FLips

Never liked Kevin Kelly. He grated on me back in his WWF days and was only good as the butt of The Rock's jokes. A complete dweeb that never had the on-air presence and/or commentary ability of any of his peers in any major company he's worked for.

I'm actually tempted one day to order the egg fried rice from there to see if it's just plain rice with an egg on top. I can't get over it.

Paid over £30 for the experience so you better believe I ate what I could stomach. I'll deal with the life threatening bout of food poisoning tomorrow.

We’ve been looking for a new regular chinese since ours got closed due to a 0 star hygeine rating. The one we tried tonight, my fuck, the sheer state of it.

Beef Curry had no spice, no flavour, and a gelatinous wallpaper paste texture. The house special fried rice had a whole fucking fried egg on top of it?

What is wrong with these people. shite.

Looks ace. Even if it’s bad, at the very least there seems to be a lot of love and fan service went into it.

Meltzer usually has some awful takes and is oblivious to the real world, and even he is asking why the fuck Tony Khan is letting one of his biggest stars go out to die on Mount Everest. 

Really hammers home just how lucky we were as fans and how lucky Sting was that he got a beautiful send off and a great match to go with it. Looking at that list there, most of them are awful last matches. Inconsequential with no fanfare, taking place at county fairs or as a throwaway body in a rumble.
It's no surprise wrestlers don't often stay retired because if my last match was against IAmTHEPROVIDER I'd be back between those ropes ASAP.

Blubbering at Sting's entrance vignette. So happy for him he gets to end it on his own terms with no screwy finishes or bad booking. A well deserved happy ending for him.

But jesus christ, Darby.

Sorted (almost) a PS1.

Found a cheap modded one for sale nearby so drove 20 minutes out for it. Only £20 so worth a go.
It's a SCPH1001 Revision model, so basically the first revision after the launch models. We're talking 1995-1997. The lasers are basically paper mache and the seller did warn me of that as well when we tested it at his house.
I got it home and my plan to swap my 7502 laser into the 1001 hit a few roadblocks. The optical drives are very very slightly different so long story short to get it to fit I had to snap the plastic legs off it with a pair of pliers and then go to my Mam's to borrow a screwdriver from her glasses repair kit to swap the plastic covers between the two lasers.
I finally get the laser swapped over and it works (though with the age of it, it's chugging along a bit even with the newer laser) and the mod chip turns out to be as old as the console because it's one of the older ones that runs NTSC in black and white.
So I've ordered a cheap RGB Scart cable off Amazon to come tomorrow and reassuringly the reviews outright mention that they got it to run a modded PS1 in colour for NTSC games so hopefully that should be the end of it.

The original guide I used to get my 7502 model that named that the best one to have names a 1001 Revision with a refurbished laser and RGB Scart as the 2nd best way to play PS1 so that's filled me with hope that tomorrow when the cable arrives I should be roughly back to where I started.

---

In other news I completed Super Turrican on the NES. I could get as far as 3-2 without cheats but the NES version is brutal even on easier difficulty as it has no checkpoints so each death sends you right back to the start of the level. Needless to say I found an invincibility cheat very quickly and used that to finish it. No earthly idea how anyone is meant to complete it legit.

I've been playing a bit of Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii U and it looks nice on the CRT as expected. That weird Wii blurriness is completely gone, the colours are really sharp. My plan was to mod my Wii U but it turns out modding a Wii is a lot easier with no chance of bricking it, so that's my plan now. Find a cheap Wii and mod it to play Wii and Gamecube natively and leave my Wii U as is, as honestly there's not much I'd want to play on the Wii U anyway that I either don't already have or that isn't re-released on Switch.

Went touring the local CEXs and game shops with a mate today and came away with some decent stuff.

The first CEX we went into had Super Turrican on the NES for £22 which is an absolute steal as online it's currently between £49-75.
It's a NES exclusive and a PAL exclusive game which I coincidentally only even found out about earlier this week and there it was. It's like fate.
Plays great, looks decent for a NES game and sounds fab too, with the soundtrack being made up of remixes or re-imagined tracks from Turrican 1 and 2. It was really clever though and took "Traps" and "The Wall" from Turrican 2 and just straight ported them across. Love it.

It keeps all the mechanics you want from Turrican. Fast paced run and gun action, exploration is encouraged, and even adds a few bits like the ability to run and difficulty options.

