Hal's Blogs

Here's a site with will transform a jpg of you to see what you will look like in 40 years.

Here's a chance to buy a GBA cart filled with award winning homebrewed GBA developed games. It's really cheap, too!

From Yahoo news, German experts are baffled over the mystery of exploding frogs.

More on Katamari 2, it has co-operative play!

From waxy.org, here's a Linux Tetris Game that calculates the worst possible bricks for you. Easy! No lines!

CNN.com has an article that scientists have determined what causes unpopped popcorn.

Yahoo News has an article on a preview of the new Superman. Click on the picture to get a larger view. All I can say is "yuck"!

From waxy.org... Admit it, this is probably,the best homemade arcade you've ever seen.

It's now been confirmed that there will be at least two versions of Xbox 360.

This japanese site has an interesting console battle website.

I found this on a message forum... Not sure of it's true origins, but I found it funny...

WHEN I WAS A KID... by unknown
When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious stories about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But....

Now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids
today don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves! There was no e-mail! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there. If you were lucky, and if it even made it there at all.

There were no MP3s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to go to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the
beginning and fuck it all up!

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to bribe some homeless slob to buy you a copy of Hustler at the 7-11! Those were your options!

We didn't have fancy shit like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and
somebody else called, they got a busy signal! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't know!!! You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Play station videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square! And your choice of colours was either black or white. You had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens; it was just one screen - forever! And you could never win, the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater, there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy sat in front of you, or some guy with a 'fro and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 6 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing you had to get off your ass and walk over to theTV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning...... That's right! We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards!

We didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove. Imagine that! If we wanted popcorn we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop crap and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy.

You're spoiled! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in the 80's!

Some pretty amazing graphics... the scoop is that EA will premier Madden 2006 this Saturday.

Gamespy has yet another preview of Will Wright's Spore game.

Yahoo news has the scoop that GameSwill buy EBX for $1.44 Billion. Wow, can we talk about monopoly? The only place for decent competition is now Walmart.

From waxy.org, a link where you can get classic arcade peg boards.

1UP.com has a nice summary of what we know will be on the next generation consoles.

From wierd but true department: "Internet / remote hunting". Log on to a website, and shoot real guns at wildlife. Are we finally blurring the line between virtual and real-life violence?

Here again, in a move to counter MSFT, Sony plans to launch PS3 3 hours before Microsoft does on MTV.

From Slashdot, Sony has released their MP3 Players. From the article, "But wait -- you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to run them through Sony's obfuscation software first.".... Of course, Slashdot has also reported that the obfuscating scheme has already been broken!

Here is a video of a choir performing various video game music!

Joystiq has a preview of upcoming E3 games.

Not unexpected, but Ubisoft announces plans for new Quebec studio. Vive la France!

Someone took the time to make a portable N64.

1UP.com has a history of videogame cartoons.

In a move to counter Sony, Microsoft plans to unveil the next Xbox on MTV May 12.

This blog has a collection of interesting things found on Google Satellite Maps.

Someone from MIT has invented an alarm clock that hides from you after you hit the snooze button.

The newest trailerfor 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is out.

From Gamesindustry.biz, it looks like PlayStation 3 will debut before Xbox 2 at E3.

From the Baltimore Sun, a man was arrested at Best Buy for trying to pay with $2 bills.

Slashdot has a link to the last remaining Pinball Wizard.

From Slashdot comes a story of some Star Wars fans waiting in line for the premier of "Sith" at the wrong theater!

Defective Yeti has a review of Doom: the board game.

Here's a really pretty looking 2D side-scrolling massively multiplayer online role-playing game (phew!)
It's called MapleStory, and is currently in free beta.

Google has addedsatellite imagery to its maps.

John Hughes is planning a 'Pretty In Pink' sequel.

From Slashdot comes this link to Executive Pong.