Hulking machines one day extinguished, never to spark again. And then, this tragically abandoned display technology will be lost to the world; forevermore.

Enough of that inevitable grim reality that shall come to pass. There is yet time to savour the final warming embers of this fire. To cherish, and revere! These living museum pieces.

Cathartic Reflection Transmission #

The best examples are made by comparison. Likely there is no better hub for this CRT love-in at the time of writing than Jordan Starkweather’s Twitter Account CRT Pixels, with a focus on in-game side-by-side comparison shots of modern TVs and CRT TVs.

The following photographs are a combination from various CRT TVs, taken with a FujiFilm X100S camera. My favourites are from the most bulbous TV, a 10″ Panasonic.

Please explore the high definition versions; pore over the coloured phosphors, as you can get close enough to see the scanlines, shadow masks, and phosphors. Then for further reading, I hope you’ll delight in my Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Review.

Have at you! # Dracula’s entrance hall, 32″ Sony Triniton KV-32DX30U, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1) #

Dracula’s entrance hall, 10″ Panasonic TX-G10, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1) #

Alucard appreciating the stones, 36″ Panasonic TX-36PF10, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1) #

The Chinese company Skmei make fantastic and inexpensive watches. Some are in the style of a well-known Japanese digital watch-maker, some are bizarrely unique designs.

All it took was the removal of four screws and a gentle levering out of each mechanism to give my rose gold Skmei the perfect face:

Before #

After #

During #

On Wrist #

Hell’s Teeth! #

It starts off cold in Frostpunk. –30°C/–22°F very quickly feels like a Newcastle night-oot with t-shirts being the maximum level of PPE. It takes us to the end of a steampunk-era world experiencing an unexpected(?) ice age. Where’s global warming gone? Replaced by climate change it seems. And the mercury tumbles still.

“Our band of survivors is led by me as Captain, and it’s okay, because I’ve played loads of 4X games in my day. See. Oh, dear. While I wasn’t looking, we ran out of coal.”

“What’s that? It’s not we now? You’re banishing me!? Hold on…I did my best.”

Frosties…they’re br-r-reat #

Frostpunk keeps you very much on your frostbitten toes at all times. You’re always in a race against the clock to avoid resource depletion. Run out of coal, and you slowly freeze to death. And as your workforce succumbs to illness, production capacity decreases, dwindling all resource gathering until you’re starved and completely unable to gather coal, food, wood, or steel.

Quickly then, build some tents and get your beacon raised to scout the overworld for more resources and survivors. Precious steam cores can only be found out there. We’ll need those for the fancier buildings and War of the Worlds scale automatons which are less efficient than humans but work 24-hours (minus coal breaks).

You did What? #

I’ve sent out all my workers, and my engineers are busy, beavering away at important research which will allow me to harvest more resources, easier. It’s like second nature to us humans…

Opening the book of laws, it looks like I’m not accountable to anyone. So, I can make some pretty radical changes in this new world order. Well, kids, it’s not like there’s anything else to do, so off you go to work. And we could probably use those dead bodies to fertilise our crops, harvest the good organs and transplant the lively limbs. Loads of frostbite you see.

Bloody Londoners #

The game’s well afoot, and I’ve kept both mine this time (onto my second run now). Some people aren’t happy about how I’m running things. Well, we’ll just see about that. These so-called Londoners think they can just tootle off back to London? The grass isn’t green anywhere, and certainly the safest place on this earth is right here. But some people are just never happy. Always got to be moaning about something.

So, I can either create a militaristic society, or go the religious route. Well, I’m trying to foster a sense of unity and community, so religion will surely be nicer than militia. Okay, I’m going to bed now for a rest. It’s been a hard day.

…[H]e’s just a very naughty boy #

Erm…now my followers are raising an ersatz crucifix in the centre of our settlement and flagellating Londoners and all-sorts. At least I’ve kept them alive, even if all hope is lost, and they’re cowed and unhappy.

On the plus side, I’ve been able to create three automatons, working the Advanced Coal mines, and R&D has progressed to the point where everyone is well-heated and fed. Just toughing out a worsening storm. And adapting to accommodate hundreds of refugees.

“Ah-ha! WE have survived.”

In Review #

A gripping game for its baker’s dozen hour playthrough. The world is well-realised, and the ethical quandaries give pause for thought. In my case pragmatism smothered humanity (it is a game, after all.) I was chastised for this in the ending. I’ll return to it after I’ve thawed out, to see if there’s a goodie-two-shoes playthrough (which I’m guessing will be much harder than lawful evil).

The intensity of the resource management, and race to survive and progress is game design perfection. I loved that there’s no combat element to the real-time strategy, so I can focus on the survival of my own settlement and not have to worry about external factors.

I think this is a one-shot masterpiece. A must-play. And as it’s on Microsoft’s incredibly good value for money Game Pass, there’s little excuse for you, dear reader, to try it out.

Special thanks to my friend Lloyd (@Lod_hal), without whom I’d never have been recommended or have heard of this fine game.

My self-built 2013 gaming rig (3770K @ 4.0GHz, 16Gb DDR3, GeForce 670) has struggled these past few years. DOOM (2016) especially, has been painful to play at potato settings.

Having spent the last couple of years hemming and hawing over upgrading, a close friend got in touch for advice on maxing out (era appropriate) his 2008 Mac Pro (not for gaming). These can take a GeForce 680, 780, even a Titan or Titan X with default OS support.

Scoping out eBay for them, I started thinking, well now, maybe I could find one for me too. The green-eyed monster was just too much for me. Goaded on, I narrowly won an MSI GeForce 980 ti Gaming (6Gb) and went from playing DOOM (2016) on potato mode to playing at 2560×1440 with all the advanced video settings turned up to the max. For £193 ($240) inc. postage, I can play all the current modern games at 60fps+ on high/ultra at 1440p.

With VSYNC off I am now able to enjoy 190fps(!) in DOOM (2016), though my monitor is only 60Hz… for now.

I realise the GeForce 2060 is £300 ($372) vs the £193 ($240) I spent on a five year old card.

…And that would’ve been better for future proofing.

…And that next year’s cards will probably take a huge leap forward due to impending consoles.

…But…I am happy as Leisure Suit Larry with my new old 980 ti.

It fits well with the rest of my older hardware and should keep on trucking until I eventually build a whole new machine 2–5 years from now.

The above video is of me playing a section about 8 hours into DOOM (2016), still slogging away at Ultra Violence difficulty. I have died many times, and relished each challenge!

I had a Commodore 64 from around 5 years old. Before that we had a C16, but I hardly remember it. I believe the C16 was a cast-off from my father’s work. Around the same time as the C64 we had a 286 PC, which I can’t remember much about, other than a CGA Breakout clone.

The C64 was miles ahead of the Spectrum. Burned in my memory is the silky smooth synth sounds, and gorgeous, colourful sprites. It put my Master System to shame (in all except loading times). In fact, I would often play the Master System while I waited for a Dizzy game, or Pitstop II, or Silkworm to load.

I still have that C64, and it still works. Occasionally, I will take it down from the loft, fire it up and play some old classics. I have so many cassettes with games that I cannot remember, or were incomprehensible to me as a child. So I try these out too; see what the designer was reaching for; how they managed to embrace and stretch the contsraints of the hardware. High concepts translated into simple games, often wonderfully executed and with timeless gameplay. IK+, here I come again.

You see, I grew up on hand-me-downs from a better-off cousin, so at Christmas or on my birthday, I’d always get a game, or if I was really lucky a new second-hand machine. Because of this, the original Gameboy and Master System have a special place in my heart.

Then I got a first-hand Mega Drive II one Christmas and it was Streets of Rage almost every day that I’d played a year or two prior at his house. He had SNES, Mega CD, basically everything!

We got a 486 PC when I was 8 that I essentially commandeered, so lots of DOS and then Windows games.

I’ve never bought a system at launch, and I scooped up N64 and Dreamcast from the bargain bin.

When we got an internet-capable PC for Christmas 1999 I quickly discovered emulators and I was in heaven! I went from being very poor and limited choice to researching which systems and games to play on PC, especially SNES.

Although I had a GBA, 2003–2008 weren’t gaming years for me, so I missed out on the DS and whatever was going on then. Then I bought into PS3 and XBOX360.

Nowadays, I still love going back to older consoles to discover amazing treasures that I missed at the time.

A lot of really good games will always be really good. For me it’s a bonus that games that haven’t aged so well still activate broader memories in proximity to when I played them.

