Two Way Roads

Blog Necromancy: Featuring Exclusive Yoot Tower Goodies

2011-12-01T21:34:00.000-06:00

Over a year ago I closed the doors on Two Way Roads, but I'm reopening it with my latest find: The Tower II Files.

Taken from an archived version of OPENBOOK9003's site, here they are. They're not exported or translated (though work will commence on it soon enough), but this is a major landmark in one of the things Two Way Roads was founded on. Enjoy.

This Blog Is Officially Closed

2010-11-08T16:42:00.003-06:00

Two Way Roads operated between 2007 and 2010, and contains a mixture of "flagship posts" (including articles on The Learning Company and Auchan's Houston location).

I am in the process of both opening up previously archived posts that I decided to remove, and replacing (though not removing) posts that are rendered obsolete, such as this one.

Comments are still welcome, I still read them and respond. Check out this page for new comments.

BUT OF COURSE! How could I not leave without some links?

• Carbonizer: my current blog
• Pseudo3D's Projects: the base for everything!

The Spirit of 2005: Astroworld

2010-10-30T13:00:00.001-05:00

AstroWorld is one of the most depressing theme park stories around. What began as a complement to the Astrodome (the "Eighth Wonder of the World") in one of the biggest American (and possibly the world) cities ended when a lazy CEO decided that the declining park was worth less than the land it sat on.

I mean, this was the park that built the first "river rapids" ride! Perfected the suspended roller coaster! This had it all!

Regrettably, I have no personal stories about Astroworld, as I never went. The closest I could say is seeing a multitude of theme park rides in September 2005, hidden in the trees, just off the south 610 loop. And then it closed. And then it was gone.

I also have a circa 2000 map that I got at the Texas Rest Center in Orange, TX (just near the Louisiana border). It (the brochure, not the rest center) can be seen here, in my Flickr photostream. I may scan a better version of the main map in the near future.

You should read the Wikipedia page for it.

In a way, in the early days, it resembled other modern theme parks, including dolphin shows (commonly associated with SeaWorld nowadays). It even spawned an adjacent water park called Waterworld in 1983.

Unfortunately, the park went downhill. Upkeep and attendance dropped off. One reason was possibly a crime spike in the 1990s, and more pressing, the fact of Six Flags' acquisition in 1987. It was around that time that it started declining...

Then Six Flags started to have financial problems, merged Waterworld into Astroworld in 2002, and announced in September 2005 that it would be closed and demolished at the end of the season.

On October 30, 2005, Astroworld had its last day in business, and was razed almost immediately after. It was gone. The land was sold off, but it was never developed: the economy went downhill, and the land continued to sit unused.

Someone actually filmed a short film using old footage he had, and even though it plays out like what happens when you consume mind-altering substances (it's supposed to be a dream sequence), it's pretty good.

Clicking on the video shows you other YouTube footage of Astroworld, including old commercials!

To this day, I wonder about the fate of Astroworld had it not been closed entirely.

I figured three things would happen (I posted this on HAIF)

1. Hurricane Ike would've damaged the park, just like what hurricanes did to Cypress Gardens. A small theme park company would have a hard time repairing it, thanks to...
2. The recession. A lot of theme parks suffered during the recession, though to my knowledge, nothing closed (or did it?)
3. Dungeon Drop, which in real life, moved to Six Flags St. Louis in 2006 and renamed Superman Tower of Power. A year later, a virtually-identical ride in Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom malfunctioned and cut off a teenager's feet.

However, after 2005, Astroworld was demolished. Even though some rides were sold to other parks, several were so damaged during demolition, they could not be salvaged.

At this point, I'd try to wrap up the post with something regarding The Spirit of 2005, the continuing series. But I'm not, and you'll see why.

The fact remains: after October 30th, 2005, Houston was never the same again.

And, now, five years after the end of Astroworld, comes an end to Two Way Roads.

It's been a good three years...much less than Astroworld's thirty-seven.

Two Way Roads was founded in February 2007 as an "open personal journal" of sorts. I could write whatever I wanted, add new things, and get comments. Initially, this was the premise.

Maybe I wasn't so clear before, but this blog is about pretty much anything I'm interested in...abandoned railroads, places and roads, McDonald's, video games, Apple, retail history...or cool thoughts. At various times I attempted a website, then eventually closed down and opened a Wikipedia account. After seeing blogs like Labelscar and X-Entertainment, as well as an article in WIRED magazine, I knew my time had come. I tried to avoid cliché things like ultra chat-speak, about my friends and enemies. I only hope to achieve some moderate form of popularity. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall see a *longer* article on McDonald's food and why the redesign is a bad idea. Later, we'll also discover which groups of people deserve an applause and which ones don't. We'll pit blogs against MySpace. We'll even sell our wares on CafePress. So, sit down, buckle up, and head into the northbound lane of Two Way Roads.

--"What this blog is about" (removed post)

TWR was supposed to have an overarching travel theme, but I guess it didn't really work that way. Early posts were generally terrible affairs: I tried to create insightful thoughts on a few topics, but they generally sucked.

But what could really take the cake would be a combo Palm/Nintendo DS. It could feature a dual compatible SD slot/DS card slot, and starting it up brings not the seizure warning and DS menu screen, but a familiar and large Palm screen. The sides of course, could feature all the ABXY buttons plus the Palm buttons, and the very bottom could be used for Graffiti in Palm mode.

--An excerpt from a removed post, "The Palm Conumdrum"

The first year was not a bad year: I marginally improved, and I enjoyed it. I talked about some of the trips I took: Cherry Hill Mall, Corpus Christi. Spam caused the comments to be temporarily closed, and a popular post was created: Yoot Tower Tips, which was derived from an insert in Yoot Tower's CD. It went on to become one of the most-visited TWR pages.

By the end of 2007, the original plan, to become like a high-end version of X-Entertainment was thankfully dumped, and by Summer 2008 TWR started to reach maturity. I made a good post (with more photos, and not just one photo I found on the Internet) when I went to Waco, and created what would be the most-commented post ever. It turned to be successful because of the high number of hits post-Ike in regards to The Mall of the Mainland...the short version is I went to the mall a few weeks before Hurricane Ike, and it got worse after Ike. Unfortunately, no one really cared about the previous post. A few weeks later, I decided to review an open-source SimTower per a suggestion. It was also a very popular page.

After noting the success of it, I thought about running the blog strictly on user-submitted ideas. But it didn't work. Summer 2009 also ran into problems. This time I tried to make spin-off blogs, including a proposed webcomic. It was also at the time Pseudo3D's SimCity 4 was founded, and the time I changed my name to Pseudo3D because Jonah Norason wasn't my real name (and it sounded stupid). Why I chose "Jonah Norason" is a secret known only to myself. Summer 2009 also didn't "work" because my family decided to do some cosmetic renovations that really didn't increase functionality, but caused fumes 24/7. So the blog work was delayed for the fumes to die down.

December 2009 saw a flurry of new activity after a particularly weak fall, and it first focused on computers. A side note was that I was first re-discovering abandonware on a revitalized iMac G3 and a new Macintosh Garden. Those were good days.

In 2010, bolstered by the many posts of December, I decided to try to make a post every day. It would be really cool to find a blog that updated every day that wasn't a commercialized network, and I was hoping this process could bring in new readers searching such a blog.

That lasted for three months. In that time, I felt committed to my blog, but in a bad way. Time constraints severely limited some posts, while others were filler. New series were tried, including Games Not Played, Saturday Night Blogging (a few posts of it had been done in 2010), Sourceforge Review, Pokémania, another travel post with promises of a series, and more. A lot of good ideas were lost in the continual need to update every day. They were developed poorly and promptly buried.

The final post of this sort was on April 1st, where I had an April Fool's Day post. On April 8th I got a strange comment on that post, but given the odd lateness of it, mentioning Obama (I never mentioned politics in the blog, and that was one rule I kept), and never posting elsewhere, I wondered if it was my brother or cousins trying to pull a prank on me. They denied it.

Throughout April, I tried to post pictures with every post (even though I stopped updating daily), but ended it two months later.

Then the Nero Wolfe post was released in June 2010. It actually got a comment...and I realized this was what TWR needed. So yet another topic was drawn up. "Variety Without Politics" was the new catchphrase for TWR. I thought it was a good idea, and prepared new posts that would bring the assumed non-commenting readers into the blog. I installed a StatCounter widget at around the time to monitor readership. But it turned out that most readers were random Google searchers. Unfortunately, the demand never materialized, and I soon slacked off on the content anyway. Then I tried to mimic Vintage Computing in the fact that I narrowed ideas (down to games and computers, mostly) and tried to add a "Comment Discussion Starter". That flopped too. Soon college settled in, and I tried to write a bunch of new posts. They did not generate much momentum, and with the continual stress of college, it was very disheartening and demoralizing to check my email and find there was a new collection of spam comments that needed to be monitored but no real comments.

A brief surge of popularity came in when the Macintosh Garden temporarily went down, but it did not result in a blog comeback. On October 7, I announced a hiatus partially to determine if I actually had any legitimate readers. No one cared. I evaluated my options. Two Way Roads was getting stale. It had failed to find a niche of any sort. The title was somewhat misleading. And it was my first blog. No one keeps blogs forever.

However, here are some of the posts I had held and was intending to post later this fall. A few have been posted (regarding The Learning Company, Cyan Worlds, and Blobbo). But here are others.

"The Atari Brand Slave Trade"

If you didn't know, the current Atari Inc. holds no relation to the Atari Inc. of yesteryear. Here's what happened.

In 1972, the original Atari Inc. was founded.
In 1976, Warner Communications Inc. acquires Atari. It is still an independent company.
In 1984, Warner closes down Atari. The most profitable divisions include the computer, video game, and arcade divisions. The arcade division is retained and rebuilt as Atari Games Corporation, while the computer and video game division is sold to Tramel Technologies Ltd., which renames to Atari Corporation.
In 1985, Atari Games was sold to Namco Ltd. (makers of Pac-Man), washing the hands of Warner by no longer having Atari.
In 1986, Atari Games is bought back.
In 1993, Time Warner (the result of Time Inc. buying Warner Communication) buys back Atari Games Corp. under the division "Time Warner Interactive". Atari Games maintains identity, but it loses the consumer game brand (Tengen)
In 1996, WMS Industries buys Atari Games from Time Warner. Meanwhile, Atari Corporation, which had since dropped computers and focused on video games, merges with JT Storage Inc. to become JTS Corporation.
In 1998, Atari Games went with Midway Games as WMS Industries spun off Midway. Meanwhile, JTS Corp. sells the Atari name to Hasbro Interactive (a division of Hasbro, obviously). This was done through a company called Hiat XI Corp., which was specifically created to buy the Atari name. Hiat XI Corp. renames to Atari Interactive Inc.
In 1999, Hasbro Interactive faces a wave of losses and slashes studios, including Atari Interactive. It is then absorbed into Hasbro Interactive fully. Meanwhile, JTS Corp. closes.
In 2000, Atari Games is renamed Midway Games West to avoid confusing the two Atari names, as Hasbro is using it.
In 2001, Hasbro Interactive is spun off as Infogrames Interactive Inc., a subsidiary owned by the French company, Infogrames SA. This is not to be confused with Infogrames Inc., another video game company they owned. Infogrames Inc. was GT Interactive Inc. from 1993 to 1999.
In 2003, Infogrames wanted to focus on the Atari brand they picked up and renamed Infogrames Interactive (Hasbro Interactive) to Atari Interactive Inc., while Infogrames Inc. became Atari Inc., which was totally unrelated to the original Atari Inc. Both became indistinguishable in game branding. Meanwhile, Midway Games West was shut down by Midway Games and absorbed what was left of it.
In 2009, Infogrames SA, which owned Atari Inc. (GT Interactive) and Atari Interactive Inc. (Hasbro Interactive) renamed to Atari SA. Namco Bandai Holdings Inc. (Namco's merger with Bandai) starts to acquire Atari, including the entire Austrailia division. Unfortunately, they get tied up in losses (like Atari SA) and the merger is put on hold. Meanwhile, Midway files for bankruptcy.
2010, Warner Bros. Entertainment gets much of the assets of Midway, once again getting parts of the Atari dream.

So as you can see, Atari split and the name was in the hands of no less than seven parent companies. Eight, if you count Warner Communications and Time Warner to be separate companies.

---------------------------------------

"There's no fare like American Fare!"

K mart opens American Fare - hypermarket
Discount Store News, Feb 20, 1989 by Donald Longo

K mart Opens American Fare

Features Upscale Apparel Brands, Low Prices

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga.--At a time when monotony rules much of retailing, K mart has launched a new hypermarket unlike any other store in the United States.

American Fare, opened here late last month, features a trendy casual apparel mix with labels that would be the envy of the most upscale discount.

The hypermarket, which expects to generate more than $100 million in annual sales, also features custom-designed fixturing in apparel and some hard lines departments. These hightech-look black fixtures are on locking wheels for easy maneuverability.

"We can reconfigure a department overnight," said Dan Lafferty, general manager, operations and personnel.

Despite the upscale apparel, the new store is very sharply prices on hard lines goods. On a wide range of products, from cookware and microwave ovens to automotives and sporting goods, American Fare had lower prices than the nearby K mart or Wal-Mart discount stores on identical items.

Distinguishing characteristics include: . Emphasis on fulfilling the shopping needs of "New Collar" consumers. These consumers have sophisticated taste, but limited budgets and time for shopping; . Extensive spotlighting throughout the store, especially in apparel. There are more than 600 spotlights in the children's area alone; . Unique children's sizing walls. One each in the boys' and girls' departments allows a child to stand next to a silhouette which is color-coded to tags on merchandise that fit that particular silhouette size.

Similarly, foot sizing imprints are located on the floor of the children's shoe department; . Diaper changing stations in both women's and men's rest rooms, further evidence of the store's responsiveness to changing consumer lifestyles; . Special American Fare hosiery fixtures that organize hose by size, not brand. The department does not use any vendor displays; . An undulating spiral banner that visually links the toys and children's wear departments.

After a week of practice runs, the 244,000-square-foot hypermarket complex officially opened here, 18 miles east of Atlanta, on Jan. 29. The opening day turnout easily fulfilled company forecasts that between 70,000 and 100,000 shoppers would arrive, despite the lack of traditional advertising blitz and pre-opening hoopla.

American Fare is a joint venture between K mart, which owns 51 percent, and Bruno's supermarket company. While K mart and Bruno's buyers helped place the first orders for the hypermarket, American Fare now has its own buying staff, located in Troy, Mich.

Unlike other hypermarkets in the United States, American Fare expects to sell a larger percentage of higher-margin products in comparison to sales of lower-margin commodity goods.

For example, the store has a relatively small health and beauty aids department but devotes extensive space to its lawn and garden area.

"We're not going to make our money selling tons of toilet paper," commented one American Fare executive as he led a group of reporters through the store.

By selling wool sweaters by Jones New York for $76, Rafaella blazers for $60, Modula jumpsuits for $44, and Zenith 31-inch color TVs for over $2,000, American Fare expects to generate larger tickets with fewer unit purchases than most mass retailers.

And unlike other hypermarkets and many discount stores which use diverters to offer customers a smattering of upscale brand name apparel, all merchandise at American Fare is ordered directly from the manufacturers.

"Our drawing and sketches convicted vendors who don't normally sell to hypermarkets and discount stores to sell to us," said Ted Peterson, of the design firm Peterson & Associates, Chicago. Peterson, whose firm designed the store, added that other conventional department store vendors have agreed to supply their prestigious labeled merchandise to American Fare after touring the store.

"The store is going to shake up the entire industry" in terms of who vendors will and will not sell to, commented a visiting retail executive of a competing chain.

Among the apparel brands sold at American Fare: . Women's--Danskin, 16th Street, Calvin Klein, Palmetto, L.A. Gear, Puma; . Men's--Pacific Coast Highway, Bugle Boy, Laguna, Slazinger's Billy Connor Signature, Sergio Valente, Bill Blass, Wrangler, Cherokee; . Children's--Beverly Hills Polo Club, Legendary Bon Homme, Hush Puppies, Hang Ten, French Toast, Camp Beverly Hills, Pizazz; . Infants' and toddlers' Curity, Gerber, Oneita Kids, Camp Beverly Hills; . Footwear--Wolverine, Capezio, Pony, Dexter, Puma, Candie's, Converse, L.A. Gear, Kangaroos.

Store hours are from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Customers can go through any of 61 custom-designed front-end checkouts, eight of which are express lanes. Twenty other registers are located in service departments within the store.

American Fare sells goods at one of three different pricing levels. Most merchandise is sold at the "Everyday Fare Price." In addition, special purchases of goods pass the savings on to customers; and goods are sold at clearance.

The hypermarket plans no price-item advertising. "All advertising will be institutional, spotlighting the Everyday Fare Price strategy," said James Glime, American Fare's managing director.

One operational savings is the use of shelf-edge pricing throughout the store. All merchandise, including apparel, is UPC coded. An NCR scale/scanner automatically enters the correct price, reducing human error at the register.

The giant hypermarket divides its 213,000 square feet of selling space among food (74,550 square feet), apparel (35,000 square feet), and hard lines (104,450 square feet). The rest of the footage is in the mall area, which includes a music and video store, a food court, a full-service bank, a hair salon and two stores operated by American Fare: a pharmacy and a card store.

An important aspect of American Fare's merchandising strategy is selective dominance. According to Glime, with just 45,000 total sku's, the hypermarket can't hope to be competitive with other discount and specialty stores in product category selection.

So, rather than try to compete head on with a selection to match a sporting goods chain like Sports Town, American Fare attempts to present a dominant selection of fishing, camping and hunting equipment, but just dabbles in team sports equipment. The CE department is strong in phones and VCRs, but light in audio equipment.

Records and tapes and greeting cards were other areas where the company felt it important to be strong. Separate stores were set up in the mall due to the limited sku's and space of the hypermarket.

A florist's shop in the horticulture department, a dominant category called American Greenhouse, creates floral arrangements and sends flowers anywhere in the country.

During the 20 months of planning prior to its grand opening, American Fare conducted extensive focus group and demographic studies in Atlanta and other markets. The result is a store that goes to great lengths to satisfy customer needs.

"American Fare is designed to allow customers to shop the way they want," said Glime. "There is no forced path. If a customer wants to shop for food today and apparel next week, that's OK, too.

"Our goal is to provide a broad assortment of merchandise in a comfortable, exciting environment at prices that will bring them back."

One finding of the research was that shoppers considered public address announcements in the store distasteful and annoying. Therefore, no "Attention, American Fare shoppers" announcements will ever be heard at the hypermarket. Instead, shoppers hear pop music modulated to be louder in some departments, such as apparel, and less noticeable in other areas, such as automotives.

American Fare has followed the lead of the Auchan hypermarket in Houston and Wal-Mart's Hypermarket USA in requiring a 25-cent deposit on shopping carts. Lafferty said this system reduces cart theft and, more important, lessens the chance of customers' cars being scratched by loose carts in the parking lot.

A second, downsized (160,000-square-foot) American Fare will open late this year in Charlotte, N.C. Because demographic and focus group studies in Charlotte are likely to uncover some differences from Atlanta consumers, American Fare officials expect the second store to differ somewhat from the premiere version.

---
Downsizing time at K Mart. (K Mart Corp. gives up hypermarket format favoring smaller-sized 'combination' format named Super K Mart Center) (Brief Article).
Daily News Record 22.n84 (May 1, 1992): p.p3(1). (208 words)
Show details

Full Text :COPYRIGHT 1992 Fairchild Publications, Inc.
ATLANTA -- After opening its only American Fare in the Southeast, K mart has abandoned its hypermart format in favor of a smaller version -- a "combination" store it calls Super K mart Center. While K mart is "very happy" with American Fare, David Marsico, director of combination stores, reports the discounter will not be opening any more.

"We feel we're successful no matter what the size," he explains, "but we think the 150,000-square-foot Super K mart Center size is easier for the customer to walk."

Neil Thall, retail consultant and president of Neil Thall Associates, Atlanta, adds, "K mart found that American Fare is not a good prototype. It's just not making it." The main problem, he notes, is locating a unit in large metro areas where there's lots of competition, and K mart is counting on consumers to buy food, clothes, etc.

Besides the smaller size, the Super K mart Center differs from American Fare in that K mart operates the grocery rather than Bruno's. "They have what K mart has--apparel, hard goods and garden center -- blended in with food," reports K mart's Marsico.

---
Regrettably, it was not to last. Bruno's, a southern supermarket Kmart worked with, pulled out of the deal in 1992. The stores were then soon closed or divided rather than converted into Super Kmart Center.

In Stone Mountain, American Fare closed in 1994 and reopened as two stores: Kmart and Cub Foods.

The Stone Mountain Kmart closed in a round of 2000 closings. The Cub Foods closed in 2001. Two other American Fare stores also opened in the early 1990s, and closed later.

Ironically, Cub Foods would later be under the same corporate umbrella as another hypermarket, bigg's. But that's another story.

Like this post? I'm intending to add more posts, like the Auchan in Houston post.

---------------------------------------------

I was never able to find enough articles or information on it. Sorry. Our next aborted post is...

"The Candidates"

Remember the second railroad mystery? I've got a few candidates, but none of them make a lot of sense.

Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery isn't that far out of the way from Interstate 10, and has that dense feel I remember, plus a circle.

View Larger Map

Sadly, the only railroads on campus are at the bottom and were abandoned years ago.

Mobile Naval Complex doesn't have anything to speak of.

--

It was never finished (the post, that is).

OK, so we've got that all out of the way. The Spirit of 2005: Popular Mechanics will be released sometime as a non-blog post, which I will make clearer soon.

In conclusion, check out Pseudo3D's Website, a simple HTML page (it will load on practically any web browser!) that explores some of my other projects and blogs. I hope you enjoy it. My new blog, Carbonizer isn't Two Way Roads II, in fact, it was structured with very different rules in mind than TWR.

As for a real replacement to TWR...we'll have to see. It's still too early to tell. I envision creating new "sub-pages" that play out like really like "flagship" TWR posts. Everything else will go into Carbonizer.

This, by the way, is the true ending of TWR, but I plan to put up a post sometime in November that just simply explains the blog is closed. During that time, comments will likely be shut down, and posts will be limited to one per page. The true "final post" will lead to links to some of the more popular posts and some of my personal favorites. I'll also maintain TWR, but I don't know whether to put up the archived posts or remove them. Some posts will be deprecated by newer content elsewhere, and I don't know what I should do about that.

Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed TWR.

Thanks for the past three years.

Signed,

The Unnamed Webmaster of Two Way Roads Known As Pseudo3D

Blobbo

2010-10-15T17:26:00.001-05:00

Prepared earlier by me, in late August. --PS3D

From Macintosh Garden:
"I remember playing this game with my little brother. Man, he was great at this game. Brings back so much memories."

That was NOT my older brother, and I knew this from the get-go because I was not very good at it. Of course, there's the possibility he was being sarcastic, but he denies it nonetheless. Anyway, Blobbo is one of those puzzle games that is fun, addictive, and the full version is very very rare.

The game involves the alien blob, Blobbo, navigating 25 levels, which includes menaces like spiders, bowling balls, arrows, flames, and other baddies. You have to get all the treasure chests before finishing the level, and it's slightly more satisfying to see Blobbo burnt to a crisp or zapped inside out than to get into a situation where there's no way out.

Recently, I found and mirrored a FAQ for the game (caution on those links down the page...you'll have to do it yourself) which reveal a lot of helpful information.

- One of the levels is impossible in early versions, and you'll have to patch it yourself with the ResEdit info.
- To get the game's full version, you actually had to send money off to the author. This practice ended back in 1996, when it was sold to an unnamed Japanese company in 1996 that intended to port it to Windows and Super Nintendo (Super Famicom). Unfortunately, this never happened. Blobbo dropped off the face of the earth soon after and resurfaced in abandonware websites...but only the demo (Blobbo Lite) version. After all, the Blobbo Lite copy was widely distributed...found in magazine inserts and public domain/shareware CD collections.

To play Blobbo Lite for yourself, you need a Macintosh capable of playing it. It works only on System 6 through Mac OS 9, so grab an emulator or older Mac if you can.

Comment Discussion: Do you or did you have a demo version of a software that you were not able to get the full version of?

A Myst-erious Business

2010-10-08T22:00:00.002-05:00

Editor's Note: Here's one I prepared in late August. --PS3D

Cyan Worlds (formerly Cyan) is a fairly mysterious company. We talked about Cosmic Osmo months ago, but Cyan Worlds is still an intriguing company.

1. The Mysterious Color Cosmic Osmo
I'm still wondering about the real "color" Cosmic Osmo. A full page is what I remember, and oddly enough, some of the most vivid things (like Queen Osmo, the radio tower) later resurfaced years later when I finally managed to get my hands on a Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel disk image. I tried visiting the 1997 version of Cyan to get my hands on that elusive page, but the links to the Site Map and Other Worlds was down.

2. Sunsoft
Sunsoft, a Japanese company, helped finance Myst, but Sunsoft's intent was to gain the exclusive rights for consoles. Specifically, the SNES CD-ROM add-on. No real screenshots of what the SNES CD would've looked like, but it's likely that it would look more like the grotesquely underpowered Sega CD. However, while we never saw Myst or Cosmic Osmo on the Super Nintendo, years later, Sunsoft helped bring Myst (and later, "The Manhole: Masterpiece Edition") to the iOS. Was Sunsoft always with Cyan, or did they re-join forces? And if it was the latter, why?

3. Three and Four
We know why Ubisoft is the publisher of the latter Myst series. A deal was inked with Brøderbund, but Brøderbund changed hands, as The Learning Company bought it, Mattel bought The Learning Company, Mattel sold The Learning Company to Gores Technology Group, and the entertainment holdings were sold to Ubisoft...but that doesn't explain why Myst III: Exile and Myst IV: Revelations were not developed by Cyan Worlds. The answer supposedly was that they were working on Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, but that ran into delays, cutbacks, cancellations, and reopenings. Not exactly as intended.

4. That Bad, Huh?
In 2005, Cyan laid off almost everyone and appeared like they would totally die, and was only saved after a deal with Turner Broadcasting and GameTap. But how did Cyan get to that position, anyway? Did they burn through all the cash reserves of original Myst and Riven sales, as well as later Myst licensing that fast? One theory is the changing of hands of Brøderbund's entertainment holdings caused losses for Cyan (Mattel Interactive was a big money-loser) but that's pretty vague. You'd think that the changing hands would allow them to bail out.

Comment Discussion: What are your memories of playing Cyan games?

A Deathly Hiatus

2010-10-07T12:33:00.000-05:00

Given that I have college, not a lot of content posts, and a dearth of comments, I regret to announce that Two Way Roads will be on a semi-permanent hiatus.

In replacement, I'll try to work on a few other projects that will be revealed over the rest of the fall.

Finally, one post will be posted on October 30th, 2010.

I refuse to downgrade the blog to create content, even though interesting things have happened over the past few weeks, including cars on fire in the middle of the road, local breweries, and a few others.

I'm not going to say "it was a great three years" because the blog isn't totally dead yet.

But for now...

The Learning Company, Mattel Interactive, and the Remains

2010-09-30T19:46:00.009-05:00

The Learning Company is another company legend that changed hands and stole names, just like Atari. It also involves other companies.

Our players were founded in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1973, MECC is founded. It is actually a government agency, the Minnesota Education Computing Consortium. It initially is involved in the business of networking large computers in institutions across Minnesota. You know, the ones that took up a room?
In 1980, The Learning Company is founded. There is no "Inc.", notice. During the same year, Brøderbund Software Inc. is founded.
In 1983, Mindscape Inc. is founded in California.

The Learning Company bought MECC (makers of the Oregon Trail) in the 1980s and continued in educational software, Brøderbund started getting involving in educational software, and by the late 1990s, the Brøderbund name is exclusively used for educational products (Red Orb is the brand used for games, and that name is BRODER backwards).
Mindscape bought The Software Toolworks (maker of educational software, things like Mario is Missing, and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), PF.Magic (maker of Catz and Dogz), and Strategic Simulations Inc. (maker of "war games")

About that time, a previously-unknown company called SoftKey International Inc., a Canadian company that had acquired The Learning Company in late 1995, changed its name to The Learning Company Inc. in 1996. That didn't equate to a whole lot: for all intents and purposes, The Learning Company had added "Inc." to its name.

