......not dead yet

raiders will return....
...er probably

the Warcraft diaries :Entry ..oooh what number are we on now , lets say 1337

So as I may have mentioned earlier - the World of Warcraft thing has gradually slipped from being a videogame to achieving "hobby status".
This is not a "Bad Thing" as such, although as I've said before , at this level EVERYTHING is a huge time sink.I manage 2 nights a week - and maybe a spare hour or two at the weekend - about 10 hours of play a week .
This makes me a "casual" player.
You do not want to know the amount of hours involved in being a "hardcore" player,trust me.
I'm also playing a support character - a healer - these guys are basically like ,well the quickest analogy I can think of would be a goalkeeper in soccer.Its a gloryless, unthanked role, but its impossble to play with out one.
The Guild (Ronin and for those who havent been following up to now , a guild is like a large team of players), has just emerged from a little bit of a Dr. Who style regeneration.We've got a large number of high level players , and now have a hirearchy of "leaders" looking after what each class of player should be doing , helping out etc.We've also got the Vent (a voice over ip chat thing) server set up and running well now.

I know this as I look after it (and actually enjoy doing it!) .I've come to regard most of the guys in the guild as mates , and being able to chat real time with them ingame is great.
Anyway thats enough about WoW just now, more important though is the revolutionary stride s I made in gaming , just a few weeks ago ...yes folks I achieved the dream , I hooked up a Dancemat to a machine running track n' field(an old retro bash the buttons olympics game)!

more here (cos I cant be arsed cut and pasting)

Slapfighting with gauntlets

Ok so it didn't take me till September , but it did take a while.
The obligatory World of Warcraft bit ..
Warcraft continues to eat up all my spare time ...At this stage I'm looking on it more as a hobby than a game.I've managed to level my priest up to 58 out of a possible 60, so I'm nearly there.
I'm probably going to try and get through those few levels as quickly as I can and then take a break for a few weeks, and try something else, like Oblivion(the game , not y'know suicide or anything)
My guild have moved to their own ventrillo server (as we were annoying the hell out of the Lads we had borrowed it from, sorry again about that ) , and we do a lot of dungeon runs and general malarky together with it .Great crack altogether..

the bit where I prattle on about old gaming
I've also managed to increase the retro collection a bit ,the tally now stands at Atari 2600 (the woodpanel one) Spectrum 48k, NES,Mastersystem,SNES,Megadrive(II),Atari ST ,Playstation,N64,(I've 4 actually),Dreamcast..and not retro but competing for shelf space - PS2,and Gamecube.
Also I've a large ball of tangled up cables and a partially hidden TV.
And about 30 controllers.
10 of them PSX ones.


Gauntlet:7 sorrows:

You're making a new addition to the revitalised gauntlet series of games.
Do you?
a. stick to the format of shooting the bad guys from far away , finding you way around laberyinthian levels,grabbing keys to open doors and chests, stealing food and potions from your mates, all wrapped up in a cartoony pleasing graphical style .
or b. Ditch most of the shooting for a dodgy combo melee combat style ,get rid of the potions, have linear levels , and wrap the whole thing up in a cod dramatic "story line" .
Oh and it has static intro screens which seem to consist of panning around a half finished drawing of the 4 warriors,which was the kind of shite people put up with on the Atari ST ten years ago , but is inexcusable on a modern game.It just makes the game look unfinished (which in fairness I half suspect it is)
Basically it sounds like someone , thought they'd bough the rights to golden axe ,and then about 3 weeks from shipping , realised their mistake and slapped a gauntlet logo on it.
Oh and any game with at combo system that rewards hitting the X button 30 times in a row , but not playing axe based keepy-uppys with a baddie has to be bad.





Obscure game of the day:Slapfight aka Alcon: by Taito

I didn't realise this was obscure until I noticed it was missing from both the tatio ps2 compilation packs.The pleasingly named slapfight is a vertical shoot-em-up , which uses the "vaguely similarr to Gradius" style of buying power-ups with stars dropped from shot enemies.Theres a nice mix of weapons , and the whole thing rattles along at a great pace.The music is cracking as well, (its probably too perky to be proper shooter music , but I don't care , I love it).
There was a great remake of this on the Megadrive called Slapfight MD, which featured and updated version as well as carbon copy of the original.
If you play this on MAME (or time travel back to 1989 and play it in an arcade), try not shooting anything on your first life and see what happens after you die.....

ah so THATS what my password was...

Ok , so I probably cant get away with that as an excuse.
Yeah , its been a bit too long since I've updated.
So what's new?
Well I got married in October , and in the interim months just about got used to saying my wife instead of my girlfriend, and remembering to wear my ring,instead of leaving it at home by mistake.I got to go to New Zealand (with my wife:)not girlfriend ..keep saying that to myself ) , and do mad stuff like binge jumping and white water rafting.Somehow I survived all this.
Anyway you don't care about that stuff , "raiders.." is all about the games ,the sci fi ,y'know the geeky stuff,.

