Gramicom: The World's Oldest Gamer?

I was sipping my morning coffee and perusing the news on the internet (as is my want) when I did a spit-take at a piece on Japan Probe.

Asahi TV has this good show, Nani Kore, that airs on Wednesdays. They go around Japan looking for unusual sights, each of which they air a 2 or 3 minute clip about. After that a panel of talents votes on it and, if they are unanimous, it gets registered into a sort of hall of unusual things fame.

My wife and I watch this quite a bit, it is one of the few Japanese TV shows out there that doesn't completely suck. We missed seeing it this week. And of course, this week they had something really cool - a 99 year old woman who plays Famicom every day.

You can watch the 3 minute clip here. It is in Japanese but you can probably get the gist of it just by watching.

She plays everyday, but only one game: Bomberman. When asked, she says she has been playing for 30 years, though as the narrator points out Bomberman was first released 26 years ago so she has probably been playing it for that long.

If you watch the clip, you'll notice that she is incredibly good at Bomberman. She sometimes clears all of the levels twice in a single day, taking about two and a half hours each time.

The best part of the video is definitely where she blows on the cart before putting it in the Famicom.

Honorable mention goes to the TV she's got the Famicom hooked up to. Very age appropriate.

I wonder how many of us will still be playing Famicom when we are that age?

Swingers: Best Video Game Movie Scene Ever?

I watched Swingers the other day for maybe the fourth or fifth time. I really like Swingers. Its one of those independent films done on a shoestring budget with a bunch of talented unknowns that gets everything right.

Its just so money.

I think one of best parts of Swingers, at least from a 30-something video game blogger's point of view, is the scene where they play hockey on the Sega Genesis. The scene (watch it here) gets everything about 90s gaming by poor 20-something guys exactly right.

Its got:

-Use of instant replay to taunt opponent after goal;

-A visibly annoyed third guy waiting his turn to play;

-Complaints shared by all parties present about how the new version of the game doesn't allow fighting;

-One guy demonstrating how to make Gretzky's head bleed to the third guy, possibly because he feels bad about the fact that he isn't getting to play;

-Use of the old "un-pausing the game while the opponent is distracted while paying for pizza" routine;

-A fight breaking out over the use of said routine;

-Embarrassing the guy who goes to the door to pay for the pizza with lurid sexual innuendo;

-An insanely messy apartment complete with Reservoir Dogs poster and foosball table.

I think the reason I like this scene so much is that it is exactly the way I remember playing games in the 1990s. I'm always going on about how nostalgic I feel for the 80s on this blog that I sometimes forget how awesome the 90s were.

This, for example, is the apartment I lived in from 1998 to 1999 (room-mates faces redacted to protect the innocent):
Pretty much exactly the same type of place as the apartment in Swingers where they played that Genesis hockey game.

At first, we only had an NES, but a couple months after moving in my room-mate (on the left) bought a Nintendo 64. That changed our lives forever. The three of us, and friends who'd drop by, would just play that thing for hours, drinking massive quantities of beer, fighting, and generally just trying to annoy the shit out of each other. But, you know, in a friendly guy way.

After a few hours of that, we'd head out to the bars in town and not come even remotely close to picking up any women.

Ah, how I miss those days.

Anyway, I've been reading about how little money the makers of Swingers had when making the film. They had to film it in actual people's apartments just using whatever was lying around. I guess that is the reason that scene looks so authentic: it actually is just somebody's apartment. I also like the fact that at the time the film came out the Genesis was already old news and not the latest console.

If the film had been made with a big studio budget, they'd have screwed it up completely by making the apartment look clean, and they'd have been playing the newest game (and not allowed to say anything bad about it because they had some sort of product placement deal with the maker).

It would have (ironically) been much closer to the scenes in the Break Up where Vince Vaughn is playing the PS2, which are just blah.

Above: not the best video game movie scene ever.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, anybody else got any favorite video game movie scenes?