Historic Schooling #

The year was 1998 and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SOTN) was my first Castlevania and Metroid-like experience. It came to me unprompted. A school-friend ponied it up after his kid-sister scratched up another PlayStation game I had loaned him. (I cannot for the life of me remember now the game I loaned him.)

At school, there were three-inch by three-inch square posts embedded into the wood-working class tables. With your hand, you could push them up from underneath for comedic effect. This school friend was quite cherubic and kind-hearted, the son of two accountants. He was however so named by these aspirational parents, that I made the connection with his double-barrelled name and the rising table wood. In a stroke of pubescent wit, he was for a week or so after known to me as “Erec-tion”.

SOTN came into my life shortly after I lost my Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG) virginity to Final Fantasy VII (what a good year). I was straying down the cherry-blossomed path to Weebdom, concreted with the concepts of hit points; magic points; levelling up to increase your vital statistics; finding and equipping stronger weapons, armour and accessories.

What are you looking at? #

As an aesthete, I appreciated the beautiful artwork on the double-decker jewel CD case. Painted in the classical style I am now familiar with across the Final Fantasy titles. Within the casing, the game CD and instruction book lay at the front section, and a separate audio CD and artbook in the back section. I could barely hide my enthusiasm upon receiving this boon.

On booting up, I poured over the gothic lettering and haunting choir background music. First impressions were sky-high. Excuse me if the sequencing that follows is incorrect, but I recall the era-appropriate voice-acting (quite awful) and rolling text intro beginning the game, punctuated by a chunk of full-motion video, including an only partially textured castle (thankfully, the attention to detail in the actual game was not subject to such sacrifice).

Fight Evil #

Now we dive into the player’s avatar, Richter Belmont, with a whip/mace weapon. Up some stairs, some corny but now memorable lines etched into my memory between the vampire Dracula and Richter the vampire killer, escalating to a broken wine glass then a fight with Dracula. Defeated, he morphs into a horrible beast about three times our height. We beat this form and then it’s game over?

No, it’s a prologue; and interestingly also a straight rip of the last level of the previous Castlevania title which wasn’t readily available to the majority of the great unwashed, Rondo of Blood.

Actually, it Begins Here #

Cut to a fast-panning forest with parallax swooshing layers, and the fast and svelte, pallid, cape-wearing Alucard, weightlessly marching at the speed of a cheetah, hopping over the castle drawbridge and into the grounds, slashing away zombies and elephant-sized wolf creatures with one slice each.

Within minutes, we encounter Death personified, “Death”, who chastises us for coming after the new incarnation of Dracula and strips of us all our incredibly powerful equipment, leaving us with our weak and short-reaching fists to battle the hordes of evil with.

Still with graceful motion and gravity-resisting jumps, we ascend a castle turret in a series of diagonal jumps and encounter our first hench-creature in our bare state. This skeleton drops a rusty short sword which we equip for a slightly better attack reach, but still most enemies will take many hits and dodges to extinguish.

Embodiment of Grace and Splendour #

It’s hard for me to stress just how perfect the movement feels. The connection between player, controller and character in this game is ethereal. In marching, attacking, jumping, and dashing backwards to avoid a skeleton’s swipe or the lunging thrust from a hulking armoured guard, it is an immense and tireless pleasure to glide through.

Accompanying the core mechanics of elegant physicality and JRPG progression is a huge, loot-filled castle to explore, with some areas inaccessible until we’ve picked up the various orbs that allow transformation into bat, wolf or mist. For example, an early purchase from the librarian [game shop and monster index] unlocks sealed blue doors.

The sprite art and animations are masterful and cohesive with the backgrounds. Monsters feel like they have mass appropriate to their size and speed, with predictable attack animations to learn and conquer. There is such a variety of unique foes throughout the game, with each of the many castle areas having a unique cast or theme.

How to Achieve Ecstasy #

Adding to the visual and mechanical feast of exploration is a soundtrack that is so good, at times the hairs on the back of your neck will tingle in ecstasy. Memorable phrases and melodies are enhanced by orchestral scoring, guitars and brass, with excellent atmospheric synthesisers in glorious abundance.

Pleasantly, there are very few cutscenes throughout the whole game, and they’re all in-engine and lasting a minute or less. These come at key points, e.g., Death stripping away our weapons, or Maria alluding to the possibility of different endings, gently enticing us to explore every nook and cranny of the castle and its dungeons. I like that there is very little lore and story, as I feel these would prove an unnecessary distraction to the environments and exploration.

You Are so Lucky #

I envy anyone who has yet to play this game as it excels as one of the best examples of interactive art and design ever produced, and as a game, it will remain a timeless classic forever more.

I hope this has whetted your appetite or sparked some nostalgic nerve cords. For further consumption, here’s a link to a two hour long playthrough (not complete of course) of the game with it’s now legendary designer Koji Igarashi, which is filled with wonderful behind the scenes commentary.

Let us go out this evening for pleasure. The night is still young.

This is a tale about how I received a 2007 Mac mini (1,1) from my closest and dearest friend, how I’ve fixed it up, and what I intend to use it for.

Background #

In Scottish schools, from Primary 1 (around age 5), the students learn to read and write. Every bedtime in our home consists of reading a few new books, thanks to regular use of the local public library. As my eldest of two daughters nears her sixth year and started school last autumn, I thought it high time to introduce her to a traditional computer for her to develop mouse and keyboard skills, because I doubt these user interface technologies will go away any time soon, so will prove useful to her.

Indeed, I am convinced mouse and keyboard will be around for many more years. Blade Runner came out almost forty years ago, yet voice recognition still isn’t reliable enough to manipulate an image based on commands from a surly, mumbling voice. I’m not familiar with Amazon’s Alexa but hear it’s another step closer to machines understanding human speech patterns. Siri is quite limited in parsing natural language, and modifying my own speech to (or teaching my daughter to) speak in command-line grammar does not seem intuitive.

My daughter is competent enough with my iPad. She can navigate the Operating System and controls, and surf YouTube Kids for awful toy unboxing videos conducted by adults with sparkly-painted nails, glittery hands, and faux-sincere excited accents. But she also plays a selection of excellent games by Toca Boca, and doodles using some BBC apps for children.

Selection #

Initially, I pulled down two old iBooks from the loft (tangerine and blueberry), however the batteries were stone dead. One ran OS 9, and the other OS X 10.4. Both were incredibly noisy; a cacophony of chittering hard disks and leaf blower frequency fans.

It was then that I considered the mid ’90s PowerBook that I received as a birthday present many years ago from the same friend mentioned in the introduction to this post, but I treasure that too much to give to my daughter, who is still learning mechanical sympathy.

Having exhausted the Apple options—I have a lot of love for nineties and aughties Apple products, not so much for ’10s (except iPhones which peaked at 4S and 6Plus for me)—I found a couple of old laptops from the early aughties, which would be serviceable as Linux machines, however could not find/rescue the power supplies from the Akira-like sprawl of decades of accumulated technology in my loft (ranging from Fostex four-track and Acorn Electron to PS4 Pro cardboard box).

Finally, my mind turned to the Raspberry Pi matchbox machines gathering dust in a drawer near my main PC. A pretty good option, but still a bit fiddly for a first computer.

It would have been easy at this point to bite the bullet and buy a secondhand machine. I’m quite fond of Lenovo ThinkPads and Windows 10, but it was at this stage that fortune smiled upon me.

My good friend came into a 2007 Mac mini (not literally) from an acquaintance via a niche internet user group (I think), and learning of my plight, found a good home for it with us.

Bring your own Mouse, Display and Keyboard #

Knowing that I would soon have a Mac mini with a DVI connection, I set about researching monitors, as I quickly learned that you cannot buy a simple adapter to convert port and signal between 27″ Apple Cinema Display with Mini DisplayPort into the Mac mini’s DVI.

Newer monitors were coming in at around £80 online, whereas an old HP, or Dell, etc. would have been around £20. But the older Apple Cinema Displays are very, very good screens. Searching eBay, the 20″ model can be found for around £50 at time of writing, however this is without a crucial component (the power supply), with the fashion being to list this part separately for a further £28–50.

I wrestled with the decision for a day, but decided the aluminium frame would look better in my home sat next to the silver and white Mac mini, and it really does look quite beautiful. The 16∶10 aspect is pleasing to the eye, the brightness is impressive, and the 1680 by 1050 pixels are very nice and not too demanding of the system to push around the screen.

Preparations and first boot #

The monitor and supply both arrived separately on 03 Jan 2018. I paired the monitor with a tangerine accented USB Apple roller mouse and a white Apple bluetooth keyboard, crossed my fingers and booted it up.

