Microsoft’s new “Origami” handheld reminded me of something I already own…

Back in, oh, 1995 or so, Sega made this crazy love child of a Game Gear and a Genesis. It’s a portable handheld gaming system, but you’ll never find any Nomad carts around no matter how hard you look. Why? Because this baby plays Genesis games!

That’s right, there’s a slot in the top built just for a Genesis cartridge, and all you have to do is slide one of those in there (say NBA Jam, the best basketball game ever), and you’re ready to rock and roll. You can see, there’s the full six buttons on there, your regular Start and Select buttons, and even a D-pad that the DS wishes it could someday have. The Nomad is a nice little piece of hardware, and Sega was pretty nice to customers with it, because it released with a whole library of games available already– the Genesis games. It’s as if Nintendo released a DS that could play Gamecube games!

What’s that on the bottom? Yup, it’s a second controller port! The Nomad was a multiplayer handheld before they ever came up with wireless networking. You could play it yourself, or hook in a second controller and you and your friend could hover around the little three inch screen. Let’s see the Origami do something like that!

But that’s not even the best part of the Nomad…

On top of the unit, there’s a little port to plug in a video cord! You can plug this thing right into your TV, and play it on the big screen! Basically, with the Genesis compatibility, the second controller port, and the video out, this thing was just a portable Genesis. It did come with a giant battery pack that holds six AA batteries, but even hauling that hunk of junk around only got you about an hour and half of playtime.

No wonder, then, that as cool as the Nomad was, it was just a little bit before its time. Sales faltered in the United States, and the thing was never even released in Europe or Japan. I got this one when I worked at Gamestop for the low, low price of $25, and all the other components are all Genesis parts I picked up a while ago.

But just because the Nomad’s old doesn’t mean it isn’t fun! I’ve got the famous Sega 6Pack to play with (including Sonic, Golden Axe, and Streets of Rage), along with the games above, and one of the best Genesis games ever made…

Before World of Warcraft was a twinkle in Blizzard’s eye, and even before they came up with the idea for a console version of Starcraft: Ghost, they made this game: The Lost Vikings. It’s an amazing game– the idea is that three vikings have been kidnapped by aliens, and you’re charged with getting them out of the spaceship and home. Each one has a different power– the red one is athletic and can run and jump, the yellow one is the fighter, and the one with the big beard is a shieldholder, and can block attacks and obstacles.

Look at ‘em! It’s really a classic game. I think I saw it released for GBA at one point, but if you’re cool enough (ahem) to have a Nomad at home, it’s the only way to go.

Sega Nomad: The best handheld console ever!

New Jersey is trying to pass a bill that would require those who run internet forums, including comment pages of blogs, to get a legit name and address for everyone who posts there, effectively outlawing anonymous internet posting. Can you imagine how different things would be if this actually worked?

Blog Post: What Do You Think of the iPod Hi-Fi?

Hey guys, have you seen this new home stereo system from Apple? It’s called the “iPod Hi-Fi,” and it’s basically a boombox that you plug your ipod into. Does Apple really think anyone will buy this? What do you think? Leave a message in the comments section below!

Comments:

Fred Martin, 1592 S. Greenwood, posts:

I think it’s an interesting choice for Apple. I don’t think many people who own ipods are still looking for stereo system speakers, but you never know.

Jose Trent, 394 Winston St., posts:

I disagree, Fred. Lots of the people who have iPods are exactly the type of people who would spend money on something else like this. I won’t be buying it, but I think it will find the audience Apple wants it to.

Joseph Shower, 44A Westbrook Rd., posts:

APPLE sux0rs! u lusers would buy aplpe crap, u fanbois!!!11 linux rul3s, apple dr00ls!!

Fred Martin, 1592 S. Greenwood, posts:

Joseph Shower? Are you the Joseph Shower from Maplewood High School? My girlfriend used to know you, and I remember you were at this barbeque one time with us, and you were listening to your iPod! What a hypocrite.