Famicomblog 100th Anniversary Experiment

This is my 100th post on Famicomblog. Yay. To celebrate the occasion I thought I would perform an experiment. In order to perform this experiment I required two things.

First, 100 Famicom carts, one for each blog post.

Second, this dog:
I suppose that is actually 101 things, but never mind about that.

My experiment was to see how many of the 100 Famicom carts I could stack on top of each other, free-standing, in a small room without this dog knocking them over.

I began stacking them in groups of seven. The first seven posed no problem:
Fourteen and still OK:
Twenty one and doing fine:
Twenty eight, everything is still smooth:
Thirty five and counting:
Forty two and we are starting to see some wobble, but we're still safe:
Forty nine. We've now reached the point where it is too dangerous to continue stacking them seven at a time. From now on it is one by one:
Fifty! Halfway there:
Fifty one!
Fifty two! Hey we might actually make it!!
Oh no:
Sigh. Fifty two it is!
So there you go. Another one of science's mysteries resolved through the use of a controlled experiment in the field. You cannot stack up more than 52 Famicom carts in a small, enclosed room with my dog.

Anyway, thanks for reading everybody!

Related Posts:
-Famicom Console Stacking: The Next Olympic Sport

A Gamer Exposed: The Ugly Truth About Retro Video Game Setups

The above is my deepest, darkest secret. My name is Sean and I am a messy gamer.

Oh sure, when I take pictures of my consoles I always dust them off, hide away all the unsightly wires and random game cartridges that clutter up the image and try to organize them in a symmetric, visually appealing way. Then I put those pics on here for the world to see.

But really it is all a pack of lies. My consoles spend most of their lives in a state of advanced untidiness.

This is what my set up looks like today, a random day like any other:
Wires and games everywhere. It just looks like a bunch of clutter, which is basically what it is.

One thing where the new generation consoles have really gotten it right is with the wireless controllers. Oh my god, how I wish these consoles had those. I was at a friend's place the other day and he had an XBox 360 with wireless controllers. I nearly burst into tears at the sight of them.

When I do a major clean up, I always remove the controllers, wind the cords up neatly and put them in a box. I always vow that I will only take them out when I play the console and, when finished, will neatly wind them back up and put them back in the box.

I never do. They inevitably just get piled up on the consoles, where they get all mixed up and force me to devote valuable time to untangling massive knots whenever I want to play a game.

Just a disgrace really. My deepest, darkest secret as a video game blogger. Here revealed. I mean, can you even tell that there is a PC Engine in this picture?:
And look at the dust on my N64! What would my in-laws think if they saw this?!!
I have to say that I don't think I am the only one of us out there. If you look around at people's blogs and on forums, pretty much every retro game collector out there only puts photos of their consoles up after cleaning them up and making them look presentable. I suspect a lot of them are like me though. Messy gamers posing as neat ones. Its a rough life, but the denial has to end sometime!! Trust me, you'll feel better!

Box Art Battle: 10 Yard Fight vs. Tecmo Super Bowl

What better time than the middle of baseball season to dedicate a post to the two best Football games on the Famicom?

10 Yard Fight and Tecmo Super Bowl are probably the two best American football games for the Famicom (and the NES for that matter). I never played 10 Yard Fight back in the day, but I do remember playing Tecmo Super Bowl a lot with friends back in high school. It was the only game that had the actual teams and actual players from the NFL.

I always got my ass kicked at it because I sucked at strategy and I was always playing it at my friend Mike's house. He owned the game and I didn't, so he probably practiced a lot on his own. Wasn't that always the worst thing about playing Nintendo games back in the day? Facing someone who owned a game that you didn't. So unfair.

Anyway. In turns of game play, I would say that Super Tecmo Bowl has aged much better, though both are fun. In terms of Famicom box art though? 10 Yard Fight dominates the gridiron on that count. God, what an awful use of the word "gridiron", I do apologize.