It booted, and I was grateful to be presented with the purple star field background and glass-shelf dock of OS X Snow Leopard (my personal favourite of all the variants of OS X, perhaps for nostalgic reasons of it being on my 2008 unibody MacBook when I said goodbye to Windows at home in the Vista-era, right up until building a gaming PC with Windows 8 during August 2013).

My daughter and I started downloading Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing from the Mac App Store (I bought it in 2012, also for nostalgic reasons). I went to create a new user for her and then…

Crash and Do Not Burn #

The machine froze up. I left it for a good twenty minutes and tried all the GUI and keyboard commands to force quit or restart, but to no avail. I killed it by smothering the power nubbin at the back of the machine with my index finger. When I restarted it, I was not greeted by the star field, but by a flashing folder with a question mark.

Oh, no. Recovery by holding Command-R on boot up didn’t work. Holding the alt-key on boot up just brought up a grey screen. Thankfully, I had the original retail disc for Snow Leopard in my loft (along with iLife and iWork ’09).

The Snow Leopard DVD was popped in and back to alt-key on boot up, but the mini wasn’t recognising it, and ejected the disc in a worrying, stuttering manner. I also noted the sound of the hard disk was just the arm moving every few seconds but the disk failed to spool up.

So I opened the mini to dissemble it for clues, sadly breaking the interconnect board optical ribbon cable port by not having the right tools (being too rough). After cursing my stupidity for not reviewing the instructions on iFixIt first, and receiving a set of tools from Amazon, I reviewed iFixIt and completed disassembly.

Then I replaced the hard disk with the one from a dead 2009 MacBook Pro; one not so careful lady owner (my mother) had killed the trackpad and display, with numerous bashes and dents to the casing, and three of the four black feet missing. Miraculously, the hard disk works (though I may replace with an SSD in the near-future to be safe and for the speed boost).

Reassembly complete, I jumped onto my PC running Windows 10, ripped the discs using imgBurn and transferred the ISO images to my trusty old Western Digital MyBookLive 1Tb NAS drive. I then used Disk Utility on my wife’s 2012 MacBook Air to restore the Snow Leopard image onto a 16Gb USB.

Fingers were crossed once more and back to the Mac mini and alt-key on boot up.

It saw the USB as Snow Leopard install media and off we go!

Final Furlong #

I completed the OS install, then installed iWork ’09 and iLife ’09 by mounting the ISOs from the Apple desktop. Finally, I updated via software update to 10.6.8 and once more downloaded Mavis Beacon via the Mac App Store.

The computer and monitor lack speakers. It is pleasantly surprising to note that this pre-2011 Mac mini supports digital audio output via a TOSLINK mini-plug adapter, but I’ll need to do some more exploring. Ideally some cute little aluminium and white speakers would do the job, and 2.0 speakers will be more than enough.

The 2007 Mac Mini (1,1) can only support 2Gb RAM, which is enough for Snow Leopard. Web browsing is okay on Firefox 47, though it labours like a small-engined car up a steep hill if it encounters too many ads on a page (ad-blocker incoming).

I may put an SSD into it, but this is not essential, and I may reapply thermal paste, as smcFanControl is reporting 45–75ºC typing this up in MultiMarkdown Composer with a single Apple support page open in Firefox, and I think it could run even quieter than it already is with a thorough de-fluffing and blow through with condensed air and new paste.

Conclusions #

And that pretty much wraps it up. I am delighted and must admit to being smitten by this tiny wee old machine and its matching monitor. I need to resist the urge to perfect the machine as its main purpose is to serve my daughter, and once it’s in situ with speakers, I’ll need to think of it as her PC.

Given that my wife has the 2012 MacBook Air, I have a five year old big rig gaming PC, as well as a family iPad Air and phones for grown-ups, we’re more than set for general computing. But this compact, light and airy setup (with a full-size keyboard mind), might be the future of my own desktop setup.

I’m mulling over getting a 2011 Mac mini for myself and relegating the gaming machine to another room. Gaming, however, is a whole other story which I look forward to covering in my next post.

Or, my week with an Apple Watch. #

In 2013/4, as modern smart watches began hitting the market, my thoughts were, “Oh, that’s a neat idea. I’ll wait for some year-on-year advances to the functionality and single-charge longevity and get one.”

The Pebble, Apple Watch, Samsung and so many little known manufacturers launched their take on the smart watch.

Fast forward to the last week in September 2017. I ashamedly and impulsively caved to my inner Inspector Gadget while in proximity to the local Apple Store; drawn inside like a moth to the flame. Excoriating my mind to splash out on the latest Apple Watch offering: A Series 3 + Cellular. Aluminium in a dark “space gray”, with a nylon sport loop, and the same magnetic induction charging technology as my toothbrush. All for the princely sum of £429 (the watch, not the toothbrush).

Now, my first foray into smart watches came earlier this year, in the form of a ~£30 fitness band from Amazon. This watch-come-band is indeed smart and unobtrusive, finished in a satin black. It holds a charge for several days, has a nice OLED monochrome display, measures heart rate, light/deep sleep, steps and even blood pressure. And it displays the time and date. It syncs to Apple Health API in the phone via a very usable proprietary app. It can vibrate to notify of an incoming call when Bluetooth paired to your phone. The iPhone app also flashes the band’s firmware, has nice infographics, and is regularly updated.

What then—except the obvious price difference of ~£400?—differentiates the Apple Watch from the fitness band (to me)?

Well, in my week of use, I’m confident that the body metrics were more accurate with the Apple Watch. But the band offers a less bulky form factor than the phone, and at £30, I’m far less precious about damaging it than any marginal accuracy gains from the £429 watch.

In the UK, EE is the only carrier that currently has the technology allowing the Apple Watch to share the same phone number as your phone (thus allowing direct calling and texting from the watch without the phone being on).

The Apple Watch battery never went lower than 67% in 24 hours of use, but the band lasted for many days without a charge. And to charge the band, you just slid one of the straps off to reveal a male-USB socket, which plugs into any [USB] port in a storm.

The Apple Watch has no camera and did not play back any video or gifs for me (except live photos). Companion apps would prompt me to “view on the iPhone”.

At first, it was neat to have my watch tapping me on the wrist with notifications and messages, but it quickly grew tiresome. It reinforced that I do not wish for the instant, immediate and regular distractions this helpful device tap-tap-taps me with. I am happier checking my phone when I choose to, and when it is not impolite to do so.

The form factor of the watch is nice enough, though could be a bit thinner.

The swappable straps on the watch are very clever and easy to switch, meaning you could sport many different looks with only a few different bands/straps. I’d definitely go third-party for these, as the Apple steel bracelets especially are magnificently expensive.

Some of the functionality of the watch, like syncing your latest photos and some music was a nice to have, but in almost every case, all I could think of was that my phone would be better and I have it very close to hand, albeit not on my wrist (see earlier point regarding immediacy).

I purchased the official Tamagotchi app for nostalgic reasons (that prompted me to hatch each pet using my phone) and the sleep watch app which was very slick. But I couldn’t find any killer apps. Perhaps I did not research enough on the companion apps that would enhance the functionality and value of the watch. Certainly, I trawled several “best” of articles.

Even calling them companion apps, by definition means the full app is elsewhere, i.e., on the phone, and a limited version is on the watch.

Ultimately, I was quick to conclude that trying to retrofit a use case to justify this purchase was a fool’s errand.

I realise this applies equally to any purchase one might make.

I’m thankful of Apple’s no-fuss 14 calendar day return policy. The associate in the store didn’t ask why I was returning it, but I briefly stated anyway that I’ll try one again in a few years.

I do think wearable technology and the wristwatch form function has a lot of potential, but it’s still early days. It was after all only ten years ago that the first iPhone came out and it took a few years for that to have a quality third-party App Store ecosystem. The iPhone 4S runnning iOS 6 (if memory serves, that was the combination) was sublime, and even as I sit here in a flying metal fart-tube typing this article out in Byword on my iPhone 6S Plus, I do yearn for a smaller device with the same functionality but even more impressive longevity between charge cycles.

And so, this week I returned my Apple Watch and strapped-on my self-winding mechanical watch again, to put the Apple Watch money to other uses, like the upcoming Switch Mario and Xenoblade games and useful Christmas presents for my loved ones.

Oh, and I was fortunate enough to pre-order a SNES Mini from a Spanish department store online a couple of weeks after the immediate UK preorder sell-out. And that arrived today for me to power on when I got home. Looking forward to playing some two player games with the family this weekend on that. And so the consumerist cycle continues.

