3 Coolest Unlocked Characters in Gaming History
June 18, 2008
Old-school game tricks to help you get your retro on
How about Samus nude. At one time there was a rumor about getting the Princess nude if you did a special thing on Mario Bros.
read more | digg story
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80’s Cable TV: On-TV
June 17, 2008
A couple of weeks ago my friend pointed out to me that me and my family where the only ones on the block who had cable in the 80’s. “You guys had ON-TV” he pointed out.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Ontvlogo.jpg
ON-TV was a subscription television service, also known as National Subscription Television, launched in 1977 by Oak Industries, Norman Lear’s Chartwell Enterprises and Jerry Perenchio. Oak was a manufacturer of satellite and pay-TV decoders and equipment. ON-TV operated in major markets such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit.
ON-TV was one of many “scrambled UHF” services in many major markets around the country in the era before multi-channel cable television became widely available. Others included SelecTV, Prism, Starcase, Spectrum, Preview, VEU, and SuperTV.
ON-TV, like other PayTV networks, aired a mixture of movies, sports events, and concerts. For example, the Los Angeles-area service showed many home games of the Los Angeles Dodgers, California Angels, Los Angeles Lakers, and Los Angeles Kings, as well as some of the era’s biggest championship boxing matches. In Chicago, ON-TV aired Chicago White Sox, Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks games (which eventually migrated over to a second ON-TV owned station, Sportsvision.)
ON-TV not only aired mainstream films, but much like Z Channel, also aired more unique films and concerts, featuring such acts as Talking Heads and Siouxsie and the Banshees. ON-TV also opted for a uniquely New Wave and heavy metal-dominated music video lineup between films, including acts that MTV and other video shows often ignored, such as Oingo Boingo, Slade, Adam and the Ants, Devo, Men Without Hats, Rush, The Police, J. Geils Band, Wall of Voodoo and many others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ON-TV
We used to attempt to watch the Playboy channel by flipping the A/B selector back an forth quickly. It was ultra softcore but for an 9-10 year old in the 80’s it was might as well have been Hustler magazine. What is funny is that Hustler and the other hardcore stuff seemed over the top. It was more of a gross out oddity taken too far that defied description. But Playboy was just right.
Aside from the occasional “skin”amax or late night HBO, What we watched more that anything else was MTV. There was no MTV2 or Realworld or whatever else lame crap they pass for entertainment these days. In the 80’s, MTV meant MUSIC TV and they actually played MUSIC videos. Their competition was the Box who played back to back videos (I think that was the name.. could have been “video box” or “thebox”). Thevideobox (or whatever the name was.. I maybe thinking of Video Jukebox) never really got that popular and might have been a local phenomenon, because I googled it and can’t find anything on it… let me know if you remember it. MTV’s only other real competition was VH1 (VH-1: Video Hits One) that got big a little later.
What was really cool about MTV at the time is that they seem to be a young and daring group of artists running the channel however the hell they wanted. As such they were able to break new ground in all directions in art: music, video, stories, shows, movies, even animation. Mad geniuses like Peter Chung introduced new states of consciousness via strange pieces like Æon Fluxin the early 1990’s. MTV was able to popularize the music video genre and the avante garde fringes of art & culture stimulating a revolutionary progressive thought that was brewing within the newly arrived Generation X. Unfortunately, MTV/MTV2 is now just another part of the corporate/commercial landscape. Innovation and freething has been pushed to the Internet.
On-TV was a big factor in my GenX development. While might chalk this up as an entirely negative thing, I would respectfully disagree. I really believe that cable is a interesting part of the American cultural landscape. In the 80’s, channels like MTV helped to define the boundaries of our culture. Many hard line traditionalist and religious types were seriously critical of the redefinition of those boundaries, but no one (not even a particular religion) owns the rights to all ethical answers. Life evolves to fast for a single one-dimensional measurement of morality and reality.
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300 NES Style
June 17, 2008
Interesting retro version of 300. Gotta love the explosion sounds!
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Romans Used 20-Sided Dice Two Millennia Before D&D
June 17, 2008
Many of us geeks take great pride in the ability to recite the history of role-playing games based on the 20-sided die, but what about the history of the die itself? Apparently it predates the original Dungeons and Dragons by almost two millenia.
Pete1the1gamer: D&D is retarded…
Me: Fuck off. You’r just mad because you don’t have a 8th level Monk with +5 dexterity and magical staff that can do 6D damage on all Undead.
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Sweet Video Tribute To The Coolest Games of the 80’s!
June 17, 2008
Combat, Pikes Peak, Bump N’ Jump, Pac-Man, Asteroids!
Direct link to the video..
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New ‘Smurfs’ Movie Will Be Live Action. Be Very Afraid
June 11, 2008
Oh dear. It seems nothing from our childhoods is sacred. I’m wondering if there is ANYway this won’t be a really long b-movie. How in the world will they explain Smurfette’s promiscuity to children? Who’s idea was this?
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The 25 Worst Sitcoms Ever
June 10, 2008
For every great sitcom, there’s a pile of crappy ones. Some get cancelled right out of the gate — others drag on for years, begging to be put out of their misery.
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Game Watch - those 1980’s handheld games
June 10, 2008
An online archive of those annoyingly addictive hand-held games that were all the rage in the early 1980’s. Who needs fancy graphics?
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Army desertion rate highest since 1980
June 10, 2008
Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
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1980 Satellite Recon Photo of Soviet Particle Beam Weapon
June 10, 2008
A particle beam weapon is a type of directed-energy weapon that directs a high energy beam of atoms or electrons at a target, and thus causes damage by disrupting the atomic and molecular structure. While the mass of these particles are very low, the ultra high velocity imparts massive momentum.
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