We’re back!
In this episode:
- bidding on old video games on eBay.com,
- the San Francisco Rush series,
- Sega in the 1990s (the Genesis, Sega CD, 32X, etc.),
- the pronunciation of Uranus,
- giant camcorders in the 1980s,
- tiny new digital camcorders,
- longer episodes of The Paunch Stevenson Show,
- the unreliability of 5.25″ floppy disks,
- old video game controllers with telephone keypads on them,
- the Coleco Telstar Arcade from 1977,
- light guns (the NES Zapper, Wii Zapper, SNES Super Scope, and Genesis Menacer),
- the Sega Activator,
- deceptive toy commercials,
- pointless toys (Shrinky Dinks, Lite-Brite, wrestling figures, etc.),
- creative toys (the Etch A Sketch Animator and the Fisher-Price PXL-2000),
- live action role-playing (G.I. Joe, The Transformers, etc.),
- our review of Incredible Change-Bots by Jeffrey Brown (2007),
- shopworn books at Barnes & Noble,
- The Dark Knight (2008) trailer,
- the Rambo (2008) trailer,
- Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007),
- the upcoming movie Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins (2009),
- Still Crazy (1998) starring Billy Connolly and Bill Nighy,
- Read-Along Adventures (www.readalongadventures.com),
- the Lame Idiot of 2007 (Michael Bay),
- and director Uwe Boll.
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Listen to this episode:
In this episode, we made fun of the way Heath Ledger looks as the Joker in the upcoming movie The Dark Knight. Today, eight days later, he was found dead in an NYC apartment. Weird.
This was a good show. I usually don’t listen to podcasts this long but the 1:50 went by quick, but more about that later. I knew kids that kept the boxes to videogames in the 80’s and I think it’s part of the speculator mentality we had back then. We though our comic books and toys and everything else would be insanely valuable so we kept everything. I remember one friend in particular who used to keep the boxes to NES games back in the late 80’s because he considered them collector’s items. He was a connesuir of video games I guess. He was always hunting down what he told me were the rare boxes. I remember him saying that the Duck Hunt box was rare and maybe the initial release Zelda was rare. He thought that having the box was an integral part of the videogame experience. Judging from the higher prices a game with the box pulls on ebay, other people agree. I didn’t really follow this logic. In the late nineties I just ended up downloading emulators for the NES and Turbografx-16 on my old windows 95 computer and playing them that way. I didn’t care about having the box or even the physical console.
I loved the San Francisco Rush series. My fondest memory is buying the first game for the N64 and then getting a little sad when Rush:The Rock Alcatraz edition was released in the arcades, but then they released a code for the Alcatraz track and I could play it at home! Nowadays PS3 and Xbox360 owners have to pay money to unlock tracks and cars in racing games, but back then we could just use codes. I think Rush 2 sort of jumped the shark with all those Mountain Dew cans you had to collect and those weird looking rocket cars.
I did keep boxes for the video game consoles because I move a lot and they’re the best way to transport these machines. I got a little pissed off when I found out a mouse built a nest in my N64 box in the garage. I threw it out because it was full of mouse poo, but I did consider cleaning it off and selling it on ebay without mentioning it once functioned as a rodent nest. The other day I pulled my Super Nintendo from the garage and when I opened the box, I noticed the entire bottom half of the console turned yellow! What’s that about? I don’t even smoke so I don’t know why that happened. It’s embarrassing. From now on I only buy consoles made from black plastic.
I think podcasts under a half hour work best because I don’t set hours aside just to listen to podcasts. My podcast listening happens while I’m doing something else like walking the dog or getting groceries. I can usually listen to about four podcasts during grocery shopping because it always takes about two hours, but holy hell your episode 93 took up my whole grocery run. It was great and I listened to it all, but I only go grocery shopping once every two weeks and if you guys keep doing episodes in the range of 2 hours I won’t be able to keep up.
Greg’s “My stupidity of games” is a great phrase. I’ve been trying to put into words a way to describe that lack of criticism I had when playing video games as a kid. To me everything was great because I was so excited just to be playing. I didn’t know that Atari 2600 E.T. sucked, I just knew my cousins had it and I was jealous. I didn’t realize how crappy video games were back then. I had stupidity of games.