You are launched into a dark street, with violent hoodlums looming into view and circling menacingly. Brawling through eight stages of unspeaking, violent thugs, your goal is to eliminate the clichéd gang lord, Mr X.

Streets of Rage is a rhythmic experience. The fusion of control, movement and music.

Feeling, seeing, hearing, thinking, reacting, planning ahead.

Immersing yourself into a state of consciousness where you feel directly and immediately connected to the cause and effects of the world you are traversing.

An abstract world, processed and enhanced by the capacity and range of your imagination and empathy.

Combination Lock #

You move in eight directions, have a jump button, a special button, and a single attack button.

With that single attack button you are able to unleash a plethora of devastating combinations by varying the timing, pauses and rhythm of your button pressing. If you down a stronger opponent too quickly, they’ll spring up again, all the while your screen will be fill with other creeps. If you come to the brink of felling a powerful bad guy with your final blow, you can pause for a split second to break the chain, then resume with a fresh volley to put them down for good, or even use their death throes to launch their spent cadaver into a group of nearby unfortunates.

The beauty of the game comes from combining short and long combos with powerful judo throws, and controlling your position on screen to take cover behind human shields, and avoid getting swarmed.

To grapple, simply embrace a foe by walking into them, and for a few seconds you are free to decide what to do with them. A Glasgow kiss and a knee to the groin? Throw them over and behind you like a rag doll, spilling the enemies behind you like bowling pins? Reposition to their back by Jumping, followed by a quick standing spoon, and ending in a lethal suplex?

Whether your strikes meet flesh or air, they are punctuated by an impressive sound response. At times, your character grunts or whines with the focus of power. In Karate this is called kiai. The theory being that making a noise while you attack makes the attack more powerful, e.g., Sonic; Boom!

Kiai Aside #

I am not entirely convinced of the efficacy in kiai, having seen its misuse by [a thankfully small number] of meatloafs in the gym. However, as a sensory and fear-inspiring climax to your attack, it can be quite impressive. Also, see Muad’Dib’s army of fremen and their sonic weapons, made even more popular in David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s brilliant novel, Dune.

Back to the Streets… #

When the screen fills with enemies you can summon a police reinforcement special attack. This pans the screen to the left, a police car rolls up and screeches to a halt, then an officer pops his top-half out the passenger window and fires a bazooka into the play area, resulting in a wall of flames or raining fire, toppling bosses and eliminating weaker enemies on contact.

Withering Heights #

Interestingly, there is no block button. A block mechanic might have added another dimension to the game but was not easily possible as the stock Sega Mega Drive/Genesis controller only had three main face buttons and no shoulder buttons. By default the special summon attack is mapped to the A button but would have been far better off mapped to the select button; the amount of times I wasted a summon by my thumb slipping off B and onto A.

While writing this pice, I imagined a block, attack, jump setup opening up even more attack options. For example, in the current game, if you press the attack and jump button together, you perform a back attack. What if there was a block button that let you parry or stagger the enemy? Akin to modern Batman brawlers. Upon reflection, the attack-only approach keeps the action moving forward at an intense pace, which is in perfect harmony to the music.

Cid[SID] is in every one #

The game is accompanied by an absolutely banging techno soundtrack, which squeezes a lot of interesting sounds and voices out of the Mega Drive’s Yamaha sound-chip. I’m not a big fan of most Mega Drive tunes. I grew up with the gorgeous C64 SID chip which produced a richness of sound and symphony that made a lifelong impression on my soul. I now plug my C64 into a sound system far more competent than the little B&W telly I had as a child, and can relive the greats of my youth, such as Silkworm and Pit Stop II (both also hold-up well for two-player gaming today).

To my ears, the Mega Drive’s sound often felt muddy, flat, and lacking in dynamic range. But Streets of Rage has a pulsing, throbbing techno-beat throughout, with the game’s composer, Yuzo Koshiro, matching the mood of each level with a layered, thrusting effort. I’ve bought the soundtracks for Streets of Rage 1 and 2 from iTunes, which I listen to often, and they bring me great joy, even though I’m not sure if the remastering adds to the experience.

Sharp, Grimy, Fast, Sleek #

From the outset, Streets of Rage burns grimy, neon patterns into your retinas. Outside the Pine Pot diner, its luminous sign shines upon a cold, blue cobbled city street. The player lands gracefully, and their sprite is expertly animated with a smoothness to their walking and jumping, and a snappiness to their attacks. This juxtaposition makes the whole movement of the game, the flow and fury, so slick and harmonious. Each of the levels has a distinct theme, graphically and aurally distinct from one other. There are incidental touches, like a gust of particle-filled wind as you enter the inner city, waves lapping onto the beach, the sickening bobbing onboard the ship, and the flashing beacons within the industrial complex.

The Co-operative #

The replayablity factor is huge as the core mechanic of gracefully beating everyone you see into pulp does not easily dull. The other timeless factor is the two-player mode, or in modern parlance: same-screen couch co-op.

This elevates the game into my top-ten of all-time, as you must carefully manage and adjust your tactics with your partner so as not to accidentally kill them with a misplaced combo, or immobilise them with a spoon embrace at a juncture where several “Nora” dominatrices/lion tamers[?] are funnelling towards you both with whips tensed.

You could also use the spoon embrace cooperatively, with the spooned player able to kick out their legs in front of them to knock down approaching enemies. Another tag-team move is to grab then vault over your partner to perform a high-jump attack on unsuspecting opponents.

Double the players also means double the bosses, which keeps things exciting. Also, when you make it to the end of the game and are invited to join forces with the evil Mr X, three endings are possible in co-op mode, with my favourite, the bad ending, occurring when one player wants to join Mr X, and the other doesn’t. This leads to a duel to the death, followed by the bad player dethroning Mr X. A fitting end.

Then and Now #

The Mega Drive II has the superior sound-chip (to the Mega Drive I), as Koshiro says himself. In 2015, a special remaster was published for the Nintendo 3DS which comes with many options, including MDI/MDII sound emulation switch, and an excellent stereoscopic 3D effect, which actually helps in aligning vertical position of self and enemies. The 3DS version also has a two-player mode (wirelessly connect two 3DS handhelds).

In my opinion, you can’t beat playing on a big TV screen as part of the PS3/XBOX 360 Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection, Steam, or even iOS (AirPlay).

Final Fantasy VIII (1999). Inside Timber Maniacs office. #

Final Fantasy IX (2000). Qu’s Marsh. #

Final Fantasy VII (1997). Near Cosmo Canyon. #

This pioneering split-screen racer was a masterpiece, and one of the first games that blew me away with the depth of immersion and gameplay mechanics.

During a race, there was no cheery chiptune soundtrack. The music came from the gradients of pitch generated by the tuned racecar engine. Playing alone, the C64 SID chip would output a beautiful symphony from this one sound source. Playing with a friend (or enemy), the competing duet would find harmonies and dissonances that were both hypnotising and mesmeric to me.

The car sprites were bold and large and the game refresh speed was arcade-slick. Going round tight bends, you’d quickly find the limits of your car’s handling, and desperately wrench your joystick past the breaking point of your wrist to avoid the edges of the course.

Rubbing the edges would result in tyre-wear, indicated by a series of colour changes to the tops of your tyres. The penultimate tyre colour was white, then, bang. Puncture and game over.

The key to this risk-reward gameplay was to take strategic, titular, pit stops prior to punctures or running out of fuel.

Upon entering the pit area, you would actually possess members of your pit crew. Set one to fill the car, and the other to clumsily teeter over to detach a tyre from the car, amble to the fresh tyres (front and rear were in different locations), then teeter back. All prior to overfuelling the car with the other crew member. True multitasking.

The tension of managing the fuel and tyre replenishment was amplified by the stress of spying on your competitor who would be gaining ground on the split-screen while you were stuck in the pits. This was utterly riveting, and as white-knuckle an experience as racing on the track together, blocking overtakes or trying to squeeze past if you were behind.

Playing it Now # Using Original Hardware #

I am fortunate enough to own the same C64, cassette tape deck and boxed game as I did when I first used my pocket money to buy the game some twenty-odd years ago.

The original hardware and games are quite affordable on eBay if you don’t have a C64, and would make a fine addition to your collection.

Emulation #

Aside from original hardware, you could use an emulator program on your personal computer and operating system of choice. I use VICE, but there are plenty of others too, and there are even some websites with in-browser emulators, though I couldn’t easily find any reputable enough to link to.

