Technical Difficulties!

Remember that I said for Saturn Month I was going to stream whenever I was playing Saturn games? well there is a problem

The problem is that my Internet is not good enough to produce a stream that is worth watching.  Either the frame rate is crap, the video/audio quality is crap or the stream just flat out dies.  There doesn't seem to be much I can do about it, so until further notice, streaming is OFF!

However! This does not mean that Saturn month will be stopping, instead, I'll be filming my runs of these Saturn games and doing some sort of commentary too.  Kind of like a "lets play" I guess, but I'm not going to be good at these games, I'm just kind of showcasing them because their awesome.

So hopefully over the next couple of days you'll be seeing stuff like Nights: Into Dreams, Die Hard Arcade, Three Dirty Dwarfs and Super Puzzle Fighter.  There will be more but those games will be filling up the next few days.

It sucks that the actual "game" part of Saturn Month is being so delayed, but everything is ready now, so lets DO THIS!

Now That's Some Bullshit #8: Sega Saturn Battery

Due to some problems with my ability to stream it's a bullshit double bill today!  Although this round of bullshit is Saturn related so that it fits in with Saturn Month.

The Sega Saturn had quite a weird set of internals.  For example the thing had dual CPU's, and while this has a load of technical implications that I don't understand because I'm not a developer, what I do understand is it basically made the whole system a gigantic pain in the ass to develop games for.

But the people making the games were not the only ones who had to deal with strange shit going on inside the Saturn.  If you look at the above picture, you can see a little space where a battery goes in.  This was the battery backup system for the Saturn and whenever you saved a game, it would save here. 

Now it's not battery backups that are bullshit, but it's the fact that this thing isn't really mentioned inside the system manual (which most people don't fucking read anyway) and there is no indication for when the power is low and you have to replace it, it's a load of ass.

I mean, I got the Saturn when I was a kid, I didn't know how the fuck it was saving my games and my parents knew jack shit about gaming systems, so they weren't aware of it either.  It wasn't until a couple of years ago when I hooked up my old Saturn and played Panzer Dragoon Saga for about 4 hours that I discovered what to do.  I saved the game, which worked just fine, but when I returned the save had been erased because the battery inside the fucking thing had died.

Plus it was one of those really awkward flat batteries that were quite hard to get hold of in the area where I lived in the UK.  Most shops didn't stock anything outside of AA and AAA batteries.

So, if after Saturn Month you decide to go grab one at a flea market or off E-Bay or something, either get that cartridge saving thing that I could never find, or replace the damn battery! 

You have been warned!

Now That's Some Bullshit #7: Three Phone Network

The Three phone network is a piece of shit and I'm about to tell you why!

Seriously, fuck this company right in the ear, I have never seen a big company like this conduct business this poorly, it's fucking atrocious!

So the story is, that after moving to Japan, I kept my English phone going for a few months just in case of emergency, so that I could contact people if something went terribly wrong.  Now, everything is well and truly sorted and I have so many other methods of communication that I don't need the extra phone now, so I thought I'd cancel the contract in order to stop monthly payments leaving my bank account.

Never in a million fucking years did I think that this process of making them stop my phone contract would be this fucking hard.  First I rang up their cancellation team, I had to go through all their verification stuff and then I got to talk to someone.  This guy said that it would be cheaper to cancel the contract in March of next year and that I should do it then.  So I hung up, and did some mental arithmetic and realised that I was straight up being lied to.

So I rung them again, had to do all the same verification shit again, and got through to another guy.  This guy said he was doing the whole process of cancelling the account and then tells me to hold then line, and after 4 or 5 minutes of holding, the prick just hangs up me!

Ever so slightly miffed off at this, I ring AGAIN, do the verification AGAIN, and get through to some other prick, who tells me that "he's trying to sort it out" and makes me hold the line for 50 fucking goddamn minutes.  It's a good job I was calling through Skype because if I had done this whole thing from my phone, it would have cost me a fortune in international calls!

Now extremely pissed off, I call again and midway through the call on skype, I get a call on my English phone from a guy at 3.  He tells me he'll cancel the contract, but not before asking me all sort of bullshit questions that were none of his business such as "why are you cancelling" and "are you coming back to the UK" etc.  On top of all this, he was constantly trying to convince me not to cancel the damn thing and stay with Three, at which point I flew into a bit of a rage and told him that once he cancels my account, I'm boycotting his damn company.

Yeah, it may have been pointless to say it but I was mad, I wasn't thinking properly.   But what he then started to do, was tell me that "because I'm not happy with the solution I will have to wait 48 hours for a call from the head office"  This made me even more angry and the next 20 minutes of this international call on my fucking phone was spent just trying to make him do his goddamn job.

EVENTUALLY it got done, but that was the biggest ball ache I've ever had to deal with in my life.  So you know what, DON'T USE THREE! EVER!  They will fuck you over and laugh at you while they do it!  It may sound stupid and unrealistic but I would love nothing more than to see this shitty company burn to the ground, bunch of ass holes!

what a load of bullshit....

