Archive for August, 2007

Retro Game Explosion Part Three: SNES

Published by Scott on August 27, 2007 in Video Games. 0 Comments

Man, I love the Goodwills! A few weeks ago we made our regular visit to the Covington store after the library. That’s our usual big Saturday day on the town. The kids and I were looking at books when the manager announced 25% off all electronics for the next ten minutes. I thought I’d mosey over to check out the speakers since I could use one more pair for my current setup. On the way to that section I reconnected with Helen who had found a Super Nintendo system. She’s been an amazing good luck charm for our recent retro game renaissance.

The SNES with one controller was only $12, minus a quarter off. They had one SNES game there, Madden ‘94, that the cashier sold to me for two bucks. It didn’t have a price on it so she just made that up, which was fine by me. Took it home, plugged it in, and it worked great. I never owned a Super Nintendo when it was a current system so I was really excited.
The following week we went to Goodwill again after the library and there was a stack of seven SNES games taped together for all of $10. Score! The games were:

  • Super Mario World- Another Mario classic. We have the port of this for the GBA but it’s extra cool to play on TV.
  • Tetris Attack- Wow! Not a whole lot like Tetris but an equally awesome puzzle game. We absolutely love it, even non-gamer Helen who has become quite a junkie.
  • Street Fighter II: The World Warrior- Great fighting game.
  • Aladdin- A movie game that’s actually a very good platformer. From what I’ve gathered it’s pretty well regarded. This was the boys’ favorite of the batch.
  • The Lion King- Another movie tie-in, again not horrible. It’s actually pretty hard.
  • Pro Quarterback- Ho hum, more football.
  • Dirt Trax FX- Dirt bike racing. It’s okay.

The next week, Helen took a solo trip while I stayed with the kids. She came home with a dozen SNES games for the low, low price of just fifteen dollars. There were actually some sucky games in this batch that we’ll try to sell on eBay, including Wing Commander, Boxing Legends of the Ring, George Foreman’s KO Boxing, NHL Stanley Cup, and another copy of Madden ‘94. The keepers:

  • F-Zero - Excellent futuristic racing game. We’ve got other titles in the series for GBA and Gamecube.
  • Cybernator- A sidescroller from Konami in which you pilot a giant 100 ton robot set loose in an alien stronghold.
  • Mechwarrior 3050- Similar to Cybernator only in primitive 3-D.
  • Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball- Fun baseball game with kind of a funky soundtrack.
  • Bill Walsh’s College Football- Exact same game engine as Madden for SNES, but college teams instead of pro.
  • Captain America and the Avengers- Beat’em up with superheroes. I don’t care for it but the boys think it’s cool.
  • Cliffhanger- Another beat’em, this one based on the ‘93 Sylvester Stallone movie of the same name. No, I’m not kidding. Again, Dashiell and Ray like it but I’m less than impressed. They laugh their heads off stabbing the bad guys (no blood!) so I guess it’s worth it.

I also bought a copy of Super Metroid from eBay. Haven’t really taken the time to dive into it yet but I can’t wait. We love Metroid and that title is by all accounts one of the best in the series.

I’ve been swinging by the Goodwill next to my school almost daily after work but haven’t come up with any more SNES games. Kind of a dry spell, unless you count the Nintendo 64 system and handful of games I picked up. I’ll write about that next in Part Four…

melting crayons

Published by Helen on August 25, 2007 in Crafts. 1 Comment

Thursday I was feeling crafty and decided we’d try a project I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while - melting old crayons to make new multi-colored ones. A few weeks ago I picked up a heart-shaped-ice-cubes tray at goodwill with this project in mind and it motivated me to round up the rest of the supplies. We had lots of crayons that were broken and peeled already, so it was just a matter of sorting them into colors combinations we liked and breaking them to make them even smaller. We started out chopping with knives - not sharp ones - but that got old fast and we moved on to ziplock bags that we hit with hammers-much faster and better results.

We filled the heart shaped cubes and still had leftover chunks, so I got out an old popsicle mold and a regular ice cube tray too.

It was a really hot day and I read on the crayola website that crayons start melting at 105 degrees so we rigged up something else I’ve been meaning to try - a rough solar oven.
We just lined a cardboard box with tin foil, put an old storm window over it, and turned it to face the sun. (Here it is with nothing in it.) As rudimentary as this was, it quickly got up to about 125/130 degrees - and that is according to the only thermometer we had, a candy thermometer - but I think that was about right.

Waiting for the wax to cool again was the hardest part of this project. Here are the creators with their finished products-
And a closeup of the goods-
Hazel put yellow hair bands on all of her favorites.