Meanwhile, Brøderbund, having lost The Learning Company to SoftKey, released more titles, such as the launch of the Red Orb Entertainment brand in 1997. Riven: The Sequel to Myst was among one of the Red Orb titles, but other real "games" continued under the Brøderbund name, including The Last Express.

But things changed quickly in the late 1990s, and in 1998, The Learning Company acquired Brøderbund and Mindscape in a fell swoop. Properties of Brøderbund like Carmen Sandiego transitioned to The Learning Company name. The Learning Company altered the Brøderbund logo and laid off most of the staff to focus on edutainment. In 1999, the entire The Learning Company Inc. was sold to Mattel Inc. for $3.8 billion. And that's when things got sticky.

Mattel Interactive, the new name of TLC, was intended to strengthen Mattel in educational software and marketing, but Mattel simply had no concept of a software company worked. Rather than develop original titles, most of Mattel Interactive's titles involved simply exploiting Mattel's brands (Hot Wheels and Barbie among them) and the marketing of the vast recent back catalog of titles produced by The Learning Company and subsidiaries.

After heavy losses (up to $1,000,000 a day), Mattel Interactive was changed back to The Learning Company when they sold it to Gores Technology Group LLC for a song, where it was divided into seven segments for sale to other companies. The Learning Company name and educational properties was sold to Riverdeep PLC, which had acquired Edmark in 2000, and would go onto to buy Houghton Mifflin. Riverdeep exploited the Brøderbund and Mindscape name. Mindscape was now used for the foreign subsidiaries, and Brøderbund, now "Broderbund", was used for Mavis Beacon (among others).

Ubi Soft (later Ubisoft) acquired the entertainment properties and exploited Myst, Catz and Dogz (transforming them into a Nintendogs rip-off), and SSI. It's a sad state that the former properties are being exploited. The only game that really improved under Ubisoft's reign is Prince of Persia, and that was because Jordan Mechner (the original creator) still owned the IP.

What is infuriating, at least to me, is the carnage had a few times to stop. If only Brøderbund had outbid SoftKey and taken The Learning Company for itself. If only Brøderbund and Mindscape declined to become a part of The Learning Company. If only Mattel had not jumped at the chance of buying The Learning Company. If only Mattel had competence in dealing with software. If only Gores Technology Group had left The Learning Company well enough alone and sold it as a whole, someone who could've used the company. But like Atari, The Learning Company is just another exploited name.

You want to know how Mattel exploited The Learning Company/Mattel Interactive?

Fresh from Vintage Computing, we have this ad.

With PCs like these:

The PCs, which were reputedly rather bad (even though they seemed to have reasonable statistics for 2000) had different themes and software packages. The Hot Wheels bundle came with a cheap steering wheel peripheral while the Barbie PC came with an equally cheap digital camera (think about it...cheapest digital camera in 2000...shudder). Thanks to the magic of Archive.org with "HotWheelsPC.com" and "BarbiePC.com", we now have the list of software that came bundled with these things: apart from Windows 98, of course!

The Hot Wheels bundle included (all of these are verbatim from the original website):
Hot Wheels® Custom Car Designer™
The Hot Wheels® Custom Car Designer™ includes everything you need to design Hot Wheels® cars and accessories on your PC. It’s easy! Just design…print out…and customize! Print out your designs on stickers to customize your cars and track! Create personalized pretend driver’s licenses, license plates, birthday cards and much more! (labels and car not included.)

Hot Wheels® Collector's Guide™

The Hot Wheels® Official Collector’s Guide™ CD-ROM offers you the most comprehensive source of information on Hot Wheels® vehicles ever compiled on a CD-ROM, and it comes from the people who make the cars! Browse through the history of Hot Wheels® and fun facts, view the collection, enter information on cars in your collection! With its wide-ranging functions, the Hot Wheels® Official Collector’s Guide™ CD-ROM is an all inclusive interactive tool for all the “official” information!

Hot Wheels® Stunt Track Driver™

Put yourself in the driver’s seat and race down Hot Wheels® tracks! The Hot Wheels® Stunt Track Driver™ CD-ROM is a thrill-packed race through six challenging stunt track environments. Jump into the driver’s seat of a 3-D Hot Wheels® car and perform awesome aerial stunts. Race against time – then add stunts to your run to better your score!

Hot Wheels® Tattoo Designer™

Design and create cool TEMPORARY TATTOOS to wear and share! 100's of temporary tattoo designs included! You can pick the ones you like and print them as is or put your own spin on them. Special software allows you to customize the tattoo into a design you can call your own. You can go wild as you choose your favorite Hot Wheels® designs to customize, print, and then wear for either a few minutes or even a few days. Create your tattoos in four different themes. Gross Things, Cool Stuff, Photo Frames or backgrounds, and Cars or Car-inspired Graphics. (tattoo sheets not included.)

BodyWorks® 6.0

Discover the world beneath your skin

Whether you're looking for an in-depth answer to a specific question or you want to learn about the human anatomy, BodyWorks® is the most informative and educational way to do it! View rotating 3-D models, browse through high-resolution images or expand your knowledge with multimedia lessons - how you learn is up to you!
This new version of 1996's top-selling anatomy software has even more of the features you're looking for:
· 80 3-D rotating models
· 100,000 medical definitions
· More than 1,500 topics
· Video lectures with your personal instructor, Dr. BodyWorks
· One-button Internet access to the latest medical information
· Extensive Web site directory
· And much more!

Compton’s® Encyclopedia 2000 Standard
Loaded with the new Exploratorium interactive science activities, 360 IPIX views, 1,000+ new and revised articles, and so much more, Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia 2000 is perfect for satisfying your curiosity, working at home, or helping your child with schoolwork. Compton's® Encyclopedia 2000 also includes current, up-to-date information, including all the important events of the last year: Suharto's resignation… the burial of the Romanovs… the bombing of U.S. embassies… the Swiss Holocaust settlement… McGwire and Ripken's baseball landmarks… Clinton's impeachment trial… the Wye River Accord and much more!

The ClueFinders™ Math 9-12
# 1 Learning Software in Schools*

Something strange is going on in a small village high in the Himalayas. Ancient treasures are disappearing – and it’s up to you and the ClueFinders’ to help! Find the clues and figure out what was stolen, who stole it, and where it’s hidden. Was it the guide, or the stable Boy? Is it in the Ice Cave or the Great Hall? Think fast, before all the treasures are gone!
Key Features:

Smart Tutor Help: Just click on friendly characters to get helpful hints.
10 levels of difficulty: Your child can select just the right level of challenge.
Extra hours of fun: With more than 500 possible solutions for 24 mysteries, kids will play this game over and over again.
9 games & activities
More than 50,000 problems
25 math skills
Action-packed arcade games
Awesome animation
Printable progress report

Compton's 3D World Atlas™ Deluxe

Visit virtually any country in the world – instantly and easily – with Compton’s 3D World Atlas™ Deluxe! Whether you are writing a report, planning travel, or exploring the world, it will provide you with all the information you need. On your journey, you will find more than 600 detailed maps, thousands of statistics, in-depth articles – even access to related Web sites. Immerse yourself in the local culture with a wealth of captivating photos, engaging videos, and brilliant sound. Even travel around the world in 3D flight.

Compton's® The Complete Reference Collection™

This CD-ROM links ten complete reference works on one disk including an encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus and atlas. It includes detailed information on history, geography, medical topics, grammar and English usage as well as an Internet Directory of 4,000 Web sites categorized by subject and age range. With more than 170,000 entries, 300 maps, 5,000 photographs and images, seven hours of sound and more all general knowledge questions in the home and at school can be answered.

Kid Pix® Studio™

Every child can become a creative whiz with Kid Pix®, the #1 Best Selling Art Software Brand. Parents and educators love Kid Pix because it's loaded with easy to use, imaginative art tools that inspire creativity and offer endless hours of fun. Kids love it because it lets their imaginations run wild experimenting with wacky tools and creating outrageous paintings.

Logical Journey of the Zoombini's®

Children build advanced math and thinking skills as they help the Zoombinis® escape peril and return home!

With Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, kids ages 8-12 build advanced math thinking and logic skills as they lead the Zoombinis in their adventure-game escape to a new homeland. Embedded in each of twelve challenges that face the Zoombinis are educator-developed puzzles that help build data organization and thinking skills vital for understanding advanced math concepts, such as algebra, set theory, graphing, data analysis and more. The challenge never ends! Zoombiniville will grow and prosper as groups of new inhabitants complete the journey. Each puzzle offers four levels of challenge, and the difficulty level automatically increases as the child masters easier math and logic topics. Furthermore, all the puzzle solutions regenerate with each play, so your child never faces the same puzzle twice -- ensuring that your child learns math topics rather than memorizing solutions.

Math Workshop™

Develop critical math skills!

In Math Workshop Deluxe, kids ages 6 to 12 develop critical math skills and explore the fun in math. With two seperate areas of activities, a child can practice the math skill most appropriate to him or her.

Downstairs, math beginners use math logic and spatial visualization to build puzzles that leap to life, or practice basic computation as they bowl for numbers with Gus the Gorilla.

Upstairs, kids turn fractions into funky music, play a game of strategy to launch rockets, or douse fiery flames in the Boiler Room while practicing fractions, decimals, and percents! Kids gain confidence and competence as they solve increasingly difficult problems in computation, logic, spatial relationships, and more.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing® 10 Standard

Master typing in just 15 minutes a day with Mavis Beacon!

With more than 6 million copies sold, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing® is the #1 typing software. It's the proven, effective way to learn and improve keyboarding skills. Perfect for advanced typists and novices, Mavis Beacon uses colorful graphs, tables and certificates to reward your typing success and guide your learning. Eight arcade-style games make skill-building fun and easy. Just enter the game hallway and take your pick! And the Advanced Adaptive Response Technology continually monitors your progress, customizing each lesson to fit your specific needs. So if you can spare just 15 minutes a day, you can learn typing skills to last a lifetime. Mavis makes it easy!

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: The '90s

Relive the 90's through the articles and photographs of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine!

Every page, every issue... Follow Jane Goodall's 35-year odyssey dedicated to understanding the ways of chimpanzees in the wild. Examine the state of our most critical resource -- water. Discover the chilling mystery behind Peru's Ice Maiden mummy. Follow the fight to save the Earth's disappearing wildlife through the Endangered Species Act. Once more, witness the devastating aftermath of the Gulf War. And experience many more captivating moments from the 1990s.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: The '90s enables you to relive hundreds of compelling stories reported during these momentous years in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine.

The Ultimate Writing & Creativity Center®

The complete word processing and creativity program that makes writing exciting and helps children learn to write. Unlike any other program, Ultimate Writing & Creativity Center combines easy-to-use writing and creativity tools with special educational features that help children learn to write–all in an exciting world filled with interesting facts, imaginative ideas, and interactive characters! Children are coached through the five stages of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and presenting. The animation, colorful graphics, sounds, and music inspire and motivate children to write everything from school reports to their own personal stories.

Cyber Patrol®

The Safe Way for Children to Surf the Net

(May 4, 1999) - 1999 Editor's Choice award goes to Cyber Patrol 4.0! PC Magazine Editors describe Cyber Patrol as "the most comprehensive filtering of any of the products we tested," and include Cyber Patrol 4.0 in the 1999 Utility Guide for Parental Filtering. Cyber Patrol is the best way for parents to manage children's computer use and safety on the Internet. It encourages positive learning and exploration, while protecting children from inappropriate material. Cyber Patrol also prevents children from inadvertently divulging information about themselves via the net (Windows only). With Cyber Patrol, you can supervise your child's Internet access, regulate time spent online, and protect your child from sites you determine to be objectionable. Now you can give your child the opportunity to explore the Internet safely; and give yourself peace of mind.

Oregon Trail® Fourth Edition

A thrilling, trailblazing adventure that builds real-life skills!

Build real-life decision-making and problem-solving skills as the leader of a wagon party. Choose your team and supplies, read maps, plan your route and guide your team through the unknown wilderness. Tough choices lie ahead, but with the help of your wagon party and people you meet along the way, you’ll conquer this challenging journey and arrive in a new land.

Organize Your Wagon Party
You'll need to build a team with the skills you think are important for survival on the rugged trail to Oregon. Should you pick a team with money or strong survival skills?

Myst®
The surrealistic adventure that will become your world...

The best-selling computer game of all-time (PC Data, 1993 through July 1999), Myst is a surrealistic adventure that will become part of your world. You will journey to an island world tinged with mystery, where every vibrant rock, scrap of paper and sound may hold vital clues to your unraveling a chilling tale of intrigue and injustice that defies all boundaries of time and space. Only your wits and imagination will serve to stay the course and unlock the ancient betrayal of ages past.

Al Unser, Jr. Arcade Racing™
Al Unser Jr. - Arcade Racing is a first person racing sim from Mindscape. With two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Al Unser, Jr. at the wheel, players are in for the white-knuckle ride of their lives. In practice mode, players circle the track alone, feeling out their cars. Then they may move into Competition mode, where they go up against 10 of the most cunning Indy-style drivers around. An advanced AI instinctively responds to the car's every move. Digital sound effects let players hear their tires screech as they make laps around 15 different circuits. Players have the option of four turbo-powered modes: Training, Competition, Arcade, and Duel. Up to two players are supported via network in duel mode.

Rally Challenge™
Experience high speed thrills as you throw a top performance turbo charged racing vehicle around treacherous stages. Including original stages from Sweden, Indonesia, Australia, France and more. Features 4 leading high profile cars including Subaru Impreza WRX, Toyota Celica GT4 and now the Proton 'Wira', realistic physics and fast action to create the most stunning simulation of rallying ever seen in a computer game. Race against the clock, phantom racer or another player via serial link, modem or network. Drive from inside your car, or view externally with one of our breathe taking dynamic rally cameras. Support is provided for keyboard, joystick, gamepads, and steering wheels. So take the challenge. Jump in the drivers seat for the ride of your life. If you dare…

The Barbie computer on the other hand, contained a slightly different bundle of hardware. It contained a whopping 13 Barbie software titles.

Barbie® Cool Looks™ Fashion Designer™

Introducing the sequel to Barbie® Fashion Designer™ CD-ROM, the number one selling, award winning children’s software title for the past two years!

Design fashions for Barbie™ and her friends Christie™, Kira™, and Teresa™!
Design fashions in vivid 3D!
More than 35 vibrant colors!
More than 80 different choices of fabric patterns!
Barbie and her friends model in 5 themed settings!
Instantly try outfits on Barbie and her friends!
Save up to 5 walkway animations to see over and over again!
Make special accessories like backpacks, teddy bears and beach towels!
Make matching accessories for yourself - coin purses and minibags!
Snap on-screen pictures as Barbie poses! Print out your favorites!
Share your fashion designs by e-mail or on disk!

Detective Barbie®
Team up with Detective Barbie® in this action-filled mystery adventure game! It's the night before the carnival opens and a major mystery must be solved! Ken and the charity money have disappeared during a magic trick! You become the newest crime-solving partner as you join Barbie and her friends in the race through the carnival searching for clues and suspects! You can even tell Detective Barbie® your name and she'll ask for your help the entire game! It's up to you to make your own conclusions and break the case wide open...but watch out-clues and suspects change every time you play!

Magic Fairy Tales: Barbie® as Rapunzel™

Help Barbie® as Rapunzel rescue the prince in this magical storybook adventure! Barbie stars as the beautiful princess Rapunzel in an updated version of the classic fairy tale. Rapunzel, Barbie needs your help to rescue her handsome prince (played by Ken) and save the magical kingdom from the wicked witch’s evil spells. Reading and decision-making skills are challenged in activities and puzzles as you help Barbie and her adorable animal friends on their journey.

Barbie® Ocean Discovery™

Help Barbie® search for sunken treasure with Sandy the dolphin and her ocean friends! Save the undersea animals when you and Barbie find the treasure hidden deep in the ocean! Play games to uncover clues and pieces of the treasure map. Each item you find brings you closer to solving the mystery of the gold and jewels! Keep playing, there are all kinds of wonderful secrets hidden under the sea…

Barbie® Party Print 'n' Play™

Have fun creating special Barbie parties in two great sizes – your size and Barbie® doll size! Design and make invitations, decorations, party hats, games and more! Plus, there are lots of great miniature accessories you can make just for your Barbie dolls, like pretty presents, tiny valentines, goody bags – even a pretend TV for a Barbie doll slumber party! Have party fun every day with Barbie!

Barbie® Riding Club

Join Barbie® and her friends for horseback riding adventures! Welcome to the Barbie® Riding Club, where every trail leads to a new adventure! Join Barbie® at the stables where you'll choose and name your very own horse. Ride and jump your way through the hills and trails of the Secret Valley. Race against Christie™ and Teresa™ on you favorite horse! Explore every new trail to find hidden paths and surprises. You can even follow the legend of the mysterious wild horse that roams free in the valley. Could the story be true?

Barbie® Screen Styler™

Customize your computer with Barbie® Screen Styler™ CD-ROM! Bring the exquisite world of vintage Barbie into your computer with nostalgic images and sounds, including interactive screensavers, patterns, posters, icons and more! These original Barbie images from deep within the Mattel archives are now available digitally for the very first time! Barbie® Screen Styler™ CD-ROM truly captures the essence of Barbie and transforms your computer screen into a showcase of classic Barbie images and sounds – at home or at work!

Barbie® Sticker Designer

Design and print fun stickers featuring you and Barbie® too! You and your friends are set for hours of fun with the Barbie® Sticker Designer™ CD-ROM! This cool, incredibly creative program lets you choose from hundreds of images including pictures from the world of Barbie®! Even import your own photos! * Plus, add names and special messages! It's that easy and so much fun to do! (Stickers not included)

*Works great with Barbie® Digital Camera!

Barbie® Storymaker™

Create animated stories starring Barbie® and all her friends! Enjoy hours of story-making fun by bringing your Barbie stories to life as never before - on your computer! Barbie® Storymaker™ lets you choose the settings, the props, the clothes, the characters - even direct their movements and dialogue. Plus you can add music, sounds and special effects. Create thousands of original Barbie stories with Barbie® Storymaker™ CD-ROM!

Barbie® Super Sports™

Snowboard and In-line skate with Barbie® and friends for extreme racing and sports action! Two games in one for twice the fun! Board and Blade with Barbie® through outrageous obstacle courses and radical racetracks! Earn points for cool competitions and spectacular stunts, then get new equipment and do it again! There are ten different levels in an awesome combo of snowboarding and in-line skating!

Barbie® Totally Tattoos™

Create cool temporary tattoos – plus matching tiny tattoos for Barbie® doll! Temporary tattoos are totally hot-- and now you can join Barbie® at her ultra-cool tattoo studio with the Barbie® Totally Tattoos™ CD-ROM! You can design and create original temporary tattoos for yourself and your Barbie dolls with hundreds of cool graphics, special effects-- even your own pictures! (tattoo paper not included)

Barbie® Photo Designer

Film-free color camera instantly puts you into a whole new world with Barbie®! Now you and your friends can become part of the world of Barbie like never before! Use your Barbie® Photo Designer Digital Camera to take all kinds of color photos wherever and whenever you want-it's easy! No more waiting for your photos to develop. Just play on the computer and instantly see the pictures you've taken! Never buy film-The Barbie® Digital Camera stores six pictures in memory or as many as you want when connected to your home PC.

Compton's® Encyclopedia 2000 Standard

Loaded with the new Exploratorium interactive science activities, 360 IPIX views, 1,000+ new and revised articles, and so much more, Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia 2000 is perfect for satisfying your curiosity, working at home, or helping your child with schoolwork. Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia 2000 also includes current, up-to-date information, including all the important events of the last year: Suharto's resignation… the burial of the Romanovs… the bombing of U.S. embassies… the Swiss Holocaust settlement… McGwire and Ripken's baseball landmarks… Clinton's impeachment trial… the Wye River Accord and much more!

Compton's 3D World Atlas™ Deluxe

Visit virtually any country in the world – instantly and easily – with Compton’s 3D World Atlas™ Deluxe! Whether you are writing a report, planning travel, or exploring the world, it will provide you with all the information you need. On your journey, you will find more than 600 detailed maps, thousands of statistics, in-depth articles – even access to related Web sites. Immerse yourself in the local culture with a wealth of captivating photos, engaging videos, and brilliant sound. Even travel around the world in 3D flight.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: The '90s

Relive the 90's through the articles and photographs of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine!

Every page, every issue... Follow Jane Goodall's 35-year odyssey dedicated to understanding the ways of chimpanzees in the wild. Examine the state of our most critical resource -- water. Discover the chilling mystery behind Peru's Ice Maiden mummy. Follow the fight to save the Earth's disappearing wildlife through the Endangered Species Act. Once more, witness the devastating aftermath of the Gulf War. And experience many more captivating moments from the 1990s.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: The '90s enables you to relive hundreds of compelling stories reported during these momentous years in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing® 10 Standard

Master typing in just 15 minutes a day with Mavis Beacon!

With more than 6 million copies sold, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is the #1 typing software. It's the proven, effective way to learn and improve keyboarding skills. Perfect for advanced typists and novices, Mavis Beacon uses colorful graphs, tables and certificates to reward your typing success and guide your learning. Eight arcade-style games make skill-building fun and easy. Just enter the game hallway and take your pick! And the Advanced Adaptive Response Technology continually monitors your progress, customizing each lesson to fit your specific needs. So if you can spare just 15 minutes a day, you can learn typing skills to last a lifetime. Mavis makes it easy!

The Ultimate Writing & Creativity Center®

The complete word processing and creativity program that makes writing exciting and helps children learn to write. Unlike any other program, Ultimate Writing & Creativity Center combines easy-to-use writing and creativity tools with special educational features that help children learn to write–all in an exciting world filled with interesting facts, imaginative ideas, and interactive characters! Children are coached through the five stages of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and presenting. The animation, colorful graphics, sounds, and music inspire and motivate children to write everything from school reports to their own personal stories.

Math Workshop™

Develop critical math skills!

In Math Workshop Deluxe, kids ages 6 to 12 develop critical math skills and explore the fun in math. With two seperate areas of activities, a child can practice the math skill most appropriate to him or her.

Downstairs, math beginners use math logic and spatial visualization to build puzzles that leap to life, or practice basic computation as they bowl for numbers with Gus the Gorilla.

Upstairs, kids turn fractions into funky music, play a game of strategy to launch rockets, or douse fiery flames in the Boiler Room while practicing fractions, decimals, and percents! Kids gain confidence and competence as they solve increasingly difficult problems in computation, logic, spatial relationships, and more.

Cyber Patrol®

The Safe Way for Children to Surf the Net

(May 4, 1999) - 1999 Editor's Choice award goes to Cyber Patrol 4.0! PC Magazine Editors describe Cyber Patrol as "the most comprehensive filtering of any of the products we tested," and include Cyber Patrol 4.0 in the 1999 Utility Guide for Parental Filtering. Cyber Patrol is the best way for parents to manage children's computer use and safety on the Internet. It encourages positive learning and exploration, while protecting children from inappropriate material. Cyber Patrol also prevents children from inadvertently divulging information about themselves via the net (Windows only). With Cyber Patrol, you can supervise your child's Internet access, regulate time spent online, and protect your child from sites you determine to be objectionable. Now you can give your child the opportunity to explore the Internet safely; and give yourself peace of mind.

Myst®
The surrealistic adventure that will become your world...

The best-selling computer game of all-time (PC Data, 1993 through July 1999), Myst is a surrealistic adventure that will become part of your world. You will journey to an island world tinged with mystery, where every vibrant rock, scrap of paper and sound may hold vital clues to your unraveling a chilling tale of intrigue and injustice that defies all boundaries of time and space. Only your wits and imagination will serve to stay the course and unlock the ancient betrayal of ages past.

-----

It seems a bit odd that Myst would be thrown in there. If you get excited at the Barbie titles and Hot Wheels titles, and the parents get excited at the educational software, it seems a wonder why Myst would get in. It's above the age bracket of these kids...

New Posts Coming September 30th!

2010-09-27T12:00:00.002-05:00

Digital Distribution Round-Up

2010-09-23T18:12:00.001-05:00

Today, we're looking at digital distribution, legal digital distribution, that is.

Steam: PC, Mac
Steam is the most popular example but has problems compared to traditional retail. It basically lets you download DRM games off of their servers. Then you would launch it from the Steam application on the PC (or Mac). It even lets you play games on another PC on another computer provided you have your username. Of course, this has its own problems. The pricing system is still grotesquely unfair...new games are for practically retail price but they don't actually ship anything physical, making them way more profit than other forms. Secondly, the validation process requires the Internet, which if you live in area with flaky or no Internet, you might have to wait a while before playing. Thirdly, and most importantly, you can't do anything with games you bought. There's no burning a game onto a DVD or CD without a crack (and that process might ban you). You can't sell games or lend them to friends. You can't even co-use an account with someone else provided they use a different computer.

Infuriatingly, Steam offers many games but very few Mac ones, even some ones that are available for Mac. While it's probably for the best, like not offering a Mac game that is an inferior port to a PC one (like SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition), it is annoying to see games that came first on Mac years before PC, like Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel...and not have a Mac version.

App Store: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch
The App Store for the iOS is an odd case for digital distribution in relation to games. It shouldn't be excluded, but it is in no place to be competed. The problem is rooted in the fact that the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad just aren't made for games, no matter what anyone says. If you notice, the only games that do any good on the iPod are casual games that are the equivalent of simple yet addictive Flash games. That's why things like Angry Birds is so popular.

The other game that works fairly well is point-and-click adventure games. Unfortunately, even that is crippled because, although they have simple controls, their PC counterparts have a cursor that is context sensitive. Case in point is Myst, which, although the best recreation of the original 1993 game, still suffers from problems experienced by the dismal port for Nintendo DS. The cursor, in the original versions, would indicate which directions are available, and what can be clicked. The other reason is the tiny screen on the iPhone ruins most point-and-click adventure games, simply because a thumb is too bulky for using it.

The iOS family can't play other ported games. Directional controls are either compensated by a finicky directional icon or by tilting the screen, which messes up play sometimes. And forget about virtual buttons, too. Download Mega Man II Lite (it's free) and you'll see EXACTLY what I mean.

Beyond games, the iOS has lots of useful and not-so-useful apps. Two types of apps really bug me.

#1: The quiz applications. These things have plagued Facebook, and now they have a home on your Apple device. Badly written, full of ads, and bonus points if they make you buy something else to see your results.

#2: The walkthrough/cheat applications. These things help you with video games, but avoid them at all costs. To make your own cheap version, simply save a GameFAQs walkthrough as an application (click "+", then "add to home screen"). The ones in the App Store, though, are just things ripped from the Internet and then sold. A get-rich-quick-scheme by some puke at best, piracy at worst.

Also note some games are cheap knockoffs of abandonware, not really licensed at all by original authors, etc.

I consider the current StuntCopter on the App Store to be an homage, but at a dollar, it seems they are exploiting the late Duane Blehm's work. If you want to see something really sad, check out all the bootlegged clones of Activision's classic Kaboom! for sale. Normally I wouldn't endorse big company lawyers, but I think Activision Blizzard's lawyers should be onto them.

Xbox Live Arcade (Xbox 360)
I don't have an Xbox, but XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) really shows (to me) what Nintendo should've done with the VC.

From free promotional games to arcade games that they put thought into choosing (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1989 Classic Arcade) to a more accessible "indie game" platform to a way of user-transferring games (something Nintendo has yet to learn), XBLA has potential. It has a slick interface, a DVD release of a few of them, and more. The bad sign is that no matter how old the game, it's tied into the Xbox Live leaderboard to compare scores.

GameTap (PC)

GameTap is probably one of the worst digital distribution plans in a long time. The overview is unlimited games on a month-to-month basis on a set fee.

GameTap, the brainchild of multi-billionaire media maven Ted Turner, allows you to play games from Windows/DOS, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, all manner of Sega consoles, and the Intellivision. And for the record, most of the emulators work well. No fiddling with DOSBox settings, no setting up old Ataris, no dodgy Dreamcast emulators.

Unfortunately, that's about when all the good things end. For one thing, it's subscription. You don't own anything, all the games are chopped up in DRM in your computer, and Internet is required for activation. VC&G reports many other problems, includes a serious lack of added content (awful comedy sketches), constant crashes, and more.

Most of the GameTap horror stories on the Internet involve the awful customer service and the difficulty of cancelling. You're lucky if you cancel it in 15 minutes!

