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...where they had a holographic-like display (although not a true holograph, but it was the early nineties, so who knew any better). the gameplay was pretty flaky since they used taped actors and if you didn't move your joystick the right way, you're screwed (a la Dragon's Lair).

Here is a link to it.

Anyone remember "Hey good lookin we'll be back later to pick you up"??? Mr. Microphone did this 3 decades ago, albeit using AM instead of FM...

Someone should have pointed out the first dozen times this exact same idea was done in a game. Maybe they would have gotten over it a decade ago.

How can you have Giant Robot Week without Johnny Sokko and His Giant Robot?

Send in Captain Quark.

Also of mention was the saturday morning cartoon and the merchandice. Looks like a franchise to me.

Also of mention was the saturday morning cartoon and the merchandice. Looks like a franchise to me.

I've seen these on and off for two decades.... Aqua Net is a really good/cheap fuel for them.

Bootlegging wasn't a crime in the 70s? Don't you remember that episode of "What's Happening?" where Rerun hides the (enormous) cassette recorder in his jacket to bootleg the Doobie Brothers concert ? He got cold busted!

For $2000 down, $50/month, and a bit of dedication, anyone can expand their fan base, make high-quality albums, advertise, get gigs, and make money as a musician.

From The Brobdingnagian Bards website on their "About Us" page:

You'll even find us in an office fixing your computer.

Yep, sounds like they are making lots of money to me.

Pro-quality digital audio board: $250

Sure, and I can create "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" on my iMac. I'm not arguing that you can't record, produce, and release music cheaply. I'm arguing that you can't produce "high-quality albums", "get gigs" that pay enough to live comfortably on, or "make money" without a professional studio. If you don't like the recording company's politics, just buy the studio time yourself and work with a professional to do the final remastering. Now you have high quality audio that you can advertise and distribute however you want. But please, please, stop spewing this crap onto the web that sounds like it was recorded via Mr. Microphone or Fisher Price

Slightly Askew -- pining for the fjords

You may be wondering why Snood is so much more popular than the game it poorly rips off, Bust-a-Move (aka Puzzle Bobble). I mean, BaM was around for years, appeared on many more systems, enhanced the gameplay over the generations, always had multiplayer , etc, etc. So why Snood?

Simple: Snood was (is?) available in the America Online games section.

Yep, we have another thing to curse the "drooling AOL hordes" for - popularizing an inferior puzzle rip-off. Oh, and for a good non-spyware-riddled version, try Popcap.com's Dynomite, or at least go out and one of the many versions of Bust-a-Move (not all versions listed).

Ok to follow the theme. Pedaling to the oldies:

Joust would lend itself quite well to the pedal-for-your-life concept.

Now, if somebody would just brew up an easy interface for MAME, we'd be set!

Only if the game is Paperboy.

Wow, it was prescient for the late-1950s cartoon series Ruff and Ready to have robots from Munimula, which was aluminum spelled backwards. Now you've got me wondering why people call Reynolds Wrap tinfoil when it's really made out of aluminum. Was there an earlier product actually made out of tin?

Same as the user doesn't want to see how a car works. The user only wants to use the car, and to be spared the gory details.

And it's thinking like that which leads to Customer Service calls asking why the change they just submitted at your web page wasn't instantly implemented in their account. If they understood how your system works (their request is queued up along with those of hundreds of other customers, and will be processed -- in order received -- in a few minutes) they probably wouldn't call.

Probably because they don't fall down. Some people remember.

I typed in "erector set" in Google and naturally got dozens of hits for sexual dysfunction.

Check out Erector World. And for nostalgic toy types generally, there's Yesterday Land.

I don't know about this vibrating floor thing. I didn't ever work out to hot form my Electric Football game I had when I was younger. The vibrating floor seem to make them all run ut of bounds and fall over all the time. The fact that the same technique works on Seniors is really mind boggling.

The only difference: They have domino robots.