If you want to see how it looks in action here's a playthrough.

I picked up NBA Jam on the SNES while I was there for a fiver too, which is a decent price for that as well. I'm not into basketball but I had good fun on it when we all went to the arcade in Leeds so thought for a fiver it'd be a decent pick up and play multiplayer game in case nobody wants to play Clay Fighter with me. Boomshakalaka.

I also got Donkey Kong '94 for the Game Boy from a Cash Converters for £9.99, which is well below current asking price for a great game. It gets an exclusive arcade cabinet design and full colour on my Super Game Boy so that's really nice to play on the telly.

We went to a shop that was mad brick-a-brack mostly full of vinyl records but also had games and DVDs. It was like the wild west. They had filled the window with retro stuff, mostly Master System, Mega Drive and Gameboy Advance/DS but it must have been there for fucking years because it had been drained of all life by the sun and was all monochrome. An absolute waste.
The games inside didn't fare much better, all mixed together and randomly dumped. Glass cabinets displaying what you would think would be rarer items but it was stuff like copies of Cheggers Party Games that had fell over face down or battered Halo 2 on the original Xbox. I have no idea at all what the deal was with that shop.
In a mad stroke of luck though on the way out as we walked past the window again, I saw a Wii RGB cable I was looking for just dumped in the window at the bottom. No label, no price. I went back in and said "how much for the Wii scart cable in the window?" and he looked and went "It's not a scart cable". Right ok but how much is it?
He looked it over for a few seconds and went "I dunno. Couple of quid?". I give him a fiver and just left.

So now my Wii U is set up on the CRT. It looks surprisingly good after a bit of tinkering with the settings. Obviously doesn't look as good as it would on a HD telly but it's crisp and plays fine. The Wii games will look really good on it though because they weren't made for HD. I have a digital copy of Mario Galaxy 2 I'll give a blast some day.

Maccy’s cocked our order up and I got two double cheeseburgers instead of one. I’m not sure what you all call slamming two doubles together but I’ve known it as a McGangbang since a lad in uni called it that way back yonder. Whatever you call it, it belongs in this thread.

Nice of him to recognise one of the all time greats by throwing a woo in there because he's on video.

Bought a shirt yesterday and paid extra for next day delivery but because it's a leap year it hasn't counted today, so it's coming tomorrow.

A real shame. I was under the impression he was recovering. A lovely bloke by all accounts.

I won’t believe it until Ringo puts a brunch video out.

9 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

IT LIVES WOOO!

 

The way he says DEEleted is really getting to me. Showing his age too with “give us a call we’re at home”. Ringo definitely still has a landline.

That's proper cracked me up. I feel a bit bad about how much I laughed at it.

When I first started borrowing tapes and watched the golden era stuff, Virgil standing up to Dibiase was a defining moment of that era for me.

Was he any good after that feud during the New Generation or WCW? Absolutely not but fair play to him staying in work the entire time.

Last thing I remember seeing of him was the Chris Jericho package early in AEW which he was really funny in. Got him a few Dynamite appearances too. Always grifting.

RIP Virgil.

7 minutes ago, Loki said:

@FLips do you have a Game Gear?  There were a few exclusives on there that I loved - their version of Sonic & Knuckles I think was great, a good Mortal Kombat, and some crazy JRPGs.

I deeply regret trading my Game Gear in, as I do with every console I ever sold, even though it would now be on the shelf behind me gathering dust alongside the GBA/DS etc.

 

Edit: It was Sonic The Hedgehog 2 I'm thinking of.  

I don’t but I’ve played a good few games on it, Sonic 2 included (that minecart level is brutal). 
I was a Gameboy kid through and through!

Clay Fighter is a pure nostalgia buy. I had Mortal Kombat 3 and Street Fighter 2 on the Mega Drive but my SNES had Primal Rage and Clay Fighter. I’m under no illusion it’s anything but an OK fighting game.

@RedRooster I felt the same way about Knuckles Chaotix. Even for the time I’m not sure who decided it was fun, it has nothing going on at all and then they stuck a bad gimmick on top of that. A very strange addition to a time Sonic rarely set a foot wrong.

2 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

You are living the life I would if my wife wouldn't kill me. I am enjoying this all vicariously through your posts.

