Tag Archives: procrastination

Old-school gaming

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I’ve been an afficionado of old-school games since, well – since they were new-school games really. I just personally think that games peaked at about the point when the number of controls were less than (or equal to) the number of digits in my posession (currently ten).

Playing on the consoles of today, I find myself fumbling with controllers which have a D-pad, one or two analogue pads, and “fire” buttons on the front, sides and back. FIFA Street on the XBox is a great game, but I’d need at least three extra arms if I ever wanted to play it properly.

So emulators are the name of the game – I give the old Spectrum emulator an airing every now and again to have a bash at the still fiendishly difficult Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy 2, but my usual time-sink is SNES9X, and either Street Fighter 2 Turbo or Super Mario Kart – the greatest fighting game ever and the greatest driving game ever, respectively.

It’s just not the same using the keyboard to control the game though, so when a (now former) work colleague pointed out that RetroZone sell original SNES controllers with USB cables retrofitted, I had to have one.

It works perfectly on my Mac Mini, with no drivers or setup required at all. And this is why I haven’t achieved much for days.

PS. Game websites are horrible. Thank heavens for Wikipedia.

Changes

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It’s often been commented that the problem with blogging is that if you have anything really interesting to write about, then you’re most likely too busy doing it to actually write about it in any great depth.

Not that I consider things really interesting at the moment, but I’ve acquired a new computer, a niece and a housemate in the space of three days. In three days time I’m off to visit brother, brother’s girlfriend, and niece. Two days after that, I’m playing my first solo gig in about five years.

And at some point in between, I’ll be booking my flights for Thailand 2006. It’s going to be a while before I have time to write anything of any great length, so why not read up on Thailand 2004 and Thailand 2005 if you haven’t already?

The prospect of focussing this blog on travel writing has occurred to me, since it’s the only thing that I seem to have sufficient motivation to write in any great depth about, but then there’d only have been two entries this year – obviously I need to spend far more time than I do in foreign countries…