Take a look at that box though:
This is a really great box. Colorful, action packed, beautiful. The art itself is done in a kind of retro 50s way, with the cheerleaders and ref looking like old-school cartoon characters. The players are more realistically done in a heroic looking action scene. The game title is great too, in bold yellow and red characters.

All of these early Famicom Irem games, like Sqoon and Spelunker, have similar box designs. They kind of mimic the look of the cart with the LED light in roughly the same position on the box as it is on the cart.

The back of the box is pretty cool too, basically just continuing the design on the front:
One peculiarity of these is that the plastic insert which holds the cart is orange rather than the standard clear plastic most Famicom games used:The instruction manual is also pretty cool:
Super Tecmo Bowl, on the other hand, doesn't have anywhere near as inspiring a box. Its a great game, but look at this dud:
No color. No action. Just some dirty guy looking at you through his helmet.

I've always wondered who this guy is. Phil Simms? I couldn't remember what Phil Simms looks like, but a Google image search convinced me that this is not Phil Simms. Lawrence Taylor? Don't need an image search to convince me that this isn't Lawrence Taylor.

Who else played for the Giants in the early 90s? Jeff Hostetler? No.....anybody know who this guy is?

Anyway, the back of the box is also pretty boring:
And the manual....oh crap its that guy again:
What is his name? Argh.

Related Posts
- Box Art Battle: Lode Runner vs Raid on Bungling Bay

I Nearly Died Getting a Red Twin Famicom Today.

Today I finally broke down and bought a complete, working Twin Famicom. I was at Omocha Souko and they had one for 8,000 yen (about 100$). That is a lot of money considering I bought my three other Twin Famicoms for between 100 and 300 yen apiece there. But they didn't come with the all-important power cable, so I've had them just collecting dust, not even sure if they work, for quite some time now. This one came with the cable. Get!

Anyway, I actually almost died on the way home with my purchase. It was raining heavily today and as I rode my bike down a hill I went over a metal grating that, it turns out, becomes extremely slippery when wet. I was going quite fast, probably 30-35 kmph, when suddenly my bike just completely fell down right underneath me. This sent me flying across the pavement at an alarming rate, screaming "Oooooooohhhhh shitttttttttttt" as I did so. I came within a couple of feet of getting run over by a passing car, but luckily we avoided each other (or more accurately they avoided me, I had no control over my body's motion at that point).

My knees and the palms of my hands were a ghastly site and my pants now had a couple of new holes in them, but nothing was broken (except my bike), so I was pretty relieved.

After confirming that I was in one piece I then remembered: My Twin Famicom!! Shit!

By an incredible stroke of luck, I had put it into my backpack, which was on my back during the accident. 9 times out of 10 I would have put it into my bicycle's basket. If I had done so, it would have gone flying and been smashed for sure. A two litre bottle of water I had in there came skidding to a halt a good thirty metres up the road.

Anyway, to take this post back to the subject of my Twin Famicom, the long and the short of it is that after arriving at home (after a quick stop at the drug store for some bandages and disinfectant) I took it out of my backpack. Nothing obviously wrong with it. It is the red one. I agree with Bryan that this is the best version of the Twin Famicom. A thing of absolute beauty:
As a way of building up the suspense, I tested the Famicom cartridge part first. I stuck a copy of Bomberman in there and it worked the first time. That was a good sign. But the real test was going to be that Disk Drive.

I've accumulated quite the collection of Disks from junk bins here and there. I dumped them out on the floor next to it:
And one by one started testing them. The first time, things looked promising. I have two broken FDSs and I know what ones with a broken drive belt sound like. "GRRRRRRRR" is what the sound like. A very annoying sound. This one, thankfully, did not make that sound. It made a lot of different sounds, which indicated to me that it knew what it was doing and would make my game work momentarily.

Only it didn't. Each time I tried, I just kept getting an Error 27 message. Crap. Again and again I tried, but nothing.

