Memorabilia@theNEC or Geekfest2003

Memorabilia@theNEC or Geekfest2003

"I'll just pop over here and get my wookie signed".
Which is the kind of thing is overheard fairly often at sci/toy/memorabila/nerd conventions.
Which is where I was at the weekend
Which is handy as thats what todays blog is about

I was at , to give it its full title
Memorabilia@theNEC'03
Or as I refered to it in the pub the night before:Geekfest2003
A friend of my Girlfriend is a collector of all things Starwars related , and has been at a fair few of these before.So knowing I knew my stormtroopers from my sny Snootles, he recommended myself and heself went.
Now I love my SciFi , but I had a bad experience at a star trek convention in Wynns hotel a few years back (in that I went to a star trek convention in Wynns hotel), so I was a bit worried.
Thankfully the cringe factor wasnt too bad, yes there were strange people in home made uniforms , a forlorn looking bloke pushing a leaky dalek about , but it was actually fairly cool. On the way in there were the usual out of work actors dressed as vader and stormtroopers .These are kind of like those guys dressed as Mickey and Goofy in Disneyland , except for nerds, it feels very similar.
Only for some very shaky social barriers you wouldnt be able to move for happy geeks having their photo taken hugging Darth.
Anyway , getting inside the hall ( and to my RDS attending eyes its feckin' huge), things had the comforting look of a massive jumble sale , only with all the houseplants and minipops albums removed , and a massive donation of booty from forbidden planet.Also there was scattered around, a large amount of early eighties home computers and handhelds, which being the kind of guy I am gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling
Myself and herself circled the stalls a few times and eventually descended into an orgy.

What?

Sorry , wrong convention , we actually decended into an orgy of buying.The people working the stalls had same kindly manner as mental healthcare workers, theres possibly a parrallel here , I'm not sure.
I managed to nab a few star wars bits and bobs (tasteful stuff, the 12" talking Darth Vader is a work of art missus honest), a few transformers (seeing people 10 years my senior nearly welling to tears over getting a "jap-import-boxed-mint-Soundwave, with lazerbeak" made me feel more normal , well a bit ), oh and one of the tomy 3d games I mentioned in one of the earlier blogs (I love this ,but,God ! I can feel my eyesight going already).It occurred to me that I'd managed to buy a load of junk that I had gotten for Christmas as a kid, theres probably a fairly deep psychological reason for this, but I'll save that for my therapist.(I dont actually have a therapist , but I speak to my cat so I'll tell him and see what he comes up with , I dont think its working though as the best he's come out with for my rage issues is to make a kind of a ruaaarw noise then look to go out, still hes cheaper than the dog, anyway where was I ?)My Girlfriend nabbed a few bargains herself , best of all a singing christmas Homer , which , if it doesnt drive her workmates to a crazed mess by Xmas , means I owe her a tenner.
Refuelled on tea and limp sandwiches we met up with her workmate.
He's a really cool guy , and seems to know everyone there.
He's also a real collector , unlike myself who loves to paw his toys (oh-er) K. (no he's not from MIB, its his secret identity for this blog, anyway he'd probably think Mint-in-box first rather than men in black)is a keep it in the box and get another protective box to cover the first , kind of guy.
He has this great idea of getting star wars figures of whatever people are doing signings at the conventions and getting them to sign the boxes.
Now I'm not really into getting autographs , and I'm even less into it when you have to pay a tenner a pop per sign.It makes it kind of like prostitution.I'd no qualms about standing around gawking at them though , even if that gives it a bit like Zoo kind of feel .
I can tell you though that

a/ Tom Baker has snow white hair ,its that white
b/ the guy who played Jaws has a huge head
c/ the guy who plays the cat from red dwarf looks different in person
d/ theres a guy called derek who looks very,very,very,very,very,very much like Patrick Stewart.....But isnt.
e/ David Prowse does the letter D the same way I do (ok ok I make an exeception for autographs in his case as he's Darth Vader after all:))

There's a good bit more I could talk about , like the three hundred pound posters, wheelchair klingons ,skintight spiderman costumes "urrgh my eyes!!" ,asking a fat comic book guy look a like with a simpsons stall if he had a comic book guy figure :"no I do not", but I cant be arsed
Anyway after walking around some more we met a few of K's mates, who are nice people , did one more circuit and then made our excuses and left,we'd no money left at this stage and I'd kind of O'D on scifi.

On the way out I hugged a Stormtrooper, it was a good day.

Randomate!!

randomate!!

I've become a tiny bit disillusioned with gaming as of late
Not multiplayer games/lans whatever, but the kind of games I normally love where you spend months building up a character ala Final Fantasy or baldurs gate, or unlocking levels ala GTA.I've been feeling lately that its a kind of an false economy , as you spend all your spare time locked in a room away from loved ones, food,natural light ,TV whatever, and while you have that feeling of patiently creating something , at the end of the day you come away empty handed.At least Airfix freaks have something to hang from the ceiling!.
So I decided to jump back into a bit of "twitch gaming" forgoing all the planning and patience those games need and go back to the adrenaline pumping stuff that attracted me to gaming in the first place.
I was stuck waiting for my elderly washing machine to finish drying my work clothes (long story) late last night , so using my mates laptop in the kitchen and with a usb/playstation2 pad I fired up MAME.(mame is a program that lets you run old arcade games on your pc, www.zophar.net is a good place to start if you're interested, downloading games for it is a bit legally naughty if you dont own the original arcade machine though,so I must have a chat with my mate,anyway... )
I figured 20 minutes , using his collection of ROMs and the select random game option should work .I figured it might throw up some interesting results so I made some notes...