Joseph Shower, 44A Westbrook Rd., posts:

Whoops. Yes, that was me. I do own an iPod, and I use it. I admit, I was just doing a little bit of trolling. My apologies to everyone on the board. Fred, is your girlfriend’s name Susan? How is she doing? We should get together sometime.

Fred Martin, 1592 S. Greenwood, posts:

Hey Joe, no problem. Susan’s doing great, you’re right, we should get together some time.

Ricky Adams, 25495 W. Brynbrook Ave., posts:

Great blog post. Try my website: http://cialis.cu!!!!!!@@@@@@

David Harrison, 39 Deer Creek Ln., posts:

Hey! I think my kid knows a Ricky Adams. If you’re that kid, Ricky, your mother will be hearing from me.

Sharon Adams, 25495 W. Brynbrook Ave., posts:

Hello all, and David. I must apologize for my son. I had no idea that he was running these blog spamming programs on our computer. I have suspended him from computer use for the next three months. Thank you for informing me, and I again apologize for his comment spam.

Also, I think the iPod is a great idea! I bought one for my niece– she loves her iPod, and listens to it all the time!

Steve Jobs, 1 Infinite Loop, posts:

I think the iPod Hi-Fi is a terrific innovation in music! It lets you fill your home with sound, not stereo parts! And it lets your music sit in your hand, not in countless CD cases. The Universal Dock, built into the iPod Hi-Fi, fits all current iPods, and so I think anyone with an iPod would love to have one of these.

Steve Jobs, 1 Infinite Loop, posts:

Oh crap. Is this blog based in New Jersey? I thought I was posting anonymously. To the creator of this blog: if you delete this thread and never tell anyone about this, I’ll give you a new iPod AV when they come out.

I’ll have you know that my Oscar predictions yesterday were almost dead on. Which is pretty much the first time that’s ever happened.

But I was wrong about something. A reader writes that Matt Dillion isn’t actually on Entourage. “That’s his brother Kevin,” she says. Oh well, can’t win them all.

Also, we have a brand new episode of Happy Time up, in which I talk all about the Oscars. I planned to write something else about Crash winning tonight, but I talked about it so much on the show, that all I have for you is what’s below. Go listen to the podcast.

The truth is that I stopped caring about the Oscars a long time ago, right around the time that Saving Private Ryan lost to Shakespeare in Love (which I liked, but come on. “Earn this”? classic). But I keep doing this every year, and since I’m going to an Oscar party on Sunday, I figured I might as well go ahead and firm up my choices.

Oscar Predictions 2006

Best Picture

Should win: Crash was the only one I actually saw, but it definitely shouldn’t win.

Will win: Crash. Did I mention I hate the Oscars?

Best Actor

Should win: Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The guy’s great and he seems down to earth. As down to earth as movie actors come, anyway.

Will win: Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Best Actress

Should win: Felicity Huffman. Though I’d prefer to forget about that show about the wives of the houses (have you heard of it?), I’ve liked her a lot ever since Sports Night. And she’s married to William H. Macy, which means she deserves some kind of prize.

Will win: I have weird visions of Keira Knightley winning, but I’m thinking Reese Witherspoon

Best Supporting Actor

Should win: George Clooney. Syriana should be in many more places than it is.

Will win: George Clooney. If Matt Dillion wins, I don’t know what I’ll do. He’s not even the best actor on Entourage (shout out to the Pivster!)

Best Supporting Actress

Should win: I love Rachel Weisz, and I think she should win an Oscar. Just not for The Constant Gardener.

Will win: Ebert says Amy Adams. And, after last year, I tend to follow Ebert.

Best Director

Should win: Ang Lee. I’ve discovered Ang Lee flips on and off with great regularity. He does Eat Drink Man Woman (not bad), then he does Sense and Sensibility (meh). He does The Ice Storm (great), and then he does Ride with the Devil (bad). He does Crouching Tiger (awesome), and then he does Hulk (self explanatory). Now, he’s done Brokeback Mountain– whatever his next movie is will really, really suck.

Will win: Ang Lee

Best Animated Film

Should win: No Pixar movie this year? Oh man, this will be hard then. Howl’s Moving Castle was good but a rerelease. That leaves the wonderful…

Will win: Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the WereRabbit

Best Foreign Film

Should win: Once again, I haven’t seen any of them.