Right first to Warcraft . Here's what I've come to realize , if you want to give up playing games , take up World of Warcraft.
Its true , after a while time spent playing other games,isn't time spent enjoying a good videogame it becomes time you could be leveling.
I've bought 4 games in the past 6 months ..and I've only played these during downtime in WoW.
And worse still is that you will have become so obsessed with leveling up that half the time you'll just be killing creatures over and over.
That all said the other half of the time you'll be having a blast
A good guild helps , and my one Ronin is one of the best you could hope for.With them lads , and the lads from the sister guild "theHoffs" usually theres someone knocking about to do instances with , raid the horde , or just to have a laugh with .
We've a decent ventrilo server setup now so its possible just to have a chinwag while you kill murlocs
Since I last posted I've crawled up to level 44 , its taken me a while , but I'm very slowly catching up with my mate zanderwhan who's hit the heady heights of 60.
I've get my own horsey too , having a mount makes a huge difference in the game, in that you can zip between areas very quickly increasing the amount of time you have to actually do stuff.
I've also switched to a new server (well along wih my guild) Mazrigos .
Things have started slow there ,as it was fairly low population at first , but thanks to some other server relocations theres a good mix on both factions .
Anyway thats all for now ..gonna try and update a bit more frequently than up to now,although dont be suprised if you dont see one till some time in ...September ..:)

Warcraft Diary 7:Riders on the Storm(reaver)

So a lot has changed since I last posted a Warcraft diary.
My main character luas has pretty much been relegated to "Alt" and I'm now just playing on the Strormreaver server with drbob, my human priest.
This is partly as the guild I'm in now ronin are a good laugh and all fairly mature (well in age anyway!), and even just grinding away with guildchat on in the "background" is fun.Partly as Stormreaver is a livelier server than FW(although those queues!).And lastly as I actually prefer playing as a priest.It probably says something about me that I'd rather play team games in a support role (I usually pick the engineer/medic in battlefield 42 and vietnam, and the engineer in TFC, ) but I get a buzz out of healing (especially the "here comes the cavalry" last second healing!)buffing and ress-ing.
Playing as the alliance continues to be fun , I'm currently questing in the duskwood area , and its a spooky Adams family style area complete with haunted graveyards and catacombs.I've also done the first alliance instance "the deadmines" - It's better designed than its horde counterpart "the wailing caverns" , I've experienced the "joy" of instance pickup groups as a priest , and its a bit of a pain(no thanks for doing your job, and when someone dies despite the fact that you've shouted out that you've no mana left to heal them , its all replies of "OMFG why didnt you heal n00bx0r etc").I did eventually finish it with help from langerless, zanderwhan, and vazz from the guild though.Next up I reckon is the "stockades" ,and then the "the blackfathom depths"

I also got to be, briefly anyway, the webmaster of a guild site , while the official forums for ronin were being finished , I knocked up a temporary one at www.roninguild.cjb.net , and kept it going until the "real" board was up.So that was a laugh.
Anyway that's all for me , probably be a bit of a gap in posting for a while as my wedding is almost upon myself and G.Its all action stations from here on
:)

Night Drivey

Not really a game as such , but a really nice demo -




Drivey is a cell shaded 3D driving sim
it looks beautiful , and pressing F1 will let you adjust the settings and colours and what side the steering wheel is on.
The (tenous) retro angle angle I found is that pressing keys 1-4 will change the enviroment from a motorway to outside a town, to a tunnel and lastly one that looks like an updated version of Night Driver!(the classic Atari racing game)Compare and contrast:

Ah hoy hoy!

Hi there
I'm Dr Bob* and depsite the fact that this is in essence a new blog , you may have noticed there's a rather large archive.the main reason for this is that this is a new incarnation of my old blog Retro -metro.I've shifted pretty much all the old entries from there to here, mainly as , well since the other bloggers there talk about important life changing stuff, and I was rattling on about Zx80 computers , I was standing out like a sore thumb.So Dr Who like, "Retro-metro" has regenerated into "Raiders of the Lost arcade" ,with a new look and a a slightly more appropriate name.
So what will you get here:
Lots of talking about gaming - as its (after my Girlfriend) my main passion in life.
Even more about Retro-gaming , does it have 4 onscreen colours , basic controller and an overuse of "blip" as a sound effect?? well sign me up!
My Warcraft diary m yeah I'm hooked , I admit it
Basic musings on Tv and pop culture whenever I can be arsed
Purty pictures from time to time

What you're probably not going to get:
Stuff about my personal life , my Girlfriend or my Job. I'm a fairly shy person, and I'm not really into the whole exhibitionist blogger thing.I'm getting married in a few weeks,my jobs in IT and I'm pretty happy with my lot all things said.There thats all your getting!
Current affairs- Its not that I dont have an opinion , but theres people out there who can say it all better than I can.Personally I disaprove of the way the US is being run and their foreign policy, and I totally disagree with the way Ireland is run (which for non-Irish readers is akin to the way a sports and social club is run , all half arsed meetings and budgets done on the back of cigarette packets).
Those "the Hoff" pics , just let it die folks!
Grammer and correct spelling.
see you soon , Dr Bob
_____________________
*Hadn't realised it but there's a few Dr Bob's out there already , maybe we should form a league or something , anyway I'm Dr Bob- Irish edition if that helps.