Sunday, October 12, 2008

Long Have Been The Days I've Wanted To Mash A Morphoid...



...nearly two decades in fact. Sometime in spring of 1989, in the back of a Video Games and Strategy magazine, I saw a short review of "Bashi Bazook: Morphoid Masher" and the above picture. And ever since, I had never seen any more than the above picture. But holy crap, did that look like a super cool game. Unfortunately, it was never released in the U.S. So I've searched and searched, and pretty much been given scarce information, and as always, the above picture.

All that's changed fairly recently. A while back I found THIS article, and the loads of screenshots which got me back on the chase. Then, paydirt!

A full on Long Play of the entire game.








Don't have time for all that? Here's a 13 minute Speed Run! That's right, a Long Play AND a Speed Run in the same article! Hey, after 20 years of searching, I want to share the wealth!



The Night The Teenagers Ruled The World!



I just found this great fansite for 80s B-Rated Zombie movie "Night Of The Comet". It's got everything; trivia, quotes, memoramblia, bios of the cast... Above is the trailer, voiced by Optimus Prime himself. Below is a fun vid by Pirated Video where they whittled the whole movie down to 10 minutes. It's full of spoilers, so don't watch it if ya wanna check out the movie for more than just nostalgia.

Oh, and of course DMK has 23 cars.

The Conet Project, And Why You May Wanna Hold Onto Your Old TV.



We pretty much all know by now that television is switching over to a digital signal next year, and without a converter box, we will no longer be able to receive our favorite shows. That's hardly news.

But what's gonna happen to that huge bandwidth of broadcast signal? It's not going to simply dissappear... There is plenty of speculation as to who is going to be using those signals, from cell phones to emergency broadcasts to homeland security.

What about those of us curious enough to hold on to our regular tvs, or happen to have some of those old-school radios that pick up TV signals? What do you think we may be able to find scanning those "unused" frequencies?

Have you ever heard of a Numbers Station?

Scanning the shortwave dial, occasionally you will come across a funny little robotic voice (usually female) reading off a series of seemingly random letters and numbers. Reports of accidentally finding such stations date back to World War I, which could make them among the earliest radio broadcasts. References to them have been used as plot points in films since Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee, appearing in Red Dawn, Toy Soldiers, Vanilla Sky and the television series Lost.

Funny thing is, nobody (at least nobody you or I are likely to know in our lifetime) has any idea where these signals are really coming from, or what their purpose is.

In 1997, Iridial Disks released a 4-CD collection called The Conet Project a found-sound project based on the work of numbers station enthusiast Akin Fernandez. The collection has been circulating around the underground since. As of recently, Iridial has released the collection as a series of free downloads from their site.

It's highly unlikely that anything broadcast along these newly acquired frequencies would be broadcast unencrypted. Without delving any further into speculation, all we can do is hold onto our rabbit ears and see for ourselves.

Reactable Improvisation Demo



Excellent improvisational video by the guys that created the Reactable Demo video previously posted by Chad. Actually, it looks like all these videos are on the Youtube profile of one of the guys who made the thing.

Enjoy.

Atari 2600 Rarity Guide



Provided by the excellent source of everything Atari (vintage and homebrew), AtariAge, here is an excellent rarity guide for collectors. It's a great source to roughly estimate how much you might have to pay to replace your childhood collection (HINT: usually not very much)

Or for someone such as myself to find that of my personal collection of about 140 games, only one rates even a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 for rarity. Meh.

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