Will win: Ebert says Totsi. I’ve heard it’s good.

Best Documentary

Should win: I share Ebert’s lament that Grizzly Man didn’t even make the nominees. I haven’t seen it or anything yet, but it is in my queue! And I heard it’s terrific.

Will win: Murderball

Best Original Screenplay

Should win: Syriana deserves every single award it can get. This screenplay was much bigger and more important than even the movie it ended up being. Syriana should win, because it might be the most important American narrative movie of the past five years.

Will win: Oh right, this is Hollywood we’re talking about. Crash, that piece of cliched and unbelievable tripe, will win. It’s not even Paul Haggis’ best work!

Best Adapted Screenplay

Should win: A History of Violence was excellent. The Constant Gardener won’t win, but it was great.

Will win: Some flick about gay cowboys. It’s obscure, you probably haven’t heard of it.

When I was eight, Grampa told me the chariots would carry him away, just like Elijah. He told us how there would be fire and a whirlwhind out of the sky, and the prophet would come down in a chariot of flaming gold with horses of molten brass, and it would carry him over a golden road straight up to heaven. Whenever my mother heard him talking like that, she told him not to teach me such things because I was only a kid. But when she turned away, Grampa would wink at me, and then I knew it was true.

When I was ten, Grampa had to settle for a silver chariot– a wheelchair. “This is nothing,” he would tell me. “Wait until you see what Elijah’s got for me. That’s riding in style.” But Grampa looked older and weaker to me. Why, I wondered to myself at night, would Elijah want him?

When I was in high school, Grampa and I didn’t talk much. Grampa didn’t talk to anybody much, except for a little muttering every once in a while. We never talked about the chariot story, but I had long abandoned it as the ramblings of an old man. I loved my grandfather, but my friends were more important to me. Sometimes, Grampa would look at me, and I would see the golden chariot look in his eyes, and know he was thinking about Elijah and those horses. But we never spoke about it. And I worried about what really would happen to him.

I went away to college in a chariot of my own– a Greyhound bus to State. I majored in Computer Science, and learned what they were really doing with minerals like gold and silicon. I wondered what Grampa would think of the chariots they were building. I wondered if his heaven was a place technology was building for us.

On the phone, I heard from my mother that Grampa was getting worse. He fell once, had a stroke another time. He had a nurse that came to our house and took care of him, but things didn’t look good. She didn’t know how soon, just not good.

When I was home once during college, I heard something moving the hallway. I got up and saw nothing in the middle of the night. I walked out past Grampa’s room, where his oxygen machine was running, and into the living room. Outside, through the porch doors, I saw a weird orange glow on the porch outside. I walked toward the doors to see what was on the other side, when one of them slid open.

It was Grampa. The glow reflected off of his face, and whatever gave it off was just outside of my view. I didn’t think to ask Grampa what he was doing out of bed. Or why he was standing without his walker or wheelchair.

“He’s here, boy,” he said. “I told you so. Have a good one.” And then he winked at me and smiled. It was like I was eight all over again.

Grampa walked off into the glow, and there was a flash before I could look and see what was there. When I finally got a look, of course there was nothing.

The next morning, they said he’d gone peacefully in the middle of the night. The funeral was later that week, and everyone said he’d lived a good life. They said he’d passed on.

But only I knew where he’d passed on to. And how exactly he got there.

IGN posted a Top Ten of the best videogame weapons of all time, and I couldn’t believe they got things so wrong. (thanks, Josh, for input)

The Real Top Ten Videogame Weapons of All Time

Honorable Mention: Zerglings – The easiest, cheapest, most n00berific “weapon” in Starcraft is so popular it has spawned a whole new verb. Anytime you’re rushed by large numbers of small annoyances, whether in WoW or RoN, you’ve been zerged.

10. Buster Sword – Silly looking, but powerful, and perfect for the future setting of what many argue is the best Final Fantasy ever. Me, I like Final Fantasy VI (or 3, if you’re not as cool as I am), but I did love playing the classic story of Cloud and his rebels. You need a big sword to take down Sephiroth, and Cloud had it.