I also learned upon writing this post that Pitstop II was available via the Nintendo Wii (as a C64 Virtual Console title), however Nintendo delisted all C64 titles during August 2013. This is a real shame, as I have the Wii C64 Virtual Console version of IK+ which is very playable with Wiimotes. I would have picked Pitstop II up too, had I known it would be delisted. Alas…

Further Reading #

Look at the original Zzap!64 magazine review of Pitstop II.

A peculiar, entrancing and pure experience, unencumbered by backstory or objectives, Dream Simulator allows you to explore within the expansive terrain of vivid dreams.

Accommpanied by a frenetic electronic soundtrack that is as haunting as the fast-paced footsteps that are disjointedly attached to your character, the game is often eery and unnerving.

Each night, you are dropped into the dreamworld within a house. Touching any surface or entity will warp you randomly to another dream area. There are recurrent themes, but as you move around, the world changes erratically, with textures and colours shifting in a way that almost escapes your notice, along with the terrain scaling further and nearer, warping your perspective.

I have only described some of the games interesting features. The game evokes thoughts and feelings that are inexplicable. I would highly recommend putting on some headphones and playing late at night in a dimly-lit room for at least an hour to explore the experience.

It was through the One More Go podcast that I discovered this twisted gem of a game. If you are at all interested in gaming, I would definitely check out their podcast, where they discuss “games that we used to love, games that we still love and games that we hope you’ll love too!”

Sadly, since this post was written, the One More Go podcast has ended. It’s still very much worth a listen for its timeless content. All eighteen episodes are available on Apple Podcasts and likely other podcasting platforms too.

I play Battlefield 4 on the PC a few times each month with fellow adult males and females from an online circle of friends, called a clan.

We all have a great time voice-chatting with each other while we play together on the same map in squads to achieve objectives and hold strategic points to win each round. The chat is often filled with campfire stories and banter, interspersed with tactical discussion regarding the game in hand.

We bond in this social group setting much like one would have done growing up at the Scouts or equivalent institutions that I am not so familiar with.

The in-game violence is abstracted and not glorified. It is like playing tag or dodgeball. When you get tagged, you have to wait for around ten seconds to rejoin the game. A round can typically last 20–40 minutes. There are ground, air and water vehicles which multiple people can enter simultaneously, as well as exploring the terrain on foot. Up to 64 human players on the same map play in two opposing teams, split into squads of up to five members.

It’s easy to demonise computer games, as people unfamiliar with them have done for the past five decades, however it is important to remember that computer games are a medium, much like books, films and music. There many fine examples and some masterpieces. As with any medium, for each masterpiece there can be thousands of mediocre and terrible examples.

Once one has selected a quality computer game to play, the other major difference from other media is that a certain level of skill and context is required to play and appreciate games. The general learning curve can prove too steep and frustrating for some.

The other aspect of gaming as leisure activity that I ponder about often is the commonly-held perception of it being a total waste of time and something that one ought to grow out of, as the responsibilities of life are continually heaped on; how dare we waste our time playing in imaginary worlds where nothing we do will ever transpire into real world value.

Though I have found that my self-selected diet of games includes business simulations too, which I have no doubt helped me from an early age to learn quickly, be goal-oriented and think about the world in terms of connected systems, rather than just isolated cause and effect.

A mix of empire-building strategy (Civilization, Capitalism, Sim City 2000, Transport Tycoon); reflex-testing action (Doom, Tyrian, Castlevania); immersive role-playing (Final Fantasy VII, Deus Ex, Earthbound); and many other genres and titles combine to form a rich and interesting living history of an exciting medium where one can derive both value (in terms of skills and knowledge) and entertainment (mental and intellectual stimulation and relaxation).

A close-up photo of a tape measure. The hooked tab resembles Dr. Robotnik from the Sonic the Hedgehog games. #

This piece is intended as a homage to games in general, a discussion of my experiences with gaming platforms, and a proclamation of my love for gaming, speaking as a rapacious appreciator of this wonderful interactive art form. This is not a controversial PC Vs. Consoles opinion piece. That would be an utter waste of time and energy. The main points I shall put forward are:

• The best single-player games are timeless and yield inestimable value to appreciative gamers.
• To enjoy today’s cutting-edge PC games as their designers intended is expensive.
• Delaying your gratification a few years could save you a fortune. Patience is also, I’m reliably informed, a heavenly virtue. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having the money to spend on a killer gaming rig now…
• Though you can enjoy PC gaming masterpieces such as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth [2006] or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines [2004] today with a relatively inexpensive gaming machine.

It has been seven years since I owned a capable beast; that story is told elsewhere.

High-end gaming PCs are like racehorses: even the finest are retired after only a handful of years. In the aughties, they were incredibly expensive both to buy and to maintain.

Costly, not just in money, but in time. You could spend £1,000 and a year later, your machine would struggle to play the latest games as they were intended to be seen. A three-year-old powerhouse from 2003 would struggle to keep up with the games of 2006. Some expensive transplant surgery would be needed:

Let’s see. We’ll need a new Graphics Card, and ooo… a bit more RAM. Oh, that graphics card is going to need a bigger power supply, and then your motherboard will be the bottleneck. Hmm, the CPU you currently have is a different socket from the motherboard you plan on getting. The case is nice though; you can keep that.

With consoles, like the Sony PlayStation 3 or the Microsoft Xbox 360, we have a platform that has a longer modern life, with the most recent (seventh) console generation set to last at least eight years with no mandatory hardware upgrades required. Excepting replacement of the whole console due to unfortunate but not uncommon catastrophic failure, the cost of maintenance in pounds and hours is negligible.

For me, this isn’t a case of owning a PC or a console. You can have a horse and pony, donkeys, chickens, turtles, and any other animal or beast. If you have the room for it, can afford it, and will give it the love, care and attention it deserves, then you should have it, else you should set it free. Having a loft full of aged animals [read: decrepit computer hardware] is maybe not good for you, or for them. Minimalism be damned; for posterity these cherished pieces still hold personal, sentimental value to the geeks who grew up with them. It is a love that cannot be emulated.

Albeit it can be emulated, some of the time. Getting a hold of the original joypad and via a USB adapter, most Windows and *nix systems support programs that allow nostalgic trips to the best old games, and classics missed first-time round.

A computer is required then, but how expensive does it need to be? Well, what are you going to use it for? Today’s cutting-edge games require today’s cutting-edge hardware (to be played as intended). Whereas games of five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago don’t. Highly capable hardware will set you back £700 to £3,000 (you could probably get something pretty amazing on the price/performance curve somewhere in-between).

Older games and games consoles can be had for a fraction of the price at wondrous flea markets like eBay. The point I’m getting to is this: what do today’s cutting-edge games offer that games of yesteryear do not? Apart from the obvious improved graphics, sound and scope, the main difference I feel in today’s best games is the influence and refinement from past effort. They are informed by their forebears. Only in the best examples the gameplay has evolved and past foibles and poor decisions mitigated; by standing on the shoulders of giants.

However, the excellence of new games does not preclude the timelessness of any past treasures. There are lifetimes of sublime gaming experiences to be had from the body of games that have already been released. Like other forms of entertainment, you will never have the time to enjoy them all. To pick wisely, there is a world of enlightened people who have enjoyed certain games a great deal, and felt compelled to reach out and tell others. For this Retro Gamer magazine is an ideal source of nostalgic ambience to read as you comb eBay and the like for old computer games and systems.

There are plenty of standalone masterpieces, and the timeless ones will always be available to us in the future. I knew this when I ducked out of the PC arms race in 2006, just as MMORPGs like EVE: Online and World of Warcraft were coming to the fore. Social online games such as these are outwith the scope of this piece though. Here I am a proponent only of offline gems such as the life-changing Final Fantasy VII.

Moving forward with this logic, spending a modest amount on a gaming PC, a current generation console, and older consoles today would allow all the treasures of the recent era all the way back to the dawn of the computing age to be played. This logic further permits that around £500 every four years would allow you to have amazing gaming experiences now, equivalent to spending £2,000 every year or two to stay on the bleeding edge of technology.

Most modern games are multi-platform and though the graphics may not be as good on the Xbox 360 as they are on a Water-cooled GTX 51200 3570k blue-LED Horsey i9, the experience and gameplay may be not be diminished at all by the inferior graphics. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Happy gaming.