It’s all about give and take. This may look like a lot but I gave up the entire spare room so she could fill it with yarn and turn it into a crochet/knitting room.

She also drags me to wool shows every few months.

Went a bit mental with the retro buying with it being payday. Alongside the 5 NES games I got the other day I scooped up some (relatively to their usual asking prices) cheap games over the last couple of days as well.

All SNES games;

• Mortal Kombat 2 - £9
• Clay Fighter - £6
• The Lion King - £4
• Super Castlevania IV - £31
• Kirby's Fun Pak (Kirby Superstars outside the PAL region) - £36

That will be me for the month now. I shouldn't have really gotten Castlevania and Kirby but it's two big hitters I know I'll play to death and looking at recently sold and still active listings I've saved about £30 between them so it felt like now or never.
Really excited for Castlevania IV as well because I know my wife will play it with me. I convinced her to play Castlevania 1 with me the other night and she got immediately hooked on it. We were up until midnight completing it and then the next morning she got right out of bed, put the NES on and sat and played it herself until she completed it. She's loaded it up a few times since and it's lovely to see her enjoying it.

In other NES news I sat and finished Ducktales earlier. People are right when they say it's one of the better games on the console but it's certainly not without it's flaws. Weird hit detection and invincibility frames are the main reason you take damage  rather than any actual difficulty, and there's a really odd design choice where you go to the Mines and it transports you to get a key in Transylvania, then takes you back to the Mines. You also go back to Transylvania to fight the last boss. Almost like they ran out of space and had to just put a load of the game in one stage.
That being said you can't deny the ease of play, fun pogo mechanic, bright graphics and beautiful music. The fact it never gets frustratingly hard, gives you a end-game score to compete with and you can finish it in half an hour is the icing on the cake really. I've heard Ducktales 2 is a sleeper hit so if I can find that cheap at some point I'll give it a bash.

Had a nightmare with my chipped PS1 I was ranting and raving about. A couple of months ago now I had a mate over and we were playing Mortal Kombat Mythologies and during a cutscene the game crashed. We turned the PS1 off and it stopped reading discs completely.
I got confidence after my NES fixing and decided finally to open it up and sadly can't see anything wrong with it that Youtube/Reddit suggests. I tried changing the laser with my original non-chipped console and still no luck, so my Brother came over and he tried resoldering the mod chip to no avail, so as a last attempt we removed the chip completely and still the same issue. Seems to likely be a motherboard issue, so under the bed it went and I'll have to keep an eye out for a new one at some point.

I also got a new desk and chair delivered for WFH so had space to shuffle things about. I made the executive decision to take my PC speakers and subwoofer and connect them to my retro setup. Thanks to the SNES/N64 sharing the same RGB cable I have them both wired into the speaker system now. The SNES just sounds a little cleaner than direct through the TV but let me tell you that playing Lylat Wars with a sound system and the Rumble Pak had me like

It sounds amazing. F-Zero X and Ocarina of Time had a quick go too just to see how they sounded. Not sure I can go back to TV sound now with the N64 at least.

Also found out you can use the Wii scart cable on the Wii U so at one point I'll pick a cheap one of those up and get my Wii U on the CRT to play Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HD on it. I already have the console and games so for like £6 for the cable it's worth a pop I think.

Here's a photo of the setup currently. I'm getting carried away I think.

Just now, Hannibal Scorch said:

I thought Becky was awfully dire in that opening segment. Has she always been that bad?

Glad I’m not the only one. I watched the segment on Youtube earlier and thought she was awful. 

Received no suggestions so there's no review this week. I can only assume this is some sort of coordinated attack from another secret forum.

Next week I'll be playing Toejam and Earl.

9 hours ago, CAREBEAR LUVVA said:

This. Absolute shite, but I watch it quite often, maybe every 6 months or so.

 

This might be the saddest match I've seen since the Big 'un in Wigan. 6 years ago and look at the state of them!

Justin Credible looks absolutely awful but you can at least give him the benefit of the doubt he was "retired" at the time. Sandman looks like a town center beggar but somehow got work in TNA after this. New Jack looks the best of the lot of them and he's only 4 years away from being dead.

That being said I was laughing the whole thing. Justin Credible walking out to no music, failing a chair throw and then his mic not working, Justin Credible's superkick, New Jack needing Sandman's help to climb to the top and then falling off anyway. Amazing.