Well, the clear shelf space I created through my Famicom sale has lasted all of a week. They were having a 40 percent off sale over at Omocha Souko on all purchases over 2000 yen (about 25$) so I decided to splurge on a PAX Power Glove.This was sort of me just bowing to the inevitable. I've had chances to buy the Power Glove before but had always resisted the temptation. They aren't generally remembered as one of the better Famicom controllers after all, and they are pretty bulky and take up a lot of space. But after some consideration I decided that no Famicom collection worthy of the name could ever possibly be complete without this weird thing and so I finally caved and bought one.
This is a pretty good one, complete in its box and in almost brand new condition:
When I got my NES at the age of 13 I remember looking in the Zellers catalog and seeing this thing. It was 89.95. You know what that means, right? Yup, it means that I wanted it so bad that more than 20 years later I remember which department store's catalog it was in and how much they wanted for it.
Of course, in the catalog they only showed a picture of the glove itself, which looks pretty awesome:
Its like having the entire Darth Vader outfit reduced to a glove and put on your hand.In actual fact though the Power Glove requires a ton of other stuff to make it work. There is this rack thing with sensors that you have to put on your TV:
I was fortunate that our TV coincidentally happens to be the right size for this thing. The manual suggest stacking books on top of your TV if it is too small. I love the fact that the sensor array has little LED lights that blink on and off seemingly at random while it is on. It looks like some background prop from a Star Trek set or something:
As I tried to play around with it a bit my dog, Doogle, discovered it:
He loves it. It is made of material that is roughly of the same texture and feel as most of his dog chew toys. So from the moment I put it on all he wanted to do was bite my hand.I hasten to add that he pretty much always wants to bite my hand so this isn't necessarily the Power Glove's fault.
It did complicate matters somewhat though as I'm sure this thing is difficult enough to use even without a 5.4 kilogram fluffball with teeth basically hanging off the thing with his mouth. With one it is damn near impossible. I tried figuring out how to play Galaxian with it. While the spaceship moved around on the screen a bit, I'm not sure if this was in response to my movements or just some random thing that it did.
In fairness though I didn't actually read the manual, which has several pages dedicated to programming this thing, which I assume is necessary in order to make it work properly. Doogle just wasn't having any of that though so I reluctantly put the thing away without having fully realized the awesome potential that the glove promises. Perhaps someday I'll sneak it off the shelf when he is out for a walk with just my wife or something:)
