Kevin Muldoon

Sony today announced that the PlayStation 2 Will Be Available for Under $100. Although the PS2 is several years old, it is still a great system and there are dozens of A+ games available for it, most of which can be picked up on eBay at bargain prices.

I already have a PS2 but if I didn’t I’d be keen on picking one up at this price (I’m assuming the UK price will drop as well). If there’s anyone out there who finds the Xbox 360 or PS3 slightly above their price range, this would be a good option.

Link : PlayStation 2 Will Be Available for Under $100

One of the first things I did arriving home was purchase Street Fighter 4. I have been a Street Fighter fan since I was a kid. I first started playing Street Fighter 2 religiously with my friends at lunchtime during High School when I was about 11 or 12.

It proved to be great value for money as for 20 pence you could play for 20 minutes at least as we always got to the end bosses and more often than not, completed the game as well. A year or so later I was playing Street Fighter 2 on the Super Nintendo and soon after that I swapped about 5 games to get an imported version of Street Fighter 2 Turbo (It cost £75 from the market – Robbing Bastards!! haha). Since then I have purchased numerous versions of the game for other systems.

So I was really looking forward to Street Fighter 4. I’ve heard a few people saying they are disappointed with it but I actually think it’s a good game, except for one thing. The online part of the game sucks balls. This was the part of the game I was really looking forward to too.

There are two main problems with it.

The first is a problem with connection speed. The game tells you to only play players with a green connection bar, which signifies a good connection speed. My mate Malky said to never play against someone with less than a green bar but after 4 days of owning the game I have still not seen anyone else with a gree bar.

I have only seen yellow bars, which signifies an average connection or more common, a red bar, which signifies a poor connection. A lot of problems occur because of this. Mainly, the game is unresponsive. Half the time you do the command to do a specific move it just doesn’t do it, which makes the game frustrating and close to being unplayable.

The second main problem is actually finding a game. There seems to be very few players on the game and the ones which are one, for want of a better word, are assholes! I realised this the other day. I was playing a guy the other day who kept just running away and doing fireballs. I soon realised why he was doing this. The guy had setup the game a 30 second one round game. He was clearly doing this just to get cheap wins and increase his online ranking.

I can’t understand people like that. People who are more interested increasing some pointless rank instead of actually playing the game. Am I getting too old for gaming or is every other gamer concerned about these ranks online. I finally got a good game going today in an unranked game. We were both Akuma and the guy was beating me 2-1. After some close games he increased this to 4-1. I then demolished him 2 games in a row with near perfects every round and when it was 4-3 he left the game.

Damn kids!

I’m a big fan of retro video games. I’m also a big fan of people who are good with electronics and have a little too much time on their hands.

So I was intrigued to see that someone has put a Super Nintendo inside a toaster.

It’s quite impressive that the Nintoaster actually works. Wonder how much he would get for it on Ebay?

Here’s what the creator had to say about it :

You guessed it! A Super Nintendo crammed inside of a toaster.
Built from nothing more than a Super NES, a toaster, four different types of adhesives, magnets ripped from a broken hard drive, six orange LEDs, a bunch of resistors, plexiglass, and many many spare wires. Not too dissimilar from my previous toaster, only this time the temperature comtrol knob DOES serve a purpose!

If for some reason you feel the need to adjust the brightness of the orange LEDs, now you can. I’ll admit though, it does seem to take issue with my copy of Super Mario World 2. The game seems to randomly glitch and ultimately freeze at certain points, then lose my saved game. It could be my copy of the game, the length of wire used to relocate the cartridge slot or a combination of the two.

I’m not too concerned about it though because it was able to play every other game I tested in it flawlessly, including Super Metroid which I was able to play through from start to finish without issue.

Link : Super Nintoaster