Famicomblog

His name is Phillip, but you can call him Phil. Everyone does. He is a robot. A Famicom Robot.

His day begins on the floor amid a pile of empty girly drink cans. Evidence of his frustration at the world that has denied his genius at every turn. The gentle nudging of Doogle brings him to consciousness.
He has his daily 9 o`clock ping pong session with Richard Branson. He loses every game. He is too short to see the table top.
The afternoon sees him having high tea with Mr. Floppers, his best friend in the world. Today they talk about their shared sense of relief that Sarah Palin will not be running for president.
Five o`clock and the Muscle Men drop by for a visit:
Ten o`clock and it is once again time for bed. He bids Doogle a good night and retires for the day.


Oh yes, everybody, look! I got the Famicom robot! 50% off sale! GET!

He came complete with his box:
And instruction manual:
This guy was a steal, usually they sell for about 100$ complete like this but I got him for only about 10 bucks. I think that was mainly because when I pulled him out of the box he was covered in orange spots like this:
A bit of scrubbing with a wet wipe got rid of all that though and he looks just like new. The only thing missing as far as I can tell is the battery cover. I`m not sure if he actually works as I don`t have enough batteries on hand and, frankly, don`t really care. I just bought him to look at.

Related Posts
Famicom Light Gun and Wild Gunman
Pachinko and the Famicom: AKA the Stupid Side of Japanese Gaming

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:)

In a few recent posts the subject of video game cartridge durability has come up in the comments section.

In this post, we put the question of the durability of the Famicom cart to the ultimate test. I have devised a gruelling regimen of ten physical and psychological stress tests to put this copy of Harikiri Stadium through in order to see how far it can be pushed before reaching the breaking point.
Lets just get right into the tests.

1. Getting Run Over By Me on My Bicycle:
Pretty straightforward really. This photo was staged after the fact as I couldn't photograph while riding over it, but I actually did go and, at about 10kmph, run over the cart.

This didn't appear to phase it, there was no visible damage afterwards.

2. Throwing it into the Ocean:
At the beach near my place. Just tossed it in there and let the waves knock it around for about 30 seconds or so.

This just got the thing wet and full of sand.

Trivia discovery: Famicom carts float.

3. Getting Slammed in the Desk Drawer:
Slammed it pretty good in there. Nothing broken afterwards.

4. Making it spend 2 minutes in a municipal public restroom without air conditioning on a scorching hot July afternoon:
Without a doubt the test I enjoyed administering the least.

6. Forcing it to phone its overbearing mother:
Francine had not heard from her son in ages.

7. Dropping it off Something High:
Took it to this pedestrian bridge in an industrial area. Its a lot higher than it looks:
After being extremely careful that nobody was around, I gave it a nudge. It landed in a grassy patch that probably broke its fall:
Nothing obviously broken.

8. Seeing What a Stray Cat Would Do With It:
This didn't turn out to be very stressful at all. I just picked out a random stray and it turned out to be an extremely friendly one who liked getting petted on the head and chin. He pretty much ignored the Harikiri Stadium cart and just wanted to curl up around my feet.

9. Giving it to my Dog to see if the Scent of the Cat Would Drive Him Nuts:
It didn't.

10. The Ultimate Psychological Stress Test.
For this test, I surrounded the cart with a group of the toughest and manliest of his peers as seen in the above photo.

I then took out a package of "For You" stickers - the girliest stickers that Daiso has to offer:
I then applied them to the cart's surface one by one.
By the time we were through it looked like a horde of seven year old girls had gone medieval on the poor guy:
The Outcome.
Having completed the entire series of tests, I put him into my Twin Famicom to see if he still worked.

And to my surprise he....doesn't quite work anymore:
It isn't completely broken, but no matter how many times I put it in, the image is all distorted.

Unfortunately I'm not actually sure which of the stress tests did him in. Probably the ocean, but I'm not too sure.

Lesson learned: To be on the safe side you should probably refrain from putting any Famicom carts you care about through this specific series of tests.

Anyway, there you have it. A Famicom cart driven past the limits of its endurance. Not a pretty sight, I'll admit, but all in the name of scientific inquiry.

Special thanks to Ecto-glow and Nate in the comments section of this post and Bryan and videogamesarerad in this post for the idea.

Related Posts:
-Famicomblog 100th Anniversary Experiment
-Tour D' Excitebike: Fukuoka 2010

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.

LinkAnyway, thanks for reading everybody!

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

A public service announcement from Doogle.

OK, OK I know I know...enough with the dog already.

Our new family member.