The Elcor (an elephant-like monotone talking species from the videogame series Mass Effect) prefix all verbal communications with an implied emotional tone, or a pseudo-emotive statement. This, @cactopops (on app.net) pointed out, is an incredibly effective way of conveying tone in text-based communication (without simplifying to emoji I might add). Prefixing tweets and app.net posts with an emotional perspective or statement hashtag would allow our tone to be more clearly encoded in our message.

There are further upsides to communicating this way. My favourite example is this. If you do not know what tone you are trying to encode, then what value does your message have? Do the words alone convey the tone (especially given the constraints of short-form writing)? As an exercise in emotional self-awareness, if you write the tone of your message first, that allows you to check yourself before you wreck yourself before you hit send or publish. Is emotion required? And will your message be positively or negatively charged?

Also, think of the trending and stats possibilities if there is a large uptake in communicating this way. Picture this…

• #FishingForLuls (Moral Trolling)
• #ProvokingForAngryReaction (Immoral Trolling)
• #PointlessMiniPublicDiarising
• #WithMuchAnger
• #Thankfully
• #Sincerely
• #Cautiously
• #Apologising
• #Humbly

While researching this post (to see if this was an isolated phenomenon), I found another post, by Nick Sheridan: “Talk like an Elcor day: Walk with the aliens! Talk with the aliens! Grunt and squeak and squawk with the aliens!”, and many forums which have experimented with speaking like an Elcor.

In very short-form communication (think 140–265 characters) with strangers and accquaintances, what better way to communicate than like an Elcor?

My favourite games were made in the nineties. For a long time I thought this was because I did a lot of growing up and had a lot more free time, and less commitments then. In 1990, I turned five. In 2000, I turned fifteen. I went from C64 to Master System to Megadrive to Playstation with a big dose of DOS throughout, and later Windows gaming too.

Gaming turned a corner in the second half of the nineties. We went from 8-bit to 16-bit and beyond. Beautifully rendered sprites (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) gave way to lumpy, clumsy polygons; and a horde of cruft games (with the odd nugget of gold among all the tonnes of worthless dross that the cheapness of Compact Discs brought). It took years for technology to catch-up with representing the designer’s imaginings. And it also took quite some time for developers to get the hang of camera in 3D space. I remember that magazines at the start of the PlayStation’s life always remarked on how good (or more often terrible) the camera was.

But I’m by no means against polygons. There is a certain artistry to classic Sega titles like Virtua Fighter that worked very well — because the feel of the game was so real; the mechanics and responsiveness. I could easily argue that Sega Rally is the best racing game ever made. The feel of the car; The responsive controls, and the difficulty to master. Even now, I’ll boot up the Saturn for a quick blast; the steering wheel as satisfyingly tactile as ever. I still play Castlevania: SOTN to this day. I have it on my Xbox 360, and on my PSP. (You have to play through a couple of levels of the vastly inferior Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles to unlock it within an awkward to get to secret area. Why Konami? See here for Kotaku’s unlocking instructions.)

So when gaming reached the turn of the century, and the aughties were upon us, 3D was still largely in it’s infancy. Only a few games managed to be stylistic enough to hold be worth playing now. So many ere just all about the graphics; shoddy polygons and muddy textures, and no decent gameplay beneath the cracking caked-on rogue graphics.

Against this heritage then, what else made up the backdrop of gaming in the aughties? Well, 6th and 7th generation consoles. And alongside them, handheld consoles that kept the spirit of 2D gaming alive, and monstrous, unreliable PCs that constantly needed the latest graphics card and processor to have a hope of playing the latest games. And at £200–300 a pop, that was a real labour of love. And one that I mercifully quit in 2008, when I gave up tinkering with Windows and PC bits to buy a Mac.

UK Popular Console Release Dates # Console Date (Y/M/D) PlayStation 3 2007.03.23 Wii 2006.12.08 Xbox 360 2005.12.05 PSP 2005.09.01 Nintendo DS 2005.03.11 GameCube 2002.11.18 Xbox 2002.03.14 Gameboy Advance 2001.06.22 PlayStation 2 2000.11.24 Dreamcast 1999.10.14

I spent a good deal of early aughties gaming emulating old systems on my family’s 550MHz Pentium 3 powerhouse. (I over clocked via BIOS. Thankfully, it held-up for the remainder of it’s five year life.) You learn patience squeezing titles down a dial-up connection: praying the connection doesn’t drop out, or that Windows doesn’t twirl into a blue-screen of death.

Perfect Dark [2000, Nintendo 64] #

As the spiritual successor to the infamous and definitive N64 FPS GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark had a lot of impressing to do. The three years between these games shows. Rare were able to push the hardware, with much of the game necessitating the N64 Expansion Pak (increasing system memory from four to eight megabytes).

As the protaganist Joanna Dark is an original IP of Rare, they had freedom to experiment with this game. The single player is full of good humour, conspiracies and aliens. But where the game really comes alive (as in GoldenEye 007 ) is the multiplayer. Innovative new game modes (for the N64) such as King of the Hill and Hold the Briefcase, combined with highly customisable bots, teams, varied weapons, and interesting arenas made this game so much fun to play together.

An HD-skinned Xbox 360 Perfect Dark was released for the Xbox 360 market place in 2010, and it is still a joy to play.

Deus Ex [2000, PC] #

Deus Ex, with its brooding cyberpunk tracker soundtrack and dark visuals made for a groundbreaking title. The game story branched in different directions depending on critical moral decisions, resulting in three distinctive endings, but more importantly, different dialogue and missions throughout; meaning many playthroughs could be enjoyed to experience the whole game.

Much effort was made to create the atmosphere, with even seemingly unimportant NPCs adding to the story and at times offering items and information to help the player along.

RPG elements are well implemented in the game, where experience points can be spent towards improving skills such as computers, lockpicking, medicine, swimming, and different weapon types from Level 1 to Level 4.

Augmentations (your character is a nano-technologically enhanced cyborg in a near-future dystopia) are upgraded by procuring canisters, and range from Level 1 to Level 4. Trade-offs must be made for each part of your body between one of two augmentations, e.g., Cloak enables invisibility from organics but not machines, and Radar Transparency vice-versa. This makes the gameplay more interesting, and gives the player more freedom to play the game their way. (Personally, I went in guns blazing nine times out of ten.)

Max Payne [2001, PC] #

Another stunning game. Even now it still looks good, with photo-realistic textures portraying a gritty, visceral noir vision of New York. The comic style story sequences and interspersed protaganist narration goes a long way to pushing the quality of this game into a masterpiece. Layered with a musical score which is haunting and beautiful, the scene is set for a fantastic game.

And the gameplay only builds on this. One hyphenated compound sums it up perfectly: bullet-time. And cinematic bullet-cam (where occasionally you will be shooting a baddie and the camera will slowly rotate around them while you can still riddle them with more bullets). Some may call the game samey, but I believe the mechanic and controls were slickly executed, and the satisfaction of bullet-time shooting in third-person didn’t wane at all from start to finish.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City [2002, PlayStation 2] #

Where Grand Theft Auto 3 was groundbreaking in taking the franchise from top-down adult Micro Machines fare, to a large-scale 3D open-world, it was also pretty dark and grim, and wet.

Vice City used the same formula and engine, but was vivid with eighties colour, eighties sunsets, and eighties music. With this loud new scenario, and oodles of eighties pop-culture, Vice City fast became my favourite game of the time.

Burnout 3: Takedown [2004, PlayStation 2] #

When it comes to arcade racing feel and speed, there are few games that can keep pace with Burnout. Harking back to the aforementioned Sega Rally, Burnout gets it so right. By having different game modes and interesting abilities such as being able to manoeuvre your car post-crash to take-out opponents, Burnout stayed intense fun for tens of hours, and is still just as good today. It is another game which can be digitally bought and downloaded on the Xbox 360.

Battlefield 2142 [2006, PC] #

To this day, BF2142 is still my favourite of all the Battlefield games. Being set in the future allowed for some fantastic weapons, class abilities, and vehicles (think walking tanks). But there is one reason that makes it better than all the others.

Titan Mode. Both teams have a massive floating warship which begins each round with a core protected by four power-relays and an external shield. Teams must capture points, like in conquest, however the points are missile silos. Each missile launched weakens the enemies Titan’s shield. When the shield is destroyed, players can launch pods from the Armored Personnel Carriers or drop from the helicopters onto the Titan. Then the Titan can be infiltrated, the four power-relays (located down four different corridors) destroyed, and finally the Titan core shot or exploded to smithereens. Once the core is down, players have a ~30 second window to escape the exploding Titan and parachute to the ground, to earn a Titan survivor pin. All while the other team are trying to do the same.