I think it's a play on words with that old educational show 3-2-1 Contact.

there's a blurb here

And I can go back to using server-side image maps instead of client-side! After all, that still doesn't make navigation impossible: blind users will just have to plug in all the possible x,y coordinates to find all the links.

All the information of the web and all the fun of the game of Battleship rolled into one!

I thought I was the only one to remember the Far Out Space Nuts.

Apparently, I was wrong.

>GNU is a stupid-sounding name to begin with, and
>their made-up pronunciation (Guh-New) is
>counterintuitive and only makes their name even
>less attractive.

It's only counterintuitive if you didn't grow up watching the Great Space Coaster

Matt

From the Tango article:

UPDATE 9/5/01: Our U.S. utility patent case for an "Ultra-Narrow Automobile Stabilized With Ballast" has just been allowed. International patent applications are in progress

Reminds me of Weeble Wobbles. "They weeble and they wobble but they don't fall down!"

So if it gets hit by a truck and goes flying for fifty feet, will it land right-side up?

-ez

That seems way too hot, more that 400 degrees , the flash point
of paraffin is 450, the same as for paper.

Wham-o made theirs with silicone. Here
is a nice page that goes into the details

tell that to my Easy-Bake Oven :) pshaw! silly convection!

That is the game I missed.

My brother and I used to play these games to settle everything from arguments to where to head out on Friday nights...

Ahh, the people at the local grocery knew us well while their Defender and Stargate machines worked....

The fabric contains electronic wires and tiny capsules of a special thermochromatic ink that get darker or lighter as they are heated or cooled.

hehehe...just like HyperColor shirts, except it's electronic.

"You'll never look at an apple tree again!"

Convatec (a Bristol Meyers Squibb company) had this same sort of vending machine in their main lobby for more than 5 years now. You insert money, press the corresponding button and a mechanical hand picks out the item and gives it to you. So its not even new to the USA, its just new to slashdot.

Yeah, I've seen those here in too. Only difference is there's a little joystick to manueveur the hand and you pick out the item. I think all of the ones here are broke though, because they always drop the item before I can get it to the door.

The human brain burns, by calculation, about 20 watts of power.

The Pentium 4 does 75 watts. W.T.F.

For cryin' out loud--instead of some water cooling, why don't take advantage of the inferno and add a damn Easy-Bake Oven as an upgrade? I can make some brownies while I'm blowing the brownies out of some fragbait in Unreal Tournament.

Or... we're not from the US and therefore didn't share the same sort of childhood experiences as you... would you mind explaining to those of us who don't understand you, exactly what you're talking about?

Sorry, I figured "Cootie" must already have been in every country in every language since it was so ubiquitous when I was five years old... or at least it seemed that way when I was five.

Try these:
YesterdayLand Toys, with pictures
Instructions for the game
and Milton Bradley's product page.

oh my god! Thanks for posting that pic! That really brings back memories -- I had a Blip game too -- was a blast until it was played so much that the mechanicals inside broke and the ball stopped moving.
After that, the "cool" toy was a handheld LED football game.
Having one of those earned you instant friends and kept the jocks from beating you up and stealing your lunch money!

Robot boxing has been around since the 1960s.

Damn. Now you've made me all nostalgic. Anyone here remember "World Beyond" in Phoenix, AZ in the summers on Saturday morning? They had great trashy sci-fi movies and a ZZ Top guitar riff for intro music? Anyone remember Edmus Scary? Had AC/DC's "Back in Black" for a doorbell?

Damn again. Sometimes I miss being a kid. Then I remember how badly 9th grade sucked and I get over it.

-B

I think I saw something like that years ago on an episode of The Bloodhound Gang.

Don't you think it's only a matter of time until advertisers start putting commercials inside TV shows, a la The Truman Show? I never thought that movie was all that great, but I'll never forget that part where Laura Linney (Truman's "wife") starts advertising for some product right in the middle of the show. Sure, it's ridiculous, but how far are we from this? Not very if you ask me. Product placement in movies (and TV shows, I'm sure) play a huge part nowadays, and their part will only increase as time goes by.