The Sega Saturn Bios!

Well this post is coming a little bit late for me.  I wanted to post this about 3 or 4 hours ago, but I was getting the run around from a phone company and got very delayed as well as very angry...more on that tomorrow, but for now, let's talk Saturn!

Since I've had quite a busy Saturday I've not really had much time to play any actual fucking games, so what I thought I'd talk about today is the BIOS screen that you get when you fire up the console with no disc in it.

This is a weird topic to blog about I know, but the Sega Saturn has one of the coolest, most bad ass BIOS screens of any console I've ever seen.  I'll post a video showing the screen but the whole thing is on this space backdrop with these cool looking controls and when I was a kid, this shit was amazing to see.  I had no idea what most of the buttons did at the time but I was flying through space and that was fucking cool!  Also if you put a music CD inside the Saturn then the 2 cubes on either side of your control panel would pulsate and change colour.

No console that I have played (which is most of 'em, I think) has had a BIOS screen this fucking awesome.  It may not seem like all that much now, but when I was a wee lad I loved fiddling with this damn thing!

Have a video!

I am very stupid

Well, this is kind of a semi update post I guess, I literally just realised that the e-mail listed on the side bar has been wrong all this time, the correct address is now listed so if you've sent me any mail, I didn't get it because I'm a massive wasteman, sorry, feel free to resend it though!

Also, tomorrow marks the start of Saturn Month! Prepare for awesome!

Free Game Friday: I wanna be the guy!

Ok well it's Friday and this week is a bit of a cop out because I've not really bothered to actually play any free games, so instead I'm going to talk about a game that everyone under the sun knows about.

If you don't know about this game, you either don't play games that much or you've been living under a rock for the last god knows how many years.  I Wanna Be The Guy is a stupidly hard platform that takes pleasure in ruining your day.  The game is very unfair and does nothing but troll the player from start to finish but the save points are well spaced out on the games standard difficulty (hard mode) so you always feel like you only need that one lucky run through in order to progress.

Considering the game is free it's pretty long too, you may get lost at a few points and failing that you'll most definitely get stuck somewhere.  Sure, when you beat the game that first time, a replay seems a lot easier but this game is awesome the first time you experience it.

Saying any more really would feel like a waste of space since I think everybody with an internet connection has at least heard of this one.  So if you've not played it, get some anti-rage pills and give it a spin, because you've been missing out.

The Sega Saturn!

Today we're going to talk about something I have very fond memories of, the Sega Saturn.  Holy fuck was this console AWESOME!

I don't remember how old I was when I first got my Saturn, but I was still pretty young.  All I remember is that I was going back home in the car with my family from....somewhere, and my dad just decided to randomly stop in an electronics store and pick one of these bad boys up.  I mean I was young and stupid at the time, I didn't have a fucking clue what it was until I got home and popped in Fighting Vipers!

This was probably the first game I ever played that was 3D and it blew my fucking mind.  You may think that this title has been long since forgotten and no one gives a shit but you'd be fucking WRONG!! If you've played Soul Calibur 4 (not sure if it's in 5) then then whole system where you could break off bits of armour, this is the game which did it first.  Hell, the game even had a feature to save your goddamn replays before anyone even gave a fucking about that kind of thing.

Despite all the fond memories of that game though, the Saturn is home to my personal favourite video game EVER! Which is Panzer Dragoon Saga

This game was fucking HUGE, it came on 4 discs and has one of the most interesting game worlds I think I've ever seen.  For anyone who doesn't know, Panzer Dragoon is a series of arcade type shooting games where you fly a dragon, but this game was an RPG spin off.  This game was so fucking good that a couple years later when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, I was disappointed with it because I didn't feel it stacked up to PDS.

The rest of it's library was pretty stellar too, things like NiGHTS and Die Hard Arcade just to name a couple kept me occupied for fucking hours although it did have a couple of crap games too, but what console doesn't, right? The Saturn was basically the point for me when gaming became more than just a thing to do to kill time, it became a full blown hobby, or passion, or whatever you want to call it.

It wasn't all wonderful though, the Saturn had some really awkward hardware so emulating it is a real bitch, and the console itself had a battery backup to save games, so if you don't replace that little bastard then your save games will delete themselves when you turn off the machine.

The last thing I want to say is that it had one of the best advertising campaigns I've ever seen in Japan, take a look.

Segata Sanshiro is a fucking bad ass, no wonder it did so well in Japan.  Shame that in the EU, it came out so close to the PS1 launch that no one gave a shit.  Oh well...

So to finish this post I want to announce Sega Saturn September!  Starting from September 1st, I'm going to make some kind of Saturn related post every day, so you may be seeing 2 or 3 posts daily during this month while I blog about other stuff as well.  Also, providing I can get the stream to work, I'll be streaming Saturn games whenever I have free time, I'll provide the link once it's set up.  So I hope you're ready to be educated on one of the best gaming machines EVER!