Until.....
Moero Twin Bee. I put that disk in there and steadied myself for the disappointment of seeing another error message. Only it didn't. For the first time in my entire life I laid eyes on the sight of a Famicom Disk System displaying something other than an error message: the actual game itself appeared on the screen:
Fuck Yeah!!!

Sorry about that profanity, but fuck yeah. That was sweet. I could actually play an FDS game! My Twin Famicom works!! Yes!

The bad part is that it seems my entire collection of Famicom Disk System Disks except for Moero Twin Bee do not work:
So much for my plans to spend the rest of the day playing Super Mario Bros. 2.

The other bad news is that, with the arrival of my first Twin Famicom AC adapter, I could finally test my other 3 Twin Famicoms.

All three of them load Famicom carts just fine. And the disk drives on all three are completely broken. Error messages and that "GRRRRRRR" sound galore.

Famitsu turned 25, and the top Famicom games of 1986

I scored a rather interesting piece of Famicom history today, a copy of the very first issue of Famicom Tsushin.

As kind of an interesting coincidence, this was published in June of 1986, making it almost exactly 25 years old.

Edited to add: at least it would have been. Reading the fine print I realized that this was actually a reprint of the first issue. Very cunningly disguised as the real deal, even the ads are all the same as in the original (as is the publication date). On the bottom of each page in small print, however, it states that it is a reprint and tells readers not to call any of the phone numbers in the ads as they don't work anymore. Guess that explains why it only cost 500 yen! And why it came with a towel celebrating the 800th issue, which I didn't notice until getting it home. This must have been made as part of some sort of commemorative promotion or something:
Anyway, Famicom Tsushin, for those who don't know, is a biweekly video game magazine in Japan that now goes by the abbreviated name of "Famitsu". It is another testament to the power of the Famicom back in the day that this magazine - which is not published by Nintendo and is a general video game mag - was named after the Famicom. It is far and away the most famous gaming magazine in Japan.

Anyway, despite being a repro, there is a LOT of interesting stuff in this thing which will provide me with ample material for a whole bunch of posts. I thought I'd start off with the info on pages 8 and 9 here:
On the left are the results of "reader surveys" in which respondents ranked their favorite games for the Famicom and Famicom Disk System. I put "reader surveys" in quotation marks since I find it hard to figure how they could already be displaying the results of a reader survey in their first issue. But anyway, I thought it was kind of neat just to see what people liked 25 years ago.

Here are the results in order.

Famicom

1. Goonies
2. Legend of Zelda
3. Gegege no Kitaro
4. Gradius
5. Ninja Hattori Kun
6. Twin Bee
7. Super Mario Bros.
8. Dig Dug II
9. Nazo no Murasamejo
10. Mighty Bomb Jack
11. Kage no Densetsu
12. Atlantis no Nazo
13. Spy vs. Spy
14. Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken
15. Tag Team Pro Wrestling
16. Argus
17. Son Son
18. Hydlide Special
19. Obake no Q Taro Wan Wan Panic
20. Gyrodine

Famicom Disk Writer:

1. Nazo no Murasamejo
2. Super Mario Brothers
3. Baseball
4. Tennis
5. Legend of Zelda
6. Soccer
7. Golf
8. Mahjong

On the right page, they display the top ten most popular games for the NES in the US at the time, based on sales. It provides for an interesting comparison:

1. Super Mario Bros.
2. Spartan X (Kung Fu)
3. Baseball
4. Excitebike
5. 10 Yard Fight
6. Golf
7. Soccer
8. Pinball
9. Tennis
10. Wrecking Crew

They even have a little featured article about the NES in there:
The caption under the picture reads

"The console is high class, but unfortunately for some reason they made the cartridges big, so Japanese Famicom carts won't fit it."

An early (perhaps the earliest?) example of somebody noting that it was too bad the NES carts didn't follow the Famicom pattern!

Related Posts:
- 1985 Famicom High Scores