9. Fireballs – Mario’s hands and feet were powerful weapons in themselves, but you were never so powerful as when you had eaten the flashing flower. The best was when you brought fire into the water levels, and were able to grill you up some fish. Until you touched one, that is. That shrinking sound still gives me nightmares.

8. Red Shell – There is almost no greater joy in the universe than using a red shell in Mario Kart to take out an opponent right before you sneak ahead of them and cross the finish line.

7. RCP-90, The Klobb – Everyone loved the RCP-90 in Goldeneye, but I was a big fan of the Klobb. Not because it was a good weapon or anything (the aiming was terrible, and it was weaksauce), but because whenever I killed someone with it, I could yell “It’s Klobberin’ time!”

6. MP5, AWP – The MP5, most have learned, is the cheapest, most reliable weapon you can pick up in CounterStrike. No matter how much your team sucks, you can still afford to do some damage with it. But no weapon is more cursed (and loved by AWPing bastards) than the most expensive and powerful sniper rifle in the game.

5. Snarks – Even disregarding CS, Half-Life was home to some terrific weapons. The Crowbar could very well have made an appearance on this list, as could have the RPG or the laser mines (which could have appeared here for Goldeneye, come to think of it). But no weapon was as charming or as hilarious in HL as the Snark. It had the best animation, too– it tried to bite you even as you held it. And it gave rise to one of the most fun mods ever, Snark Wars.

4. Gravity Gun – Sure, the Havoc physics engine in HL2 was cool, but you hadn’t seen nothing until you picked up the gun (a.k.a. the “Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator”) and played catch with Dog. And after that, the game wasn’t so much a war against the Combine as a set of objects you could pick up and throw around. After the gun gets infused with Dark Energy, it’s all over but the tossing.

3. The Redeemer – Whenever I played an Unreal Tournament level with the Redeemer in it, I usually spent a good deal of time just trying to get this thing, and fly it remotely into the enemy’s faces. And as fun as the gun itself was, I had even more fun playing with the Dr. Strangelove mod– a mod that lets you ride that rocket directly into the supernova sized explosion that comes with it.

2. The Chainsaw – Flashback to around 1986. I’m just a kid, and I’m over at my friend’s house on his computer. “It’s a computer game called Doom,” he tells me. “And you can hit these guys with a chainsaw!” I didn’t believe it until I saw it.

1. The BFG9000 – But no weapon in videogames has been as popular or caused as much amazement as the ol’ BFG. Why is it so popular? Could it be the weird and wonderful model for it? Or maybe the crazy green plasma it decimates a room with? Here’s the description from Wikipedia for what a BFG actually does:

When firing the BFG9000, there is a pause of exactly 6/7 of a second (about 857 milliseconds) before a green plasma ball is ejected. If the plasma ball hits a solid object, it explodes and causes between 100 and 800 points of damage on that object. After a further pause of exactly 16/35 of a second (about 457 milliseconds), blast damage is calculated: 40 invisible rays are emitted by the player in a cone-shaped area (about 45° half-angle) in the direction the plasma ball was fired (if the player has turned around, the direction of the blast damage rays don’t change – they are still traced in the direction of firing of the original plasma ball; if he has moved around, their origin changes). Each ray causes 49 to 87 damage points if it hits a solid object. Therefore the minimal damage of the weapon is 49 points of damage (if an object is hit by one ray and not the plasma ball) and hypothetical maximal damage of the weapon is 800 + (40 × 87) = 4280 points of damage (if the plasma ball hits an object for full damage and all 40 rays also hit the object for full damage). Although that much damage can never actually be inflicted due to the periodicity of the simplistic pseudorandom number generator used by the Doom engine, damage in the 3000+ hit points range is common enough for the weapon to be used to kill a Spider Mastermind in one shot during assorted speedruns.

Just in case that doesn’t make any sense to you at all, here’s the real appeal of the BFG, the reason why, after however many years, any gamer will tell you it’s the best weapon in gaming:

It’s just a really Big F***in’ Gun.