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Tag: Star Wars

  • Searching for Star Wars Jeopardy!: The force was strong with this one.

    Searching for Star Wars Jeopardy!: The force was strong with this one.

    I gotta say, I’ve been in a rut lately. Having fairly average to unremarkable days, barely inspired to watch, play or even read new stuff. Suddenly, I got inspired by an idea that a friend suggested to me. Thus I started dabbling in emulating old computers. Stuff like PCem and such.

    Compared to console emulation, which are meant to just emulate games running on specific hardware, emulating an old Macintosh or Windows PC has a lot more going for it. Adjusting CPU and RAM sizes, installing software and making sure it works, seeing if your PC is even beefy enough to smoothly emulate a virtual machine… Despite all those headaches, I find it fun to mess around with. Turns out tinkering with stuff is neat.

    From Super Scattergories. Made by Cyberdice, the same folks who made Outburst. It’s very similar to it, complete with crude jokes.

    Throughout this journey I’ve started amassing a large amount of game show and trivia games for the period. Mostly licensed titles like Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud, to more off beat games like Radio Active: The Music Trivia Game (hosted by Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame!), and Outburst, a game I wrote about all the way back in 2014. There was one that seemed to elude me, despite having a MobyGames page and a proper link on the Wayback Machine.

    Just slap Darth Vader over Alex Trebek on the 1998 Jeopardy box, and boom, perfection.

    Star Wars Jeopardy! is a fan made Jeopardy!-like game made by Arnaldo “Arnie” Carvalho, a Star Wars fan. This particular fan game was released around 1999 on his own personal website, reviewgames.com, of which he made a Mobygames entry for the game back when the site was still fairly new. I had been made aware of it thanks to friend of the site Bobinator, who had suggested all this Windows PC emulation chicanery in the first place, and thought it would be a funny thing to put aside the UK version of You Don’t Know Jack and The $100,000 Pyramid.

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  • Exploring the galaxy with the December 2015 Loot Crate.

    Exploring the galaxy with the December 2015 Loot Crate.

    It’s been a month, so it’s time for Loot Crate to come my way once again. I already wrote about last month’s Loot Crate, and I thought that I might as well write about them as I got them. Since Loot Crate is probably one of the more popular things in terms of nerd culture, this is more of a personal archive for myself, since most of the stuff inside is already well known on the web.

    I almost didn’t get this crate, as I found it in the trash. My dad had accidentally threw it in there, thinking it was just an ordinary package. Thankfully there was no signs of damage or smells on the box, so I was able to recover it before it would’ve suffered an untimely demise. So let’s tackle this month’s Loot Crate, of which the theme is “Galaxy”.

    I mean, these look so generic-looking that I’m not surprised that it was almost in the trash.

    Oddly, the box is in a different, more box-like shape this month compared to last month’s, I wonder why that is. After cracking the Loot Crate open, I start to find out why…

    Halo 5: Guardians ammo crate container

    But I thought we already finished the fight…

    Hey, it’s a box within a box! Xzibit would be proud. More specifically, it’s a box shaped like an ammo crate that features the logo of the UNSC, the main military group of the Halo franchise.

    My experiences with Halo involve playing a leaked beta build of the PC port many a year ago, and co-oping through Halo 3 with a friend, which had a rather interesting tale that might be a bit much for this kind of blog. Since I was mostly a PC gamer by the time Halo hit the scene, I never really found much interest in the franchise. It wasn’t terrible, but I never got sucked into the cultural zeitgeist of it all. A shame really.

    There’s also a code for some unlockable items for the then recently-released Halo 5: Guardians, but alas I’m still stuck in the Xbox 360 world, thus I don’t think these items will ever get redeemed. That’s okay to me, because I can’t imagine that game being any good.

    One day I should give Halo another chance. Either through Xbox or on PC. I bet those games are really fun in co-op.

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  • I Bought Stuff! 8/29/2012: Pre-PAX Edition.

    I Bought Stuff! 8/29/2012: Pre-PAX Edition.

    So PAX is coming up. That popular video game thing in Seattle that has all the cool video game and nerd-culture related things that’s right in my neck of the woods.

    But instead of packing and getting ready to hop on a train tomorrow, I decided to go check some thrift stores and hope to find some interesting stuff. And I definitely found some of that. This will be a small, but interesting haul indeed.

    Quite the bizarre combination on hand here.

    • Virtua Fighter (32X, $3)

    • Metal Head (32X, $3)

    • The LucasArts Archives Volume IV: The Star Wars Collection Volume II (PC, $5)

    Over the years I’ve amassed a fairly small collection of 32X games, that ill-fated add-on for the Sega Genesis that was pretty much the Beginning of The End for Sega. I have a fair share of the ones people remember like Doom and Virtua Racing Deluxe, but a few other games elude me primarily because of how popular they are, like Knuckles Chaotix. In hindsight I should’ve grabbed it when they were $30 for a loose cartridge, because it’s definitely much higher these days.

    Virtua Fighter really doesn’t need much explanation: A 3D fighting game in the infancy of 3D graphics in arcades. The 32X version is likely an acceptable version of that game, but probably not the most ideal version to play these days. I’m not even big on fighting games, but I consider this significant enough to own.

    Metal Head is basically a first-person shooter in a mech. While not particularly new — stuff like MechWarrior existed for years before this — it’s something unexpected for the 32X, and had some surprisingly good 3D out of it. A shame it was put onto this dying system.

    Both of the Goodwills I went to had a surprisingly influx of NES, SNES and Genesis games, but most of them were the common licensed schlock or sports games. I even saw the infamous Pit Fighter for the SNES, but I’d rather not waste my money on garbage I’d only own for the novelty value.

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