GameTap is, for all intents and purposes, a false prophet of old games and new games. The Internet recommends you don't try.

This is an edited version of both Dislike of the Wii Part One: Virtual Console and iPhone vs. Nintendo DS.

Nintendo's Virtual Console was promised from almost the earliest days of the Wii and was admittedly a pretty cool concept. For the first time ever, you could purchase old Nintendo games in a digital format and play them on a console, legally! You would pay 500 Wii Points for an NES game, 800 for a SNES game, and 1000 for a Nintendo 64 game. Each Wii Point was worth about a penny (or a bit more than that, when you factor in taxes), so a NES game would be $5. For 2006 and at the release, $5 sounded quite reasonable.

But somewhere down the line, everything went down the tubes. IGN has an article on the subject, which I will summarize. 2006 had a very strong start with up to four titles appearing weekly. In 2007, three new games appeared Monday. This seemed to be good. Classics rolled in like the 16-bit Donkey Kong Country titles, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario World, and some lesser titles like the TurboGrafx-16's J.J. & Jeff. Fans were clamoring for their favorite 8-bit and 16-bit video games but everyone was happy. In 2008, everything changed when WiiWare was introduced, forcing the Virtual Console to share room with new Wii-exclusive titles like LostWinds. Nintendo decided, for some odd reason, to only have three new games every Monday. Bad WiiWare games and new consoles for the Virtual Console with lackluster games appeared. Neo-Geo, TurboGrafx-CD, Commodore 64, arcade, and the Sega Master System further fragmented the system. Finally, DSiWare appeared with a pack of forgettable titles and destroyed new VC releases.

Virtual Console also had several other problems. Sure it was cheaper than new games in their respective areas, possibly even cheaper than their real-life counterparts on eBay, but they weren't anything special. They didn't have colorful box art or descriptive manuals. The only thing you got was the game in a fairly ugly Wii Channel button and a few text boxes describing the story and controls.

Many games also experienced changes. The most obvious is the port of Wave Race 64. See, for the original Nintendo 64, it was sponsored by Kawasaki (the official name of the game was Wave Race 64 Kawasaki JetSki, but not everyone knows this). So in the Wii port, the Kawasaki name is replaced with Wii banners. That didn't exist in 1997, now, did it?!

The pricing also got worse, with 500 points appearing reasonable in 2006. Retronauts sums it up nicely.

A little over three years ago, the sheer novelty of playing old video games on a new system made the prices on Virtual Console seem more than reasonable; plus, let's not forget that the economy was somewhat healthier in 2006 -- so much so that Sony's Ken Kutaragi felt completely comfortable saying that consumers would happily work more hours to afford the $600 PlayStation 3. To be fair, it was an arrogant statement at the time; but if Kutaragi said this today, there'd be angry mobs out for blood. Still, just a few years ago, everything was just a bit more expensive -- though video games have been getting cheaper and cheaper in the interim.

As if total ignorance in title selection, a tight control on an old pricing scheme, and all that, what infuriates people the most is that the titles are locked into the machine. Want to play at a friend's house? Better pack it in the car, and mind that sensor bar. Wii broken? Good luck trying with Nintendo to recompensate you. Want to upgrade to that sleek black Wii? Forget it! Want to play games on your laptop? That SD card's only gonna work with that Wii!

Another thing is the VC is only on digital media. Nintendo has a yet to release a compilation disc for the Wii.

WiiWare, on the other hand, premiered in May 2008 and cut into VC instead of complementing it. Most of the WiiWare games crowded out VC games. Some notable games like Mega Man 9 were well-received, but they weren't exclusive to the system. When you consider the other games, like "Aha! I Found It!" Hidden Object Game, Copter Crisis, and Muscle March, a lot of WiiWare games stink. Especially sad is that it was trying to deal to independent dealers, but the dev kit costs $2000, and that's not even counting other requirements you need. There's no amazing new game only for WiiWare made by an independent company. Oh, and it has the same "same Wii" problem as VC.

DSiWare is even worst, and charges dollars what should be free, because the DSiWare is even worse. Wanna play the paper airplane mini-game from WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!? Paper Airplane Chase will set you back a full two dollars. I'd rather just have the GBA slot back. Throw in some bad ports (Rayman), generic platformers (Oscar in Toyland), or an over-priced, graphical update of Dr. Mario for 500 points with no multiplayer. Dr. Mario Express will be there for you!

Overall, Nintendo's digital distribution is a sad wreck of overpricing, locked-in DRM, and lost potential, but hey! It's fun to play classic games on the Wii without hacking it, right? Right?

Good Old Games (PC only)
The closest to a good model. It has DRM-free downloads, it offers extras, but there are few games, and all PC-only. Kind of reminds me of the many budget games on the shelves of Wal-Mart, but with less "tycoon" games, more "real" games. It may even possible with GOG to get a game that runs both on the original system it was designed for (DOS) and a modern system. It's even working with Home of the Underdogs. However, the price ($9.99) still seems a bit high. I mean, cheap jewel-case budget releases go for that, possibly less. You COULD make your own: buy jewel cases, print out some sort of box art, and stick it on the shelf, but where's the fun in that? I mean, my retail copy of Yoot Tower had a black-and-white jewel case label (inside a full box, however), SimSafari came in a large box but only had an unlabeled jewel case, and the earliest games of computers were often sold as plastic baggies with a printed insert. Despite good intentions, some abandonware should be laid to rest.

Recently, GOG.com went offline, throwing gamers into a panic. The wording made it sound like they could no longer have DRM-free downloads, but in reality, they were going out of beta. People were still annoyed that they pulled a stunt like that.

I don't think physical media is that dead, despite what analysts may say. After all, they predicted an untimely demise of Nintendo after the Wii, and no one expected the Wii's excellent sales records. AND they thought FMV games were the way of the future.

How Arendi can be successful and unique

2010-09-13T14:14:00.003-05:00

In Syracuse, New York, a controversy is raging. It involves the 1990 mall, Carousel Center, a man, and an empty building. Basically, a developer named Robert Congel came up with a plan to build an enclosed tourist resort called "Destiny USA"

Shopping Mall Museum puts it well.

In 1997, a massive expansion of CAROUSEL CENTER was made public. Originally known as the Empire Project, and eventually as DestiNY USA, it would encompass nearly 5 million square feet and redevelop several acres of oil refinery storage tanks and rust belt industrial installations southeast of the existing mall.

CAROUSEL CENTER, itself, would be doubled in size, becoming the nation's largest shopping center and bumping Minnesota's MALL OF AMERICA down to the number 2 position.

In addition to retail, DestiNY USA would include a 90,000 square foot salt water aquarium, 500,000 square foot multi-field indoor sports and recreation complex, a glass-enclosed Winter Garden with Erie Canal replica, 15,000 seat amphitheater, 100 acre domed park, 20,000 hotel rooms, three golf courses, a performing arts center and many other amenities.

A photo op-type groundbreaking was held in October 2002, which commemorated the start of construction on the first phase of DestiNY USA; the 1,300 room Grand Destiny Hotel. The hotel was scrapped after it was revealed that the city would not extend tax breaks for a hospitality-oriented expansion. The addition would have to be strictly retail.

The DestiNY USA project hit other snags. Controversy erupted over all of the tax breaks given to Pyramid Companies. Doubts also arose about claims made concerning its potential impact as a major Upstate New York tourist draw.

Finally, in March 2007, a real groundbreaking was done. Phase One, Arendi, was underway. The retail expansion was said to be a "convention defying retail experience that redefines customer service" (Pyramid Cos., the developer, is big on secrets). However, the economy slipped downhill during that time, and no tenants were announced. Instead of completing by 2009 or 2010, the bank stopped giving loans and the construction was halted in June 2009, leaving it as a empty but sealed shell attached to a bustling shopping mall. Pyramid eventually released more details on it, as seen on these, articles. Let's examine them, and find some details.

Walk into any shopping mall in America and you'll see a common area down the middle with stores, divided by walls, on both sides.
Now imagine a mall without walls and maybe without traditional stores at all. Instead, shoppers walk around huge, open floors with brand-name products sold by their makers directly to the public. Electronic tags attached to every item for sale and inside shoppers club cards carried by customers allow the mall to precisely track consumer shopping habits, right down to what items they pick up, which ones they put back, which ones they buy -- and in what order.

From this, it starts sounding like a really gimmicky direct-outlet mall, which might just work, but then, we hit a snag.

Brand makers receive access to all of the data and insights about consumers collected by the mall. But in exchange, they must give all of their profits to the mall.
That's the unusual -- and untested -- retail concept that developer Robert Congel planned for the first phase of Destiny USA before the financial rug was pulled out from under his mall expansion in May in a dispute with his construction lender.

And now you see the problem. No one, especially in the bad economy, wants to throw all profit into a concept that might provide them feedback data.

One source familiar with Congel's plans said the goal was to create a setting in which stores could collect the same valuable consumer data that Internet retailers such as Amazon.com gather every time they make a sale.

You know, Amazon.com collects its own profit...

Dinesh Gauri, assistant professor of marketing at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, called the developer's plans "pretty ambitious" but said he was skeptical of the business model.
"Sharing a hundred percent of your profit with the mall owner?" he said. "I don't think it sounds reasonable at all."

He's right!

To be successful, Destiny would have to persuade shoppers that Arendi would benefit them, he said. If consumers are being asked to give up a degree of privacy as they shop, they are going to want something in return, such as lower prices, he said.
"If I am paying the same price as I would be paying at a Macy's to get a pair of Dockers, I'm not going to go there," he said. "But if they say, as an additional incentive, the pricing here will be a little cheaper, then I will be more inclined to visit there."
Destiny also would need to get retailers to overcome their natural reluctance to share consumer data gathered in their stores with potential competitors, Gauri said.
"Privacy is one of their biggest concerns," he said. "Sharing things with competitors is probably the last thing they will ever do in their lifetimes."

Error #2: Would you be willing to give up extensive information about yourself for a $10 off coupon? Anyone? Anyone?
It gets worse, too...

"One of the worst things for retailers is to run out of a product that is in demand," he said.
Customers would have to register at an Arendi Web site, providing their name and e-mail address. If they'd like, they could also provide personal information such as age, clothing sizes and preferred fabrics.
In return, they would be given customer ID tags, plastic cards about the size of credit cards. They would carry the cards with them when they go shopping at Arendi, just as they carry shoppers club cards to grocery stores.

Finally, we move up to the more redeeming properties....

Destiny partner Bruce Kenan said the model combines the convenience of Internet shopping -- the instant availability of detailed product information and comparisons from multiple manufacturers and user reviews -- with the ability to touch, smell and try a product.
"This is a marriage of Internet and physical retail," said Kenan. "People are going to like it. They're going to demand it."

And since the selling space in Arendi would not have floor-to-ceiling walls, store build-out costs would presumably be less than they would be in traditional mall designs. One source said Arendi would look more like a giant exhibit hall than a mall.

The whole thing is reminiscent to the Epicenter Collection I covered a while back in my blogs (the link links to articles, and another series of articles I wrote). Except Epicenter Collection didn't make a desperate grab at profits in exchange for "market data". For Arendi to work, here's what I envision.

After passing the center namesake carousel, what was an entrance has colorful signage welcoming me to Arendi. I pass through. The floor becomes nice hardwood, and an exposition center of the hottest brands seems to appear. In a way, it was along the feel of MacWorld, Comic-Con, and E3...and those were just the tech brands. I picked a directory to Arendi at the information desk (I declined the card), and decided to visit the ThinkGeek booth.

A "Classic Video Table Tennis Kit" is on display. The fully built model is impressive, but I can't pick one off of the shelf. I decided to grab a tablet and write the product number down, IKEA-style. Card users could immediately swipe the bar code. I go to the counter of ThinkGeek and order it. Luckily, it's in stock and they can bring it out so I can pay with a credit card. If it wasn't, it would be shippedCash and checks aren't accepted in Arendi, only the Arendi card and credit cards.

Next, I go to the Arendi food court. The Arendi food court thankfully isn't like an exposition center in terms of prices. It's a mixture of traditional mall food court stands and some regional USA-themed ones Pyramid developed. The Texas barbecue restaurant looked rather convincing...and tasty, but I passed it up in favor of an Orange Julius (I wasn't that hungry for a full meal).

After finishing, I explored a bit further. Being myGofer (Kmart's "catalog showroom") and a Hot Wheels store, I found an "alley" of stores that mostly local stores selling a mixture of used and new goods. Being that some of the booths were very small, I'm guessing this is how this is how to respond to eBay. Some of it I noticed look liked regular people owned it, but some were corporate-like small businesses. Digital Palace I recognized...they used to operate out of a store in the now-closed Rolling Acres Mall. It also reminded me a bit of the back alleys of Japan's Akihabara district, even though I had never been to it.

I ended up buying some old Mac software I intended to upload to Macintosh Garden, as the publishers had died years before. Just then, I get a call on my cell phone, requesting we need Windex and maybe a gallon of milk. The myGofer has everything I need. It, in essence, is almost like a Kmart Super Center like there used to be in Waco, Texas, except it is arranged like a catalog showroom. With the pick-up format, it's far less exciting, but I get the Windex and the milk successfully and quickly. I ended up winding my way back to Lord & Taylor, which I used as a short-cut to return to my car in the main Carousel Center. It certainly was an experience.

Despite how nice and cool Arendi is in this world, it isn't enough to be a full tourist attraction, possibly on the basis it's full retail. There are very nice upscale and sought-after brands occupying relatively large places in Arendi, but it's a struggle against a place like New York City, where brands mingle with one-of-a-kind restaurants and experiences. But it is cheaper.

The Spirit of 2005: SimCity and Simtropolis

2010-09-11T09:00:00.001-05:00

The full span of SimCity lasts several years (not just 2005), but I will begin with it. The genesis of my SimCity love began with when my older brother got SimCity 2000 in 1995, nearly ten years prior to 2005. It was quickly installed on the new Performa 550 and he played it extensively, making all sorts of cool cities. Eventually, the Performa would see the expansion pack, SimCity 2000 Scenarios Volume 1: Great Disasters and the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, a separate application used to create different “tile sets” that would change appearances of buildings. Eventually, SimCity 2000 was moved onto the PowerWave tower and got a noticeable speed boost, and it continued on. Unfortunately, two DOS/Windows-only games that utilized SimCity 2000 cities, SimCopter and Streets of SimCity never came to Mac. By the actual year 2000, my brother had moved onto other things, and SimCity 2000 was relegated to the “occasional playing”, even by me. Sure, I tried to make a few cities, even ones that grew to a sizable size, but my brother was no longer playing.

One day in 2002, I found in in this very OfficeMax a promise of a new SimCity: SimCity 4. It was on the cover of Computer Gaming World, and I still regret I didn’t buy it. I was surprised that it wasn’t named “SimCity 4000”, but just the simple 4 was much better. However, I did not actually play 4. Despite looking at screenshots of the promised game that summer, it would likely not run on the iMac G3 we had. Very likely it would require a G4, something we did not own. In 2003, I settled for a copy of SimCity 3000 for Mac. It did not a massive leap like 2000 had from Classic (originally, it WAS to be full 3D, but it was axed) and it was very slow. It did have admittedly much nicer-looking graphics than SC2K and upbeat jazz instead of the 8-bit tunes of SimCity 2000 (I eventually realized that the Mac version of SC2K had far better tunes than the DOS counterpart...) but after a while, I got tired of the new features.

I was fascinated with 4, though. I played some of it at a friend’s house for starters. In fall 2003, the game was released for Mac by Aspyr Media, and Rush Hour was released for PCs. SimCity 4: Rush Hour was an expansion pack with drivable cars, signage, airports for fire-fighting planes, four-lane roads, monorails, ferries, and parking garages. I eagerly went to various “Sim” sites, starting with the now-defunct SimStuff, then SimGlobal, SimCity Central, and finally a large site that occasionally struggled with funds: a site called Simtropolis.

That summer (2004), I finally got a copy of SimCity 4 for Mac. There was no Rush Hour Mac yet, but I had high hopes. After all, by the time Mac users got Rush Hour, there would probably be news, if not release, of a new expansion pack. The Sims had gotten seven expansion packs, each with different themes. The Sims: Livin’ Large hadn’t added new aspects of gameplay, but subsequent expansions added vacations, pets, and even magic. I wondered how it would translate into SimCity.

Unfortunately, SimCity 4 was kind of slow (even for a screaming fast G5) but that didn’t deter me. Armed with a thick Prima guidebook I got in the GameStop of the Vista Ridge Mall (and for only $10, too...a bargain!). Soon, the BAT came out, and my favorite site at the time, SimCity Central started creating buildings for it. I dreamed up many buildings that I could build, but obviously none ever came to fruition. It wasn’t helped that once again, the BAT (Building Architect Tool) was PC user-only.

Rush Hour was released that fall for Mac. Sadly, there was no new expansion packs released for SimCity. Unfortunately, my brother started using the G5 for work purposes, but in late 2005, I rediscovered it for the iMac G5. My first goal was to get cool buildings. The coolest by far was SimPEG’s “Hydroelectric Dam".

With my experience at Nintendo Database Forums, I decided to sign up for Simtropolis on September 11, 2005, just to get structures like that. That day, SimGoober released a real-world BAT: Ace Hardware. It was on the newly-posted part of Simtropolis many years ago. Regrettably, complications came up. The buildings were too long to be downloaded on a 56k modem with my time limit on the Internet, so I set up a way of my family downloading it on faster computers at their work sites. Furthermore, a few buildings were in .EXE format. My first question on the Simtropolis forums dealt with toggling the tile view, something swiftly answered.

The music of SimCity 4 was by far my favorite aspect, and I loved it. When I got from Galveston I wanted to recreate basically the entire stretch of Houston to Galveston. The strip malls that lit up at night. The theme park. The office buildings. The elevated stoplight. I wanted it all. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really possible at that time, especially with the fact I had a Mac, no skills to speak of, and not even Google Maps to help with BATting. It was also on that same post where I learned that in order to make a post on Simtropolis you had to possess some minimal HTML.

Ultimately, my relation with Simtropolis went through ups and downs, possibly stemming from the very unpleasant political section. The unbalanced political discussion was one of the major turn-offs of Simtropolis and I was grateful not to see that in SimCity 4 Devotion, which I joined in 2006. During fall 2006, I found New York CJ, a cool blog about NYC in SimCity 4. After realizing my computer was getting way too packed with mods and ultimately I quit playing. It was too slow, some of the mods weren’t showing up (especially some of the weird Japan ones), and the buildings weren’t lighting up at night, just in time to see everyone erupt with anger at the first screenshots of SimCity Societies. Those were dark days, but also a bit fun: it was great to see most of everyone sided together again on protesting this travesty to the SimCity name.

I restarted playing SimCity 4 in late 2008, but then the iMac G5 decided to have a “graphics breakdown” in early 2009. I kind of took the frustration out on SC4D and was punished severely (they haven’t forgiven me yet...) but I refused to let them me and founded Pseudo3D’s SimCity 4 as a “renegade” site similar to how SimPeg.com is separate. Didn’t work as well as I had expected.

Meanwhile, at Simtropolis, hate was brewing for Cities XL, formerly Cities Unlimited (announced around the same time of SCS). By this time, it looked like a joke that was not worth playing. That didn’t deter some people, and Simtropolis was part of a massive beta testing giveaway. Cities XL arrived buggy, missing most of the features promised, and all focused on a cheap MMO gimmick that didn’t work well as it should’ve. The developer closed nearly six months later.

With renewed faith in SimCity, I decided to try again BATting the following summer (I had intended to use SketchUp) but ultimately delayed it until college hit. That’s my Simtropolis and SimCity story in a nutshell, and I hope to make an actual BAT this year. Thanks for reading.

I intended for the release of this post (in Spirit of 2005) to come with an actual BAT, but I have not done so. However, now that I've finished with this, I intend on making a few new items to Pseudo3D's SimCity 4, including an actual BAT when I make one.

The Spirit of 2005: Galveston, Part Two!

2010-09-10T11:30:00.005-05:00

[Previous]
[First]

The vacation to Galveston wasn't pretty. In reality, Galveston isn't exactly a "beach resort", the beach is separated from the main city due to a concrete seawall placed due to a devastating hurricane that destroyed the entire city, caused over 8,000 people to perish, and ultimately caused its similar-sized rival inland (Houston) to take advantage of an oil boom. The ultimate circumstances crippled Galveston into basically being a tourist town (a few universities remained) and allowed Houston to become insanely successful, becoming one the fourth largest city in America.

Back to the present, er, the past. Galveston in this particular September, was in its off season. This meant that the beaches weren't maintained, traffic was lighter, and homeless people hung out at street corners.

A few memories in no particular order:
- I read a copy of Popular Mechanics extensively. A review on it will be done later this year on TWR.
- One of the bums I remember was asleep, with only a warm 2-liter bottle of store brand cola as liquid sustenance. (a 12-ounce can for visual purposes)

Finally, we went to Pelican Island. It was full of surprises. First, there was an awesome raised stoplight: it has to be really seen to be believed.

View Larger Map

It was exciting for my inner roadgeek. Bonus points in that it was suspended over a rail yard in a swamp. And, if you count my more recent discoveries, it wasn't even built as a suspended stoplight. The east-west portion was completed in the late 1980s or early 1990s (between 1982 and 1995).

As we approached the bridge to Pelican Island, we could notice an actual railroad running alongside the road.

Sadly, much of it (especially leading up to the bridge) has been completely removed, even by 2005 some parts were missing. Still, it held up remarkably well. A switcher had been there up until 2003, and the railroad hadn't been really used for at least 15 years. By 1995 at least, the Island section had been dismantled.

During that time, we visited the ships at Seawolf Park, including the submarine Cavalla and the U.S.S. Stewart. Both ships were long since retired by the Navy (the very early 1970s) and were basically sunken into the ground. On the helm of the Stewart, we watched a cruise ship go by. The thing was huge. For size comparison:

We were standing on the helm and watching as thousands of cruise-goers stood on multiple levels (each well above us) and waving. We waved back. I think people tried to say hello, but it was lost in the wind. It must have been quite a sight for all of us...my family seeing a giant cruise ship with people crammed aboard (everyone must have been on deck...the cruise ship was departing) and so distant and tiny, or going off in a cruise and seeing one family waving from an old WWII destroyer escort.

The Cavalla was far my favorite. Thanks to the nice "submarine metal" smell, it really was cool. And we were the only people on the tour (if I recall). If I recover any pictures, I will share them.

Anyway, I returned with high hopes for, ironically enough, SimCity-related dreams (my brother watched Lost episodes) to share on a new SimCity website I joined. What was it? Come back tomorrow for The Spirit of 2005: Simtropolis and SimCity 4, of which I will try to make one of the longer TWR posts ever in terms of text.

I finished the Redwall book report, by the way.

Want to read more on my adventures in Galveston? Check out the 2008 "sequel" here!

The Spirit of 2005: Galveston (Part One)

2010-09-09T12:45:00.005-05:00

[Previous]
[First]

It was a Friday in September 2005. I had a Redwall book report due the following Monday (and I only read half of it), I had a sore throat, I had to go to tae kwon do lessons (a short-lived venture, and we are not going to talk about it here...ever), but I still wanted to go with my brother, mother, and father on a business trip to Galveston.

At around 5:00, we set off. I had my Redwall book and the WingNuts soundtrack. At that time, Texas 40 was not yet complete, and Highway 6 in its original state. I noticed many things along Highway 6 that I would really never see again, including concrete medians, the Peach Creek Road intersection, and others. I did not notice if the Robert Road intersection had a crossing with gates, for instance.

By the time we got to Hempstead, it was definitely evening, and by the time we got to Houston, it was most definitely dark. Since it was too dark to read anymore, I decided to continue listening to WingNuts music while staring at the various strip malls, all brightly lit for the night. Regrettably, in years past, the brands included the once-venerable Service Merchandise, but I was still fascinated.

Eventually, we passed by the Foley's office building and the doomed Astroworld. Six Flags announced that Astroworld would be closed and demolished (admittedly, it had been declining for several years). Foley's corporate building would be closed and merged into Macy's South in Atlanta. It was an end of an era. As the approach to Galveston continued, the city lights disappeared. Eventually we got to a Walgreen's (to get some cough drops), passed the stalwart H-E-B Pantry Foods (Pantry Foods had pulled out of the B-CS area), and eventually got to a suite on the Galveston coastal road. It was a nice suite hotel (with condos mixed in!) but the rent was very cheap of a hotel like that due to the off-season and the fact that the beach was mostly washed away. Tomorrow, there would be much to see and do.

The H-E-B Pantry

Allegedly the old Foley's offices

[Next]

Also, pay attention to this page by tomorrow, as I can embellish it with links, maps, and images.

The Spirit of 2005: Of Highways and Roadgeeks

2010-09-08T11:25:00.004-05:00

[Previous]

I would consider my brother and I roadgeeks. We both enjoy the unusual patterns of roads. Even though it was somewhat birthed with our love of SimCity 2000 and how cool big overpasses looked when we went to places like Houston, Austin, or Dallas, (and to a much lesser extent, Waco). Eventually, we got much less excited over the prospect of seeing a mega-overpass but we retained interest. During 2005, my brother explained to me that the highway signs were... different. Indeed, some of the "l"s were different, and had curls at the end of them. The tops of "t"s were now flat. It looked new and not out of the 1980s like the other type was, and I welcomed the newer ones. This first was noted on a 2005 trip to Galveston (which will be explored later).

But now, it seems like ALL the signs are the new type, and in some cases, it's kind of ugly. It seems like we're not even in America anymore. I could continue to rant on this and mourn the loss of other sign types (including the HOV lane signs like in Houston).

The fact remains that both of us like roads and enjoy the ways that even different states have roads set up. In Texas, nearly all highways have frontage lanes along them. The transition is usually incredibly smooth. Just take off, and you're in the frontage lane. No yielding necessary, no making sure the cars on the frontage lanes aren't pulling a fast one on you, and it all happens far off enough so you can be sure to change lanes if you're turning right.

We even have "Texas turnarounds", though officially a ""Texas U-turn". It's surprising how other states have yet to pick up on that fact. Of course, they have their own "fun" ways to do things.

One of my favorite intersections that I've had the chance to experience is the Continuous Flow Intersection. The fact is, it's slightly disconcerting and space-intensive, but it really works! Check it out!

Anyway, the first trip regarding the new signs was in Galveston...

[Next]

Comment Discussion: Do you consider yourself a roadgeek? Anything interesting in YOUR area?

The Spirit of 2005: WingNuts and MarbleBlast

2010-09-07T11:33:00.002-05:00

It wouldn't be fair to include some of the games I played during Spirit of 2005 realistically. I never got past the Guardian in Chrono Trigger (in the sewers), and eventually all my playing time would go to Marble Blast Gold and WingNuts: Temporal Navigator. They, in essence, were heavily upgraded versions of arcade games like Marble Madness and Time Pilot, but I loved them anyway. Good graphics, awesome music, and hey, WingNuts integrated a sound effect I hadn't heard since Super Munchers!

I could never beat the more harder levels of Marble Blast, and for WingNuts, I never could get it to play the Stage 2 music again (I either got to a very difficult level I have yet to re-achieve, or it's a bug…but I've since done a clean re-install).

Anyway, those are the games I ACTUALLY played during summer 2005. Oh, and The Sims: Bustin' Out, but I already mentioned it and wish not to speak of it again.

Download Links
WingNuts: Temporal Navigator (to get the music, do "Show package contents", then "MacOSClassic", then "Music")
Marble Blast Gold (costs $19.95)
Super Munchers (not compatible with OS X)

Finally, WingNuts: Temporal Navigator cheats which are now fairly difficult to find on the Internet!

Cheats for Wingnuts

1.
Press delete. Enter cheat code. Press any arrow key but not the Enter key. If successful you will hear a thump noise.
The only cheat code that I can recall is 'tired of dying' ; gives immortality.
Hope this helps.