Braves 6, Diamondbacks 12

Published by Scott on August 19, 2007 in Sports. 3 Comments
Picture 613Picture 609 Picture 607Picture 608

I took the lads to the Braves game yesterday. Lots of fun, even though the Braves got their butts kicked. The D-Backs pitcher, 24 year old rookie Micah Owings, is a local boy from Gainesville, GA. What a night he had- four for five with six RBI, including two home runs. Did I mention he was the pitcher? Sickening from a Braves fan’s perspective but you couldn’t help pulling for the guy.

We did see Chipper, Andruw, and Francoeur hit solo homers. They didn’t make much of a difference in the lopsided score but were exciting anyway. We ended up leaving after the eighth inning, the first time I think I’ve ever left a game early, because Arizona had the game in hand and the boys were getting tired. There was a twenty-five minute rain delay early on so it was getting late for them by the time things were winding down. The only bummer was that we missed Francoeur’s second home run. Oh well.

It was also Elvis Night. Elvis tunes blared, two daredevils called The Flying Elvises parachuted onto the field before the game, and the jumbotron had Elvis pictures as the background behind players’ pictures and stats. I didn’t see anyone dressed up as The King in person but they did show a few people on the screen. I like Elvis so I thought it was all pretty cool.

Before the game we hung out in the Coke sponsored section of Turner Field. It’s got a nice view of the Atlanta skyline and a place where kids can run the actual distance between two bases. There’s also a giant Coke bottle which I never realized was made from baseball artifacts like bases, balls, bats, and shoes. You can’t discern those objects from a distance but up close it’s neat.

Hummingbird festival

Published by Helen on August 14, 2007 in Chatter. 1 Comment

Sunday we braved the heat and went to a hummingbird festival at a nearby plantation.
Paying to get in to look at a bunch of activities you have to pay for or things you can buy is really not our thing, but then we spotted some old farm buildings and went to check them out.
We talked to a man who moved to this County in 1947, who told us there were only two paved roads in the whole county then. He showed us a corn sheller (takes the dry kernels off the cob) and let all the kids have a turn with it. We have a corn sheller in our shed but weren’t really sure what it was. Then he told us about the mule-drawn cart rides.
Dashiell and Ray both took a turn, they were handed the reins after passing this tree-
They went out to the other side of the field (past that grain storage thing.)
and stopped the cart back at the beginning-
Dashiell!
And Ray - who really impressed this guy with his driving skills.

Retro Game Explosion Part Two: PS1

Published by Scott on August 7, 2007 in Games and Video Games. 2 Comments

While I was tipping over wheelchairs and shoving old ladies out of the way to get to the NES games at the garage sale I mentioned the other day, Helen was on the other side of the driveway scoring a Sony PlayStation. I had actually won a lot of Lightspan games on eBay earlier in the week and we were planning to buy a PS2 to play them on. It never occurred to me to seek out a PS1 for which the Lightspan games were designed. Duh. It was perfect timing stumbling across this one. For thirty bucks we got the PlayStation with one controller, five PS1 games, and 6 NES games. Pretty sweet deal, especially considering all this stuff was in mint condition. Helen also found a second controller for a buck at another garage sale too.

One of the games we bought was WWF Smackdown. I’m not a wrestling fan but there were four of us thirty something dudes at the in-laws and we were looking forward to some ridiculous fighting action. I set everything up and then discovered the case was empty. Bummer. Not-quite-Uncle Dan brought his Gamecube though so we had a Tiger Woods golf smackdown instead. The PS1 games that were in their cases, plus one we found at Goodwill the other day, include:

  • Crash Bandicoot: Warped- a fun 3-D platformer
  • N2O Nitrous Oxide- like a 3-D version of the arcade classic Tempest
  • Lego Racers- racing game, Lego style
  • A Bug’s Life- lame movie tie in game
  • Pandemonium!- we haven’t checked this out yet

I mentioned that we won a Lightspan auction, which consisted of 32 PlayStation educational games. The boys haven’t really looked too closely at them yet. I had to track down a memory card first, again via eBay, so they could save their progress.

I must say I’m a little disappointed by what I’ve seen so far. I guess I expected them to be a lot better than the computer games my school uses. I was led to believe by what I read that they were more like “real” games than digital worksheets. They seem to be on par with the current Math/Reading Blaster series. Perhaps they were superior to the educational software available at the time of their original release. Then again we’ve only explored a couple of titles so maybe some of the other ones are better. Not that they’re bad or anything. They’re just not what I had hoped for. I will say that Dashiell and Ray were engaged and enjoyed playing them. That’s really the whole point of our Lightspan experiment.

