Phil and Mr. Floppers: A Very Merry Christmas Special

Sunday, December 25 2011, 7:00AM.

To be continued....

I am Idiot Hear Me Roar

I just did a Google image search for the word `idiot` and of all the amusing things I found, I think the above best captures the essence of my stupidity.

Let me share with you here a tale of incredible incompetence in the field of diagnosing the problem with a retro console that seems to be broken. Like me you will laugh, you will cry, you will shake your head at the folly of human endeavour.

The story begins in April when my wife gave me an original 1977 Nintendo Color TV Game 15 Complete in its box. It was a thing of beauty and I spent a whole afternoon hooking it up to my TV. Unfortunately when I finally got it to flash something on the screen, this is what I got:Notice, please, that there is something missing on screen in this pong game. There is a paddle on the right side, but the one on the left is nowhere to be seen.

My first reaction was to look at the console, which has a ton of buttons and switches on it:
No matter what combination of pushing and switching I attempted, however, nothing produced the desired result. That left side pong racket just would not appear.

For what I did next I can turn to the blog post that I made here on that very day:

¨This puzzled me greatly. For about an hour after getting the thing hooked up, no matter what I did I could not get the paddle on the left (1player) to show up. I made my way onto the internet and after much surfing to no avail eventually stumbled onto this Youtube video. The guy is just showing the insides of his Color TV Game 15 and while doing so he notes that if you unplug one of the controllers (you have to physically open the casing up to do that) the corresponding paddle disappears. "Great" I thought. Probably the controller is just unplugged inside the thing and all I have to do is plug it back in and we'll be ready to go. Nope. I took everything apart. Both controllers were plugged in. I noticed that when I switched them though, the number 1 controller did not work at all. The ingrates at Omocha Souko had sold me a Color TV Game 15 with a broken controller! D-oh!¨

Yup. I did everything I could think to do, even pulling the entire thing apart, but to no avail.

And I left it at that. For eight long months I had no functioning Nintendo Color TV Game 15 on which to play pong. All I could do was stare longingly at it, imagining the fun all the other families with functioning pong machines were having while I sat there, feeling empty.

Then a few days ago, as I reported only yesterday on here, I found another Color TV Game 15 at Omocha Souko for a cheap price! I bought it immediately, intent on scavenging one of the controllers from it.

I tested the second one out too and, very interestingly, found that it also seemed to have a broken controller as when I turned it on, the exact same thing happened. Only one pong paddle appeared on screen. Like the awesome genius that I am, I concluded:

¨I`m not too sure what the deal is but this can`t have been mere coincidence, they must have had some sort of defect in the controllers.¨

Anyway, long story short, I switched the controllers around and got one of the consoles working perfectly. My wife and I played it that night and had a great time. I was so happy.

Then last night we decided to play it again. I turned it on and was immediately devastated by what I saw on the screen:
NOOOOO!!!! The left controller broke after only one day`s use!! The left paddle was gone! Our lovely pong gaming career was at an end until I could find another of these hard-to-find 34 year old consoles in a junk bin somewhere!

I then collapsed in a heap of tears at my wife`s feet, curled up in the foetal position and started to suck my thumb.

My wife, however, kept her composure. She picked up the controller:
And within about 5 seconds she had miraculously fixed it! Both pong paddles were on the screen! And she didn`t even use any tools or anything!

I was absolutely shocked. Looking at her in amazement I asked: `How did you do that?`

Looking at me with an expression of incredulity and speaking in the same voice you would use to teach a three year old how to properly fill in a coloring book, she put two fingers on the controller like this:
And said `You tuuuuuuurrn it, Sean. Tuuuuuurn it. Do-you-understand? Turn?`

I nodded to indicate comprehension, mimicking a turning motion with my fingers.

`YES! Turn! Thats it! Good boy, Sean!

My stupidity has never been so brilliantly exposed. Eight months of searching for a cheap junk console for parts. Several hours worth of work on taking apart two consoles and switching a bunch of wires. Hours of research on the internet. A trip to the hardware store to buy a new screwdriver.

When all I needed to do was turn the #@%*ing knob.

