Vaniloquence

Meaning vain or foolish talk.

Tonight, I'm struggling more than usual to focus. Which is bad. Why? Since I'm going to be away this weekend, I've decided to write both Friday's blog post (this one) and Monday's one in advance so that I don't have to spend too much time writing it, and I can just upload it on Sunday night.

Well, I'll just write and see if I come up with something at least readable that I can post. I woke up this morning with three distinct "wants" in my head. I wanted to play my old Sega Megadrive (namely, my Sonic collection), I wanted to play my old Warioland games (for the Gameboy series) and I wanted to build stuff with matchsticks.

There was a problem with each of these "wants". I can't find my actual Megadrive, let alone any of the games for it. My father might have gotten rid of it ages ago, but whatever the reason, I cannot find it in this house.
I play a Gameboy Advance SP which, for those of you who do not know, does not take standard batteries. It has a rechargeable pack, for which I've lost the charger. Oh, and I'd probably be unable to find any of the Warioland games anyway.
And for the final want, I have no glue (or matchsticks, it would seem).

I would just like to give a quick relaxation call for you all. This isn't going to be a long-running problem-solving matter, like it was with the Spyro 2 fiasco.

Since I needed to go out today anyway, I decided that while I was out, I'd pick up some glue to build with, so that was that problem sorted. Until I got home to discover that I have no modelling matchsticks. But I'll get some another time. Once I got home, I decided to sort the other two problems. Since I have neither of the working consoles to play these games on, and they were played on a system which relied on buttons as opposed to a joystick, I figured that a computer would be the most appropriate Plan B.

Now, back when I was in Year 9, this was how we killed time. Our school blocked any kinds of in-browser games and any websites that might provide downloads to them, so we downloaded them and brought them in on USB flash drives. There are only so many Flash games that you can play before the graphics get repetitive and boring. So, we decided that we rather missed the games from our childhoods and set about finding them and trying to download them. The best way of doing this on a school computer (fairly high-specification) was by downloading an emulator. A piece of software that emulated an old games console. For example, GENS is a Sega Genesis / MegaDrive emulator, SNES9x is (obviously) a Super Nintendo Entertainment Sytem emulator and so on.

GENS is the emulator I picked to play my Sonic The Hedgehog collection on (Brilliant games, showing the adventures of a blue hedgehog battling his way through insane levels to defeat the evil Dr. Eggman, who is trying to take over the world by imprisoning helpless animals inside robots) and several other old Sega games.
And VisualBoyAdvance is the Gameboy emulator that I chose. Both emulators work incredibly well on even low-spec computers, though at times framerate suffers.
Regardless, you may be thinking that Gameboy game cartridges and Sega Megadrive game cartridges don't fit into a computer anywhere. It's no problem. You download the games in ROM format to play on an emulator. I mean, it's not always easy to find the games that you want that haven't been hacked or customised, and it does take quite a bit of searching, but once you find them, they're not massive in size (usually around a few megabytes in size) and once you download them and unzip them, you can play them straight away on the emulator.

It pleased me for a while, to cut a long story short. I played Sonic 2 for quite a while. Some guy had customised it under the name Sonic 2: Hell! in which you just play Emerald Hill: Act 1 over and over again. Which is hell. I then moved onto some other hacks of it, before moving onto the WarioLand games.

I do quite love the WarioLand franchise. I mean, Mario and Luigi are the two famous Nintendo characters, but a set of games have been created for their more muscular, butch cousin, Wario. He's somewhat more invincible than Mario, in that just touching an enemy doesn't always harm him. And he can shoulder charge enemies, along with "butt-slamming" them. Great fun. Certainly something to pass the time.

Anyway, I'm not really in the mood to write another post right now, and I can't be arsed to wait till midnight to post, so this one'll be early. A quote to finish and I'm done:

"Idealism precedes experience. Cynicism follows."