During pause screen:

"i need help" - adds three ships
"i need shields" - sets shields to maximum

Before starting a new game:

"weapon a" - varying weapon upgrade levels
"weapon b"
"weapon c"
"weapon d"
"weapon e"
"weapon f"
"weapon g"
"reset" - turns off all cheats
"engage tim" - turns on all cheats
"total carnage" - all cheats except infinite damage weapons
"upgrade heaven" - max bullets, missiles and bombs
"bullet bonanza" - infinite simultaneous bullets
"missile pleethora" - infinite missiles
"tired of dying" - invincibility
"gas me baby" - infinite fuel
"give me time" - maximum time
"world of hurt" - weapons have infinite damage
"wonder goodies" - goodies cannot be shot down
"mega bombs" - maximum number of simultaneous bombs
"i am no weenie" - turn off all cheats
"let me live" - twice the number of starting ships
"let me rule" - three times the number of startin ships
"the baron loses" - shows the winning screen
"quit" - quits the game - oooo, so exciting

Anyway, after summer ended, my brother came back home and 2005 improved substantially. My brother told me something, however, that was changing highways forever.

[Next]

The Hall of Shame

2010-09-06T12:23:00.004-05:00

I've been getting plenty of blog-spam lately, all from Anonymous people. If I get one more spam item, I'll change settings so you can no longer post as Anonymous.

This is a variety I think they use on forums, too, based on the non-HTML they used for hiding URLs. Proboards uses this type.

Hi PPL, i would just like to make an say hi to the members at www.blogger.com

Thank you for keeping us up-to-date. I truly enjoy it and find all the info really useful.

Excellent post, I found your site via Google. I bookmarked your site for furture infomation, many thanks.

[URL=http://www.nelliestore.co.uk/shop/category/7/Canvas-Prints/]Canvas Prints[/url] [URL=http://www.nelliestore.co.uk/shop/category/7/Canvas-Prints/]Canvas Prints[/url] [URL=http://www.nelliestore.co.uk/shop/category/7/Canvas-Prints/]Photos On Canvas[/url]

The www.blogger.com can easily be substituted with anything, and the "via Google" can be "via Yahoo" or "via Bing". Oh, and "future" is spelled F-U-T-U-R-E.

Fantastic blog I loved reading your info

[url=http://partyopedia.com]birthday party supplies[/url]

Note the same Proboards-type markup, but even without the link, I'd still delete it.

Hi Dudes, i would just like to make an introduce myself to everyone at twowayroads.blogspot.com

Your forum is fantastic! Generally when I visit forums, I just come across crap, but this time I was very surprised, finding a informative forum containing good information.

Thanks every body at twowayroads.blogspot.com and keep your dandy effort up!!!

[color=#99aadd][URL=http://www.contemporary-furnishings.net]modern furniture[/URL] [URL=http://www.finger-puppets.co.uk/shop]Hand Puppets [/URL] [URL=http://www.finger-puppets.co.uk/shop] Puppets [/URL] [URL=http://www.contemporary-furnishings.net]modern furnishings[/URL] [URL=http://www.contemporary-furnishings.net/Accessories/c14/index.html] designer accessories [/URL] [/color]

Yet another forums bot. This one is a bit more obvious, but notice the color code...it's a light blue color, similar to highlighting colors. Here is an example.

Hello. In a crisis, fell revenue from sales [url=http://rapira-mir.ru]rapira-mir.ru[/url] . Tell my what can be done. Thanks in advance.
Vsem privet. V uslovijah krizisa upal dohod ot prodazh [url=http://rapira-mir.ru]rapira-mir.ru[/url] . Podskazhite chto mozhno sdelat'. Zaranee Spasibo.

In Soviet Russia, spam deletes you!

Comment Discussion: Have you ever had truly bizarre, or outright annoying spam?

Also, a special presentation: toward the end of this week, will reach the true "flagship" part of Spirit of 2005, told in an epic several-parter!

File archives

2010-09-04T12:31:00.000-05:00

Free file archives are really cool and really intriguing (the smaller, the better...we're not talking about shady torrent warez places) and I've considered having one. After all, I with the (old) finding of Macintosh Garden, then the local Project HOLD (which serves no interest to you unless you live in my area), then Retromags, and the latest finding of another Macintosh software archive. Or if you aren't really into that, there's other free (and educational!) files, too, like the New York Public Library's online digital archives. You can look through over 700,000 images: "historical maps, postcards, photographs, old restaurant menus, floor plans, advertisements, botanical prints, cigarette cards—from the library's collection". It's things like this that are separated from Google, and you should be aware of them (hey, that's an idea: "File Archive Awareness Day")

The problem with file archives is that first off, I donate what I can to certain sites: like that Macintosh Advocate CD I did months ago.

For everything else (exclusive), it's either not worth the time or subject to copyright. I may even get in a position where something is rare and the publisher wants it off, even if it's been years since it was on the market. At that point, your hard work is lost at the minimum.

Ideally, I'd like to have a huge file archive, hosting items from anywhere and everywhere: anything scannable in my house is going up there (okay, maybe not to that extreme). Things on my hard drive, book PDFs, lots and lots of software and ROMs, movies and TV shows, comic strips, magazine scans, music, and more would all be fair gain. Unfortunately, I'd be subject to lots and lots of cease-and-desist files, leaving my archive with not much at all.

Even if I manage to avoid cease-and-desist files, lawsuits, or angry people, there's still the significant problem of finding a host. Mediafire, Mega Upload, and its ilk are all shady places. Without a membership, you're a third-class citizen with slow speeds and limited uploading. And those places are not getting my credit card.

On the other hand, it's not like I was really going to be mass-dumping lots of obviously copyrighted materials or things I got somewhere else. It would be nice to add exclusive items not yet seen on TWR (or the rest of the Internet, for that matter) but I think it would take away from potential TWR traffic. It would also force people to actually read and discover instead of just rooting around for useful stuff. Even adding a file archive of things already seen on TWR would circumvent actual TWR posts. Or I could just add a post that leads to other TWR files...or you can just browse TWR!

I really haven't decided.

Comment Discussion: Do you have a file archive, or wish you had one?

Bored on Board

2010-09-02T11:28:00.002-05:00

In one of my lab notebooks, verbatim:

However, there is a trick used often by cooks, determination of volume by displacement (discovered by Archimedes just before he cried "Eureka" and became the earliest recorded streakers).

Who wrote this?

The Spirit of 2005: Hurricane Katrina

2010-08-29T13:35:00.004-05:00

Katrina isn't a bright topic, but it DID happen this day in 2005. It's also hard to talk about it sometimes without bringing up politics.

The truth is Katrina affected a lot of things: it changed the face of Louisiana and Texas forever. While New Orleans is a half-abandoned place today, it did affect other places. When people got out of New Orleans, they went to new places, and took their culture with them. Here in College Station, Texas, we got a good Cajun restaurant (Crazy Cajun's) and new residents. The children of said residents went to much better schools.

When I went to Louisiana a few months later(!), much of the destruction was visible. You can play along in Google Earth right now, and watch as roofs become blue with tarps (there were a lot of blue tarps, likely government-issue). Visit New Orleans (29.972297,-90.025846) on August 30th 2005 to see the flooding, or this part of Lake Charles (29.972297,-90.025846) to see wrecked boats.

The Back to School Special ~ The Fall Introduction

2010-08-25T09:00:00.001-05:00

I don't have a lot of memory about elementary school (my kindergarten teacher once read us "The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles", but I had forgotten the title until I asked her until senior year), but I do remember some really out-of-date books. One of them described (in short) the "future", which involved the exciting world of microwave ovens and modern buildings that look like this:

They also talked about videophones and how it was really an exciting prospect to see a grainy black-and-white picture of the person who you're talking to.

Some years later, I also remember a book on BASIC programs that one could write classic programs, like "Hunt the Wumpus". Cool, but out of date (even for 2001).

A couple of years later in 6th grade, we watched several videos, including a terrifically bad one on maps. It had to be low-budget and terrible deliberately, because it featured (among others), sounds ripped from Kid Pix Studio, recognizable props (like the round nerd glasses), and lame jokes.

Girl: ...and general reference maps!
Guy: Who's general reference?
(cut to another scene with guy wearing nerd glasses)
???: I'm General Reference!

Other movies included the 1970s version of "Bridge To Terabithia", which turned the saddest part of the book into a laughable scene due to bad acting, and the (very odd) animated version of "The Phantom Tollbooth". What were they smoking?

Several years later (11th grade), there was another film I watched that involved, among other things...

- Guys drinking cooking oil straight from a glass!
- 1980s fashion and hair!
- People going around in a Ford Aerostar mini-van and harassing people about their meal choices!

Seriously, this stuff couldn't be made up!

For Fall 2010, TWR plans to dramatically cut back on content. Don't expect weekday updates, nor a set schedule. I'll try to create a post on Sunday and Saturday, as well as other mini-posts throughout the week (kinda). Posts may be substituted with a notification that I did something on a webpage or another blog of mine.

The Spirit of 2005 will continue with additional posts, and the "Fanboy" series will be continued.

BUT, first, a quick gift. I'll be trying to use my last free days before I go back to classes trying to whip up a few posts to keep us all going through the fall, and last night I whipped up a mirror of Macintosh Game Joho. Since it looks like it might go down at any given time (host instability is a bad sign), I whipped up a mirror, available here. With the exception of a lack of a Japanese page and a few broken links which are not my fault, it's just like the other version. Ad-free, too!

P.S.: starting this fall, we'll have a comment discussion prompt on most posts.

End of Summer Wrapup

2010-08-22T17:19:00.003-05:00

Well, here it is. The end-of-summer wrap-up!

We explored the The Spirit of 2005, our summer series, though it didn't live up to expectations (but 2010 isn't over yet), touched on this year's E3, and talked about what could have been, where we could have EarthBound 64, the Epicenter Collection, and an underground Houston light rail.

I couldn't find a military base that had some spurs in it that were being dismantled as of 2003, see here for the post, but I'll keep looking (unless you can help!)

We talked about food, fast food, video game ports, and emulation.

We analyzed crime shows, derided crane games, and brought up one of the greatest comedy trios of all time.

From hypermarkets to Zelda, from Pokémon Crystal to the Intellivision.

A few useful Macintosh tips were shared as well. We even went to Michigan.

We scanned information about a PC card and hypermarket maps.

We also talked about early video games, later video games, and more on the subject in a series.

A bit of a lost post from 2008, another topic on plantains, and a few other posts rounded off the summer.

But that's not even counting the Splashtown webpage, progress on a local road, and more.

We made mistakes (the link to the Splashtown webpage was broken!) and finally, spoke in "we" even though it was "I".

See you tomorrow, when we launch the Fall 2010 season of TWR! The fall season will feature more "variety" content, remaining 2005 posts, and a few other bonus things.

Meanwhile...

2010-08-21T07:53:00.002-05:00

Dark days are once again back at TWR. Having saturated with mediocre posts all related to games, being essentially laughed out of an Internet forum related to said games, and having beat or having gotten stuck at Nintendo games, TWR is quitting that. Meanwhile, we lost our only blog follower...a sign of true decay.

We don't have anything really planned in the near future. Certainly not video games of any type, and not retail either, because that is old and trite. Like the malls suffering a continued death, nearly all retail fan websites are slow to update if not dead altogether.

I want to go back to learning Python and stuff, and working on the final 2005 posts. Other posts will be available at that time. Next week, we will have a few more posts as we try to find "another direction" for TWR (keeping with the general theme, "Variety Without Politics") and have an end-of-summer wrap-up. See you then!

Photo credit to "Joe Kuby" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/joekuby/412690056/)

The Master List of Various TWR Projects UPDATED

2010-08-19T21:00:00.003-05:00

BUMP!! I feel that the blog is getting too saturated with gaming-related posts. In addition to the cancellation (or at least delay) of the "Fanboy" series, I've been planning on making something totally new, akin to the Nero Wolfe piece a while back. I'd also like to focus on websites.

I know I've planned a lot of various TWR-related projects, and here are they are:

==BLOGS==
Beyond our flagship Two Way Roads, here are the other blogs. Please see my profile for the full list, including some defunct ones.

Southern Mall Gallery: Intended to be a licensed "backup" of Mall Hall of Fame, should malls be removed due to space constraints. Currently, as since no malls have been deleted, no malls have been added (Sharpstown Mall was added as an example).
Pseudo3D's Retail Related: Intended to replace Retail Addiction Blog. I need to export the original Retail Addiction.
Pseudo3D's SimCity 4: See "Spirit of 2005: SimCity 4".
abjComics: The problem with abjComics was I like to draw spur-of-the-moment cartoons (such as some political cartoons for my own enjoyment). When it actually came to drawing as a series, I despised it. Plus, because I didn't have Photoshop, black and white drawings turned out over-contrasted, and frankly terrible.
College Station Roads and Retail: Still being updated. Occasionally.

==SPIRIT OF 2005==
SimCity 4: Not yet done. Sometime I'll force myself to get back on the BAT. Around September, maybe, but I'll have school.
Popular Mechanics: Not yet. Expected around September.
Behind the Arches: Soon.
Katrina: August 30.
Galveston: Late August, maybe September.
Of Highways and Roadgeeks: Around September.

==OTHER PROJECTS==
That Pokémon Magazine Scan: Not yet done!
Splashtown Website: I'd like to add more rides. But the stupid new Flickr layout makes it a tad harder to get the pictures I want.
Blue Skies and Nintendo: I've been thinking about it some more and I'd like to relaunch it. In partial, it is based on some of my favorite older websites.
- NES Warp Zone was once a respected site on Planet Nintendo. It changed hands in 2006, but the new owner didn't do much with it. There's ugly banner ads, broken links, and more. It barely received any updates, and only got one update in 3 years to announce that it was listed on a poker website.
- |tsr's nes archive was also full of information, abandoned, and got no reinvention or even mention when the current Magweasel launched.
- The Nintendo Information Repository has some cool stuff in it, but it hasn't been updated in five years. Graveyard, indeed.
- NinDB, formerly Nintendo Database, I have known for several years ago. It's quite a different place than what I knew, and pointing out facts on the older website alone was, in retrospect, a mistake.

==NON BLOG RELATED STUFF==
Tape Burn Notice tonight: 8:00 PM, tonight!
Read The Two Towers: I want to finish Lord of the Rings before the end of August. Easier said than done, based on my poor progress.
Learn Python: Reading a PDF, mostly. Need to also reinstall it.
Gourmet cooking: This too.

Yeah, I need to get to work.

The Problems of Being a Fanboy, Part Three: Nintendo DS

2010-08-19T18:03:00.001-05:00

The following posts do not indicate current fanboyism, but are rather an archive of what I actually hoped

May used to be a special time for me: the end of school (this was before finals) and of course, the Electronic Entertainment Expo! And in 2004, Nintendo premiered a new handheld: the Nintendo DS. To me, it looked like a perfect device. To a guy with only a (used) Game Boy Color and borrowing a (non-backlit) GBA, the DS looked like a perfect piece.

The thoughts went through my mind, and I liked it. First off, it was backlit, which was awesome. No more lamps or clumsy add-ons. Four buttons was a nice thing, too. A stylus. There were lots of games announced, including GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, Mario Kart DS, and Super Mario 64 x4. The thought of a handheld Super Mario 64 was exciting, and it would be the first time I would really play SM64 like I wanted (most of the times I played was at the dentist's office, where nothing was done, plus no sound vs. my cousin's house, where all 120 stars were gotten). And it could play Game Boy Advance cartridges which I (incorrectly) meant as ALL of the Game Boy/Game Boy Color games.

Sadly, I soon found out that wasn't to play GB/GBC games, Super Mario 64 x4 turned into Super Mario 64 DS, which wasn't a straight port of the N64 classic. (see a video here) Then I found out that it was to be a "third pillar" console, not to replace the Game Boy line. I breathed a little easier, and decided to change my opinion. I wished that the Nintendo DS would fail. Crash and burn type fail. Bargain bin at Wal-Mart type fail. VIRTUAL BOY fail.

And in a way, I was right. And yet I was not. The "third pillar" approach hurt the early DS sales, while PSP started to get a slight edge. Eventually I got a DS and a GBA SP. My GBA SP can't play GB/GBC games anymore...but I like both of them nonetheless, though I would like my GBA to play GB/GBC games.

Later (2005), I was back to being in support of the DS (while still secretly holding out for a peripheral that would let me play my older games) but had another hope: computer game ports! With the stylus (this was before the Wii, see), who knows what kind of things could be ported? I had four games I wanted to see...

SimCity 2000: After a disastrous port on the GBA (I need to add that to this page) by Destination Software (the same people who had screwed up Snood long before its casual-game conversion). I was hoping that EA could get a real port of SC2K in that preserved all the graphics, goodness, sound, and more. It was not to be. It was years before SimCity DS, and I refused to support the game who largely destroyed the series that I love.

SimTower: The Tower SP came out in early 2006 for GBA (not DS), which was something I readily bought. Unfortunately, it didn't have the brand name of SimTower, the graphics were compressed dramatically, sales were poor, and the touch-screen sequel, The Tower DS, never made it over. Drat!

Riven: The Sequel to Myst: I was excited over the prospect of Myst coming over to the DS. Unfortunately, the port was poorly done. While some things couldn't be helped: the DS stylus can't have the same mouse-over cues as the original mouse, other things were totally badly done that could not be looked over. A few years later, Cyan Worlds themselves ported it and The Manhole: Masterpiece Edition to the iPhone/iPod. 256x192 versus 480x320 certainly gets iOS in the "resolution winner" category. The iOS ports win in almost every category, even going down to the original "Cyan" introduction (regrettably leaving out the cool "Brøderbund" logo, though).

WingNuts: Combat Evolved: This was one of my favorite games during 2005, but I'm sure that I would've been disappointed with a DS port.

What about you? Did you have any expectations for the DS that went unfulfilled?

Wednesday Night Wrap-Up

2010-08-18T22:19:00.002-05:00

I just beat Super Mario 64.

More Musings on the Coleco Adam, et. al.

2010-08-17T16:38:00.004-05:00

In a few previous blog entries, we kind of explored the Intellivision Keyboard Component in a short-lived series. Today, we're looking at the Coleco Adam. For those who don't know, Coleco Industries, a then-famous toy company at the time, created the "ColecoVision" in 1982 (the height of the first big video game boom) with superior "arcade-quality graphics" to compete with the Intellivision (by Mattel) and the Atari VCS (Atari 2600, by Atari). The ColecoVision boasted an expansion slot, and a two "modules" were made for it, including a system that essentially was an Atari clone (to run Atari games on a ColecoVision) and a steering wheel controller. The third component was also a stand-alone system: the Adam computer system. The system had a word processor, a "Data Drive", and a printer. The computer was widely regarded as a failure: it had numerous reliability and design flaws, including a noisy printer that had to be hooked up to the computer or it didn't work, a proprietary data format that was neither cassette tapes nor floppy disks, the list went on and on. Ultimately, the Adam brought down the entire company, and is widely regarded as a bad idea. However, looking beyond the design and reliability problems, it really WASN'T that bad of an idea. For one, the idea of packaging an entire computer system (main computer/keyboard/software/manuals) was rather novel at the time, and the BASIC programming language was very similar to AppleSoft BASIC, and more. Overall, what better way to introduce a real computer into homes than it is to just have an add-on peripheral for is (in essence) an expensive toy? And wouldn't everyone go for the computer that runs, say, everything? The ColecoVision had a way to run Atari 2600 games (an Intellivision-compatible peripheral was supposedly planned for never released), Adam was on the verge of introducing a C/PM disk drive. If Coleco Adam was more successful, the ColecoVision/Coleco Adam likely would've had the Intellivision module, maybe Apple II compatibility as well. That would give it an unparalleled thousands of compatible programs. But, of course, that never happened, and the Coleco Adam is an example of what NOT to do.

Meanwhile, the other video game companies had similar ideas. Atari had its own set of computers, but that didn't stop them from planning a keyboard component of their very own. Intellivision was smart in some areas, and dumb in others. It gains smart points by deciding not to put the Keyboard Component into mass production...it would've been $600, like the expensive "Expansion Module #3" for ColecoVision. Best not to have an expensive computer component for an already expensive console...overall, it would cost nearly $2000 in today's money...NOT a very good plan. Intellivision also screwed up when it pushed the Intellivision II, a low-cost redesign of the Intellivision, except for the fact that it was probably made of some of the flimsiest materials available. Doubly sad in that no one system can run all the games AND all the peripherals. And the worst part was, it was designed to lock out third-party Coleco cartridges (yes, they made games for other systems) but ended up locking out some of its own games too. Intellivision's own "computer" was the "Entertainment Computer System", an underpowered system with only half a dozen games or so. But it had potential.

We never got to see how the Atari VCS keyboard, the ECS, or the Adam really played out because of the video game crash in 1983-1984. It was caused mostly in part by horrific overproduction of cartridges, but, as Rusel deMaria and Jim Levy point out in High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, Coleco, Atari, and Mattel thought that home video game consoles would merge with computers. Unfortunately, when compared to something like Apple, Commodore, or IBM, the video game computers were nothing, and that likely hurt them as a system. As video games, they were something, but as computers, they kind of stunk. And the video game crash hurt all three.

Coleco Industries went into a tailspin and sold off all their properties before perishing in the early 1990s.
Atari Inc. was shut down by parent company Warner Communications. The arcade business was retained and formed into a new company called Atari Games Corp., but everything was sold off, with the computers and video games going to Tramel Technologies Limited (later Atari Corp.)
Mattel pulled the plug on Mattel Electronics, leaving the Intellivision to liquidators until another buyer was found.

Thus it was no mistake that Nintendo did not bring over any keyboards or modems from Japan.

In a way I'm a bit sorry that the video game companies did not succeed in making a real computer. I would've loved to see a mid-1980s video game system that had the power to run any game console AND a home computer OS to boot.

TOMORROW: The rest of the Fanboy series!

The Spirit of 2005: The Sims Bustin' Out

2010-08-17T12:50:00.003-05:00

So if I hadn't told you by now, 2005 was, you know, pretty boring. And it was one game that really defined 2005. Unfortunately, I did not finish Chrono Trigger. I think I stopped shortly before Robo joins your party.

It was something else. The Sims: Bustin' Out was the game of choice, and became less of a game and more a heavy sedative. It was literally a Wal-Mart bargain bin product, and the whole game consisted of your Sim (directly player-controlled) running around town, talking to people, doing lame mini-games for money, buying items for your pitiful apartment, and performing bodily functions. The music was kind of catchy, though...but it's best we not talk about it.

Plantains

2010-08-14T17:56:00.003-05:00

Plantains are not my favorite food. Looking like a large, thick banana, they are kind of like a combination of a banana and a potato. In addition to a weird taste by themselves, I regret the fact I added two cloves of garlic for one plantain.

The Problems of Being a Fanboy, Part Two: Game Boy Advance

2010-08-13T19:57:00.002-05:00

The following posts do not indicate current fanboyism, but are rather an archive of what I actually hoped

The Game Boy Color was a great system to follow up with the original Game Boy, and the Game Boy Advance was the perfect successor to the GBC. With a redesigned case, a new wider screen (at the time, it had better definition than some HDTVs), a already-secure library of games thanks to backwards compatibility, and a four player capability, the Game Boy Advance seemed to be the ultimate handheld. The 32-bit CPU was more powerful than the SNES and possibly comparable to the PlayStation. 3-D games were promised.

But through the course of the GBA's lifespan, we never really saw anything get past what looked like an upgraded SNES. SNES ports were available, but none of them were particularly good. What happened?

1. For one thing, the promises of GBA were even more than in 2001. In 1999, they planned to release a digital camera for the GBA and a way to hook up to the Internet. The GBA camera was shown at 2002, with a game called Stage Debut being shown at 2002 and 2003, where you could put a model of yourself in a game.

2. The Game Boy Advance cartridges held only 32MB. It was well above the SNES, NES, or GB, but still failed to stack up to latter N64 cartridges, PS1 discs, and others. Thus, my dream of PlayStation ports was not realized, but also because of the...

3. "32-bit processor" means nothing. No one advertises "bits" anymore because its not that a measure of system speed. The Intellivision was 10 bits, but it is much lower-resolution and less powerful than the NES. And the Jaguar wasn't 64 bits. It did have a few 64 bit components, but it couldn't even stack up to the PS1 in terms of graphics.

4. The GBA didn't have a backlight, which wasn't truly corrected until a revamped version of the GBA SP, which had an actual backlit screen. Unfortunately, by that time, the GBA was dying, many had been put off by the original GBA's lack of a backlight and the GBA SP's washed-out front-lit screen.

5. SNES ports were not good. In addition to the not-backlight, Nintendo didn't put in X and Y buttons. The lack of a backlight ruined Donkey Kong Country when brightness was artificially enhanced at the expense of color and saturation. Other ports made clever use of the L and R buttons, and games experienced new changes. I was unhappy with a number of changes with the port of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which included young-Link sounds whenever he used the sword, fell down pits, etc. Super Mario World had a port in which the sound was changed for the worse, possibly due to an inferior sound chip in the GBA.

6. I was highly disappointed with Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, due to the fact that despite the new graphics and larger size, you couldn't visit Kanto or Johto, the original two worlds. You couldn't even trade with them, and no in-game mention is made of them at all!

Whatever. I'm going home.

The Problems of Being a Fanboy, Part One: The GameCube

2010-08-13T16:05:00.006-05:00

The following posts do not indicate current fanboyism, but are rather an archive of what I actually hoped

I was definitely a Nintendo fanboy back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Years later I had written a three-part series and a forum post, including the line "Looking back toward some of my posts (2006-2007), it was pretty clear I was a different person back then. I was a shameless Nintendo fanboy. Looking back, I really expected the PS3 to fail and for Wii to become a winning console, finally defeating the PlayStation for once and for all. Third parties (Rockstar!) would join the Wii, Sony PlayStation games would join the Virtual Console, and Project HAMMER would be a blast to play."

But what about the actual thoughts I had that I had?

It dates back to the early days, even back to the Nintendo GameCube. The GameCube was the first disc-based console that Nintendo had, and it looked like a winner. For one thing, it was a cool and unusual shape, not like the other disc-based consoles at that time nor any cartridge machine. It had way better graphics. Unlike the old Nintendo 64, it had a seemingly-polygon free 3D Mario. It had new games: Rare had the cool-looking Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet, Banjo-Kazooie 3, Kameo: Elements of Power, and Donkey Kong Racing. Nintendo had Luigi's Mansion, which would put Luigi in the spotlight as he goes through a haunted house and fights ghosts. There was even a good-looking picture of Luigi's hand holding a Game Boy Color. Miyamoto, creator of Mario and Zelda, had created a new game series: Pikmin. A sequel to Super Smash Bros. was there: Super Smash Bros. Melee. Nintendo was to publish NBA Courtside 2002, which featured player's faces that looked like real people. While the faces seem somewhat flat and unrealistic today, it was amazing back in 2001 and far better than the Nintendo 64. All at the same time, Retro Studios in Austin, Texas was planning the new 3D Metroid, Metroid Prime, and an RPG called Raven Blade. Other games were planned like Eternal Darkness, a Wave Race sequel, and a sequel to 1080° Snowboarding. Sega was in on the game, too, with two new games.

Unfortunately, by that time, there was still trouble. The successful PlayStation had been followed up with PlayStation 2, and that had been out for a year. The PS2 was equipped with cool technologies: USB and DVD to name a few. And Microsoft had its Xbox, the online-capable Halo: Combat Evolved, but not much beyond that. Sega had already been downed, as it had slipped to third place with Dreamcast, the short-lived sixth generation console.

The future seemed secure: Nintendo had a machine that was disc-based (a shortfall of the N64), powerful (better than PS2), and had expansion ports (including a high-speed port, and two serial ports). It was soon announced that a serial port would be used for a modem/broadband adaptor.

Of course, we all know what happened. First, came the launch. The Japanese launch was severely weakened (it happened a few days after 9/11), and the American launch was somewhat dampened by the Xbox.

The small distinctive discs were also small in size: 1.5 GB compared to the 6.5 dual-layer DVDs of PS2 and Xbox. The modem was used only for a few third-party games. Nintendo had to relax its "quality standards" on third party games, which allowed for cheap third-party ports made by EA and others. Meanwhile, the games were not up to snuff: Luigi's Mansion was no Super Mario 64, Wave Race: Blue Storm was fun but very (pardon the pun) shallow, and the Rare games planned never appeared, except for StarFox Adventures, released nearly a year later and a disgrace to the Star Fox name.

By December 2002, Rare was in the hands of Microsoft. The "sequel" to Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine was no sequel either, besides, the fabled Super Mario 128 was still in the air. As Microsoft and Sony zoomed on with better games (and "killer apps") and the GameCube began to fall out of favor, it was no longer a favored platform. Nintendo had become a laughingstock. Even The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a new Zelda game with an innovative cel-shaded look, was derided by others and appeared to drive the fact home that the GameCube was weak. By January 2005, Capcom released Resident Evil 4, still regarded as possibly one of the best third-party games to ever grace Nintendo. But by then it was too late.