random game #1
Gradius III
aha after R-type , the twitch shooters of choice were the Gradius ones.Gradius was more famously known as "Nemesis" on this side of the pond.Fast, hard, and with just a little strategy amongst the bullet weaving, Gradius III `had you picking up pods dropped by vanquished baddies to allow you to "buy" upgrades on the way. Being fairly late in the series of games (the 4th despite the title..go figure)gradiusIII has a fairly slick opening showing each of its predecessors title screens with the year they were released superimposed over the graphics. On hitting start, I was eased in with a series of defenceless ships dropping pods everywhere.Yeehaw thought I a minute later as I had missiles, shields , twin lasers and speedups coming out my proverbials ,all in making me practically invulnerable, at least I thought I was.At this point I was introduced to enemies best described as "flaming flying furious sand doggies" who turned out to be, in fact, actually invunerable.This consequently reintroduced me to the fact that Japanese shooty games get a bit crap after you lose your first life, in that you restart halfway through the level, facing the heavily armoured scum of the universe , armed with a solitary gun of about the same offensive power as a straw and some chewed up bits of paper, as THE F£$kING DESIGNERS HAVE TAKEN AWAY EVERY POWERUP YOU'VE GOTTEN UP TO THIS POINT .Unless you've the reflexes of a five year old kid that’s been drip fed Red bull and sherbet the rest of the game tends to be a short and rather eventful affair, the events usually involving your ship running into something moving a lot faster than it is.Still fun while it lasted

So on to game two, straight out of the randomiser we have :

Random game #2
Toki!!
Hurray!! I actually played this one, manys a 10p went into the battered, ciggy burned,slightly ramshackle one in amusement city in Dame st. Unfortunately after a while I realised I wasn’t great at it and ended up playing "splatterhouse" the machine beside it instead, which wasn’t much of an improvement really , but I could get to the bit where you got the shotguns.Anyway Toki,is a game where a monkey tries to save his human girlfriend from a wizard or something (what do you mean unnatural activities!? the monkey started off as a bloke but got turned into a simian with some sort of curse....or something of that nature).Its a platformer so you can run ,jump, and as all monkeys do spit fireballs at bad guys.Easing into it I make good progress , past the zombie monkey, shooting the flying jellyfish , attacking the vine climbing crabs and taking out the simian powered, steam shooting flying Aztec stone block.I'd never realised how bloody weird this game was.Anyway I'm at the part where the learning curve has gone all vertical themed and I'm simultaneously being attacked by a spider, some flying spiky things and a mysterious spear throwing ghost , when I remember why I stopped playing this bloody thing.Eight seconds later and this monkeys gone to heaven and I'm presented with the continue screen which consists of toki's girly begging you to continue or she's going to get killed, jaysus , emotional blackmail or what!!
I think about firing up splatterhouse , but instead stick to my guns and random-ate:

random game #3
Clowns ,
an Atari black and white game that was created before the dawn of time and probably ran on something that babbage designed.Thankfully it doesn’t run , well the screen went white and I didn’t wait around to see if it was going to work...I was here for excitement , I was here for fun , I was here for.....

random game #3(again)
Quantum
looking like asteroids on hard drugs , Quantum proceeded to run , make the screen go purple and then quit me out to windows, ok third time lucky

random game #3(no.3)
" vs gong fight"

farking bizarre
its a very early boxing game, featuring two teeny tiny boxers , in huge ring , reffed by what appears to be the bloke off the Pringles box.The cpu controlled boxer appears to have scarfed down a lot of controlled substances before the fight as he appears to move at something close to lightspeed.I attempt to punch it out of him ala stallone vs dolph lundren in rocky III. Unfortunately my boxer is sticking to Marquis of Queensbury rules, or else the other guy got to the pile of illicit drugs first as I move very slowly indeed .As I rise, dazed, from the canvas for the second time in 10 seconds I notice that Pringles man sounds like a "speak&spell" with a Mexican accent, strange...

It’s over all to soon , and as I eat canvas , and Dolph goes off to have a celebratory meal of steroids, I randomise again

random game #4
pop flamer
rather than write about it , here's my exact notes, I think that my dodgy neck muscle medication had kicked in at this point
WTF!!
Pacman with mice and flamethrowers
drink juice for added flames... barney the dinosaur.... drugs!....people paid money for this.....pop the balloons!...oh I'm dead...this game is garbage...
a frog

random game 5
last game , after this I called it a day and hit the sack
Phozon
shockingly this is actually quiet good, I've never heard of it before though as it wasnt big outside japan.Its a change from the shooting and junping in that its a bit existential .You're a molecule , (high concept eh?) floating around a screen , and at the start of the level you're given the shape of a molecular string , bits of what look like Veruca Salts chewing gum from Willy Wonka then proceed to float around , with you collecting them to form the right shape, all the while being chased by a ballooney thing that looks like something from the old windows 95 "3d flowerbox" screensaver.Sounds shite , but is actually bloody great...