Another thing that's related to this -- a while ago, I bought a box of Sugar Crisp cereal, and on the back there was some storyboard-like comic about how Sugar Bear was going to steal Sugar Crisps from Granny Goodwitch. Then there was some dude named Sugar Crisp Crook who was into pilfering this cereal from Sugar Bear...and the more I read, the more I realized this sounded like a TV cartoon, albeit a bad one. A quick search on Google yielded the results I'd expected -- it was indeed a part of a TV show called Linus the Lionhearted. Check out the quote on this website:

Linus the Lionhearted was created in a time when the line between commercials and programs had not yet clearly been defined.

Well, guess what...if commercials are not going to be watched, the line will once again be crossed and re-crossed. Just because we've always watched commercials for "free" TV doesn't mean it'll continue to be this way.

- SJW

Sounds a lot like A.P.B. -- except that the chases were the main part of the game. Ah, the late 1980s were a much more innocent time :)

Yes, you too can have a T-shirt like those worn on The Shirt Tales!

I went to my sister's HS graduation, and the principal gave his speech... he used the word epitome, but pronounced it "epi-tome" instead of "e-pit-o-me". And that's one of those words I consider a classic high-school-english-paper word. Of course, this was about the time Ernest P. Worrell was pronoucing the word that way, and it took me a little bit to figure out that there were two words, but then again I wasn't the principal.

Thanks for the heads up on dachshund -- you just saved me some future embarassement! So far in my life I (luckily) haven't to spell either doxen or pronouce dachshund.

The definitive answer lies here

Admittedly, that was a runaway planet travelling between the earth and the moon - but a case could me made for a large enough asteroid hitting the moon causing an equivilent amount of cosmic destruction, though perhaps the exact increase of mutations/wizards would differ.

Rock'em Sock'em Robots, baby!

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned Quincy, M.E. as one of the precursors to CSI. As far as I can recall, Quincy represented the first "detective" on television to use medical and forensic techniques to solve crimes.

By the way -- No mention of Quincy would be complete without a reference to his sidekick, Sam Fujiyama, played by Robert Ito.

As a nation, we seemed to survive the breakup of New Kids on the Block fairly well. (You can be judge of whether the band members survived intact or not.)

A-men. I loved my Tinkertoys, and Erector sets, and Lego Technics, and Capsela! Loved Capsela. Mostly because it was about the only electrical toy you could play with in the bathtub, even though the capsules and connectors tended to get friction-welded together over time. :-) Flunked out of engineering school anyway, though.

I, Robot

You're wrong.

This is the first 3D game, it's not first person, but it does use rendered polygons for everything. Unless a 3D game means it has to be first person, of course...

Note also that there were funky TRON toys and a TRON video game.

Don't make fun of Emmy award winning retard Chris Burke. His moving role as Corky on ABC's Life Goes On has won the accolades of his peers both in Hollywood and in the Retard Sanitorium.

What is a 'virtual child'?

Take manga, for example, or hentai. Most of the characters in most Japanese animation have characteristics that look to westerners child-like. Does that make all sexually explicit manga child pornography? Is this child pornography [warning: explicit]? Should it be banned?

Then, how do you tell by looking at a picture how old the subject is? Sure, yes, you can (almost always) tell the difference between a five year old and a fifty year old, but can you always tell the difference between a fifteen year old and a twenty-five year old, even in real life? If you can't in real life, how can you in drawings?

What about fantasy worlds in which people change ages? Take, for example, Freaky Friday, in which a mother and child exchange bodies for a day. If the 'mother' character (supposedly actually an adult but in a child's body) had had sex, would that be child porn? If the 'daughter' character (supposedly actually a child but in an adult body) had had sex, wouold that be child sex?