And now we’ve added a PlayStation to our growing video games collection. I’ve never owned or even really played any Sony consoles before. I found this awesome source for classic game recommendations and will be looking out for more PS1 goodness on future Goodwill runs. Maybe Helen will run across some at garage sales too. I’d better stay away though or I might hurt someone.

A finished project-

Published by Helen on August 6, 2007 in Crafts. 0 Comments

I feel like I’m always showing off my fabric purchases but rarely show a finished project - today I have one!
I made a curtain for the hallway window at the back of our house. The afternoon sun streams in the lower half of this window for a few hours a day in the summer and it heats up the hallway and the adjacent rooms. Hopefully this will help.

picture-507.jpg

Retro Game Explosion Part One: NES

Published by Scott on August 5, 2007 in Games and Video Games. 1 Comment

We’ve stumbled across some amazing deals at garage sales and Goodwill over the past month. As a result our classic video game collection has increased significantly. I’ll break it down into three parts instead of one super long post. First up, our NES acquisitions.

While in Michigan Helen and I ventured out alone to scope out the local garage sales. Crazy, huh? It’s extremely rare that we do anything without the kids so naturally we spent such an occasion combing through other people’s junk. As we walked up the driveway at our first stop, I complained about how uncomfortable I felt gawking at stuff while the owners looked on. I had hardly finished my thought when I saw an NES motherload- a box with about twenty games inside!

The problem was that another guy was looking at them. Now Helen will tell you that I elbowed him out of the way to get to those games. It wasn’t quite that extreme but I was pretty aggressive. I got in his personal space and asked if he was going to buy them. He mumbled something about not being sure which system his kids had and slinked away so I could pounce. Clearly I meant business. Turns out a lot of it was garbage like Home Alone but for two bucks each I grabbed:

  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Mario Is Missing- a geography adventure game w/ Mario
  • Dr. Mario- Tetris like puzzle game that I used to have
  • Bases Loaded II
  • Skate Or Die- pre Tony Hawk skateboard game
  • The Simpsons: Bart Vs. World

Each was in pristine condition and came with directions. These people really took care of their stuff. Looking back I’m kicking myself for not buying their NES system they were asking ten bucks for. I figured I already had a working system but I should have grabbed it anyway. It even had a case for it! Helen went back the next day but it was gone. The one that got away or something.

Then a week and a half ago a sizable lot of games turned up at one of our two local Goodwills. Helen saw it while I was at work down the street. At the time my computer/email was out of commission and I stupidly had my cell phone turned off. Ended up making a special trip back later that evening instead of waiting until after work the next day. I bought a handful, wrote down the names of the ones I wasn’t familiar with, and have gone back twice to buy more after doing research. Some absolute classics in this batch, all at three dollars apiece:

  • Ice Hockey- so much fun! I played tons of this back in the day
  • Contra- up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start
  • Ninja Gaiden- only familiar with it by reputation
  • NES Open- golf with Mario and his pals
  • Tecmo Bowl- football
  • Rush’n Attack- killing Russians, cold war style
  • Excitebike- motocross racing
  • Adventures of Lolo- puzzle adventure
  • Zoda’s Revenge
  • Superspike V’ball / Nintendo World Cup- volleyball and soccer twofer
  • Low G Man
  • Renegade- beat ‘em up

I just picked up those last six and haven’t played them yet. They need to be cleaned before they will work. I should be getting the Nintendo 3.8mm Gamebit Security Tool I ordered in the mail tomorrow, which will make that process much, much easier.

Also, at Goodwill yesterday I snagged a Game Genie. I was pretty excited, even more so later when I got it to work. It’s a cheating device that allows you to enter codes to alter games, giving you unlimited lives for example. Some of those old games gave you a code after you finished a level so you could pick up where you left off. A few even had a battery. But most of them you had to start over after you turned the console off. Unless you had a lot of time and mad gaming skills, you might never get through to the end. It will definitely come in handy.

To top it all off, Helen’s friend gave me two NES consoles along with copies of Dr. Mario and Super Mario Bros. that were stored away somewhere at her extended family’s home. Both power up but neither will play games. I’m sure it’s only a matter of restoring or replacing the pin connectors. They don’t have controllers or A/V cords either so I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do with them. I might try my hand at some mods or fix them up and give them away.

Sew, how’s school?

Published by Helen on August 3, 2007 in Crafts. 1 Comment


The boys were dying to do some more sewing, so I let them pick out some flannel to make pajama bottoms. Hazel wanted some too - so I made hers, but the boys did all of the sewing and most of the cutting on theirs. Stylish, no?

Oh, and the things they are holding are blocks of ice with action figures frozen in them.