The last hope for the GameCube appeared in May 2006, when Super Paper Mario and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess were announced. Twilight Princess had first appeared in 2004 as the realistic Zelda game everyone was hoping for, but was delayed until it was a dual-release for the Wii and the GameCube. SPM was moved to the Wii altogether.

Similarly, the GameCube was quickly discontinued not too long after Wii came out, just like the N64 before it. Successful consoles tend to stick around for a while, long after their glory days are behind them. The Atari 2600 was discontinued in 1992 (after it had been on the market for the last 15 years), the NES was discontinued in 1995 (one year before the N64, 10 years market life), and the Super NES was cut in 1999 (9 years). The PS2, another success story, is still on the market today: this December, that would be 10 years.

As an older person now, looking back, I can see the excitement I had over the GameCube. It wasn't the savior of Nintendo...it didn't win back market share or even outsell the N64, but it was an amiable effort. This blog closes part one of four.

Thanks to Nintendo Power Issue #145 and Wikipedia

Sega PC

2010-08-10T13:55:00.002-05:00

If you're wondering what happened to Sega PC, it was a joint venture between a company called Expert Software and Sega. In March 1999, Expert Software was acquired by Activision, and that was later folded into Activision Value Publishing.

That's probably why we never saw any further Yoot Tower developments or Windows ports of Sega games.

The Spirit of 2005: Splashtown

2010-08-08T19:37:00.003-05:00

The long-awaited Spirit of 2005 post is finally here. Rather than a long post, I introduce to you the first real non-blog website of the "Pseudo3D Network". It's the page dedicated to Splashtown. It's in the vein of other fan pages dedicated to (mostly defunct) waterparks and amusement parks. Eventually I plan to add memories (both of my own and others), separate pages, more photos, and much more. Already a section dedicated to the food places in the park and Hanna-Barbera Land are in the planning stages.

There are seven more items in the Spirit of 2005.

I have to work on an entry featuring an Apple IIGS game soon. It's cool.

Open Console Architecture

2010-08-05T10:10:00.007-05:00

I've been a bit stuck recently. I've been forgetting to update the Splashtown webpage I've been working on (it's going to be awesome, I assure you) and my other console ideas have let's face it, duds. I planned a "Spirit of 2005: BusinessWeek" and proceeded to write out a history of Control Video Corporation, which would ultimately (and briefly) turn into the massive AOL Time Warner. But it turned out to be mind-numbingly boring and I axed it pretty quickly. I also had a page on failed video game consoles, which also wasn't fun as it was merely bad speculation. I did want to link to the wildly implausible Action Gamemaster, a portable super-system that could play NES, Super NES, Genesis, and its own proprietary CD-ROM format.

Rather, today, I decided to talk about open console architecture, and physically, not the ability to install Linux on it (legitimately).

The idea of open-console architecture goes all the way back to the second generation of video games: the Atari 2600, the Intellivision, and the ColecoVision. The first generation, by the way, is from the 1970s and is almost entirely Pong-based dedicated consoles. The Atari 2600 was one of the first major consoles to have cartridges with games on them, but it didn't have any expandability. However, the Atari's first competitor, the Intellivision, was designed with something different in mind. Manufactured by Mattel(!), the Intellivision was to have the "Keyboard Component", which would convert the Intellivision into a full computer. The Keyboard Component (and later, the low-end "Entertainment Computer System") would connect the Intellivision via cartridge slot. Everything the Intellivision did was through the cartridge slot, including the "Intellivoice" module and the System Changer, essentially an Atari 2600 clone that attached to the cartridge slot.

The ColecoVision had better things in mind. Put out by toy company Coleco in 1982, the ColecoVision boasted "arcade quality graphics" and two slots: the cartridge slot, and a slot for the "Expansion Modules".

Image Credit: WCityAuctions.com

The first "Expansion Module" allowed people to play Atari 2600 games on the ColecoVision, the second was just a steering wheel controller, and the third was a $500 kit that expanded the computer into the Coleco Adam, a full low cost home computer that Coleco was marketing to compete with Apple, IBM, and Commodore. Unfortunately, the Adam had far too many problems on launch.

The short version is due to the perceived merging with home computers, most people bought home computers instead of video game consoles. Add to the fact that Atari and its "third parties" were totally saturating the market with bad games (Atari's own Pac-Man and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial were abysmal) and the whole industry crashed. Mattel pulled the plug on Mattel Electronics (essentially ending the Intellivision), Coleco began a tail-spin that would force it to close by the end of the decade, and Atari was shut down by Warner Communications and divided up.

Thus it was up to Nintendo to save the industry. Nintendo did several things: first, the Nintendo Entertainment System disguised it as a toy (not a video game console), it kept a tight (almost draconian) control on third-party companies, and it avoided being a computer at all costs. That differed from the Japanese original version of the NES, the Famicom. The Famicom stood for Family Computer, and Nintendo came up with various peripherals for it, including a keyboard to learn BASIC, a modem, the Famicom Disk System, and a cassette recorder to store programs created in BASIC.

The Nintendo Entertainment System didn't have the cartridge slot to use (most games were hidden once you actually started up) so it had an expansion slot on the bottom. Nothing was ever used it for it. The BASIC kit was axed (it would make it look too much like a computer...besides, do American video gamers actually want to learn BASIC?), the FDS was axed (it was easy to pirate, made it look too much like a computer, and add-ons were never really big sellers anyway). The modem was planned, but a variety of factors (including the "computer avoidance") killed it. Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, the Intellivision and Atari 2600 were still sold to get rid of inventory (manufactured by INTV Corp. and Atari Corp. respectively--neither company originally manufactured the systems). Sega was also testing the Sega Master System, which also had an expansion slot (but never used).

Nintendo's history with expansion slots continued: the SNES had an expansion slot to be used for an add-on, but the only thing that ever saw use of it was the Japan-only Satellaview: a rather innovative system that used a satellite dish to download game data and whatnot (but no head-to-head play). The N64 had a port called the EXTension Port, of which you could hook on the Nintendo 64DD. The 64DD was the "ultimate goal" of the N64 and came with lots of promises. Huge new games, up to 8 times the size of Nintendo 64 games! A built-in clock for real time features! Cheaper to manufacture than cartridges! Online features! Add to and edit your games! Unfortunately, cartridges got bigger to 64DD size (but was still less than CD-ROM), and it was still cheaper to manufacture CDs anyway. It was delayed until December 1999, for a very weak release consisting of a subscription mail order. Rather than the DD, there were a few devices for the N64 (very expensive, mind you) that allowed you to copy games to the computer and vice versa. I read somewhere a while back that the DD also had an expansion port of its own, and I like to speculate that perhaps it was a printer (given the possibilities of the Mario Artist and the upcoming Mario Artist: Graphical Message Maker)

The GameCube's expansion port fared better: because it didn't have cartridges, the system included a port, three of them to be exact.

The Hi-Speed Port was used for the Game Boy Player, Serial Port 1 was used for a modem, and Serial Port 2 was removed rather quickly. It also signifies that the GameCube probably deserved a better life than it did: it was stupid-looking and didn't have many good games, but it had potential. It was more powerful than the PS2 (though not the Xbox) and had that expansion port for who knows what else. DVD playback? Compatibility with other systems? Who knows?

Today, the Wii doesn't have any real ports except for USB and SD, which isn't much of a replacement for a whole port like the Hi-Speed Port.

Meanwhile, Sega liked expansion ports: perhaps too much. There were two add-on consoles for the Genesis. The Sega CD and the Sega 32X. The Sega CD actually hooked into the side or bottom of the Genesis (there were multiple models), and the cartridge slot was used for the Sega 32X, a system that used special cartridges or new 32X discs. Unfortunately, the Sega CD only got low-res "FMV" games that were not very interesting, and the 32X was underwhelming. After the Saturn, Sega had the Dreamcast...an elegant machine with good graphics, on-board Internet play, small footprint, and an expansion port that was used for things like the unreleased Zip Drive peripheral. The Dreamcast was the last Sega console developed.

Xbox and PlayStation never had expansion ports.

So, with the current situation, all three systems on the market have no high-speed interface. No cool drives to attach. A printer and keyboard may be possible, but you probably couldn't add compatibility. Imagine the Wii having one side completely removable for it to sit on a separate add-on console. A built-in hard drive? A Blu-ray drive? A system to play old NES games? I mean, the GameCube had potential, but the Wii doesn't have anything! It could have at least had the Hi-Speed Port to do things (as the Wii isn't much of a speed bump from GCN)

Even on computers, PC cards have since gone away, and the only thing the expandable slots are used for are additional ports, graphics cards, and maybe a TV card. Have we really gone to that extreme, to make all devices closed source?

The Spirit of 2005: Summer Camp

2010-08-02T07:52:00.002-05:00

I don't want to specifically attack the certain summer camp I went to 2005, but I can't resist attacking it anyway. It was one of the low points of my summer vacation. The memories are getting blurry, but...

• The camp bragged it had really good food, but it wasn't anything more than Sysco-type cafeteria food. That includes pre-cooked-type meat, those nasty "smiley fries". There wasn't salt to be found.

• They deliberately didn't let you go back to your cabin during "free time", leading you only to swim in a crowded lake, the long lines for the zip line, or the pitiful selection of other things.

• Only a few cabins had been rebuilt with showers and bathrooms. The rest of everyone had to shower in nasty, over-crowded showering facilities.

Seriously, it was only bad enough to keep me from going insane (the previous year's Boy Scout Camp was much worse).

A Lost TWR Post

2010-07-31T18:00:00.003-05:00

Back in 2008, we promised "Welcome to the Spring Break Special! This is a series of updates that will be posted EVERY DAY during Spring Break!"

That never happened due to a couple of reasons, but I did find an incomplete version of the second installment of the "series". It's VERY VERY BETA and will not be updated.

---COMMENCE BROADCAST---

Spring Break Special Two: The Loser Days

Today's Spring Break Special is about pretty much nothing.

However, though, there is something interesting to note. There's a decent slideshow on YouTube featuring some dead Ohio malls (including the much-loved Rolling Acres Mall) and features the song "My City was Gone", which is (was?) used for the beginning of Rush Limbaugh broadcasts. However, the point of blurb is not provide a yay or nay on Limbaugh, but rather a bit from the YouTube comments (groan):

"I'm pretty sure that this song was actually INSPIRED by the death of Rolling Acres Mall. If I reacll, Chrissie Hynde returned to Akron after living in Europe for a while and came home to see everything that she loved about the place had died, and Rolling Acres was the prime example. With the death of that mall, an entire quarter of the city turned into a ghost-town and what survived became a ghetto.

Wrongo! First of all, the song was released in 1983 when Rolling Acres Mall was at its peak when the song was released, and the song is very anti-development (against malls)

Coming soon: TWR goes to the mall

---END BROADCAST---

64DDenied

2010-07-30T09:43:00.003-05:00

From Nintendojo's "Requiem for a System": the article "64DDenied". It focuses on the Nintendo 64DD. Sorry, no OCR. Click on scans for a better view. Not available on Archive.org.

After this, it's full speed ahead on the Spirit of 2005. It may continue into the fall.

Goodnight

2010-07-29T22:45:00.000-05:00

Hey. Nothing tonight. Only a bunch of SO2005 posts remain, and a lot of those require work, research, and memory.

Early Video Games and Such

2010-07-28T14:06:00.003-05:00

Recently I've been interested, er, obsessed, with early video games and such. Not exactly playing them, but being obsessed with figuring out a way to do something about it. First, I was thinking of designing an Atari clone myself, except the fact that it would be too much trouble (even if schematics were readily available, remember, even by the mid-1980s, Atari's "third-party publishers" (in quotes, because technically they were all unlicensed), Coleco, and Mattel had all reverse-engineered the Atari. ColecoVision sold the Atari in two forms, one as a stand-alone system (as "Gemini") and one as a ColecoVision add-on ("Expansion Module #1"). Intellivision (sold by Mattel) had created "System Changer". I also tried to figure out how such a device could be marketed today (something like the Hyperscan, rather than the Atari Flashback).

I found three new websites, all worth checking out.

Retromags has scans of old video game magazines. Unfortunately, it only goes up to 1999, and all downloads are from MegaUpload. That means you have to insert a captcha password, wait 45 seconds, and download them (one at a time). Full torrents exist, but they are few and far between (few seeders).

Magweasel is a type of Japanese-game-related-stuff type blog. There's some neat stuff on there, like this. It's created by Kevin Gifford, the man behind |tsr's nes archive. Unfortunately, the resources of creation involved in |tsr's nes archive are sadly absent from Magweasel. Apparently, the reason why |tsr's nes archive was never updated ever after January 20, 2000 was that he lost the password. No real mention of the nes archive is on the current site, which is disappointing. Though I did find some cool stuff on the site, like this video (click for widescreen).

Vintage Computing and Gaming is also an excellent blog (stay tuned for a "Fuzzy Memories" I submitted)...I hope it appears.

Unhealthy Obsessions: McDonald's

2010-07-27T11:54:00.002-05:00

I like McDonald's. It is fairly mid-line in the "fast food food chain", below Burger King and the like (and far below the superior yet regional Whataburger), but above Jack in the Box and Sonic. Unfortunately, it seems to gather hate from anti-globalist groups, health food addicts, hardcore environmentalists, gourmets, and more. Heck, even my own mother hates it. We've known about her unnecessary hate for such things (see one of the very first TWR posts for more on that) and it's even less likely that she'll change her position in the future (she discovered she had high cholesterol).

Unlike aforementioned Jack in the Box portion of Unhealthy Obsessions, McDonald's is far too big to insert every instance of McDonald's into one post. So, rather than try to scour every McDonald's-related memory I have (and there is a lot) I'll summarize it here (with a promise for more). There's the Happy Meal toys, all the food (both normal and regional), many restaurants, many memories.

I've been wanting to do something like this for a while now, but I could not figure out how to really publish it. Rather than make a blog series, I will soon unveil a simple HTML page dedicated to McDonald's that pays homage to early webpages. You know, dark backgrounds, Times New Roman, and postage-stamp sized images? Unfortunately, I have a huge backlog of things to do, including that Splashtown page and my yet-uncompleted BAT (I need to restart that). Plus we have some short(?) Spirit of 2005 items left and some other stuff I wanted to do. At least I opted for one webpage (or two, if it goes too long), instead of a blog series. It was originally to be called "McDonald's and Me", but it sounded stupid and far too close to the abysmal Mac and Me* which no one wants to be associated with.

* We're talking "worst movies made, ever" type "abysmal"

And Now A Message from our Non-Sponsors

2010-07-26T09:24:00.003-05:00

Since the latter part of the last century, the classic anchovy has been fading as a pizza topping due to bad publicity.

Support the anchovy by ordering some on a pizza today.

(A useful link)

Meijer vs. Walmart!

2010-07-24T19:50:00.003-05:00

I went on vacation, and I finally got a chance to see Meijer stores and other Wal-Marts. So, what was the prognosis?

First, let's go over a few things. I was spoiled by size by my local Walmart: 254,000 is huge, and I'll rarely get more than that.

I visited two Meijers and one Walmart Supercenter (in Marquette, MI)

The first Meijer I visited was north of Ann Arbor (en route to Flint, I believe) and was very dated. Signage was all in teal and had early-90s-type italic fonts. There were no drop ceilings, but it was still low. There wasn't even alcove shops in front, just a large window. It was the type of store that almost felt like a craft store, but the 1990s look was just enough for me to think "this needs a renovation" rather than "I wouldn't be surprised if I saw a Lisa Frank notebook around here somewhere" or "why don't they stock Nintendo 64?"

Photos coming soon.

The second Meijer I saw was much more akin to an actual hypermarket. It had alcove shops, higher ceilings, and more. It had towels and more. Unfortunately, I couldn't check the departments and Made in Whatever as well as Kmart. I do, however, have a directory.

I was disappointed that the "restaurant" was only a Starbucks Coffee, but they did have a barbershop, an actual butcher, a substantial produce section, and non-food dry goods.

The Wal-Mart Supercenter (it was branded as "Walmart", but a "Wal-Mart Supercenter" labelscar was visible) in Marquette was much better than the local one, despite being smaller. It too was an expanded Wal-Mart, and had a McDonald's (instead of a Subway), a pharmacy as an alcove shop, a portrait studio, and even an arcade. The arcade, sadly, was just a bunch of animal crane games and one of those "bubble of plastic" things. Said Wal-Mart also had some gourmet cheeses.

Finally, for the sake of completeness, the College Station Walmart directory, showing us that bigger isn't necessarily better.

Leave comments, ask questions. And another blog post will follow by tomorrow.

PCfx!

2010-07-23T11:11:00.006-05:00

First off, let's get one thing straight. This is NOT about the PC-FX, the Japan-only sequel to the TurboGrafx-16. This is about something ENTIRELY different.

When I was younger, my family only used Macs. I didn't mind it...the graceful Macintosh was a lot cooler looking than the Windows flavors available at the time, except with one minor difficulty.

Most games were available on PCs.

By the time I actually came to this sad truth, there was only one option other than getting a full PC. It was a product called Connectix Virtual PC with a promise to put a virtual PC in your Mac. It had previously made the Virtual Game Station (a commercial PlayStation emulator) that seemed to run OK, so why couldn't VPC open a world of games I never knew? Unfortunately, my family never bought it, and one of the reasons became painfully clear: it was much slower than an actual PC. Unless I really wanted to play Minesweeper or some early DOS game, let's face it...I was out of luck.

But I found out a far more awesome example...things called PC cards. Sadly, despite being faster than VPC, they were discontinued as expansion slot-less computers (like the iMac) took over (and more Mac ports of PC games became available). So I gave up. Years passed. Eventually OS 9 was completely obliterated and Boot Camp appeared, which although being a great solution, rendered OS 9 in a position of emulators. However, during that time, I found out that PC cards were not only super-expensive, but also not as fast a PC.

In late 1998/early 1999 Mac magazines (such as MacAddict) published ads for Orange Micro's "PCfx!", a card designed for game playing.

Pretty awesome, huh? And where'd those list of PC games come from? They stopped at F, but I'd like to see the whole list. If I was a bit older in 1998, that would've been the coolest-looking thing since sliced bread, and I would beg that Mom and Dad order it off a catalog (MacPowerhaus was one such catalog vendor, not the maker of the product) so we could install it in our Mac clone PowerWave tower right away. $650 for an awesome thing would run all the games we wanted, right? Wrong!

As you can see (click it to make it larger), the "PCfx!" would've been a disappointment in many aspects. You could play 1997-era games and 2D games, but it wasn't enough to run the latest games of 1998, and certainly not of 1999. At that rate, a little more could pay for a much faster actual PC. Given that the PCfx! was one of Orange Micro's last PC cards (the OrangePC 660 was faster, but more expensive), it was no surprise that PC cards fizzled by 1999 (the fruit-colored iMacs had no expansion of any kind). Orange Micro made other peripherals after the PC cards died, but it too perished in 2003. And that's the end of the story.

Anyway, since I'm back, it's full speed ahead for my other blogging and type pursuits. Webpages will be created, BATs will be produced. Blog posts will pick up. Already, in the schedule, there's two webpages, a little less than half a dozen Spirit of 2005 posts, and "Meijer vs. Walmart".

Text Clip Panic

2010-07-22T12:11:00.005-05:00

A word of caution to my fellow Mac users:

I have Mac OS 10.6 on my MacBook, and I had some text clippings from a Mac OS 10.5 iMac (G5). So I transferred them to Dropbox, but on the other end, it appended a .textClipping to them and managed to delete the entire contents of them. When Dropbox re-synced, *poof*. They were gone, ruined, corrupted. If anyone has this problem, please post here. Or if you know what happened, post here, too!

EDIT: The only way to properly "save" your text clippings is to stuff them (not zip them). Once I had my text clipping test in a .sit, it formatted normally on its transfer.

Two Way Roads Goes to Michigan

2010-07-22T00:50:00.003-05:00

I'm back from vacation! Unfortunately, I couldn't update my blog as Internet was slow, if I got it at all.

Worse yet, during that time I managed to make a large backlog of posts and stuff that I wanted to do. So, I decided to make quick notes and such (like, for instance, where we ate). This is an excerpt from what I wrote on the first day:

The flight up from Easterwood Airport to DFW was not as good as I had hoped. While I managed to orient myself once we got to DFW thanks to malls, I had to contend with this baby who consistently bawled all the way, plus a guy who had a known tendency to get airsick.

The flight up was nice: flying is very much like Google Earth, except high-res, much higher than normal, and all live. Cars move, clouds exist, and so on. A brief stay in a Dallas airport terminal led to our next flight.

Meanwhile, the other baby often gave high-pitched squeals at random intervals. Fortunately, unlike the child at the DFW flight, this one didn't cry nearly so often and it didn't start to stink until the very end of the flight. All in all, it wasn't bad.

I saw some things out the window in Dallas, but until I get better Internet access (I'm sharing the high-speed Internet at a hotel with two other people), it will have to be in the back of my mind.

Michigan wasn't a fantastic place, as I might've guessed. Even the Interstates were sub-standard (something one would expect from a state highway), and a depressing glow from either the approaching rain or the heavy pollution in Detroit.

Eventually I met up with my brother at his apartment, and we had dinner with my family at Temptations, an Indian restaurant in nearby Ypsilanti (pronounced ipsy-lawntee). It was a decent restaurant located in a midst of a shabby-looking strip mall complete with vagrants harassing people for money. Ypsilanti, as it turns out, is not known for being a great place to live, shop, or eat.

The next day, we went to downtown Ann Arbor. It was actually pretty great: people were out walking around. We went to some museums, ate at a Noodles & Company next to the Ritz Camera (vacant) and eventually ate at Burger King for dinner.

The museums in Ann Arbor and University of Michigan-Ann Arbor are neat: an art museum and archaeology museum are worth checking out, and best of all: they were free!

Oh, and it was also cool in that Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart, and Meijer were all able to co-exist. Why can't that happen down here?
This post was originally posted on July 21, 2010. Be prepared for more ninja-type edits and bumps as I add more content!

Freelance writing

2010-07-12T20:46:00.004-05:00

Well, if you've not already figured out, the Where Computers and Video Games Meet is basically coming to an end. Apart from the ColecoVision Expansion Module # 3 and the PlayStation 3's "OtherOS, there wasn't much. I could've put it from the other side of the perspective, what with the very likely unreleased Duo FC and the 3DO Blaster, but even that wouldn't be detailed (or entertaining).

Given that I'm currently unemployed, I recently came across the fact that Demand Media buys work from freelancers, but my gut reaction is no. I heard it wasn't really fun, and the idea of my real name being published on the Internet isn't a great prospect.

On a slightly related note, I found out one of my favorite books "High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games" is getting a third edition, but the Facebook page for it hasn't seen updates in over a year. And a shame, too, as my copy is literally falling apart...and copies are harder to find (and more expensive). If a third edition comes, I'll readily snap it up and compare for updates. I'll be watching for new pages on the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360, for one. I sent a Facebook to Rusel DeMaria (one of the authors), but he says there's been delays and a new edition won't come until 2011. Bummer.

Oh, and some of the more big-ticket 2005 items are still coming soon. Only four left, and they'll be big. Next time, be prepared for an on-the-site update on vacation. Or I'll wait a few weeks to put something else on, which will involve scans and unanswered questions.

Where Computers and Video Games Meet (Part One)

2010-07-10T14:29:00.006-05:00

I'm running a bit low on content recently...one involves Galveston and is kinda depressing, one involves completing a webpage and racking my memories, and a few involve scans (and I no longer have a scanner handy). I even forgot to take a screenshot of when I got SimCity 2000 running on DOSBox.

This series is about how when video game consoles merge with home computing.

To do this, let's back to the early 1980s. It was well-believed that video game consoles and home computers would merge, with the video game console-based systems occupying the segment for "the whole family" rather than the fledgling Apple IIs and IBMs (which were more expensive).

The first console to try this was Mattel (yes, THAT Mattel) who, having success with some early electronic games, launched a video game console called the Intellivision with their "Mattel Electronics" division. The Intellvision wasn't really meant to compete head-to-head with Atari, it was, according to Keith Robinson (a designer of the Intellivision): "The company's marketing was oriented toward education and family products. Intellivision was seen as the heart of a computer system that would do family planning, stock analysis, teach you guitar...that sort of thing."

Despite the fact that Intellivision sold in different names in different forms (the Sears version, for instance, was the "Tele-Games Super Video Arcade"), the $299 system seemed to be poised to success. More excitingly, the system promised the "Intellivision Keyboard Component", a component that would upgrade the system to a full computer, and a good one at that (the memory, for instance, had 16K built in and could be expanded to 8MB!! Hey, this was the 80s.)

Despite the attractive (for the 1980s) look and the specifications (it had a tape deck in the system, before floppies were the default), it had problems. For one, it was discovered internally that it would be very expensive, at least $600. It was also delayed.

By mid-1982, Mattel was being investigated for fraud in terms of not releasing the keyboard as promised. Other things were going badly with Mattel, also, as initially ads were focused on it being such a graphically superior system to the Atari featuring George Plimpton. Coleco (another company) had released its ColecoVision that year, snatched up the video console version of the wildly popular Donkey Kong, and was graphically superior to the Intellivision.

To get the FTC and a hornet's nest of angry consumers off their back, Mattel released the "Mattel Entertainment Computer System". According to Wikipedia, it was much weaker than the promised component.

Chang's "Design & Development" group (who had to keep the project's real purpose a closely-guarded secret among themselves, fearing that if Chandler found out about it he would use his influence at Mattel, Inc. to get the project killed) eventually came up with an alternative to the Keyboard Component. Originally dubbed the Lucky (from LUCKI: Low User-Cost Keyboard Interface), it lacked many of the sophisticated features envisioned for the original Keyboard Component: instead of a full 16K of RAM, it only offered a mere 2K (not all of which was actually available to the user); the cassette interface was stripped down to the bare essential needed to save and load data (and was now an optional extra, rather than built-in), and there was no secondary CPU. Still, it fulfilled the original promises—turn the Intellivision into a computer, make it possible to write programs and store them to tape, and interface with a printer—well enough to allow Mattel to claim that they had delivered the promised computer upgrade and, it was hoped, to get the FTC and its $10,000/day fine off Mattel's back.

Mattel also tried to make a full-stand alone computer around the same time, but that was a failure as well. The perceived merge of computers and video games, along with massive oversaturation in the gaming market (with Atari being the biggest contributor), brought down the entire industry. Mattel pulled the plug on the money-losing Mattel Electronics, and the Intellivision stood dormant for a few years before being acquired by another company and living out several more years before dying completely.

During the same era of the Intellivision and the Keyboard Component, Coleco did something to its own ColecoVision system that would have similar disastrous effects, only on a grander scale.

For More Reading:
Dumbest Moments in Gaming
Wikipedia
1983 Intellivision Catalog
Another good page on the Keyboard

Keith Robinson quote taken from "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games" by Rusel deMaria and Johnny Wilson
Picture Taken from SpatulaCity.com

Quick Mac Tip

2010-07-08T16:54:00.002-05:00

To view how much space the items in your trash can take up, rather than using "Get Info" on the Trash (because you can't), select every item in the trash can THEN do Get Info. It should hopefully stack all the items together in one window (giving you a readout of say, 6.9 GB) rather than opening, say, 30 windows.

Things that should be words

2010-07-07T09:43:00.003-05:00

There should be a word for...

• The opposite of a procrastinator...but still in a bad way
• A variant of extortion reserved for theme parks and museums
• That point of smell where you can't tell if you're smelling something good or gross. Right now, the vague smell of carrot cake drifting into my bedroom also resembles a whiff of dirty diaper. Sorta.

Right now, I'm embarking on creating a BAT for SimCity (and BAT thread) while trying to get Project S up. A Spirit of 2005 might come tomorrow.

