UKFilmNerd

Jesus Christ, both!! 😆 But only finger tight. Sod you bastards who get the screwdrivers out! That’s overkill. 😁

I enjoyed Ready Player One at the time even though some of it was just ridiculous. Re-enacting Ferris Buellers Day Off for example.

Armada, Cline’s next book was awful. So many references on every page, I stopped reading. I remember a line that was something like, “my mum wouldn’t let me past, like Gandelf in the mines of Moria.” Sheesh! Let it go!

I fully read Ready Player Two but the guy has no story telling abilities. Every time the main character encounters a problem, e.g. I need a level 49 sword to get past this problem, but there’s no way to get one, it was always solved with the same solution, “oh, I own the game and all Admins have level 1000 swords because we do!”

I think I reached my limit when he managed to shove in a Shaun of the Dead reference just because he mentioned a cricket bat!

CodeMaster religiously hold onto their copyrights. I remember searching for their 8bit games of the 1980s and while copies are out there, the places that do it legally, World of Spectrum for example, don’t host them because CodeMasters refuse permission for these old games to be distributed for free.

I only discovered it myself in the last month or so.

For example, I loved X-Wing CD edition back in the day for the real Star Wars soundtrack but I need to try it with MT32 midi emulation. I bet the iMuse system sounds fantastic.

It’s an emulator for playing the entire back catalogue of Lucasarts games. It’s very well documented and ready to use. As I said, if you had some kind of general midi set up or Roland MT32 back in the day, you’d be laughing. The music is awesome.

The program is called Dreamm.

DREAMM is a backronym for:

DOS
Retro-
Emulation
Arena for
Maniac
Mansion (and other LucasArts Games). 

I played the first, maybe not all the way through, on my Atari ST. Later on, I got quite annoyed that the Amiga got the sequel but Lucasfilm Games days it wasn’t coming to the Atari.

I remember getting the PC CD-ROM edition of the original game and the music was lovely.

The next time I played was game three, Curse of Monkey Island. I loved the art style and completed that one.

I plan on playing the latest installment at some point. I downloaded it onto my Xbox.

There’s also a great program for playing old Lucasfilm faces on PC. You can load soundbanks into it because it can emulated different midi interfaces that I dreamed of owning back in the day. The tunes sound amazing.

Just a simple kitchen timer.

Living with a friend, in the first place after moving out of our parents places. He smoked weed but that didn’t bother me. However, one night he invited in the local weed dealer and I was really concerned but he assured me it was ok.

We both worked at the same company, so came home at the same time a day or so later to find the front door was open. They smashed the small decorative window which allowed them to reach in and unlock and open the door.

I can’t remember what they stole from my friend but I lost my GameCube, controllers and all the games. Also, my first portable minidisc player and a pair of cheap earphones I used with them which I absolutely loved. The wire was like string and rarely tangled.

I had a few imported US games and I thought they might give me the edge. I rang all the local game shops to see if anyone had tried to bulk sell the lot but I was unlucky.

Reading these replies , I’m going to have to watch some videos on Burnout 3. I played it back in the day but I’d forgotten things like aftertouch to wreck more vehicles.

I played through games 1 & 2 a few years back and I loved the Crash Junctions.

Having been playing Burnout: Paradise recently, I now see what’s missing. Its a fun racer but stripped of a lot of what came before.

When I used to work in a supermarket, I hated the stupid customers. This is a classic example. One of the soft drink companies fairly regularly gave away 50% free.

Therefore, for the same price, the bottle would be 3 litres in size rather than 2.

The amount of people who didn’t like that.

“Excuse me, where’s the 2 litre bottle?” “Oh, it’s the same price miss, you get an extra litre for free.” “But I don’t want 3 litres, I only want two!” Sigh!

Back in the early 90s, here in the UK, a company called Cheetah produced licensed joysticks based on Batman, Terminator, Alien³ and The Simpsons. They looked great but they were terrible to use, especially the Alien³ model which I really liked but was incredibly uncomfortable. I never bought one, just tried then on the shops, awful things.

Back in the day, I bought the official Xbox360 steering wheel. It made me laugh because it was called wireless. It was only wireless between itself and the Xbox. It still needed a power brick to drive the motor and another wire to connect it to the pedals.

When I sold it, I almost made my money back because it was in high demand. MS had replaced it with that awful U shaped steering wheel that you held in the air like a Wii controller. It used sensors to tell when it was tilted. I never used one but the reviews weren’t favourable as I remember.

The 8 bit guy. I loved his retro computing channel and then one day, he acquired a rare IBM computer and promptly destroyed the power supply by sticking a screwdriver into it (if I remember correctly).

For some reason, I googled about this and discovered he’s a gun nut. They’re videos of him going grocery shopping with his rifle on his back which apparently he does this knowing it will annoy people.

Unsubscribed from the channel and never looked back.

I normally listen to heavy metal, rock maybe nerdcore rap. The other night, I was alternating between the albums of Natalie Imbruglia and Melanie Chisholm. There’s some good stuff in there.

I saw such a device on Instagram. I think it was a Bluetooth connection from the computer diagnostic port to the phone.

The app takes this data and makes the right noise based on engine revs. The app was full of different engine sounds both real and fictional along with silly noises such as farting.

In the beginning, it was a mix of LiftOff! and Jerboa. The dev of LiftOff! had twins and understandably, he hasn’t returned and the app has fallen to the wayside.

So I tried Thunder (available on Android and iOS) and it’s been really good, lots of regular updates and features as well.

I’ve really enjoyed many of the IP based games over the years, Star Wars, Marvel, Indiana Jones and even Lego GTA. Oh sorry, Lego City: Undercover.

The one that really disappointed me was Lego: Worlds. I thought it would be fun to build with unlimited bricks virtually but it’s just not for me.

I like to have physical bricks in front of me which give me ideas as I build. Finding different bricks in the pile gives me new ideas as I build. That’s not something than happens with the game.

On the flip side, playing with the 80s Space sets was a huge nostalgia kick for me.

I agree. There seems to be a job in the industry called “Professional Guesser”. It’s like those companies/people who say, “Barbie Vs Kong” is expected to make $76m at the box office this weekend. How can you possibly know?

DVDs had a maximum resolution of 576p. The Superbit DVDs by Sony were DVDs that had no extras so that they could use the entire space on the disc to maximise the bitrate. I think this was only beneficial to those with very large TVs.

Minidiscs rocked! My first model, which I loved, was unfortunately stolen. They hardly took up any room and I could carry loads of them on my travels to college. They were cheap and came in lovely bright colours.

The replacement model I bought was a Sony NetMD which I thought was amazing. It ran for hours on it’s chewing gum battery and if that failed, I could screw on an attachment to use a single AA battery.

The player used Sony’s new compression techniques and I could fit three or four albums on a single disc. It came with a dock and connected to my Windows 95 PC so I could rip CDs or convert mp3s and use the computer to fill in the artist and track name information.

I found the in-line remote on eBay so I could control it via the little cylinder remote with the backlit blue LCD display, clipped to my jacket.

I loved minidiscs.