It turns out that when you turn the knob on the controller all the way, the paddles just disappear off the edges of the screen. When you turn them back, they return. For some reason I had never thought to try turning the knob on the controller.

I am an idiot.
Even this person would probably have figured it out in less than eight months.

On the plus side, I am an idiot who actually owns two fully functional Color TV Game 15s instead of one as I had previously thought.

But an idiot nonetheless.

RELATED POSTS:
- Is it Possible to Stalk a Retro Game Store?
- A Gamer Exposed: The Ugly Truth About Retro Game Setups

Double Color TV Game 15 Trouble

In April my wife picked up the 1977 Nintendo Color TV Game 15 for me. I love this sort of simple, early video game stuff. Unfortunately when I plugged it in I discovered that one of the controllers was broken so we haven`t been able to play the thing.

Until two days ago that is. I was back in Omocha Souko and they had just tossed another Color TV Game 15 out for sale. Unfortunately it wasn`t in their 300 yen junk pile, but they only wanted 1,000 yen for it (about 12 bucks). It was missing the battery cover, hadn`t been tested and didn`t come with the AC adaptor but as I only wanted it for one of the controllers I decided what the hell and bought it.

After getting it home I plugged it in using the AC adaptor on my other one and discovered that this one too also had a broken controller. I`m not too sure what the deal is but this can`t have been mere coincidence, they must have had some sort of defect in the controllers.

Fortunately however it did have one working controller so after opening them both up and effecting the old switcheroo, I ended up with one fully functional Color TV Game 15 and one completely useless one.
We gave it a go for the first time last night. It works great. Basically you get 15 games that are pong, but are labelled tennis, volleyball, ice hockey and ping pong. There are different versions of each of these, but every game involves hitting a ball from one side of the screen to the other and that is it. Simplicity perfected. I love it so.

Related Posts:
- Nintendo Color TV Game 15

How Soon is Now? Waiting to Forget a Video Game

My blogging activities have been severely curtailed this month by a combination of being insanely busy in my non-blogging life and the fact that I haven`t found any incredible bargains recently to write about.

So I thought I`d revive the blog by writing about another generic video game topic: the amount of time it takes to forget a video game.

This is something I`ve always known about but it really came into focus for me a few days ago. About three years ago I bought a copy of Yume Penguin Monogatari for the Famicom. Its a great game that I will probably devote a post specifically to sometime in the near future. After buying it my wife and I got kind of hooked and played it almost everyday for a couple of months until we finally got to the final stage and beat the `boss`, completing the story that the game told (no spoilers).

After that we completely stopped playing the game, but during those two months we became absolute masters of it. We learned where all the dangerous areas on each level were, how to time jumps in certain locations correctly, where you needed to run to get the most power ups and so on and so on.

When I gave the game a try for the first time in years a couple of days ago though I completely sucked. I couldn`t even complete the first stage. Everything that I had learned about the game in that two month period was completely gone from my memory. It was like I had never played the game before in my life.

This is one of those things that I actually really like about video games - the fact that you can forget how to play them. It is the one thing that can prevent you from ever getting completely bored with a retro video game collection.

My playing tends to go in cycles. I`ll play a favorite game everyday for a few days until I get tired of it. Then it goes into a box or onto a shelf and I forget about it for a year or two and move onto other things. Then at some point I rediscover it and its almost as good as having just brought home a newly purchased game that I had never played before. Almost.

This applies not just with games but with entire consoles. The only console that I own which I play on a regular basis is my Famicom. The rest (I think I have 8 or 9 others) I kind of rotate. Just looking at the amount of dust that has accumulated on my Nintendo 64 tells me that it is due for some use soon:
Its been at least six months since I`ve given Goldeneye, Mario Kart 64, Rogue Squadron or Smash Bros. a go. I kind of feel a Nintendo 64 mood starting to take me over. Yup, enough time has passed - time to rotate the old girl back into the starting lineup.

