Category: Otaku

Space Crusher

I picked this up at a local con the other weekend:

It’s a Tandy/Radio Shack LCD game from 1985! “Penetrate Space City” the blurb says, fighting enemy spaceships and meteorites whilst enjoying ‘quick-action fire’ and ‘battle sound effects’.

Here’s the contents:

As you can see it’s in remarkable good condition as well as being complete in box. You’ll also note it has four-way control. What sort of game is this…?

A quick look at the manual revealed all:

It’s a Scramble clone! And – for an LCD game – a fairly sophisticated one at that. 

And yes, it still works perfectly:

The field scrolls to the left continuously and you have full control over your ship. The controls themselves are weird (Nintendo had debuted the d-pad by now so they should have ripped that off) but they are responsive and the game speed isn’t too fast.

Strangely everything is worth 2 points, and the game ends when you score 2000 (or run out of lives of course). I haven’t played it enough to see how long that would take, but my guess is easily more than one full loop.

As a kid I would have loved this game. As an adult I love the purity of it. A real gem of a find at a local con 🙂

The Stamp Collector (Part Three)

A short update in this series today, focusing on a tiny subset of my stamp collection: dinosaurs!

I bought the above a few years ago because I liked the stamps. You do too, since everyone loves dinosaurs. They turn up on stamps a lot, and going forward if I ever see a dinosaur stamp I’m buying it. For now though, my collection is scant…

The above is interesting. I purchased it from the National Stamp Museum in Washington DC. I remember it well: I walked there from our hotel by myself and wandered – unknowningly – through a ‘rough’ part of town. On a street corner as I was waiting to cross I witnessed on the other side of the street a man older than me brandish a gun at another and threaten to kill him. Both participants in this disagreement were hastily separated and calmed down by a large group of other people as I shuffled away at great speed. It was a surreal experience, not easily forgotten.

The stamp museum was exceptional though, and they had loads of covers like the one above for a song. I bought this one mostly because of the dinosaur, but looking at it now I’m intrigued by the three cancellations and the fact the one on the stamp uses roman numerals (II) for the month.

Bernard got me the above in Hong Kong and it’s another lovely example of dinosaurs. Looking online I see many more (including some fantastic diamond-shaped stamps from North Korea of all places), and they’re almost all good.

I’ll end by mentioning a bookmark I gave to Adam many years ago that was made from a strip of dinosaur stamps. I really liked that bookmark, and after gifting it tried in vain to find another. Alas I never did. If you ever see a dinosaur stamp bookmark – or actual dinosaur stamps – keep me in mind 🙂

Review: Game Poke

If you visit Japan, eventually you’ll see gashapon vending machines. They’re virtually everywhere, and a mind-boggling array of items can be obtained from them.

On our recent trip, one thing I got out of one such machine – for the princely sum of ¥500 – was this:

The ‘prizes’ are random, but this particular machine only had one thing inside. Here’s the contents:

And a detail of the device itself:

It’s a handheld video game called ‘Game Poke’! As you can see above, the instructions are in Japanese. But this is the Space Age and that’s hardly an obstacle any more:

Basic stuff really. The Rotate button allows us to ‘Bray the game’ (although it actually doesn’t), and the S/P button allows us to ‘game of the start or stop temporary’ (in actuality it does neither).

But who needs instructions?!? Batteries were included, so lets fire this thing up:

What’s this? This little Poke contains 99 games? The buttons allow you to select the different games, and there appears to be (up to?) 26 in total. However each game has variants as well, not to mention 99 (!) difficulties and a wide range of speeds. How much of these are actually different is difficult to tell, but there’s certainly an impressive amount of variety.

You can see it ‘fakes’ a larger display via a 10×20 pixel LCD display with status bar on the right. The LCD contrast is poor, with ‘off’ elements too visible, but there’s no way to reduce it.

The games themselves are, of course, abysmal. Consisting mostly of execrable pseudo clones of Atari 2600 Combat, unplayable ‘driving’ games and others that seem like pixels just randomly flickering on and off there’s just no way anyone would ever enjoy actually playing this thing.

But it does have (19 versions of) Tetris, and I’ll be generous and say they at least work. The device is speedy and the buttons are responsive and it even has a beeper for sound, but it’s extremely tiny and as a result very hard to control.

That’s a closeup of the status bar, which strangely features an awful caricature of a small Asian child (man?) who flaps his hands up and down endlessly while the unit is on. The scores themselves are virtually meaningless since it always and only increments by 100 regardless of game or what you do. I doubt anyone has ever cared about a score they achieved on this device.

Overall, to no-ones surprise – this is a terrible game machine. ‘One for the collection’, as they say, this will be stashed inside a box never to see daylight ever again 🙂

(Intriguingly I ended up seeing ‘Game Poke’ gashapon in a few places in Japan. On one of them a note was attached to the front explaining in English and Japanese that only one in five of the devices actually worked. The others apparently were fakes with stickers on their screens and intended solely as keychains. It seems therefore I got lucky?)