You had to kill enemies and then stab them with a special dagger to extract special sand that filled up an on screen guage.

That guage represented how far back you could rewind the game if you died or did something you wanted to undo.

My favourite part about this is that the entire story of the game is a giant flashback story as told by the prince.

Every time you died, the prince would say something like, “No, no, no, that’s not what happened. Let me tell the story again.”

In regards to Star Wars, I remember watching the behind the scenes documentary on the Phantom Menace DVD where you get to see them auditioning child actors for the part of Anakin.

Specifically, you watch them screen test the final three kids, one of which is obviously Jake Lloyd.

In my opinion he was second place of the three, I could never understand why George chose him.

I’ve been very picky about music players over the years. Basically for decades (well, maybe not that long) it was PowerAmp, ever since I had my HTC Hero on Android 1.5.

Then when I got into the whole Open Source thing, I chose Musicolet and loved it, even donated to the author.

Sadly, on my latest phone which seems to have incredibly strict memory/power settings, I had to stop using Musicolet. The phone would kill the player a sing or two into listening no matter what tricks I would use to try and stop it happening.

Now I’m using Phocid which has never been killed while in use.

And I keep all my music in finders, correctly named and tagged with MP3Tag and MusicBee because, you know, Autism. 😁

The only one that I unsubbed to pretty fast was the 8bit guy. I generally enjoyed his videos and then in one of them, he had a fairly rare IBM PC and for some reason, he sticks a screwdriver into the power supply and blows a component.

But what really turned me off was when footage of him turned up on Reddit, taken by himself, of shopping in a place like Costco with his assault rifle on his back. I think he was taking pleasure in scaring some of the customers too.

(I think I’ve remembered that correctly)

Anyway, never went back to his channel after that.

EDIT: I found this Reddit page where someone asked what he did. Didn’t realise that was 5 years ago now!

For my image manipulation, I use paint.net. I’ve tried other free open source stuff but can’t get on with them. I’ll gladly give this one a go! Thanks for posting.

Didn’t Blu-ray win because it was basically neck and neck with the amount of studios backing HD-DVD vs Blu-ray. I think everyone was waiting to see what the final studio would pick (off the top of my head it was either Fox or Warner Bros).

Sony paid said studio basically a massive multi $m bribe to pick Blu-ray (to help promote their new console, the Playstation 3) which they duly did and that format was declared the winner.

HD-DVD would’ve been great as the winner as the specifications don’t include any form of region protection. But blurays hold more data and therefore allows for better quality encodes.

I used to use this app a lot but I found it started to work less and less. If you follow the right links, there is talk of a new version 3 of the app but I don’t know if that’s still being worked on.

I find that redlib is more reliable for Reddit browsing. It does stop working occasionally but only for a few hours usually.

I had no idea about this, thank you.

That reminds me of that old first person shooter, The Operative: No One Lives Forever.

This is a game that had a following and people have asked for a remaster or even just a GOG release.

The problem is, no one actually knows who owns it today. It’s a bit of a legal mess.

There’s something tricky about converting pdf to epub that I can never get to work properly. Maybe it’s too do with the way the pdf is put together?

I could highlight the text of the pdf and paste it into a document but it would come out different in places. I tried this experiment because the calibre conversion was doing the same thing.

I tried many online converters but none of them could do it either. In the end, I read the converted epub and just had to mentally correct the words that didn’t properly convert.

I wouldn’t call it a bad change, quite the opposite but when I read Fight Club, I was amazed how faithful the film was to the book. There are just two major changes I can remember.

In the book, Tyler Durden meets the narrator on a (nude?) beach where Tyler is erecting driftwood into the sand so that the shadow looks like a hand. (It’s been a very long time since I read it, I think that’s right.)

Secondly, the narrator struggles all through the story to remember the correct formula for the home made explosive. If he doesn’t know, then Tyler doesn’t know. Which means the explosives at the end don’t go off. The buildings stay standing.

From what I remember, 1984’s Dune is basically the book condensed down into the highlights. If you’ve read the book, fine but otherwise, it must be quite confusing.

I think the term life hack is ridiculous in itself. (Cue old man rant) In my day they were tips and advice. You’re not hacking anything. 😁

My first computer was a ZX81, but I think it was a custom build between my father, a carpenter, and my uncle, an electrician who fixed arcade games.

It was housed in a wooden case with a proper keyboard. The 16K RAM pack had been soldered on inside, so there was no case of it ever crashing due to a bad connection.

Simple black and white graphics with no sound. I loved it to bits.

Ah yes, the game that became Starfox adventures where he’s on foot the whole time. As the name implies, I was hoping for some space combat!

BIG shout out to Thunder, a great app for both Android and iOS.

It’s really nice to use, lots of nice features, I’m really happy with it.

VLC is all you need for DVDs. You just need to download this file, unzip it, and put the DLL file into the same directory where VLC is installed.

This file will enable VLC to access the DVD in such a way to bypass the protection methods.

I can’t remember the piece size of the top of my head, but physically, the Raiders of the Lost Ark temple is my biggest and would happily build it again.

My only worry is that the rubber bands might perish at some point.

I enjoyed building the ECTO1 but the stickers were really annoying. There’s a large number of stickers representing rust and they’re all identical.

I was going to leave them off so the car would look pristine like the original film but I changed my mind.

As others have already mentioned, IDKFA for Doom and didn’t it work in Doom 2 as well?

I only ask because when ID Software released Heretic, a swords and sorcery style Doom game, I remember typing in IDKFA, expecting the same results. It was the Doom engine after all. Except typing in the classic code kills you instantly!

Another isn’t strictly a cheat code. On the old 8bit computers the UK, you could enter some programming code to change the memory before loading in a game. (This is over simplified.)

Because of the altered memory, it would effect the game in some way. E.g. infinity health or lives.

I found a listing in a magazine which you could type in to help with the ZX Spectrum version of Batman: The Movie.

In this platform game, with the cheat, when a bad guy tried to climb a ladder, they would freeze.

This was very helpful and worked wonderfully all the way through the game. That was until you reached the very end whereupon the Joker was on a rope ladder attached to a helicopter.

The code interfered with the end of game boss in a way it wasn’t expecting and the game would crash.

Thanks.

I was carrying a hoover downstairs and slipped. The hoover fell down the stairs faster than me and stopped at the bottom obviously. The wire had partially unspooled and the very British three prong plug was sitting on the ground, pointing straight towards the sky.

Guess where my arse landed once I had finished slipping down the carpeted stairs?