I`m not sure what the ideal amount of time is to forget a game. It probably depends a lot on which game it is. Some games with incredibly simple mechanics like Space Invaders aren`t very good for this sort of thing because you tend to remember how to play them pretty quickly even after years. It also probably depends a lot on how old you are. I noticed that when I played Super Mario Bros. for the first time in almost 20 years I remembered how to play it almost perfectly the first try. I attribute this to the fact that I was a kid when I first mastered it and my young brain had a `how to play SMB` path permanently imprinted in it. My older 30 something brain seems to no longer have the ability to do that so, ironically, I can get a lot more play out of a game that I never played as a kid than one that I did. Ain`t getting old wonderful?

Book Off: Price Gouging Happens in Japanese Game Shops too!

If you are a regular reader of this blog then you might have an unrealistic image of Japan as a Mecca of cheap retro game shops. This is because I tend to over-report my fantastic bargain finds and under-report the amount of stuff that I find which is ridiculously over-priced. In this post I`ll try to bring a bit of balance to that situation by demonstrating the ridiculously over priced side of the Japanese retro game market.

I was in a Book Off downtown yesterday. Book Off is a very large chain of used book stores with hundreds of locations across Japan. Some of them also have retro game sections, including the one that I happened to be in yesterday:
Book Offs are very hit and miss with retro games. In my experience (I have been to a couple dozen of them), the statistics break down like this:

60% of Book Offs have no retro games at all.

20% of Book Offs have some retro games and their prices are quite good.

20% of Book Offs have some retro games and their prices are mind blowingly unreasonable.

This particular Book Off falls into the latter category. It has some of the worst prices on games I have ever seen. I had my camera on me so I photographed some of the most egregious Famicom examples.

First, Mahjong:
Yup, 950 yen (about 12$ US). That is about the most common cart for the Famicom that is out there. I`ve seen it for as little as 10 yen at other shops and outside of this example I`ve never seen one priced over 300 yen.

Then, Baseball:
950 yen again. This cart is worth about 100.

Tennis:
950 yen. For a sports title that you can`t give away.

Devil World and Soccer:
1550 yen (about 20$) for Devil World and 950 yen for Soccer. Devil World at least is a good game, but the average price for that one elsewhere is about 500 yen and, of course, you can find cheaper copies if you know where to look. As for soccer, I paid 10 yen for my copy of that one.

Interestingly, not all of the games were ridiculously over-priced here. Terra Cresta, for example:
250 yen is actually a good price for that one. Go figure.

I suspect that this is another example of a store that hires people with no knowledge of retro games who just put random prices on stuff. It is about the only way these prices can be explained.

I should end by noting that if you ever visit Japan for the purpose of retro game shopping, Book Offs can actually sometimes turn up incredible bargains. The problem is that the vast majority of them do not. So if you are walking down the street and happen to see a Book Off, then by all means I recommend popping in to see what they have because you might get lucky. Don`t go out of your way trying to find them though, in all likelihood it will be a waste of time!

Famicom Robot Presents: The Famicom Stuff Collection

The Famicom has a lot of stuff to go with it. Most of this stuff I seem to have, except for the 3D glasses, tape deck and a few other things. Still, I got most of it.

In this guest post the Famicom Robot, Phil, offers his thoughts on some of the highlights of my Famicom stuff collection.

1. The Hori Controller
Phil: Yeah, this is cool I guess. I mean, its like a regular Famicom controller right? With these swtiches for the rapid multi fire or whatever. I don`t have fingers so that helps me out a bit, its hard to repeatedly hit that fire button for me. Yeah OK, I give it a thumbs up.

2. Power Glove
Phil: What the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?

3. Famicom Light Gun
Phil: Now THIS I like. Yes. YES! You talkin` to me?

4. Family Basic
Phil: Its not very ergonomically sound. I really have to bend over to tap away at that keyboard. Not good for my back at all. No sireee. I do not like this. Not at all.

5. Famicom Karaoke Studio
Phil: Only you......can make this world seem right... O-o-only you.....can make the darkness bright....

6. Some Capcom Controller With Lots of Buttons that I Never Use
Phil:.........

7. Famicom RF Switch Booster:
Phil: Don`t know what it is but I like it. Its like a little Phil-sized Famicom.