Pokémania: Pokémon Crystal Dummied Out

2010-07-04T17:37:00.000-05:00

To tell you the truth, this thread went through a series of incarnations. Originally, it was about the Nintendo SNES CD-ROM add-on. I would go onto talk about the effect on the gaming interest (it would lead to the PlayStation), some proposed games (Suncoast had licensed Cyan's games). Some more information is found in the links below:

Gamers Graveyard
Emulation Zone
Nintendoland
N-sider

Then I expanded it into a full "What Could Have Been" episode, citing the original Toy Story 3 concept (hint: it's an Eisner-era cheapquel made without Pixar) as an example of what could have been (in a bad way). I also threw in the original dummied-out concepts of Pokémon Crystal in...and then realized that it would make a great post in itself, and also the Pokémania concept as a whole (yes, I DO want to finish scanning in that magazine). So that's why this post is in the Pokémania series, and not the What Could Have Been series (except, officially, it's not a series yet). World of Waco
never took off, so I'm going to either integrate it with CS Roads and Retail or rename it and integrate it with others...
And thus, we begin the real post.

Pokémania: Pokémon Crystal Dummied Out

This little exchange won't happen without a GameShark in the US version.

Pokémon Crystal was released in late summer of 2001 (I want to say August, and I'm sort of right: the release date is pinned as July 29, 2001) and was the "third game" to Pokémon Gold and Silver. Crystal was different in many aspects. On one hand, it did remove some of the cool things of Gold (like being able to catch Mareep, the "electric sheep" Pokémon) but it did introduce several new things, mostly gimmicks. The first and most obvious one was the new female character introduced in the game, and that would stick to the rest of the series. The rest were mostly gimmicks. There was a special focus on Suicine (one of the Legendary Dogs of the generation), some in-game events were added or fleshed out, and you couldn't reset the clock (tough luck to those without batteries...I gotta test that for myself!).

The coolest part of Crystal that was removed was the Pokémon Communications Center. You could go in and trade/battle with people far away using the GB Mobile Adaptor. Unfortunately, at that time, cell phones in the USA were non-standard (and face it, they still kind of are) and kids didn't really have cell phones at the time.

So it never came out, with the only notice that things were up was that the "Cable Club" was renamed the "Pokémon Club".

It got better, though. The nurse gives you a GS Ball as you leave the PCC, you drop it off a few towns away, and then you get a chance to catch Celebi, the 251st Pokémon (and relatively early in the game, too!)

Everything (Celebi, PCC, etc.) was translated, but dummied out (you'd have to use a GameShark). I never had a GB-compatible GameShark myself, so I never got to use it....

Big Day Tomorrow

2010-07-03T22:35:00.002-05:00

Hi! Quick update: tomorrow is July the Fourth. I'll be doing some stuff here. Here's what's on the list:

• Another addition to a TWR series that is NOT the Spirit of 2005. Major stuff there.
• Work on my SimCity building (Wal-Mart)
• Work on my actual city (this takes priority over the former)
• The post that I was going to do yesterday and made some major changes, even tonight (you'll see that too)

Magazines

2010-07-02T13:26:00.001-05:00

Have you noticed there's there no market for magazines? It's difficult for sellers to offload old magazines and collectors of back issues alike!

Garage sales are the only way to sell them!

The Spirit of 2005: Homestar Runner

2010-06-29T08:30:00.005-05:00

"So excited, so naive..."

Warning: if you have an iPod, iPhone, or iPad, I suggest you simply give up trying to read this article. While you do have a cool device, I don't suggest using YouTube to catch up, instead, I insist you just put off reading this post until you have access to a computer that CAN read Flash stuff. So, instead of trying, there's a great article collection at the Auchan post, including one I just added.

If there was a thing to describe the summer of 2005, it would be Homestar Runner, one of the few things to keep me going insane (granted, 2005 summer was rather miserable, but there were a few bright spots, and it was memorable!)

In the format of my "Stooges" post, the Homestar Runner phenomenon really begins with my brother in summer 2003 (possibly December 2002) when he was laughing at some video at his iBook. He had a large collection of videos on his iBook, and one of them was Homestar Runner (downloaded as SWFs).

I soon became familiar with the characters, and the early Strong Bad emails. The links below I started to include the original direct link, the SWF (for downloading), and the HRWiki page (more on that later), but that got too cumbersome, and by the third entry I only put the HRWiki entry (as the direct link and SWF link are in there)

* "homsar" (original, HRWiki, and direct SWF link)
* "50 emails" (original, the SWF, and HRWiki
* "japanese cartoon" (HRWiki)
* "dragon" (HRWiki)
* "comic" (and the ones that followed...)
* "the bird"
* "kind of cool"
* "sisters"
* "kids book". This is a direct link and one of my favorites.

Later, I discovered the full cache of the SWFs my brother had and later, while looking for a transcript of the episodes: I found it:
HR*Wiki!

But even though I liked viewing them, the quality started to go down around that time. One-time gags were hopelessly overused. Strong Bad emails, once a weekly feature, went months without it. The last real toon was in April. Things like Sketchbook and Fan Stuff have not been updated since nearly September. Quote of the Week was abandoned. 2010 has just under a dozen updates by mid-year. 2005, conversely, updated about 9 times a month.

So, goodbye, Homestar. You were a great web cartoon while you lasted (sniff).

Favorite Toons of the 2005 Era
"All right, Edgar, now drop a train on 'em!" ("virus")
The color of infinity inside an empty glass ("Experimental Film")
"It's not called TrogdorCon and it's 2005." ("TrogdorCon '97")

But Wait, That's More!
I had also found a couple of Weebls Stuff toons in the mixture. There was Patrick Moore, Badger Badger Badger, and Magical Trevor!

And of course, the separate, yet totally awesome, Egg Song!
What on (Google) EARTH?

View Larger Map

Typically, the railroad gate is supposed to go across the road, not the railroad. And a train would smash through that at any speed.

(Railroad spur in Lufkin, TX)

Image Credit
From the Strong Bad email "Lackey" and the image for HRWiki's page of that toon.

PS3D
This is to replace the "Pseudo3D's Life" and "Next on TWR". Anyway, we reinstalled SimCity 4, bringing us back to 2005-2006 standards, so a post on that should follow. BATs might be longer (obviously). A big Spirit of 2005 is coming soon that's NOT SimCity, and so forth!

Sadly, the Holleman extension is virtually stopped and even the greatly expanded local Walmart admitted to shrinking the product line. Those jerks.

Continuity Snarl at Zelda (Pre-Skyward Sword)

2010-06-28T07:21:00.003-05:00

I enjoy The Legend of Zelda games but frankly, don't know how to make sense of it. The problem is, NO ONE DOES.

While fan theories are wildly all over the place, here's what I think was done (spoilers abound).

The first was OCARINA OF TIME. After the day was saved, Navi left Link. At this point, MAJORA'S MASK is in a "split" time. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was titled in Japan (at least early on) Zelda Gaiden, wherein "Gaiden" is "another story". It's also entirely possible that it was originally destined as a 64DD expansion pack for Ocarina of Time. THE WIND WAKER prologue tells of Link going off on a horse, but that was NOT, in fact, going to MAJORA'S MASK, he was going off to new lands unseen. Meanwhile, some years later, TWILIGHT PRINCESS covers this era. Ganondorf is still around and well (he was banished, but he still holds some power). But things keep going downhill, and hundreds of years pass. THE WIND WAKER and PHANTOM HOURGLASS happen during this time.

Zelda establishes a "new Hyrule" (despite the King's monologue at the end of Wind Waker). That's when SPIRIT TRACKS happens, 100 years after PHANTOM HOURGLASS. Unseen, three new Spirits (Din, Nayru, and Farore) help guide the new future of Hyrule. It is unknown if they are the same ones who created the First Hyrule.

More years past, and Hyrule enters a dark era, abandoning the tracks, and losing lots of technology (such as Pictoboxes and trains). THE LEGEND OF ZELDA and ADVENTURE OF LINK happen during the "dark era". During the "dark era", another individual decides to adopt the persona of Ganon but misspells it as "Gannon". Seven sages, helped with the spirit of the original seven of OCARINA OF TIME, help create a Golden World to hide away the Triforce once more. The Imprisoning Wars happen soon after. Eventually, this leads us to A LINK TO THE PAST. The Master Sword is rediscovered during this time, but "sleeps forever". A generation passes. ORACLE OF SEASONS and ORACLE OF AGES (or ORACLE OF AGES and ORACLE OF SEASONS) happens next. The Master Sword Link gets, however, is NOT the real Master Sword...it's just named that. But the day is won, and Ganon 2 is gone forever. That's when Link leaves and LINK'S AWAKENING happens.

Link then goes to an entirely new land, and that's when THE MINISH CAP happens. That leads into FOUR SWORDS and then FOUR SWORDS ADVENTURE, wherein the fact that Ganon is once again alive and well. This is, in fact, a third Ganon, and not the first two. Ganon is a pig-beast thing, and not a Gerudo like Ganondorf was. Therefore, one must turn into a Ganon if they have an evil heart.

And that's my theory. I think it works out pretty well. You?

Hypermarkets

2010-06-27T17:40:00.005-05:00

It's not THAT understocked, but you know what I mean

We interrupt our normal broadcast to bring you a special report.

We've talked about hypermarkets before but at the time, my local Wal-Mart did not expand to a hypermarket. Now that it's a 254,000 square feet hypermarket and I've been to other Wal-Mart Supercenters and researched others. The novelty of the new Wal-Mart (er, "Walmart") is starting to wear off so I can see the ugly parts of it.

Note that this isn't a bash on Wal-Mart as a whole: you can find that practically everywhere else. Inevitably, this brings up politics, which this blog is designed to avoid. On that topic, I will mention the Hearne Wal-Mart, which opened in the late 1970s and closed just ten years later. The commonly circulated story is that Wal-Mart killed the town by moving itself some twenty miles away for a Supercenter. Not true. The store closed because of shoplifting by employees, and the Supercenter actually was from a Wal-Mart just two miles away located in Manor East Mall. Today, the former Hearne Wal-Mart is now a high school. I just wanted to clear that up.

Alright, here goes. Some of these are compared to other stores, such as Auchan, Kmart, Target, and Texas supermarket H-E-B. Oh, and also E.J. Korvette and Randalls. Meijer was left off this list (though once I see it, I'll judge).

Make It Big
Here's the one thing where the local Walmart succeeds. It IS big, at 254,000 square feet. This is theoretically better, yet the size is compensated by other failures (keep reading). Also, to not pad numbers, keep the size of storage space/layaway down, possibly around 90,000 square feet or less.

Shelves and Aisles, Heights and Widths, Respectively
One of the things that bothers me about the remodeled Walmart (I use "Walmart" and "Wal-Mart" interchangeably, depending on the store's banner) is the shelf heights. They're just too short, averaging around five-foot-six. Shelf heights shouldn't be too short that without signage an average person should see across the store. Nor should it resemble a real warehouse (Sam's is the worst at this). Aisles should be about the size where two carts should be able to slip by each other, hugging the aisle, and miss by a few inches. Aisles were widened in the local Wal-Mart's renovation (but in another Wal-Mart, they shrunk after remodeling!) I would say Target is a winner in this category.

"Price check on the genital wart cream!"
I was horribly annoyed to find that last summer, when I was absolutely fed up with (what I perceived as) terrible management, to find that none of the price scanners worked. It was hard enough to find one that appeared to be working, harder to get it to recognize, and if you had a bar code that wasn't perfectly flat...forget about it. After the renovation, they were removed entirely. Target also has better control of this. There's also poor labeling on other products (like grocery). You have to maybe look around in the corner or on the bottom.

Know Your Audience
Wal-Mart opened an "upscale" Wal-Mart in 2006 outside of The Shops at Willow Bend in Plano, but it doesn't sound terribly special, and all the "upscale" elements were incorporated into all Wal-Marts. What a good hypermarket should do more is tailor merchandise to the local audience. To some extent they do: a poor section of town will have a different mix than the upscale section, and other parts of the country have different merchandise. But it should start really doing it. E.J. Korvette is a surprise "winner" here, in a way. Despite going out of business in 1980, it opened a Fifth Avenue store and focused on apparel (with much nicer décor than other stores at the time). A "down-to-earth" hypermarket should feature, well, discount-oriented goods. Not everything is "cheap", but there are few really upscale items, and the grocery section doesn't have a lot of frills. On the flip side, a "nice" hypermarket is a decent mall tenant, with the "frumpy" departments removed and typical departments upscaled. The men's clothing has suits, a bridal department, cosmetics, jewelry, and more. Grocery section is smaller, with pre-packaged produce and frozen foods (I'm stealing ideas from "P Fresh" Target), but things like butter, eggs, a good deli and bakery, and nice wines are available.

Don't Shrink Departments
The shoe department used to be really large before the remodel. The shoe department shrunk as did the men's clothing. Note to others: don't do it. The shoe department is even worse considering it's dramatic shelf drop. There really isn't a good store that serves as a model...I haven't checked out the shoe department at Kmart.

Made in America
American made products aren't dead yet. Kmart wowed me in the fact that most of the non-brand products were made in the USA (as opposed to China and East Asia). Unfortunately, Kmart can't really bank on this fact anymore.

The Butcher Is In
Although meat isn't like The Jungle, it concerns me that Wal-Mart doesn't have in-house butchers. I've heard not-great things about Wal-Mart meats. H-E-B has far better service in this aspect: some people even know the butcher by name, which is great.

More on Meat (and Cheese)
In comparison to H-E-B, so much is missing. There's no fish counter at all, no gourmet cheeses, no sushi counter, none of it. A deli is available, but even Wal-Mart's rotisserie chickens (which I was looking forward to) weren't on stock yet...and this was at 5:45 in the evening. It's kind of forgivable in the fact that the Walmart's deli hasn't even been open for two weeks, but I was still annoyed.

Bakery Problems
The bakery leaves much to be desired. A display cabinet of not-really-fresh baked goods is in the center of the bakery department, costs 58 cents, and has to be taken up to the checkout stands (clear on the opposite side of the grocery section). And even then, they have to do a price lookup. The H-E-B doesn't have this problem as badly. As for actual bakery content, no artisan-type breads and such are to be found. Sam's Club is good on this, H-E-B is pretty good on this, and the pastry chefs that were at Auchan also made appetizing yummies (a French and Mexican baker! Sounds awesome!)
I've also heard a Mexican grocery store in Dallas having good stuff.

Needs More Stock
Produce needs to move in and out quickly. The display of watermelons, frankly, was pitiful. Food always needs quick restocking...and displays. There should be decent descriptions of fruits, their varieties, and when they are ready to eat. Great supermarkets like H-E-B do this.

Getting In, Getting Out
The local Walmart parking lot is frustrating. The parking spaces are "straight" (as opposed to slanted) and a bit of a tough squeeze for full-size trucks (which are common in this part of the country). There's still potholes near the entrances, and lots of parking was actually removed for the expansion (including space that's now a retaining pool). Grabbing a cart is easy, but good luck getting out. First, you look at the checkout stands. There are about 30 or so, but only five are open. It's rather slow: sometimes a gift card won't get recognized and there are no additional baggers. Then, in the parking lot, there's the cart problem. Signs block carts requesting them to put them in the other aisle, but the other one is always jammed with mismatched carts coming out of the corral. Cart theft is a problem: there's low-rent apartments abound, and carts are always leaving. While H-E-B has a cart-locking system, Auchan used the "quarter" method. You inserted a quarter into the machine to get a cart, and a quarter would be returned to you. That would effectively end (or at least, curtail) problems like cart theft and leaving carts around, but no one really likes it like that way.

More on Checkout
Checkout stands should be staggered (like H-E-B or the Wal-Mart in Hewitt). Auchan also had 85 checkouts. Wrap your head around that one.

Apparel Problem
The apparel department is what sets apart discount stores from really big supermarkets, but the dressing room is a disgrace. An ugly box in the middle of the store, it only has one men's dressing room and just a few women's only ones. Target does it better, once again.

Brand Names are Better
Wal-Mart as a tendency to, in certain cases, replace a brand name product with its cheaper house brand, with NO BRAND CO-EXISTING. That shouldn't be tolerated, but I can't think of an example for that one.

Good Pharma, Bad Pharma
The pharmacy needs to be drive-through, not stuck in the back of the store. A decent selection of drugs must be offered. Wal-Mart got rid of my favorite Spring Valley vitamins (it was their version of One-A-Day Men's Health Formula vitamins) and replaced it with the Equate brand. Furthermore, there should never be only one pharmacist on duty...outside of regular scheduled hours, a pharmacy should never be closed if a pharmacist is literally "out to lunch" (and I have seen this happen).

Free Samples
That's one reason I really like Sam's Club: free samples. H-E-B also has a few at the right times.

Restaurants
The Subway in the local Walmart is lame. Subway is a different beast than other fast food places...it doesn't offer the variety of other fast food joints. The McDonald's in the Wal-Mart of Hewitt-Woodway (west Waco) is a lot better. Pretzels, popcorn, and cotton candy are in display, and the food is good. There's even a large mural of "Speedee" in the back, giving it the feel of a real nice McDonald's, and not just some dirty hole in a Wal-Mart.

Some departments just need to be "separate" from others. That's where the "mini-stores" come in. A current Wal-Mart has a restaurant (Subway or McDonald's). Auchan had a full food court of six stands (McDonald's, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and three unknowns). Kmart had Little Caesar's Pizza Stations, and I've even heard of an H-E-B having an Auntie Anne's. A great hypermarket does need to add several places to eat. Of course, McDonald's is on the top pick (or possibly Burger King). Little Caesar's, Taco Bell/KFC (a dual-branded Yum! operation), and Auntie Anne's is a great combination for starters. And we can fit two more! A full-service DQ/Orange Julius and a "house brand" that serves coffee, deli sandwiches, and ICEEs.

More Alcove Shops
An ideal mix should expand on Wal-Marts. The Wal-Mart before renovation had a vision center, customer service, and photos. And a McDonald's (which later became Radio Grill, then Subway). After renovation, the shops were torn out and moved to the front of the store. The new mix included a First National Bank and "SmartStyle" hair salon. Other stores in other Supercenters include nail salons and video rental stores. The huge Hypermart USA stores even included an arcade. What would be cool is if whole departments (especially more "fringe" ones) can be outsourced to the front of the store. To bring back a real "toy store" and not just a Toys R Us or the generic toy department, a hypermarket could buy back the KB Toys name to put in a toy store alcove. A book store (possibly operated by Borders Express, aka Waldenbooks) would also be better as a secluded store in the mini-mall. Other brands would be "showcase" brands, a la myGofer (or Epicenter Collection) that would stock few actual items up front. Jewelry is outsourced here, in a separate name, and others can be made. They might be able to save Blockbuster this way as a purveyor of DVDs and such. If this sounds stupid: hey. Lots of early discounters had leased departments.

In Sam's Memory
In reality, this exercise is what the real Sam Walton did: he went around to different discounters (including the then-leader of the time, Kmart) and studied strengths and weaknesses. He wanted it to have all-American products (except where he couldn't). He wanted to serve the customer and noted that the discounter kings of the era lived like kings. Unfortunately, this is where Wal-Mart is now.

I plan on updating this list soon enough, and if a future discounter or whatever reads this list, I'll be impressed enough if something like this comes through.

Image Source: http://www.annarbor.com/assets_c/2009/10/101109_walmart1-thumb-537x357-11639.jpg

The Three Stooges

2010-06-27T07:36:00.007-05:00

In a normal Stooges set-up, Moe would be between Larry and Curly to bash each other's heads in like a pair of coconuts.

There is so much to talk about The Three Stooges, it's really impossible to begin. They began as part of a 1920s vaudeville group with a man named Ted Healy. The first short, Soup to Nuts featured Ted Healy and the "proto-Stooges" (at the time, it consisted of brothers Moe and Shemp Howard, Larry Fine, and Fred Sanborn). Fox Studios (the producer of the film) was impressed with the slapstick performances of Moe, Shemp, and Larry and offered them a contract. Ted Healy was not happy, and his abrasiveness caused Shemp to leave in 1932.

Moe's brother Jerry was soon called in to replace Shemp. Dubbed "Curly" as a mishearing of the word "girly" (or so as the story goes), he joined the group in 1933. They split from Healy completely in 1934 (similar reasons to why Shemp quit), and The Three Stooges (as they were) went onto Columbia Pictures. And so, for the next several years, Moe, Larry, and Curly ("Curley" in some shorts) would make films for Columbia. The shorts (often about 15 minutes or so) would focus on the wacky escapades of Moe, Larry, and Curly. Sometimes canonically Moe and Curly were brothers (as in real life), and sometimes, they weren't. In the short You Natzy Spy!, the group won accolades for Moe's performance of "Moe Hailstone" (a parody of Adolf Hitler) even though America was isolationist at the time. Bonus points in the fact that ethnically, Moe Howard was Jewish, and yet could play a good parody of Hitler. This appeared again in They Stooge to Conga. Unfortunately, Curly's health went downhill by the mid-1940s and suffered a stroke in 1946.

To temporarily replace Curly, Shemp rejoined the group. Shemp had been successful in his own right and only wanted to temporarily replace Curly. The group continued to make shorts: whether Shemp was actually as funny as Curly, that's your choice, but by the early 1950s (1952) budgets were cut, and several "new" Stooges shorts were created with reused plots (starring Shemp instead of Curly) and stock footage. A Missed Fortune is the Shemp version of the better-made Curly version (Healthy, Wealthy, and Dumb).

When both Curly and Shemp unexpectedly died, another actor, Joe Palma, filled in "Shemp"'s role, often with stock footage of the real Shemp and in filming, with his face partially hidden or from behind. This created the Fake Shemp phenomenon, but Joe only filled in four shorts. The Stooges entered a truly dark era during this point (that is, if you hadn't considered Curly leaving the beginning of the end). The universally unfunny Joe Besser replaced Shemp. Joe noticed Larry's calloused face and was the only Stooge who dared to hit Moe back. Columbia unceremoniously fired the Stooges after nearly 200 shorts (and millions made). They later came back with Joe "Curly-Joe" DeRita and made some more comedies (including a few duds) on television. This opened up the Stooges to a children's audience (which pulled the adults in) and made them popular again for the early 1960s. The end was near, however. A television pilot called Kook's Tour was announced to star the "retired" Stooges traveling around the world (with each shot on location!) but after Larry suffered a stroke, the pilot was cancelled (VHS copies were later created using early footage). Emil Sitka (who had worked with the Stooges before) replaced Larry. After Larry died, Moe determined that he would keep the Stooges, with him, Curly-Joe, and Emil "Harry" Sitka as the trio, but even that never happened as Moe died in the mid-1970s.

So where do I come in?

I first started with watching reruns on TNN (yeah, that TNN) at my grandpa's house. My other grandpa had some VHS copies of various Curly/Larry/Moe-era shorts. As for the shorts, they're significantly easier to find than current TV shows (for now).

I also played the Three Stooges video game published by the now-defunct Cinemaware. It was pretty fun (for something published in 1989) and featured digitized sound and images from Three Stooges clips. The mini-games were based on shorts (oyster eating from Dutiful But Dumb, Larry trying to find a radio from Punch Drunks) and the plot involved saving an orphanage from a banker trying to repossess it. Although short and relatively easy, it does have multiple endings. One is you fail to save the orphanage, the second is saving it but not enough to fix it up, and the third is saving it and repairing it completely. I recommend you pick up an Apple IIGS emulator and a copy. The two disk images even run without a hard drive, saving you a lot of pain in setting it up (you do need an Apple IIGS ROM, which isn't hard to find).

Cinemaware went out of business in the early 1990s and briefly re-emerged in the early 2000s to make a few underwhelming remakes. This included The Three Stooges: Remastered Edition which featured cartoonish graphics (even replacing screen grabs with their own cartoons). Worst, it was programmed in Flash, making it easy to port (but unfortunately messing up everything else). By cartoonish graphics, I'll show you a few, and let you decide.

VS.

VS.

Crummy as the IIGS graphics may have been, the "modern" version is just as bad.

Image Credit
http://dgt1.net/manny/mblog/images/three_stooges_moe_larry_curly.jpg&imgrefurl=http://dgt1.net/manny/mblog/index.php%3Fentry%3Dentry090325-182317&h=450&w=600&sz=78&tbnid=WBVy4Ybn2_527M:&tbnh=101&tbnw=135&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthree%2Bstooges&usg=__juQY4rhZMYQFtQCDcUaottNs3k8=&sa=X&ei=1UgnTK27D4WdlgfZ2ZTRCg&ved=0CEEQ9QEwBg

Next on TWR
The continuity snarls of Zelda.

Crane games

2010-06-25T18:41:00.003-05:00

Do not play them. They are rigged and have a mind of their own. You might as well not even touch the joystick, as it will ignore you.

Also don't go to Labelscar.com (one of my favorite retail sites) today. There's some weird hacking group called "S4udi H4ck" that got into it and messed it up.

Details on Waco trip today are sparse. No photos or information, really.

Double Post Awesomeness

2010-06-23T21:09:00.002-05:00

Second post of the day! Rather than bore away my summer, here are things I plan to do in the near future:

ONLINE STUFF
1. Begin an export from SketchUp to SimCity 4.
2. "The Spirit of 2005" again, with a webpage to boot!
3. Another College Station Roads and Retail post
4. Work on "Southern Mall Gallery"...but that's low priority.

OTHER
1. Install SheepShaver (Mac OS 8.6?) and Boot Camp (Windows XP or Windows 7?) will be a priority soon. I should try out DOSBox anyway.

The Spirit of 2005: EarthBound

2010-06-23T09:38:00.004-05:00

Bad news kids: this post has been truncated!

To be honest, I had much grander plans for EarthBound, and I first started to play it in late 2004 and early 2005. Unfortunately, when I sat down, there wasn't much that either wasn't readily available somewhere else or things that I'd be willing to say. I have a handle on Starmen.net, and that's really the place where I have said/will say things that would've gone on this post. In fact, that's the DANGER of "Next on TWR", it commits me to something that I may or may not actually like to write. I may come back to this post and update it some.

In actuality, in the next few days, I'd like to focus on a real BIG "Spirit of 2005" post, PS3DSC4, College Station Roads & Retail, and better TWR posts. I've actually thought up a good one, and I'll be working on that.

Analysis of Modern Crime Shows

2010-06-22T11:20:00.004-05:00

Don't say we didn't warn you!

The classic "whodunnit" mystery such as, say, Nero Wolfe does not follow the same formula as the crime TV shows on heavy rotation cable shows these days.

In the classic mystery, we discover (often told past-tense) someone is murdered. Clues are gathered, a good half-dozen suspects are gathered, and then the Big Reveal comes.

Today, it isn't that clear-cut. Monk often had a totally different formula. The victim would be introduced and killed off before the theme song, and we might even get a clear shot of the murderer. When the murderer's identity is obvious (or where he says "I don't know how (s)he did it, but (s)he did it"), the mystery is not WHO did it, but HOW. Often it involves looking for evidence (sometimes the murderer even taunts Monk on how he can't prove it).

The CSI formula (far darker than Monk, might I add) usually consists of this:

1) Crime happens. Murderer found.
2) Original suspect questioned.
3) Evidence is gathered.
4) Second suspect questioned.
5) More evidence is gathered, and it turns out to be the original suspect.

Try it. It works almost every time nowadays. I watched an episode of CSI once (in high school, no less) where an entire family except a teenage girl and her little sister were slaughtered. It turns out that the killer was a boyfriend of the teenager, but THEN it becomes clear that the dad had raped his daughter (and the little sister was the daughter's daughter). Needless to say, it was quite a shock to all of us (and really gross at the same time). Unfortunately, this type of scenario is almost never seen nowadays (the episode, "Blood Drops" was in the first season and starred a young Dakota Fanning), and current episodes follow to the above formula to the dot.

The victim "killing choice" is almost always female. Male victims go two ways. If killed by a woman, there's a 90% chance they were an absolute jerk that was "worth killing". Sometimes it's not his fault. In the case of a non-jerk being killed by a woman, they WERE in a relationship, and the woman decided to kill him off because he wronged her in some way. If killed by a male, the killer is usually a greedy business partner. Other cases exist, but this is the most likely cause. Female-to-female killings are often similar causes, but happen rarely.

The first person seen in the show's opening is very likely the victim. Rarely is it the killer, and even rarer it's some random person that just happens to see the wrong thing...unless that's in the show's formula, like NCIS. NCIS however, never has the random third party witness the murder. The body is either posed as a living person (if killed recently) or buried cleverly (if dead for a while). Furthermore (specific to NCIS), the "body discoverer" isn't too bright: examples include pesky neighborhood kids, hunters, and bikers (of the motorcycle kind).

