Archive for the ‘Gadgets & Reviews’ Category
Retro Review: Geordie Racer
Welcome all to the Retro Review, the column that likes to take the past by the balls, pin it up against a British Rail lavatory door and give it a bloody good buggering. Today (or whatever day this was written), we’re looking at Geordie Racer, a BBC Look and See (educational programming) series, which involved Geordie’s (people from Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Pigeons, and strange noises, in no particular order.
The first thing to note about the TV series of Geordie Racer, is that it’s almost impossible to understand what any of the characters are bloody saying. Trying to decypher the random dialect of Geordie people is nearly impossible, so to save the embarassment of trying, we’ll just assume for the rest of this review that the programme is filmed in a forigen language, and subtitles are required to fully appreciate the plot.
Oh, and what a plot it is. Setting the scene of Geordie Racer, the townspeople are currently 50/50 split obsessed with one of two things, either, the Great North Run, or the Great Pigeon Race. Now the reason for this, I can o
nly assume, is that half of Newcastle is stupid enough to run through the North of England, and the other half are stupid enough to try and get a pigeon to do it for them.
The main protagonist is named Spuggy Hilton, a name that has all sorts of dodgy connotations throughout the series, the many references to “Spuggy in his bird, like” – which is Geordie for “Kevin is with his pigeon” – well, the sexual inuendos speak for themselves really. Anyway, Spuggy is the only person in his family who takes an interest in the Pigeon race. The rest of his family are nutters obsessed with long distance marathon running, and the thought of “The Great North Run” is making them “spuggy” in their pants.
As a keen Pigeon fancier, Spuggy (or the Spugmiester as I shall now call him), manages to aquire a pigeon all of his own, named “Blue Flash” – one of the best birds in Newcastle. Then some random bitch called Janie turns up, and along with the Spugmiester witness a spate of local art robberies, (I know, it’s hard to figure out what the fuck is going on at this point). Just how Bonnie and Clyde here managed to witness several acts of people stealing paintings, and what that has to do with racing people OR pigeons, ugh, I don’t know anymore.
The fact they had to witness these people stealing paintings on THREE seperate occasions to cotton on to the fact they were stealing them speaks volumes.
So rather than call the police, like most sane people, they decide to go and spy on the crooks themselves, using their pigeon and other stupendously dangerous methods. This is such a good message to give out to kids, isn’t it? I really gave up trying to decypher the plot at this point so you’re just going to have to make up how this thing ends in your own head.
BUT WAIT, there was more to Geordie Racer than a bad television show. That’s right, there was GEORDIE RACER, THE GAME, FOR THE BBC MICROCOMPUTER.
The game was released on a 5 1/2 inch floppy disk, you know, the kind that actually flopped and took ten minutes to load, the video game version of Geordie Racer actually was kinda cool, but purely because it beat the endless handwriting and Italian lessions that my primary school forced upon us.
The BBC Microcomputer had the graphics of the old style Teletext, and this is pretty much what this game offers. After a very badly rendered title screen with one-bit rendition of the theme tune, players are treated to the main game, which consists of…. “Part 1″ and “Part 2″.
Comprehensive.
After selecting one of these, you can choose to go to a “Metro station”, which is funny, because Newcastle-upon-Tyne has no form of underground or overground tram system. It barely has bus routes. It’s also funny how this tram system conveniently has stations named “Home”, “Shoe Shop”, “Chemist”, “Bank”, etc. – I sure wish that the GMPTE would build me a tram system that only went to the places I went too!
After you visit the bank to get “£20″, the chemist to get “Foot Cream” and the “Shoe Shop” to get shoes, you can start the race. This involves answering questions, each one you get right progresses you 1 mile, each one you get wrong earns you a blister. Too many blisters and you’re out!
The questions are basically asking about things that happened in the TV show, so without watching it, you’re pretty stuffed to actually complete this game, and as such, I have now eaten the floppy disk.
Well, that was painful. Time to tally up.
Danny’s Retro Rating:
Retro Review: Microsoft 3D Movie Maker
Welcome to Issue 2 of the Retro Review, the column that loves to take old software by the balls and give them a good shake. Today, we’re looking at that no doubt memorable classic:
The game allows the user to choose from a wide range of scenes, then place 3D characters into those scenes and animate them in any way they wish. They can add speach bubbles or, with a suitable 16 bit sound card and microphone, record their own dialogue. The completed movie could then be saved and even shared online.
Now, of course, during 1995 the third dimension was still very much in it’s infancy. The Playstation was just about starting to make some inroads, but most 3D games still consisted of sprite-based bad guys in limited perspective environments. This was especially true for PC games, which lacked the gaming hardware that computers today take for granted. Back then, if you had more than 64mb of ram you where considered the elite.
For the time, then, the graphics and features available on this game are quite impressive. At first glance, anyway. The scenes are actually pre-rendered, and the 3D models have about three polygons each, but this is of course forgiveable. It still looks quite pretty.