This meant incredibly cooperative gameplay was required to win. Which made the game incredibly tense and fun when played with a squad of friends.

Fallout 3 [2008, PlayStation 3] #

A living, breathing, post-apocalyptic world filled with characters you can meaningfully interact with, and a feeling that you can wander anywhere. This game has immense scope and is executed so well. Except for the bugs (and no, I don’t mean Rad-roaches), which this game (and all Bethesda masterpieces since) suffers from. Save regularly.

Super Mario Bros. Wii [2009] #

Got two to four people? This game is just as much fun as Super Mario World, only now you can mess up your friend’s well-executed jump by being in their way. This adds a new layer of frustration, but in a fun way, like Streets of Rage on the Megadrive, but playing through the gorgeous landscapes with someone else at the same time is a wonderful experience.

Borderlands [2009, Xbox 360] #

Forget depth, complexity and story-line. This game is an excuse for shooting things with ever-more powerful weapons. And that’s all it need to be. What made it so much fun was the split-screen coop, which meant I could play through the whole game with my better half. And it also meant she became quite deft with FPS games.

Played together, Borderlands is a very fun experience. I definitely wouldn’t have bothered to complete this if I was playing by myself though, so if it’s just you on your lonesome, I would stick with a game with depth, such as the Fallout series.

Shadow Complex [2009, Xbox 360] #

Super Metroid in a different skin, i.e., areas of the map unlock as the player finds upgrades. 2.5D platformer with great shooting mechanics. Any Metroidvania game gets the thumbs up from me.

Mutt is “a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems”.

The problem I find with many clever computer programs, is that they are written by people who are exceptionally intelligent, however they demand a large amount of specific knowledge to install and use.

Considering myself competent in using computers, but not knowing much about the command-line, nor *nix of any kind, exploring the possibilities can be a devilish but rewarding challenge.

But why is free software so poorly documented? #

For free software to be truly free (as in both beer and speech), it should be easily installable and configurable by any literate person. Not barricaded by prickly and/or incomplete instructions.

For example, my lovely but computer-phobic mum should be able to follow documentation to install and use the software. All prerequisite knowledge not in the documentation should be referenced right at the start. There should be no or as low as possible a barrier to entry and usage.

Why should we care about free and open source software? That’s a discussion for another day. But I will say this. Generous people are working together in their own time to develop software that is useful to the public. They share their working so anyone can contribute and make the software better.

All software should have a plainly written and easy-to-follow user’s guide. Especially free software:

1. As a way to attract newcomers who feel generally that free (as in speech) software is unfamiliar and hard to learn, and;
2. To lead with a good example for others to follow.

If the software cannot be installed and configured successfully, is that a fault of the user or the developer(s)?

So here is Mutt for my Mums (on Mac OS X). Basic muttrc supplied by Koralatov.

Note: Although this is written up to be informative (and a little tongue-in cheek), I will be user-testing this with my mum. Don’t slam me for errors in this case, as I am proving a concept. And yes, I am also aware that my mum would not use Mutt over a GUI mail client.

Prerequisites #

• A computer running Mac OS X 10.5 or above (check by clicking the Apple icon at the top left of your screen, then clicking ‘About This Mac’)-

• Homebrew and it’s prerequisites, here: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Installation

Installing Mutt #

1. Open Terminal by pressing the cmd key and space bar together, begin typing terminal, and hit enter when terminal is highlighted. Or, you can go to your Applications folder, open the Utilities folder, then double-click on Terminal.
2. (You will have installed Homebrew per the prerequisites section above.) type the following command: brew install mutt
3. Next install msmtp. (a smtp mail client for sending email). Type the following command: brew install msmtp

Setting up Mutt #

This should be enough to get your started, but you’ll need to fill in your password in the appropriate places, and create the following folders by typing the command mkdir, leave a space, then type the folder name, and finally hit the "enter" key):

mkdir ~/mutt
mkdir ~/mutt/cache
mkdir ~/mutt/cache/bodies

You also need to create the following files (create files by typing the command touch, leave a space, then type the file name, and hit the "enter" key):

touch ~/mutt/sig
touch ~/mutt/aliases

To edit text files, we will be using a program called Nano. To use Nano we type the command into our terminal.

nano ~/mutt/sig

Type in your signature, e.g., mine below. Use ctrl key and oh key together to save, hit enter, then use ctrl key and ex key together to exit.

Aliases (email address shortcuts) #

Setting aliases is handy for later. When you are sending mail to someone, you can write bob1 in the To: field, rather than bob.robertson29145@uk.magicalunicornmail.com

Your aliases file is populated in the following fashion, one entry per line (spacing is optional, but there must be at least one space between each part of the entry).

nano ~/mutt/aliases

EXAMPLE aliases

alias son rogerdodger@aol.com (Roger Dodger)
alias bob1 bob.robertson29145@uk.magicalunicornmail.com (Bob Robertson)

'alias' = tells mutt this is an alias 'son' = the alias you type in the To: field when creating a new email. 'roger…' = the email address '(Roger…)= how the real name is displayed

Setting .muttrc #

This step involves editing two files (.muttrc and .msmtprc) using a text editor called Nano.

Firstly copy the text below (highlight with your mouse then press cmd key and c key together to copy). (We will paste this into Nano later.)

COPY FROM NEXT LINE, starting # .muttrc

# .muttrc
# --------------------------------------------------------------
# BASIC SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------------------------
## IDENTITY
set        realname            =   "Your Name"
set        from                =   "your@email.com"
set        use_from            =    yes
set        hidden_host
set        envelope_from       =
## ALIASES SETTINGS
source   ~/mutt/aliases
set        alias_file          =   ~/mutt/aliases
set        sort_alias          =     alias
set        reverse_alias       =
## CACHE SETTINGS
set        certificate_file    =   ~/mutt/certificates
set        header_cache        =   ~/mutt/cache/headers
set        message_cachedir    =   ~/mutt/cache/bod
# LAYOUT
# --------------------------------------------------------------
## INBOX SETTINGS
set    sort           =  "reverse-date-received"
set    index_format   =  "%4C  %Z   %-18.18L   %-30.30s   %{ %b %d %H:%M }"
set    markers        =
## CLEAN HEADERS
ignore      *
unignore    From Date Subject To CC
hdr_order   From To CC Date Subj
# FORMATTING
# --------------------------------------------------------------
## COMPOSITION
set     autoedit        =    yes
set     recall          =    no
set     include         =    yes
set     tilde
set     editor          =    nano
set     signature        =   ~/mutt/sig
set     delete          =    yes
set     fast_reply      =    yes
set     fcc_clear
set     include         =    ask-yes
set     move            =    no
unset   reply_s

## FORMAT SETTINGS
set    allow_8bit       =    yes
set    charset          =   "utf-8"
set    send_charset     =   "utf-8"
set    locale           =    en_GB
set    use_8bitmime     =    yes
set    indent_string    =   "> "
set    wrap             =    78
set    smart_wrap
set    attribution      =   "On %D, %n wrote:n"
set    date_format      =   "!%a, %b %d, %Y at %H:%M"
set    forward_format   =   "Fwd:

# SERVER SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------------------------
## IMAP SETTINGS
set    imap_user        =   "your@email.com"
set    imap_pass        =   "your password"
set    mail_check       =    60
set    check_new        =    yes
set    imap_keepalive   =

## SMTP SETTINGS
set sendmail = "/usr/bin/msmtp"
set sendmail_wait =

## FOLDERS
set    spoolfile       =   "imaps://imap.ionos.co.uk:993"
set    folder          =   "imaps://imap.ionos.co.uk:993"
set    record          =   "imaps://imap.ionos.co.uk/Sent"
set    postponed       =   "imaps://imap.ionos.co.uk/Drafts"
set    mbox            =   "imaps://imap.ionos.co.uk/Archives/2021"
set    pager_stop

STOP COPYING after set pager stop

1. Type the following command nano ~/.muttrc
2. To paste into Nano, click within Nano, then press the cmd key and vee key together, or secondary click (right-click). That’s it.
3. You will need to look through the file using the arrow keys and change the IDENTITY, IMAP and FOLDERS settings. (You may need to google your IMAP settings, e.g., google search for AOL IMAP settings)
4. As before, when finished editing, press and hold the ctrl key then the "O" key to save, hit enter, then press and hold ctrl key then "X" key to exit.