Also, expect a "theme" to go along with it. It's never just a random domestic disturbance or body in the street. Whether it's a new locale or an undercover look at some niche industry or hobby (including extreme sports, rock concerts, marijuana-growing, etc.), it's almost ALWAYS there, but not portrayed accurately. Religious-themed episodes always seem to go into the "blatantly inaccurate" scale, and the religion is always Catholicism.

Finally, the denouement is either serious or light-hearted. CSI will very likely having a woman weeping ("I can't believe you did this, boo-hoo"), and others may leave an answered question ("Who was he?").

NEXT on TWR!
The Spirit of 2005 continues with the Spirit of 199X.

Emulation and Compatibility

2010-06-21T12:47:00.005-05:00

Not just yet, old buddy.

I have a MacBook that runs Mac OS 10.6. Currently it only runs Mac OS X programs. Anything without Universal binary runs with Rosetta, an invisible compatibility layer, but some early Mac OS X software (such as tuxRacer) refuse to run at all.

I also have a program called Sweet16 which runs Apple IIGS software like a dream. I can easily run two-decade-old software on it. Although it is not my grandpa's old Apple IIGS which I hold dear in my memories, it seems to work. Heck, the emulator even allows some copy and paste (although it is done through the emulator, and not the actual "Apple IIGS" system). And if I wanted to, I might be able to make stand-alone apps (called "Emupacks") that load ROMs, settings, and preferences, allowing me to play something like Milestones 2000 like it was an Mac OS X application.

That's two decades old. And even yet, I can't run things that are a decade old. Late-era Mac OS 9 games that failed to get a Carbon patch are included in this group (and even Carbonized OS 9 stuff seems to be getting more like Mac OS X is going to spit out any day now!)

I want to run my old Mac OS 9 games on my MacBook. Unfortunately, the ungraceful-yet-somewhat functional Classic Environment was discontinued a few years ago, and the only option (beyond using a different computer) is using SheepShaver, an emulator that runs the classic Mac OS. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, SheepShaver isn't that fast. Not being super-speedy isn't a big concern: most of my games don't mind 68k anyway. But there's also sound issues, finding software and installing software, and possibly Terminal voodoo...sticky stuff that's not really worth messing with.

Infuriatingly, Windows users are able to run practically any DOS/Windows program with little pain or additional software. Maybe that's why Mac's market share is so bad. When you periodically render thousands of programs obsolete, I guess you could lose user base. And I'm not talking about the Mac OS 9/Mac OS X jump. I'm talking about the Apple II series-to-Macintosh jump. If you look at ANY scans of old, say, gaming magazine, Apple II gets as much, if not more, coverage than DOS. I'm sure the corporate suits also jumped ship when Apple II started to die.

But that's just theory.

Anyway,

Having a MacBook, one might question why don't I just get DOSBox/Boot Camp? One of the reasons is I wanted to fully "discontinue" use of previous computers while making a good migration. I won't give up our family's old iMac G3 yet until I make sure everything is on there and there's no reason to bare my face to it. And furthermore, a lot of Mac versions of dual-platform games had sharper resolution and better color than their DOS counterparts (some ports weren't so lucky).

Hopefully I can install SheepShaver or something soon.

Image Credit
Today's image is a picture upload from LevelSelect.Org. SimCity 2000 is owned by ~~Maxis~~ Electronic Arts.

Next on TWR
Analysis of modern crime shows.

Ports vs. Exclusivity

2010-06-20T07:13:00.004-05:00

Believe or not, this is a licensed port.

Once again, I've decided to change blog ideas. So if you guessed "SheepShaver", you WERE right, but then I decided to change the blog post ever so slightly, as to "lead into" the new post.

Ports vs. Exclusivity is about the games that we enjoy and why sometimes they stay on consoles.

Nintendo has famously not allowed its games to show up on anything but Nintendo consoles. I do admit that Nintendo games did have a few chances to be on the computer: the joke demo Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement was actually shown to Nintendo as a plausible way of porting Nintendo to home computers, but Nintendo turned them down.

The short-lived obscure Duo FC series was another chance at Nintendo's home computer success, but considering at the time Nintendo had ambitious plans on its own (see David Sheff's Game Over for more).

Finally, in the late 1990s, emulation of the NES (and soon the Super NES) had Nintendo cracking down on ROM sites, which was a shame as they were the ONLY WAY to run Nintendo software on computers. Nintendo, conversely, could've had a "Nintendo CD-ROM Collection" series that could've brought Mario and Co. over to computers for the first time but that never happened.

Sega, on the other hand, had an entire "Sega PC" division which brought a few games over from the Genesis. Activision even got into the game by bringing over the Activision Action Pack.

In actuality, Activision and Sega weren't even doing real ports, they were packaged with mini-emulators themselves. It's even possible to patch your own Atari ROMs into the Activision Action Pack.

In other ports, in the early days of the console wars (the players being Atari, Coleco, and Mattel) often published for other consoles and "exclusivity" wasn't that an exclusive club. But in the Nintendo/Sega wars, it became important to snap up third parties and create a smash hit of original characters and licenses. Ports to consoles were junk compared to their computer counterparts. Zoop, is, at best, lower resolution to the game. Lemmings and SimCity 2000 for the console are absolutely awful, even with the SNES mouse.

For Apple II/DOS (and later Mac and PC), exclusives were very rarely to boost market share. Mac/PC simultaneous releases (and ports) have always been common, and the reason why PC gets the better end is because sometime in the 1990s, well, one of the reasons is that DOS to Windows was an easier jump than Apple II to PC. To this day, it's a whole lot easier to play a 1987 DOS game on a PC than it is to play a 1987 Apple II game on a Mac (more on that tomorrow).

In modern days, do we really need three distinct consoles offering completely different things? I mean, PS3 offers a better gaming experience than anything else, but Sony has made efforts to block using your PS3 for practical purposes, such as using the PS3's massive power with Linux for great supercomputer research stuff. Wii has an underpowered system compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360, and the Xbox 360 is the oldest of the three, with continued success. Porting is only done on third party titles (and sometimes the Wii gets left out due to its odd control scheme). You'll never see Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the PS3 or Halo 3 on the Wii.

Worse, even though things like Halo and Grand Theft Auto appeared on PCs, Nintendo still has no legal way to get onto the PC. What is Nintendo doing, and is their strategy working?

Bonus Links
Atari Activision Plugin Download
Porting Disaster (TVTropes)

Words of PS3D
The smells that stick out in your memory are the worst ones.

Image Credit
Pac-Man was snagged from a screen grab on Texture Monkey but the original was Atari Inc.'s 1983 Pac-Man.

Next on TWR
OK, no hints. Tomorrow's is one emulation specifically.

Unhealthy Obsessions: Jack in the Box

2010-06-19T14:18:00.003-05:00

Hello. I'm Jack, founder of Jack in the Box. Perhaps you remember when I was "fired".

Unlike The Spirit of 2005, I really had no idea what to do for Unhealthy Obsessions until it hit me...write what you know. I actually sat down and began writing a history of the company with Jack in the Box commercials in between. But then I wanted something that you couldn't get by a combination of Wikipedia and YouTube commercials.

So I decided to write what the Jack in the Boxes have done for me. Unfortunately, while I enjoy the commercials, the food...not so much. Like Sonic (the fast food, not the hedgehog), there isn't much to save JBX. Only a few really stick out in my memory.

In August 2008, I ate at this dump of a Jack in the Box. It was mentioned in a more timely manner back in '08, but let me tell you...it was a small, dirty place. There wasn't even much in the way of seating. Food took long and it was kind of cold, undersized, and gross. Thankfully, it was clean enough that I didn't inherently feel like I was going to get food poisoning.

Nearly every Houston trip involves a trip to the Jack in the Box in Hempstead, Texas. In case you're unfamiliar with the area, Hempstead is the city between Houston (and can be considered "far northwest Houston") and College Station (home of Texas A&M University) or Brenham (home of Blue Bell Creameries). Hempstead as a city is rarely seen by travelers: it is bypassed by 290 and last February, one of the nation's largest car dealerships shut down. I mean, all all this is one dealership!

As you can see, the Jack in the Box is inside of Hempstead but feels like it's out in the middle of nowhere.

Another well-known location (as in, it appears on regular trips) is in Bastrop, Texas. It was here that I decided I didn't like Jack in the Box egg rolls (I mean, I liked frozen egg rolls). Notably, I also found out this Jack in the Box has pictures on walls with screen grabs from various commercials. I first noticed the "superhero" image here, which, surprise, surprise, turned out to be a real commercial. But I can't find it on YouTube anymore. Even the no-sound version is hard to find.

Another Jack in the Box I visited coming home from another trip seemed to be staffed entirely by teenagers (the kid at the register couldn't have been older than 13). At least they had free Jack in the Box antenna toppers!

Next Up on TWR
HINT: I shave...my sheep?

FOODFEST

2010-06-18T16:32:00.000-05:00

This post was a little hard to write simply because I didn't want to give some lackluster post and decided to really embellish it. Never mind that this post has gone through a number of versions and was previously posted (and removed) at least once. The original publication was May 22, 2010. This is about food and what to do about it.

Banana smoothies
1. Freeze your bananas rather than use ice. Ice produces a nasty texture, a high possibility for dilution, and is hard on lesser blenders.
2. A liberal amount of yellow food coloring (4 drops per serving, roughly) produces a more pleasing color. Don't overdo it, though.
3. Rather than milk, sugar, and yellow food coloring, use original-flavor SunnyD (like the post the other day).

Beef jerky
Good but expensive for what you get. Instead, try to make your own.

Beer
I don't actually drink beer, but I will tell you: if you are willing to spend a few more dollars, go for beers made by local microbreweries rather than the mainstream American lagers. You will find that beer could taste much better.

Cereal
House brands are pretty gross when it comes to cereal. Generally, the more generic a cereal is, the tastier the house brand is. Except for Cheerios. Their stuff is gross.

Chocolate chip cookies
1. The original Nestlé Toll House recipe is the de facto for cookies. Just don't be afraid to leave out the nuts. ;)
2. The more butter (and that's butter, not margarine) the better.

Hamburger
I found that placing colby cheese (rather than processed American) and fresh Romaine lettuce makes any hamburger taste AWESOME.

Ice cream
Ice cream is complex. House brands are VERY hit-and-miss (compare ingredients, and there are often multiple house brands of ice cream). Try doing homemade, and if all else fails, hit up a good frozen yogurt place (it's healthy and tasty!)

Pizza
1. People in Texas like to have ranch dressing as a side to pizza...it must be a Texas thing since I don't see it anywhere else (and no "Texas ranch" jokes either, please)
2. Never, ever microwave leftover or pre-made frozen pizza. You WILL regret it! Only microwave it to thaw it...then put it in a toaster oven for the rest.

Ramen noodles
1. Drain out the liquid prior to serving for a simple, no-liquid dish but still flavorful and moist. Less sodium, too!
2. Try adding meat and vegetables (like the front). Said meat and vegetables are recommended frozen (they'll cook soon enough). Supermarkets usually stock frozen shrimp and stuff. Wal-Mart Supercenter stores also stock such items.

Soft drink
Soft drinks made with pure cane sugar (rather than corn syrup) are great. Buy in bulk (as in, 12 or more) and refrigerate them. Suddenly, syrupy drinks go down nice and clean! PepsiCo makes "retro" Mountain Dew and Pepsi, Dr Pepper makes Dublin Dr Pepper (but it is quite rare), and Coca-Cola makes sugar versions (but they are hard to find). Also, Whole Foods Market has pure cane sugar for their house brands.

Zucchini stew
My mother makes the best zucchini-and-beef stew. It's never been published on the Internet, ever, but someday, I will share it. Someday.

Spurring "Unhealthy Obsessions", I finally legally have...

...obviously, these are not the real things, but they are pretty close. Orange Julius and Twinkies were pretty close (though my last batch of Twinkies were messed up on account of aging vegetable shortening). Also, it has KFC Original Recipe only having flour, salt, pepper, and MSG, based on a lab analysis of the stuff done in the early 1980s. Given that you can see spices and taste them, either the analyzer wasn't picking up the spices (this WAS the early 1980s, after all) or it could be that someone was simply cheating on the recipe (see Wikipedia for more on that...)

A closer variant has been claimed to be discovered in a book called "America's Most Wanted Recipes" but I don't have a copy handy.

With fast food really expensive in general (and rumors of the "end of cheap food"), this might help me in my junk food conquests. There are three supermarkets relatively close to me (H-E-B, Walmart, and Kroger) which offer many of the basic ingredients. I've tried Orange Julius and Twinkies, and I will admit, they taste very similar to the Real Things and were good nonetheless. My cousin has another Orange Julius recipe which I will try sometime (he claims that it is a "real one", but I've seen several varieties of "real ones" floating around the Internet. We'll see).

What Happened to the Promises You Made Back in the Beginning of the Year?
The website components will re-launch soon enough and SimCity 4 buildings are coming soon. Consolidating the computers I used will help a lot.

Image Credit
This awesome montage by Flickr user Komshiki is the backdrop for today's post.

Next on TWR
"May 10, 2008". Is that too cryptic? You don't even have to leave TWR!

Another Railroad Mystery

2010-06-17T08:38:00.004-05:00

I'm looking for an old railroad in this state, possibly this city.

Remember that weird railroad spur I obsessed about for nearly half a year until I finally found it?

Now, I'm looking for another railroad, this time, located in a U.S. military base in a city off of Interstate 10 in either Mississippi or Alabama. The most likely candidate, instead of Mobile, seems in Gulfport, Mississippi.

The thing about this railroad was entering a quiet military base in December 2003, driving on its curvy roads, and noticing that very close to the road was a railroad, but not a traditional railroad. This thing obviously used to be a railroad based on the gravel base it had and the occasional ties, but no rails. Occasionally, we would cross a road that had a rail still in it, but the rails would be hanging off either side, since there were no actual rails on the tracks themselves.

This is where I think it could have been.

View Larger Map

Both sides of 7th had actual spurs running on either side of it (and were abandoned in roughly the same time frame) but I don't recall seeing any active spurs of any type, and the roads were quite curvy. I think there was a traffic circle in it.

Anyway, if you could help me point it out, that would really be appreciated.

Image Credit
Today's post is brought to you by SouthEast Roads which I wish there was something like it for Texas.

Lifehacker Links and Linked Links
http://lifehacker.com/5565403/five-tactics-for-getting-sleep-on-long+distance-flights

Current Progress on MacBook
Last night, a number of freeware applications were installed, including Google Earth (with the Wikimapia plug-in), TextWrangler (by Bare Bones Software), and Bean (a Microsoft Word alternative). KEGS, an Apple IIGS emulator, was also installed, but it was vastly user un-friendly (not recommended to ANYONE but a Terminal-using basement-dwelling nerd) AND needed Rosetta. Fortunately, Sweet16 was available. It was capable of full screen, Universal code, and based after the user-friendly Mac OS 9 "Bernie II The Rescue". I was up and running "Milestones 2000" in no time, thanks to a disk image import from a Mac OS 9 iMac G3. Most files are not transferred over yet, but I do plan on making a Walmart post here or on CSR&R soon. Today, I also added Google Earth to the Dock and removed iMovie. iWork '09 was also installed, but the icons installed on the Doc, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, were removed.

Pseudo3D's Life
Copied Freeverse Software's "WingNuts" to the MacBook. Also tried WingNuts 2, which has a remixed main theme of the original WingNuts and sounds way too much like Top Gun theme. That was probably no accident.

EDIT: Here it is in MP3 format, for those who want to listen to it.

Next on TWR
The return of our food-focused blog entry that appeared a few weeks ago but now, newly revised!

What Could Have Been

2010-06-16T19:30:00.000-05:00

EarthBound 64 was the best-selling game of 2000 for the Nintendo 64. Oh wait...

Disappointment comes in many forms, and one of them is when something, ANYTHING, is planned, and it is Cool and Good, but something happens, and it doesn't end up happening. It could have run out of money, could have been an executive decision, someone important to the project died, et cetera, et cetera. Perhaps they were simply proposals.

I might make this a regular series, but I can't really say that for certain yet.

EarthBound 64 (Mother 3 in Japan) was to be the 3D sequel to EarthBound and the flagship title for the Nintendo 64DD, which we will discuss later. Screenshots emerged in 1997, featuring new faces in a "Wild West" inspired landscape. Taking advantage of the N64DD's capabilities, there would be day and night (in accordance with real time), and things like seeds growing from trees. The N64DD was delayed while the actual Nintendo 64 lost ground to the PlayStation (and its upcoming successor). In 1999, the game was moved to cartridge with "Mother 3.5" being released on the DD with new quests and the DD capabilities, but it was too late. The N64DD had an extremely weak, Japan-only release in late 1999 and was discontinued within months. EarthBound 64 met its fate in late 2000. Eventually, it was remade as a 2D title for the GBA, but the game was cut down and story elements were cancelled.

Read more here.

Epicenter Collection was a big disappointment to me in many ways. What is it, you ask? The concept was a department store with, instead of traditional departments, boutiques dedicated to Internet and catalog retailers. It was to build in Ohio's Polaris Fashion Place (replacing Kaufmann's), but after it was decided it would be more profitable to demolish it for a "lifestyle center" annex, it moved to Christiana Mall's former Lord & Taylor. But after over a year of radio silence, the site was sold to Target. Read about what it could've been here, here, here and my own piece
here

Houston's METRORail hasn't gotten an addition since the charter Red Line in January 2004. The light rail, which runs roughly from the former Astroworld site (which closed in 2005, hint hint) to the northern end of downtown with 16 stops. Infuriatingly, the other major Texas city, Dallas, has 38 stops on its light rail and three routes (not to mention the big transfer stations and their commuter rail). Naturally, Houston wants to catch up with four new routes, but construction has been delayed. It's to be done by 2012, but with groundbreaking just less than a year ago, it seems highly unlikely.

The light rail doesn't follow a "replaced road" or "replaced railroad" like Dallas does, it has a separate lane in main roads (with restrictions on turning and crossings). This was a proposal for Post Oak Road, which, if you don't know, is in an upscale part of town (with a fantastically huge shopping mall fronting it).

Unfortunately, this won't happen...and likely, the road will be stripped and refitted with regular ol' light rail in the MID-2000s with TURNING RESTRICTIONS. GRRRR.

Public Notice
In keeping with our new tagline, "Variety Without Politics", we'd like to ask you (the people who read this) would like to see. And encourage you to leave comments. The CAPTCHA requirements have been removed, because it never stopped the spammers anyway and persecutes against real people.

Credits
The light rail image came from Lockmat's image gallery on the HAIF.

Lifehacker Links and Linked Links
http://lifehacker.com/5564957/set-up-a-foolproof-and-fireproof-automatic-backup-plan

Pseudo3D's Life
I went to the "Grand Opening" of the new Walmart. The 254,000 square foot store first opened in 1988. More details on CS Roads & Retail! Oh yes, and I got a MacBook, which is awesome, and more details will be available soon.

Next On TWR
Another great railroad mystery.

E3 Break Day

2010-06-15T19:25:00.003-05:00

Rather than do an ACTUAL blog post, I decided that I'll take the "day" off so to speak*, and explore the goods that E3 has produced. Sadly, I just haven't seen real "excitement" since the days of 2006 (probably because E3 was a hotel conference in those dark years) but here, some titles/systems that look intriguing are

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)
Super Scribblenauts (DS)
Nintendo 3DS (with some cool games to boot)
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode One (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, and the iPhone)
Kinect (Peripheral for Xbox 360)
Mario Kart 3DS (suppose if the computers weren't nearly as dirty cheaters as they were in the Wii version)
Civilization V

Unfortunately, there was no details on new city-building-type games in the vein of SimCity (but what did I expect?)

*OK, it was actually the source material that didn't work out...

ANYWAY, I do have new material in the pipeline BUT I really don't know the direction of the blog, where it's going or what it is. Thus, I changed the blog header to something else. Something cooler and less like something that I wrote in 2006.

The Spirit of 2005: Chrono Trigger

2010-06-14T17:23:00.003-05:00

Think the main character bears a surprising resemblance to Goku? You're right! They were designed by the same person!

If there's one game that I started playing in 2005 but never finished, it was Chrono Trigger, Squaresoft's 1994 opus.

I had just completed another now-well-known RPG that was overshadowed by CT back in the day but is now getting back to a rightful place.

Anyway, Chrono Trigger starts out as the main character going to a carnival, meeting a cute girl, and getting sucked into the past by one of his friend's inventions. It was rather intriguing to me, as I had read it about in a mid-1990s issue of Nintendo Power and even used a walkthrough. Unfortunately, despite really cool music, I lost interest after a series of aggravating bosses (I think I got to somewhere early in the "bad future" area)

I think I would like to replay Chrono Trigger sometime (my save file is probably intact, knowing the processes of the computer) on my Wii, but I got burned out by EarthBound, what with level grinding and random encounters. Still, I'd like to have a chance to continue on Chrono Trigger sometime.

LINK AND MEDIA BONUSES
While I'd like to provide those Nintendo Power scans (sometime), I would like to show you links to the "cool music"...
1-02 Chrono Trigger (the introduction song!)
1-04 Peaceful Day (the present)
1-09 Wind Scene (after being warped to the past)
1-19 Frog's Theme
1-20 Fanfare 1
2-01 Ruined World (the "bad future")
2-05 Lavos' Theme (the main bad guy's theme)
2-09 Robo's Theme (it bears resemblance to something else...)

If you like it, you can search for the music elsewhere on the Internet. The ROM is also floating around the Internet, but that's between you, your conscience, and Google.

Lifehacker Links and Linked Links
http://gizmodo.com/5563073/this-is-flash-running-on-an-iphone
http://lifehacker.com/5562864/lifehacker-pack-for-mac-our-essential-list-of-the-best-free-mac-downloads

Pseudo3D's Life
Even the local H-E-B can hold hazards to one's eyes. Old women (~65) should not wear 15-year-old girl clothes...

Back to Daily Posts?
I'll try since I have time, but remember a few things...there may be times when I don't have access to the Internet, and I'm certainly not going to "compensate".

Next Up On TWR
Tomorrow, we'll investigate a few "What Could Have Been" items, distilled from TVTropes.

Nero Wolfe

2010-06-13T16:48:00.005-05:00

"Confound it, Archie. I have you to thank for this acarpous entanglement."

I will state that I have enjoyed Nero Wolfe books quite a bit. To put the series, which was written by the late Rex Stout, is best written in the words of TVTropes.

"Brilliant, eccentric cynic Nero Wolfe makes his living as New York City's finest private detective. He charges outrageous fees, usually in the tens of thousands (and we're talking Thirties dollars here), to solve the highest-profile murders — because, quite frankly, he needs the money. After an adventurous youth in his native Montenegro, he's now fully engaged in the pursuit of self-indulgence, weighing in "a seventh of a ton" ('to insulate my feelings,' he explains). He literally refuses to leave his home on business — or most anything else, for that matter — and has seen to it that there's little reason why he should."

The thing that separates Nero Wolfe (as a series) from other murder-mysteries, is that Nero Wolfe is a detective, but rarely goes anywhere.

Rather than running around town, questioning suspects, and "packing lead", so to speak, Wolfe stays in his Manhattan brownstone, which includes a full-time gourmet chef (Wolfe, as it turns out, is quite picky about food). Then who runs around town?

That's for Archie Goodwin, his assistant, which collects all the clues. Typically, the murder happens, the clues are gathered, and all the suspects are gathered around in Wolfe's own room to determine.

Of course, I can't really go on about Nero Wolfe too much: that's information you already know or should read about, available on Wikipedia or aforementioned TVTropes. Watching A&E's "A Nero Wolfe Mystery" also is a good way to get into the series, which actually holds faithful to the book.

Unfortunately, copies are a bit hard to find. Thankfully, most bookstores (such as Barnes & Noble stock the mass-market paperbacks). Unfortunately, even they cost around $6-$7 a pop. eBooks aren't much cheaper.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted this was to show an interesting thing in the 1990s mass-market paperbacks, "The World of Rex Stout", which pulls memorabilia from the Stout Estate, such as "Might As Well Be Dead"'s recipes.

It turns out Stout himself was quite the gourmet as well. These recipes claim to come from The American Magazine, which unfortunately ended about half a century ago, and scanned incomplete archives of said magazine do not have any Rex Stout recipes.

Lifehacker Cool Posts
is a new feature we have at TWR. The equivalent of "sharing" links in the side-bar, they're down here! Although I could probably try to use real sharing.

http://lifehacker.com/5561572/make-your-own-diy-projector-out-of-cereal-boxes
http://lifehacker.com/5560305/eat-well-on-just-1-a-day

ALSO
The image credit is from the unofficial NeroWolfe.org and the post "F-F-F-F-Fuming" is thankfully starting to nullify...I have one more job opportunity (we will try to avoid monetizing the blog at ALL COSTS, though maybe the Amazon.com sidebar could appear somehow), the laptop will arrive (and hopefully posts and post count will go up), this blog post is written, CS Roads & Retail will re-awaken, Mall Hall of Fame will continue to update (and the new sister site, featuring Forest Fair Mall as the starting entry!), and Macintosh Garden will still lose EA's back catalog as it were, which is a shame. BUT those games are still pretty easy to get, I have most of them anyhow (either downloaded or fully-legal), and copyright law should be reformed.

NEXT UP IN THE BLOG
The promised Spirit of 2005 kicks off with a trial entry that was not what we intended, but will still be a good post nonetheless. It was a beloved Super Nintendo game.

F-F-F-F-Fuming

2010-06-11T11:37:00.004-05:00

I am not in a mood to talk.

One of my last job options finally developed into an interview, but I didn't get the job.
Laptop won't arrive for a few days.
One of the blog posts that I thought I had partially written out is not complete.
CS Roads & Retail wasn't able to survive without good pictures.
Mall Hall of Fame is ending.

Then a snitch from my favorite abandonware site, Macintosh Garden got all of EA's games removed...even though a lot of those games are extremely rare, unsupported, unavailable, etc. etc.

Anyway, I plan another series to be "UNHEALTHY OBSESSIONS" to be on junk food.

Saturday Night Blogging...Again!

2010-06-05T14:32:00.006-05:00

NEW STUFF ADDED
It's been a while since I did this, and when if I said I wasn't going to do any blogs until I got a new computer, I was wrong!

==COMPUTING==
My Performa 550 came bundled with the following:
Macintosh System Software 7.1P
ClarisWorks 2
Quicken 4
Best of HomeWorks Templates
Click Art Performa Collection
Macintosh PC Exchange
At Ease
The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia on CD
World Atlas on CD
The Family Doctor 3rd Edition on CD
Time Almanac on CD
Microsoft Dinosaurs on CD
The Tale of Benjamin Bunny on CD
Apple Special Edition of America Online
American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Edition
Mario Teaches Typing
Wacky Jacks CD Game Show
Spectre Challenger
Super Munchers
San Diego Zoo Presents Animals! on CD

==MONEY==
Another issue I want to address is that I haven't found a job recently...so to keep my finances growing over the summer, I will be considering (not DOING, mind you) monetizing the blog. This would involve AdSense ads and probably Amazon.com side links. Though not the dreaded "green links" that pick out key words. I hope you won't mind...but if you do, sound off in the comments, as usual.

==BLOGGING==
I have yet to find new blogs that aren't overtly personal or the assortment of blogs that are specific but not necessarily informational. Unlike something like Pleasant Family Shopping, which has great information/photos on long-since departed chains and some living ones! Such a blog is an "infoblog", which I've hoped TWR would be. So what would be a non-informative blog would be? Something very specific like Coffee Consumption (which self-mocks itself as being a said useless blog) and other things that I thought up off the top of my head, and actually exist. Something like "Broke Fashionista", "Living In Houston"...they all exist. I even tried Dead Goldfish which is a one-post paragraph on the woes of a teenage girl (complete with all the grammar mistakes you'd expect, almost to the point where'd you think it was a viral fake) and better yet, it hasn't even been updated in over five years!
Or there's the mindless entertainment blogs...we discussed this in another post (since been removed) about I Can Has Cheezburger. There's no solution to these...they always update, but every once in a while, I find something cool and go on a mild archive binge, and chuckle at subtleties like this.

==TV SHOWS==
On Thursday, I watched the premiere of this season's finale of Burn Notice!