Then shit starts to move, and the whole thing falls apart. Any attempt at walking by any of the characters results in some bizzare stepping motion while the entire upper body remains motionless. Any other form of movement is erratic and somewhat strange, and it’s all too easy to use the motion tool to make the characters appear to hump each other.
Infact that last bit is the most realistic animation on there. Then there are other issues, like the ability to make the characters randomly hump their way into the sky and off into no-mans land. The scenes are set in place so the characters just seem to wander off forever. Combine this with a frame rate of 8, and you can see why this game is probably a bit strange.
Now I do love the fact I can make a fat old sailor shag a Japanese lady at complete at total random at 8fps, but this does bore after a while. You can, if you want, make a proper movie with this thing I suppose, although I doubt it’ll become a timeless classic.
Strangely enough this game has a bit of a cult following, though. As recently as 2005, modifications and expansion packs have been released for it, as well as new tools and things of that nature. That’s a whole decade of unleashing terror on unexpecting kids of all ages.
This game then is, for all its faults, random quirky fun, and the ability to make anything have sex with anything from the street to a telephone box is nothing short of win.
Danny’s Retro Rating:
Retro Review: David Bellamy’s Endangered Wildlife
Well I am quite bloody drunk right now Sir, so what of coourse do I share of my mental genious than to say I have discovered a brand new idea for a pivoting topic point of blogging. Here is the amazing review of really bad software, video games and gadgets from the old days. I SHALL CHRISTEN IT, THE RETRO REVIEW.
First up, as per the title, David Bellamy’s Endagered Wildlife, for Windows 3.11, 95, and Macintosh Whatevercrapitwastheyhadthen.
For those not familliar with David Bellamy, he is a large bearded man who, for many years, fronted some namby-pamby shows on the TV about pandas. He later went on to do these very disturbing advertisements about Dettox disinfectant. Of course, with the Bellamy bandwagon at full roll, a video game release was inevitable.
Now the first thing to mention about this game is that, rather unpredictably, David Bellamy has absaloutely feck all to do with it. His voice, photograph, not even his name appears at any point except on the Compact Disc cover. This is, of course, something of a major dissapointment.
The plot opens up with a poor quality video of a pod crashing in what looks to be the surface of Mars. Then a video message is beamed into your 
brain, of two really cheesy actors in bad Star Trek costumes. They claim to have come from the future using some mumbo-jumbo technology, and have come back in time to warn us that the Pandas are all dead in the future.
Oh fucking n0es! – it’s now your job to meddle with the timeline and save all the forest-life from extinction. Now, to acomplish this task, you have to partake in one giant wordsearch puzzle for each endagered species that requires rescue. Now call me crazy, but, I’m not entirely sure what they hope to accomplish there. Now if we could sort Afghanistan out by doing a wordsearch and some really stupid mini-games, then the world would be a far better place.
Along the way you have to partake in various wordsearches, jigsaw puzzles, and watch various video clips of monkies randomly eating Bamboo. Once you’ve completed each puzzle, you move onto the next animal until eventually Bill and Ben pop back up on the viewscreen and say “cheers”. They then fuck off back too the future without so much as offering a cup of tea for your efforts.
Overall then, this game is severly lacking in any real substance. Duke Nukem it is not, with it’s cheesy MIDI soundtrack and total misrepresentation on the front cover, this game is bound to bring hours of sheer boredom too any household.
My grandparents love this game, by the way.
Danny’s Retro Rating:
Sky to offer content on Xbox 360
Not really news to some, I grant you, but I think it’s worth a mention, along with some other Sky and Xbox related news I wish to talk about.
Sky and Microsoft announced last week that Sky Player would be making it’s way to the Xbox 360. This means that on-demand content from all Sky’s major channels, including Sky Sports, Sky Movies and of course Punjab Radio, will be available for viewing on Xbox 360 any time of the day or night.
I guess the best part is the fact it also allows live streaming of channels, so, the first thing that jumps to mind is the fact I can take my Sports channels with me when I move out later this year (subject to 1001 things) – which is nice.
The other neat thing is the new EPG (or Electronic Programme Guide to all you lay-people) that has been sent to my Sky HD box. Anyone who has Sky will know that the current (well, now old) EPG dates from 1998, and has many flaws and problems.
The new EPG is much better than the old. The first, and most overdue feature is the “Mini TV”, which is actually a very clever solution to a major handicap that Satalite TV has always suffered from. It caches the EPG data onto the hard disk drive, so that a tuner is free to provide the Mini TV.
This also means that the now and next banner can show programme information for programmes up to 24 hours in advanced, so there’s no longer any reason to miss any part of a programme.
The search feature is also quite cool, being of the Google style “enter a word and we find it” box, which I always find useful because I could never find a thing otherwise. I can now type in, for example, “Apprentice”, and get all the Apprentice shows for that week, and indeed I’ve found many shows this week I would have totally missed before.
The best bit, though, is….
NO MORE EPG MUSIC!