Setting .msmtprc #

Lastly we will edit .msmtprc. Following the same steps as above, copy the below and edit. Edit your host (per your googled IMAP settings), user and password.

nano ~/.msmtprc

COPY FROM NEXT LINE, starting # .msmtprc

# .msmtprc:
# --------------------------------------------------------------

account       default
host          smtp.ionos.co.uk
port          587
auth          on
user          your@email.com
password      xxxxx
auto_from     off
from          your@email.com
tls           on
tls_starttls  on
tls_certcheck off

STOP COPYING after tls_certcheck off

1. Edit your host (per your googled IMAP settings), user and password.
2. As before, when finished editing, press and hold the ctrl key then the "O" key to save, hit enter, then press and hold ctrl key then "X" key to exit.

Just before we launch mutt, we need to change file permissions for privacy and safety. Type these lines, hitting the "enter" key at the end of each to execute.

chmod 600 ~/.msmtprc
chmod 600 ~/.muutrc

RUNNING MUTT #

To run Mutt, open a Terminal window (by pressing the cmd key and space bar together, begin typing terminal, and hit enter when terminal is highlighted), type mutt and hit enter. Mutt will open and provided you entered your settings correctly in muttrc and msmtprc, you will be receive and send mail. Now you just have to learn the keyboard shortcuts, and you’ll be navigating and managing your mail very speedily indeed. To exit mutt, just hit the "Q" key to quit.

While visiting the monthly auctions at Taylors Auction Rooms, Montrose, a friend happened upon a cardboard box. Not just any cardboard box, though. It was an old Gateway computer box. (Remember the black and white ‘cow spot’ branding, based on the Holstein breed of cow.)

Within the box was not a lovely, old, decrepit Gateway Pentium-233 or suchlike. Instead, a glorious Amiga A1200, basking in it’s original box; kitted out with a 209Mb hard disk too. Also in the box were several cases of floppies, endearingly labelled and scribbled upon; an ancient printer; and some failing Atari 2600 style joysticks.

Over the moon, I secured “LOT 3522 BOX OF COMPUTER WARE” for a small sum, along with a humorous lithograph, Saving the Hens by artist Barbara Robertson.

On bringing the Amiga home, I jacked it in and booted it up. The sound of the floppy drive whirring away brought back waves of nostalgia. Happily, I went straight for Syndicate, a cherished old game that I originally played through on the Sega Mega Drive (pre-owned from Electronic Boutique, with Genesis printed on the box art). Sadly, installation failed partway through Disk 3 of 4.

Undeterred I began a browse of eBay and stumbled upon many ways you can upgrade an Amiga. Foolhardy, I picked up a 4Gb Compact Flash (with IDE adaptor) “Hard Disk”, thinking, ‘Wow! What an upgrade. Now I can load all my games on.’

Not so fast. Many [most?] games don’t come with an installer. That’s where I found WHDLoad, which is an amazing shareware product that integrates your original games with installers (some of which even add value in fixing or patching sketchy compatibility and bugs). Games are made into a single file (or image) and by default the whole game is loaded into RAM when opened.

When I got Syndicate to install via WHDLoad, upon execution I was given an error message along then lines of ‘not enough RAM’. Taking a disingenuous stab as to why Syndicate (WHDLoad) would not run on my Amiga A1200, I thought: four floppies @ 800Kb (max) + Workbench 3.1 overhead ~800Kb = 4Mb RAM. The Amiga A1200 comes with only 2Mb RAM (as did my family 486 SX-25MHz, which we upgraded to 4Mb for Sim City 2000 back in 1994/5).

So I started looking at Amiga RAM upgrade options:

1. Fast RAM PCMCIA (up to 4Mb extra, simple)
2. Trapdoor expansion slot Accelrator card

Diving straight into upgrading Amiga RAM via an accelerator card, there are a plethora to choose from. Accelerators come with upgraded CPUs —from the slightly improved 68030 through to the beastly 68060 that necessitates uprated Power Supply Unit (PSU) and cooling—, some have Memory Management chips (MMUs) and Floating Point chips (FPUs). Most importantly (for my purposes), these accelerators facilitate RAM upgrades. 64Mb is not unusual.

Depending on the configuration, these accelerator cards can typically sell for anywhere between £100 and £400 on the likes of eBay. I was able to snap up a Viper II 68030 with 8Mb RAM for ~£80 (April 2012).

It took a genuinely scary amount of force to jam the card into place. I thought I was prepared for this as I had read up on forums such as the English Amiga Board, but it was still a fearsome moment, checking if that snapping sound was good or bad. Turns out it was good, but I had to tease it out ever so slightly afterwards to get a good connection. Accelerator fitted, I immediately found my next obstacle.

Before installing the accelerator card, the system loaded fine and everything worked, except for not having enough RAM to run WHDload games. I fitted the accelerator card, but now on booting I got an error message stating:

Loading failed: object not found C:LoadModule failed returncode 10

Commenting the following lines in the startup-sequence (by inserting a semi-colon at the start of the lines) allowed the system to load, but when I then double-clicked a WHDload game to run it, the task bar at the top of workbench would quickly flash “attempting to load[…]”, but nothing further happened:

;IF EXISTS DEVS:scsi.device ; C:LoadModule DEVS:scsi.device ; EndIF

Thanks to a forum user Retro-Nerd, I came to the conclusion that my RAM module was not firing on all cylinders. Confirmed with a quick memory test. All was not lost. Retro-Nerd pointed out a fix. Un-comment (Delete the first semi-colon only) the following line in S:WHDLoad.prefs:

;NoMemReverse ;do not allocate memory reverse

Bingo! Worked a treat. Now most of my Amiga woes are gone. Though I could do with more fully-functioning RAM…and a couple of zip-sticks for Sensible Soccer…and an old CRT TV for authenticity (and for Playstation 1 and Sega Saturn light gun games)…and…

My love of the Amiga has been rekindled and I’m looking forward to playing some oldtimeless games with oldtimeless friends.

Booted up the Playstation to have a quick game of Battlefield 3. However, Sony demands I download a ~180Mb update (version 4.00). In countryside broadband terms, that’s an hour gone.

What is the frequency of Sony PS3 updates? Because it seems every time I turn it on (infrequently since I bought an XBOX 360 when HALO: Reach was released ☟), I have to download another system update.

Whereas, the XBOX 360 updates are occasional and very small in comparison. I’ve never had to wait more than ten minutes.

So, Battlefield 3, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait. I’m going back to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the XBOX 360. And don’t even get me started on the huge launch-day patch for Battlefield 3.

Perhaps I’ll just buy a Dingoo A380 instead.

☞ I thought Halo: Reach was a very disappointing game. Killzone 2 does it so much better and came out far earlier [than HALO: Reach] (February 2009 versus September 2010).

Through the vernacular of a once loyal MS Windows user, Siegler takes our hand and walks us through what is so great about the newest iteration of Mac OS X, 10.7 Lion.

But the following is my relationship with Apple, inspired by Siegler’s account:

The year was 2005. I bought my first iPod, a 2nd generation iPod Nano, with a John Lewis voucher work rewarded my team with as a thank you. I still have this iPod, still use it, and still appreciate the design (except for the earphone jack being on the bottom instead of the top of the unit).

It was my gateway drug to Apple.

Windows kept me prisoner by merit of the time and energy I had poured into getting to know her. It can be very hard to leave a relationship, even one riddled with mental and emotional abuse. Oh, the time I invested trying to maintain a stable Windows install.

And then in 2008, my resistance to Apple eroded. With my laptop’s Windows install coughing and spluttering; streams of digital bile, gobbets of BSOD sputum and error messages all over my attempt at having a quiet night in with my computer, I finally caved.

I saw the latest Aluminium bodied MacBook. I recalled the glint in the eyes of my friend whenever he talked to me about Apple, and his growing collection of Apple hardware. I weighed it up: Stable; sexy (hardware and software); usable; and with minimal tinkering required, but plenty of scope there if you want to.

Right, I thought; enough is enough. My mail-order computer was in the post. The bloated and sluggish hag of a Sony Vaio, barely a year old, was quickly shown the door. More than a decade of pain and strife, gone. Untethered, I was; free.

Have I looked back since?

No.

None of the Apple equipment I have enhances my abilities or talents to get things done. How could they? They are only tools. Fine tools, but tools nonetheless.

But, I haven’t had to reinstall the operating system, tweak much, or waste hours repairing, sharpening, and tidying. Lion is still fast on my nearly three year old MacBook. Also, the flicking between desktops makes good use of my relatively lo-res 13″ screen. It looks like my next notebook hardware upgrade is still years away. (Okay, so I also have an iPad 2; an iPhone 4; and several iPods.)