***SPOILER WARNING***
I didn't pay attention much last season but I found out this episode that Management was not a government higher-up AND the one who burned Michael. Obviously, unlike Monk, finding who burned him (or in Monk's case, finding his wife's killer) was not the entire premise, but also why. The new season takes it a little deeper as there's some private company who is kind of involved with the government introduced--said company employs Management and uses burned spies to stop gun smuggling worldwide, but they have other motives, apparently. However, it doesn't deviate from the main plotlines too much: Sam, Fiona, and Michael still help clients.==BOOKS==
My print-outs of DeadMalls.com features is almost done! I plan to put it together in a method similar to this, except I printed mine out on letter-size paper and painstakingly put them together via rubber cement. More on that (and some books in general) will be explored in a later date.

Super Summer Kickoff

2010-06-01T19:00:00.001-05:00

We are back from our brief hiatus. Welcome to the Summer 2010 season at TWR. As you may have noticed on the last post, we are now only saving picture headers for "flagship items". The compelling reason to get the pictures for flagships is that posts were discouraged unless I got a picture, and generally, getting that picture was hard work and I think may not really have complemented the actual blog. I've prepared a few other posts, and so we begin our grand plan with an official opening of CS Roads and Retail!

Also, recently, I've watched the Lost finale, and even though I haven't been watching it from day one, it certainly turned out to be a disappointment. There were things put in there that I didn't like at all, and things left out. As a result, Lost will NOT be a part of "The Spirit of 2005", even though it was a candidate. But I watched Toy Story recently (as part of a way to prepare for Toy Story 3, which I'm actually pretty excited about...it looks like it's really going to be something, and not just a franchise zombie like a certain movie that was released a few weeks back that is on the third sequel. In other news, I've watched Iron Man 2 as well, which turned out to be okay. In general, Marvel superhero movies tend to be disappointing...does anyone remember The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer? That or they turn out to be unforgettably awful and "okay" is a compliment. By the way, I've never actually seen Spider-Man 3, but I read the novelization, which was better as vital film scenes were cut.

We are working on the first "Spirit of 2005" post this week. "Blue Skies and Nintendo" and that retail site/blog I was working on will come back to life with new material. And SimCity 4-related stuff, I hope.

But I decided not to skimp on content, and instead give you two new lists: one updated and one all-new. Video games will be played this summer. I plan to play, in order:

1. EarthBound (SNES)
A unique RPG. In the words of Starmen.net: "In 1995, RPGs were stuck in a rut that Dragon Quest had dug. Most were still set in medieval times, with knights and mages battling mythical monsters with swords and magic. Few games dared to defy this mold until EarthBound (MOTHER 2 as it is known in Japan). No other game was like it, except maybe its prequel, MOTHER, which had not been released outside of Japan. EarthBound introduced, and even today continues to introduce, RPG fans to an entirely different experience.

The story is set in the 1990s in Eagleland, a kitschy and romanticized parody of America (perfect lawns and quiet suburbs). No dragons, mystical knights, or staff-wielding wizards appear in this game. You are just an average 13 year old kid from the suburbs...until the night a meteor lands in your backyard. The local wildlife start attacking you, a gang of local hoodlums begins causing trouble downtown, you realize that you have psychic powers, and a mysterious messenger from the future tells you that you are destined to save the world."

Currently I'm about 95% done and battling endless waves of foes in the Cave of the Past.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)
Largely regarded as one of the best video games ever. Currently I'm in Dodongo's Cavern, the second dungeon.

3. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
Currently I'm going for the second dungeon. In fact, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing. Is the Ice Rod even possible to get at this stage in the game?

Anyway, this is the first great Zelda game, featuring a parallel world where evil reigns.

4. Chrono Trigger (SNES)
I'm saving the description for this one for a "The Spirit of 2005"...but maybe I should not really complete yet. Yet.

5. Mother 3 (GBA)
The sequel to EarthBound, released only in Japan. Patched with an English translation. Will definitely play.

6. Final Fantasy III (SNES)
A.K.A. Final Fantasy VI. I heard the opera scene is one of the best scenes in a video game, ever.

Somewhere in there I'm also going to insert a few other Zelda games.

Also, books will be read: I've read both Artemis Fowl and Harry Potter, both, totally. Lord of the Rings I want to read and maybe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, except it kind of ends on a rather bad note...and the sixth book, written by the author of Artemis Fowl...has the writing as fairly inferior compared to the work of Douglas Adams.

This summer, we will hopefully see some updates to Mac stuff and we definitely have a post planned about the Renaissance Faire, and we plan on doing other related things, including a video of Padre Staples Mall in 1990 and other loose ends around the blog. We won't be doing Yoot Tower stuff given the bizarre circumstances that happened last time around. And we can't upload the Beaker video as promised: the tape got taped over because I didn't label it properly.

I'm planning on getting a new computer VERY soon, and we can access things that this one just can't, including Windows, SheepShaver, Google Earth, and SimCity 4. And THAT'S WHEN the second part of the Super Summer Kickoff continues...

Hey, where's the picture?

2010-05-25T21:26:00.001-05:00

As we wind down the school year, TWR is getting a bit less posts than it should. Keep on waiting, though: a slightly new format, all-new posts, and much more are coming this summer, including an expansion and re-posting of FoodFest. Thanks for reading TWR!

The Weekend at TWR

2010-05-14T19:57:00.004-05:00

Picture Credit: Labelscar from the "Retail Newsbrief" article, though it's entirely possible it was gotten off somewhere else

There's so much to talk about that I can't really begin. First off, you may have seen a new article for RetailAddictionBlog about a proposed renovation for a now-dead mall. But you may not be interested in it. Or that big post I'm preparing for when the Walmart (née Wal-Mart) finishes expanding into a Supercenter.

And I've been sick lately, so that...stinks. I've been thinking about TWR (and a good post for it) but I lost the original post idea, but the root still stands: this summer, we're going to try to "write what we know". It could be an interesting thing I wanted to share (like the one below about the pictionary-telephone one), a scan, or whatever. I need to start scanning more things and archiving (before the evil robots.txt claims another website!)

This summer, there will be "series".

The Spirit of 2005 is the flagship item, featuring mementos and fun from 2005. There will be integration with Splashtown and SimCity 4.
Pokémania will be present: a series rather than a simple history.
The World of Waco, a look at the past.

And more, possibly. Anyway, I need new browsing sites/blogs/forums (I'm tired of my mall sites, a few webcomics, and Lifehacker)

To end this night, I wanted to share a recipe I made:

SunnyD Smoothies
1. Put frozen bananas in blender.
2. Pour in SunnyD (Tangy Original works best) as to mostly cover bananas.
3. Blend. Add SunnyD or bananas to alter texture, taste, or volume. No sugar though...SunnyD is loaded with corn syrup as it is.
4. Enjoy.

The Pictionary-Telephone Type Game!

2010-05-07T16:13:00.006-05:00

...apparently called "Fax Machine" but I can't find any references to it online, and this page seems to reference a non-existent Wikipedia article.

Anyway, I won't repeat the rules (it's written in the comments and shown in the link) but I will tell you that it is one of the more fun things I've played. Some memorable ones include...

• I got "Praying in morning" once, so I drew a guy praying, facing the sun, with a Bible nearby. Unfortunately, in the next revision, the Bible was lost and soon appeared as if the man was praying TO the sun. So it became "man prays to fox god" by the end.
• A drawing of "Peter Pan grows up. Tink is not happy" showed an arrow going from child Peter to adult Peter with a frowning Tinkerbell. Unfortunately, someone thought the smaller figure was shooting a gun at an adult, and it soon became a person shooting a pregnant woman.
• A "box of free weasels" became a bunch of insects having a race.
• A picture of Mario stayed intact until someone thought it was about mushrooms of the psychedelic type (it went downhill from there)
• A friendly battle between Superman and Batman turned into a crime scene (with a generic criminal and victim)
• An "astronaut drinking tea with a newt" became, rather quickly, "an astronaut drinking tea with a newt"
• And finally, a youth leader of mine told of a picture that went from marriage to a picture of chains BACK TO marriage!

Any funny stories you have of this game?

(Photo Credit: A widely-circulated screen capture of Get Smart)

The Bento Box

2010-05-01T19:40:00.000-05:00

Bento, contrary to what I heard once, is a type of Japanese cuisine: it's just a pre-packaged lunch with rice, meat, and (pickled) vegetables. However, it can be hand-made. In that form, it's mostly a way to get kids to eat things. It can range from the relatively simple (as seen in picture above) to complex...
It can take form in various characters from a certain Nintendo company...such as Super Mario [via Technobob] or, in a significantly less appetizing form, Pokémon [via Kotaku.

But alas, Bento, at least, from what I've seen, doesn't look appetizing on a full stomach at all: the combinations of odd vegetables, cream cheese, and lunch meat are all non-good to me...I can guess most of the ingredients of this Calvin and Hobbes themed bento box and it still is not appetizing. Not to mention all the time it takes to make.

Still, Bento is a pretty intriguing thing...we might take a look at bento again one of these days.

The Genuine Ending of Cypress Gardens

2010-04-29T08:23:00.005-05:00

The tale of Cypress Gardens is quite depressing, yet somewhat fascinating. In case you didn't know, Cypress Gardens was in a way Florida's first theme park. It had its ups and downs: it opened in 1936 and soon rose to be a place of water ski shows, lush gardens, Southern Belle models, and other live demonstrations. It was sold in the 1980s following the opening of a certain mega resort but lived in the shadows of the other major theme parks like Universal Studios Orlando, surviving primarily as a niche.

Unfortunately, after the September 11th attacks, the economy spiraled downhill, taking out the tourism and retail businesses that were treading water. Cypress Gardens was one of these, and it closed in April 2003.

And that was the end of Cypress Gardens. Just like that, it closed, leading the historic gardens to decay and possibly razed for yet another condominium complex.

Cut forward to summer 2004. I was going to Panama City Beach FL for the first time and in a Florida tourism booklet I picked up at the welcome center mentioned Cypress Gardens. Assuming it was out of date, I read it anyway. It explained that Cypress Gardens had been bought and would open as "Cypress Gardens Adventure Park" featuring not only the traditional gardens, shows, and Southern Belles, but a water park, new theme rides, and 150 live animals.

From this description of FloridaThemeParks.com (http://www.floridaamusementparks.com/resources/Cypress-Gardens-Adventure-Park.html) which I guarantee won't last long:

Cypress Gardens Adventure Park

Cypress Gardens Adventure Park reopened in December 2004 after a 19-month closure. This family-oriented amusement park located in Winter Haven, still features the spectacular historic gardens and water ski shows it’s been known for since its’ debut in 1936, but it also has more than three dozen thrill rides, concerts and daily shows, including comedy, song and dance and other attractions. Cypress Gardens is half the size and half the price of Walt Disney World, so it makes a great all-day family getaway. One of the must-see attractions at the park is still the 45-minute ski show that made Cypress Gardens famous as the “water-ski capital of the world,” during its’ heyday in the 50s and 60s. The beautiful gardens are another highlight in the park. Cypress Gardens Adventure Park is less than 30 minutes from U.S. Highway 192, one of Orlando’s main tourist corridors. The admission price is $38.95 for ages 10-54 ($31.95 for seniors) and $31.95 for children ages 3-9 (free admission for children age 2 and under.) This price provides access to all activities in the park including rides, shows and concerts, and entrance to Splash Island Water Park is also included in the general admission fee to Cypress Gardens. The ticket price also allows you a second day free if used within six days of the first park visit.

Cypress Gardens Adventure Park Address and Phone Number
Cypress Gardens Adventure Park
6000 Cypress Gardens Boulevard
Winter Haven, FL 33884
863-324-2111
www.cypressgardens.com

Cypress Gardens Adventure Park Rides and Attractions
The Gardens
Native plants and exotic flowers combine in this spectacular display. A giant Banyan tree, planted in 1939 from a seedling, stands proudly in the historic gardens. The Topiary Trail features a collection of colorful topiaries in the shapes of animals such as a rabbit, swan and serpent. A sparkling waterfall is the centerpiece of this trail, surrounded by brilliant blooms. In the Plantation Garden at Snively Mansion, you will find the aromatic herb garden, rose garden and butterfly garden at the Wings of Wonder butterfly arboretum.

The Shows
Choose from eight shows at Cypress Gardens. The daily water ski shows at Mango Bay proves that the “water ski capital of the world” lives on. Watch skiers take to the water and sky as they perform their gravity defying feats of wonder. They perform jumps, ballet-like movements and comedy routines – all on water skis! This show leaves visitors laughing and gasping at the skill of these wonderful performers. Enjoy a parody of life on the high seas at the “Pirates of Cypress Cove,” and thrill to the grace and beauty of the ice skaters at “Cypress Gardens on Ice.” Live music is part of “Farmyard Frolics” and “Jubilee Junction Gazebo.” At the “Wild West Shenani-Guns,” a Wild West town comes to life in a humorous skit of mischief and mayhem. “The Living Garden” is extraordinary. Performed daily in the Topiary Garden, watch as a beautiful “statue” comes to life and is transformed into a living fountain of beauty. Speaking of beauty, the “Southern Belles” of Cypress Gardens have long been a symbol of the park as they stroll the lawns and gardens, welcoming guests to the Adventure Park. The Southern Belles have been a tradition of Cypress Gardens since 1940.

The Rides
Cypress Gardens Adventure Park features 39 rides, including four roller coasters and a great selection of children’s favorites. There are two “adventure zones;” Paradise Pier and Adventure Grove. Paradise Pier has a boardwalk that is reminiscent of an old-fashioned amusement park. This is where you’ll find Hurricane, the park’s signature coaster, the Swamp Thing, a suspension roller coaster with more than 1,000 feet of track. Other rides include the family coaster called Okeechobee Rampage and Thunderbolt, a 120-foot drop tower. Storm Surge is a six-person water ride that plunges six stories down a twisting, churning river. Other traditional rides at Cypress Gardens include the Tilt-a-Whirl, Boardwalk Carousel and Sky Wheel. Splash Island is the park’s brand new waterpark, which features 6 water attractions. Rides are available for everyone at Splash Island, from the gentle “Tikki Garden” for small children to The Polynesian Adventure, a large, wet-play structure that holds up to 500 people at a time. Kowabunga Bay is a 20,000 square foot wave pool, and Paradise River includes more than 1,000 feet of bends and curves for a wild ride around the “Island.” The more adventurous will love Tonga Tubes, a 40-foot tall twin tube slide and Voodoo Plunge, a triple slide complex with two 60-foot slides and a twisting, turning body slide.

The Concerts
More than fifty all-star concerts and special events are held yearly at the Star Haven Amphitheater at Cypress Gardens Adventure Park. Performers include legends like Kenny Rogers and Loretta Lynn. General seating is included in the price of admission and guests are encouraged to bring lawn chairs. A limited number of reserved seats are available for concert series.

The Animals
An all-new animal area is home to more than 150 animals, including a variety of birds, mammals and reptiles. One of the most famous animal residents of the park is Tarzan, a 75-year old alligator that once starred alongside Johnny Weissmueller in the well-known “Tarzan” movies. Guests can feed the specially trained birds. The animal park also includes a petting zoo for children.

Jubilee Junction
This is Cypress Garden’s “village,” of 15 shops and restaurants. Food includes everything from upscale fine dining at Snively Mansion to the Jubilee Marketplace food court. Artisans can also be found at the Jubilee Junction, crafting their wares. Specialty shops include a year-round Christmas Shop, an ice cream shop, souvenirs and more.

Cypress Gardens Adventure Park History
Cypress Gardens originally opened in January 1936 as one of Florida’s first major tourist attractions. It was a showplace for 8,000 varieties of flowers from all over the world. The first water-ski show was held at Cypress Gardens in 1943, and the park quickly became known as “the water-ski capital of the world,” and drew more than 1.2 million visitors a year. After years of declining attendance, Cypress Gardens went out of business in April 2003. It was scheduled to become a housing development when a grass roots effort to save the park got underway. Proponents were successful in getting the state to agree to pitch in $11 million to help save it. Polk County added another couple of million, and soon Kent Buescher, the founder and owner of Wild Adventures in Valdosta, agreed to buy the park for $7 million. Cypress Gardens was on its’ way to recovery.

And then...

Unfortunately, in 2004, Hurricane Charley ripped through the area as workers were preparing for the park’s reopening, causing approximately $3.5 to $4 million in damage. Numerous trees and much of the lush tropical landscaping was destroyed, but luckily, a banyan tree planted by the park founders Dick and Julie Pope in 1939, escaped with minor damage. The hurricane damage delayed the reopening for several weeks, but in December 2004, Cypress Gardens Adventure Park opened with a new look, new restaurants and attractions and a whole new beginning.

The triple Florida hurricanes damaged the new Cypress Gardens, which essentially doomed the last incarnation of the park. The owners at the time, "Adventure Parks Group" had spent too much money in repairing the park and sold it again in 2007 to Land South Adventures, reverting back to Cypress Gardens. There, it continued to exist for the 2008 season. It was a money loser and reopened again in 2009 with the animals gone and the rides gone, with the waterpark as a separate attraction.

This time, Cypress Gardens really was doomed. On September 23, 2009, Land South closed the park, unable to keep the park in its traditional form no matter what.

The park will reopen as Legoland Florida: sad considering that the demographics will shift again and its just another Legoland. However, it's not a total loss: Legoland Florida will maintain the things that made Cypress Gardens special, like the gardens, the water ski shows, and one of the last roller coasters it had. Plus, its a renovation of an existing theme park rather than a new theme park altogether, saving money, time, and costs. So it looks like ~~Cypress Gardens~~ Legoland Florida will be a success again...but as a whole, the story is bittersweet.

Image Credit: DWTickets

P.S.: Also from FloridaAmusementParks.com, a map for your convenience:

Video Games To Play This Summer

2010-04-27T17:16:00.006-05:00

This summer, I plan to play, in order:

1. EarthBound (SNES)
A unique RPG. In the words of Starmen.net: "In 1995, RPGs were stuck in a rut that Dragon Quest had dug. Most were still set in medieval times, with knights and mages battling mythical monsters with swords and magic. Few games dared to defy this mold until EarthBound (MOTHER 2 as it is known in Japan). No other game was like it, except maybe its prequel, MOTHER, which had not been released outside of Japan. EarthBound introduced, and even today continues to introduce, RPG fans to an entirely different experience.

The story is set in the 1990s in Eagleland, a kitschy and romanticized parody of America (perfect lawns and quiet suburbs). No dragons, mystical knights, or staff-wielding wizards appear in this game. You are just an average 13 year old kid from the suburbs...until the night a meteor lands in your backyard. The local wildlife start attacking you, a gang of local hoodlums begins causing trouble downtown, you realize that you have psychic powers, and a mysterious messenger from the future tells you that you are destined to save the world."

Currently I'm about 40% done, what with me trying to battle to Department Store Spook.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)
Largely regarded as one of the best video games ever. Currently I'm in Dodongo's Cavern, the second dungeon.

3. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
Currently I'm going for the second dungeon. In fact, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing. Is the Ice Rod even possible to get at this stage in the game?

Anyway, this is the first great Zelda game, featuring a parallel world where evil reigns.

4. Chrono Trigger (SNES)
I'm saving the description for this one for a "2005" special.

5. Mother 3 (GBA)
The sequel to EarthBound, released only in Japan. Patched with an English translation.

6. Final Fantasy III (SNES)
A.K.A. Final Fantasy VI. I heard the opera scene is one of the best scenes in a video game, ever.

And I'm going to do ALL of it on a Wii, hacked with Homebrew!

Manor East Mall

2010-04-26T16:35:00.006-05:00

Picture Credit from "Bryanite" of The HAIF

One of my favorite local dead malls was profiled last year on Mall Hall of Fame with the help of the HAIF and my old Internet handle, Jonah Norason (it really wasn't my name...which is why I became Pseudo3D!)

But MHoF is hard to navigate (and even harder with a new Blogger setting) so I copied it here. It's kind of notable because it had the first mall-connected Wal-Mart.

From this point on, it's the words of Mall Hall of Fame (it's at the bottom of the page here as well).

---BEGIN TRANSCRIPT---

The original two stores -Montgomery Ward and Kroger- that were later worked into MANOR EAST MALL.

Photo from http://www.btutilities.com/

The first phase of what would eventually become MANOR EAST MALL. In 1966, a freestanding Montgomery Ward and Kroger supermarket open at the intersection of East Villa Maria Road and South Texas Avenue, in the southeastern environs of Bryan. A drive-in theater had been on the site previously.

1972 and the shopping options in smalltown Bryan grow exponentially. The previously-existing Ward's and Kroger are joined by 159,900 square feet of air-conditioned mall. Counting Kroger, the complex encompasses 235,400 leasable square feet.

In 1981, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart abandoned the "Discount City" moniker that it had used since its inception in 1962. The new "Brown-era" logo, seen above, was the design aesthetic used for "Wally World's" first shopping mall-connected store, at Bryan's Texas' MANOR EAST MALL.

1981, and the first shopping mall-connected Wal-Mart opens, as a third anchor at MANOR EAST MALL. The 83,900 square foot store was in operation for thirteen years. In 1994, it was replaced by a new SuperCenter, built 1.3 miles away.

Two views of today's TEJAS CENTER, a redress of MANOR EAST MALL. A demalling carried out between 2003 and 2006 demolished nearly half of the mid-century center and replaced it with a power-format complex.

Photos from http://www.arkitex.com/ / Arkitex Design Studio

A contemporary site plan of TEJAS CENTER. Structures highlighted in blue are sections of the 1972 and 1981 mall that were substantially remodeled and reoriented with exterior entries.

Drawing from http://www.stalworthonline.com/ (Stalworth Real Estate Services)

MANOR EAST MALL

East Villa Maria Road and South Texas Avenue
Bryan, Texas

Finding an answer to the question "where was the first shopping mall Wal-Mart?" proved quite elusive. An email querie sent to the corporate website resulted in a less-than-helpful, standard form, "check our website" (which had no such information) response. Readers of the MALL HALL OF FAME submitted several likely candidates. The most plausible, it seems, was a "Brown era" store, which was added to Bryan, Texas's MANOR EAST MALL. The shopping complex started out with two freestanding stores; a 1-level (57,500 square foot) Montgomery Ward and 1-level (18,000 square foot) Kroger supermarket. These were situated on a 34 acre plot, 1.9 miles southeast of downtown Bryan. Developed by Bryan, Texas' John Culpepper, they opened in 1966. In 1971-1972, a single-level, fully-enclosed shopping mall was added northeast of the existing Ward's. It was anchored by a 1-level (59,200 square foot) J.C. Penney and included Karmelkorn, The Fair, Orange Julius, Beall's, Britt's and an Eckerd Drug. Including Ward's and Penney's, MANOR EAST MALL encompassed 217,400 leasable square feet. With its completion, Bryan became the smallest city in the Lonestar State with its own fully-enclosed shopping center. The complex was expanded with a third anchor store in 1980-1981. Wal-Mart built a 1-level (83,900 square foot) location onto the southeast side of the existing mall, with the Manor East 3 triplex sandwiched between. MANOR EAST MALL now housed 308,100 leasable square feet and fifty-eight stores and services. Retail rivalry came along in February 1982. POST OAK MALL, located 2.8 miles southeast, in the adjoining community of College Station, encompassed 800,000 leasable square feet and eighty retailers. An expansion of POST OAK MALL -completed in 1985- snatched J.C. Penney from MANOR EAST. The vacant store in the older mall was retenanted by Food 4 Less and then a 50 Percent Off store before being sectioned into Bealls, Jo-Ann Fabrics and a Life Church. Wal-Mart relocated to a SuperCenter-format store (located 1.3 miles northeast) in the fall of 1994. Its abandoned space sat vacant for several years. Meanwhile, MANOR EAST declined into a less-than-prestigious property. Adding insult to injury, Montgomery Ward was shuttered in 1997. Jack Culpepper, son of the mall's original builder, began to envisage a redevelopment of his retail center in 1999. The three phase project got underway in April 2003 and included demolition of 150,000 square feet...comprising the vacant Ward's and two south store blocks of the old interior mall. The remaining structures were demalled, with stores reoriented with exterior entrances. Modern, creme-colored facades were added. A newly-built (93,000 square foot) H-E-B opened, as a primary anchor, December 12, 2004. Encompassing 360,000 leasable square feet and thirty-five stores and services, the complex, renamed TEJAS CENTER, was completed in August 2006. Tenants included JoAnn Fabrics, Bealls, Family Dollar, The Theatre Company (a live-perfomance venue in the old triplex space), Hastings and Gold's Gym.

Sources: Posts by Jonah Norason
Houston Architecture Information Forum / Posts by "RJC0618", "Iron Tiger" and "Scotch"
http://www.btutilities.com
http://gen.culpepper.com
www.stalworthonline.com
Bryan, Texas property tax assessor website

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I was also IronTiger and initiated a discussion on the Mall on the HAIF. With that said, here's some more details:

• Eckerd stayed around for years, and finally closed up shop around 1998 when it moved to a free-standing location on
• There was a Family Dollar in the Mall in its final days, though I'm not sure if it was actually connected to the interior.
• In my first and last visit in summer 2000, we had just bought a cat and we were looking for pet supplies. Inside was a gloomy place with blue walls and I think some periphery (celestory?) windows. It reminded me a lot of the pool houses in the local pool. You had to turn right and go down a hallway to get to the last store, Animal World.
• In reality, this "forced right" was very likely caused by the fact that the east (to Wal-Mart) and the west (to the other stores) were sealed off.
• The senior John Culpepper lived to see the rise and fall of his creation: he passed away in December 2008.
• The mall was said to be the first "tilt-up construction" mall made. Apparently that's when they pour the concrete and hoist the wall up.
• Gold's Gym was actually in the strip mall portion of the mall (Hastings and others came in-line in the early 1990s)
• I think the description of the JCPenney divide is wrong. I think it was at first Food 4 Less THEN 50 Off Store and Jo-Ann Fabrics, THEN the current three-way split.
• The live theater complex came in-line in September 1997. Wards closed a few months later.
• The Wal-Mart left a nice labelscar for many years afterwards, even up to 2002.
• A five-and-dime called Kress (no, not Kresge) was also in the mall.
• A snow cone stand called Shivers later moved into the parking lot. It moved out around 2003 and spent about five years as a semi-successful store in College Station before biting the dust.
• The predecessor of the H-E-B was an H-E-B Pantry that was located elsewhere on Texas Avenue.

Definition of a "Pleasant Surprise"

2010-04-25T20:36:00.003-05:00

I was on a spring retreat this weekend with my church. It was rather interesting, and I'd love to describe more in detail of what went on. The blog title is derived from finding a Powerade vending machine for only 75¢ and getting two upon putting in my money. Other things included a skit involving Mario, Luigi, Hannah Montana, Russell (from Up), and a few other characters in a plot to stop WALL-E from building robotic emus that would take over the world (really, it's best you not ask. Or do. I like comments), mild frostbite from a helium tank experiment (also, don't ask), crickets, Homestar Runner quoting, Citadels, very loud snoring, and much more.

MISC. QUOTES FROM STUFF THAT WAS REFERENCED
Doh! A deer! A female deer! (The Simpsons)
Coach Z, you jerk! (Homestar Runner)
And you wagered Texas...with a dollar sign. (SNL)

I know that the Northwest Plaza project didn't get done, but stay tuned for it and more, on TWO WAY ROADS.

Northwest By Northwest

2010-04-23T16:10:00.003-05:00

My favorite Labelscar-covered Missouri dead mall is on its last legs and will almost certainly be demolished. I want to do something about this mall, so on Sunday we might see a commemoration of some sorts.

The Vegetarian Enigma

2010-04-22T16:15:00.004-05:00

Recently, I've become a little unsatisfied with my weight and lack of muscle tone. I bike and use my pull-up bar now and then, but I've been thinking that I can start something new: being a vegetarian once a week! I'd have a non-set day as to not miss any big-ticket items (bacon, burgers, steak, chicken) but even then, it would be a challenge.

One of the things that has really irritated me about vegetarianism (and veganism, which is another issue altogether) is it is associated with a certain group of people that seem to think that eating any sort of animal makes you some sort of monster. Plus the fact that most vegetarian type foods is simply to be abhorred. Nearly all vegetarian products are either bland or absolutely disgusting (plus, they're more expensive). And you never want to be branded as a vegetarian, because all your meat-is-okay people will hate you for it.

Very likely if I do decide to "go veg", I'll still eat cheese, eggs, meat by-products, yogurt, milk, and everything else. From there on it's mostly just fruits and vegetables.

I really don't know...but it may be worth a shot.