I read the wikipedia entry on the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 and it sounds like a fun technology for its time, but why is there a revival of popularity for this ancient technology? Why when there’s really fantastic digital cameras would filmmakers of today want to use a cassette tape video camera made 20 years ago for children? Who even sells cassette tape nowadays? These hipster filmmakers are morons!
I thought the most pointless toys ever were the 12 inch tall Star Wars dolls. Who at Kenner thought that little boys would play with dolls? Equally pointless were the ittly bitty little die cast metal Star Wars figures with their itty bitty little die cast ships and playsets. The paint would always flake off and I’d lose the figures because they were so small, leaving me with ships and playsets too small for the regular toys to interact with. Why even experiment with those scales when they had a good thing going with the regular line?
I think Shipwreck was supposed to be a mexican guy. On his bio card his name is Hector X. Delgado. If Greg larped him as a kid, I congratulate him on his Steven Segal-like multiracial acting skills.
I called it early on that Incredible Change-Bots would be terrible, then I got it and changed my mind. It was funny listening to you guys goof on it. I was expecting Rob to just come out and say it’s terrible but he never did! What happened? Now in retrospect after I’ve spent an additional $45 on both the hardcover version and joining the fan club, I’m thinking I got waay tooo excited about this book. Unfortunately it’s too late to Incredible-Change my mind.
It was funny when Rob said Heath Ledger looked like an idiot as the Joker. I listened to the show last Thursday before he got dead. Of course now everybody will be reverent of Ledger’s dramatic portrayal of the messy long haired Joker and they’ll be reluctant to criticize it. Hopefully you guys will be unfettered by Ledger’s death and keep calling it like it is.
I gotta wrap it up so I can’t comment on the last 24 minutes but it was a great show and don’t make another one this long.
Esteban, I doubt we’ll release another episode that’s as long as this one. We just figured we’d do something special after coming back from a five week break.
When I was 11 years old, I saved all of my NES game boxes and had them stacked in the corner of my bedroom. A year later, I realized they were pointless and threw them in the garbage. I buy video games to play them, but I know many people buy them as an investment, which is weird to me. Some people even buy two copies of each game…one to open and play and one to keep sealed to resell several years later.
I do like the artwork on a lot of the old Atari 2600 boxes though. Some of those paintings are great (Haunted House, Defender, Asteroids, Missile Command, etc.).
I read that some people still make videos using the PXL-2000, which is weird, but some people also make videos using the old Game Boy Camera! The videos are interesting for a few seconds, but there’s only so much that can be done with a grainy, choppy, low resolution, black-and-white camera.
Regarding Star Wars toys, that’s definitely Greg’s department. I only had a few when I was younger, but I believe Greg collects them in some capacity. I think he has some of those tiny ones you described. Weren’t they part of the Micro Machines toy line or was there another set of microscopic Star Wars toys, too?
I remember you predicted Incredible Change-Bots would be bad, but then you ended up liking it so much that I bought it. I don’t think the book was horrible, but it was close. The concept has so much potential, but Jeffrey Brown wasted it. In comparison, your blog has more content and is much funnier. If you wrote a Transformers spoof, it’d be great.
Have you read any of Jeffrey Brown’s other books? If so, are they better?
Heath Ledger’s death surprised me, but didn’t upset me. He was a harmless actor who starred in movies I didn’t care about. I’m sure Greg and I will see The Dark Knight this summer and believe me, we won’t hold our opinions back, positive or negative.
The ridiculous SNES Super Scope light gun…I mean, light bazooka:
I have no idea who the person in the picture is. I found it on Wikipedia.org.
longer episodes of the paunch stevenson show? fantastic; no complaints here! since you chaps like tech and old video games, maybe you would like to listen to fellow podcaster the retroist – who has some shows on that subject. http://www.retroist.com/podcast-archive/ . i think esteban is right – shipwreck seems to be of mexican descent and a live action version of him – from the cartoon at least – were cast, i think amaury nolasco of ‘prison break’ fame would be a good choice.
Oh the days I have missed with the super scope. I had the wiimote as a Late teenager