Dorks and Dinosaurs

OK, I'm splicing together a few things, these were both from PC World. The first one was from comp/mag, which is being disassembled.



This odd ad from PC World (March 1999) features how YOU can get lots of money from repairing PCs in your own home! You even get a powerful IBM computer to do it with. Of course, all this is if you sign up to the "International Correspondence Schools", meaning that to get this spread like McDork here has received, you need to pay thousands of dollars, and to get the FULL set, you probably need to finish the course. Advice: just buy an iMac, which was popular at the time of this ad.

Fast forward a few years and we get a glimpse of an odd advertising campaign circa 2005 for Microsoft Office. Odd because there wasn't a new Office between '03 and '07, unless they upgraded '03, which wouldn't be bad because '07 was complete garbage, and odd because there are people wearing rubber dinosaur masks.




And to be honest, if you were a business using Windows XP, even in 2005, you are still a dinosaur in many aspects.

Nester's Adventures #29

At one time, Nintendo Power ran a monthly comic called "Howard and Nester", co-starring Howard Philips of Nintendo of America. The storylines gave hints for whatever the big game of the time was (typically the comic's theme was last month's cover game) with some mild joke or pun on par with comic strips of today. After Howard left for a job at JVC (in real life), the comic strip was renamed "Nester's Adventures", but the quality of the artwork started to slip (in my opinion) and without Howard, instead relying on random bit players (whether kids or video game players). This eventually proved the beginning of the end, and it was ended in the end of 1993. Nester has made a few comic appearances since (including 1997 and 2008) but not much since then.

This is a 2-page Nester's Adventures strip from Issue 29, and you can see that it's even less funny than H&N (though I have to admit, the Madonna line made me chuckle) and not much game hints either.

These aren't my scans and were taken from Retromags, but I do have the magazines.

Nintendo Power Volume 109 (June/98)

This is the June 1998 issue with Banjo-Kazooie featured on it. Cover price $4.95 in the United States, this issue has a few things going for it, including...

- Some tips on Banjo-Kazooie, specifically finding trinkets like Jiggy Pieces, Jinjos, and Extra Honeycomb Pieces.
- A comparison of Mortal Kombat 4 for Nintendo 64 and its arcade counterpart. Of course, this being Nintendo Power, you know which one wins (even if controls and graphics take a nosedive)
- BioFreaks review: which has some ludicrous presence that some mutant-cyborgs can bring the United States back together again. Or something like that.
- An E3 report!! The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time makes its final showing (the Zelda 64 title is still used). Twelve Tales: Conker 64 (a new name for Conker's Quest) makes its second showing, and would go on for two more until the game was cancelled and transformed into Conker's Bad Fur Day, Space Station: Silicon Valley, the ultimately disappointing Quest 64, the lamented EarthBound 64, which was eventually cancelled and released as a pared-down 2D Game Boy Advance adventure, and a few others. Another cancelled game that was less high-profile was Survivor: Day One, a game by Konami. It was cancelled.



Less depressing than the cancelled games and the disappointing games (including Earthworm Jim 3D and the infamous Superman) was the announcement of Pokémon and the Game Boy Color. While becoming a big success, it only helped reinforced the idea that the N64 and Nintendo was the "kiddie" console.

The contests, which Nintendo Power had up until their sale to Future, usually had a t-shirt (third prize), the "featured game and maybe something extra", and "featured game+something awesome". Often times, it was only tangibly related: a Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest featured a trip to Six Flags Magic Mountain, or a truckload of coins (for Blast Corps, I think). This one featured a trip to the Seattle area to see Kobe Bryant play against the Seattle Sonics (with two courtside tickets). And of course, this being Seattle (as they were the home team but rival to Kobe Bryant), you got to check out Nintendo of America headquarters. You also got Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside for N64, as the 5 runner-ups got (except, instead of Seattle, they get an autographed basketball).

There was also Game Boy Camera "strategies" and a review (it scored 8.3 overall). The strategies were tips, including taking pictures of drawings, and splicing together a film. The example showed 8 panels of a clown being incinerated by a spaceship.

And, if you were a good enough artist, you could win things like a DVD player or digital camera, which, being in 1998, was pretty expensive. Heck, I have a 2001 camera, and I don't know how much it originally cost, but it still produces tolerable shots.

Nintendo Strategies

Here's something I got from my cousins: an old unofficial Nintendo strategy guide. Not covered by |tsr's nes archive, this little guide has about 30 games covered, with two pages each (lots of wasted space, however, mind you).

Having not really seen any NES strategy guides of that era, this guide basically gives you a few tips on certain Nintendo games. Sadly, the tips are not that great: for Super Mario Bros., it only gives a few tips on what has become legend: infinite one-ups, and the locations to the Warp Zones. And for Skate or Die, it basically sums up that all you need is practice (many of these games were about timing). Having not played many of these games, there are no major inaccuracies I could tell, except for two: you can go up to 128 lives for Mario (not 100) before dying, and they refer to Birdo (Super Mario Bros. 2) as "the dragon". Okay.

The cover is weird (as always from that era). You can see a rather impish-looking Link, some vegetables from Mario 2, and what looks like Big Bird in a flying car (seriously, can't figure that one out).

This was published in 1989 and was backed by Consumer Guide, oddly enough (though the name isn't on the cover).

MacAddict December 1998

This is the MacAddict issue for December 1998. There are supposed to be a number of "cracks" (or so the April '99 issue says) in this magazine (no idea what that means. jokes? errors? piracy?)

Some stats for this issue: it's Volume 3 Issue 12 (28), cover price $7.99. 128 pages.
As soon as you open the magazine, there's a funny two-page ad for Yoot Tower, the sequel to SimTower in which there's a skyscraper, with large windows, all of which are dark and empty, except for one, in which someone is mooning those who watch on the outside. The text reads "our deepest apologies to pc users, but Yoot™ Tower is coming out on mac first. get your copy at yootmacfirst.com."

Some highlights of this issue include:

- Pictures and info of a custom Mac, a 7600 logicboard inside of a 1940s Zenith radio. It's unique in that it doesn't have a floppy drive (and this was submitted before the iMac was announced).
- A large (8 page pullout) ad for Mac OS 8.5
- The fate of the Claris applications: Claris FileMaker (as well as Claris itself) became FileMaker, still made today, ClarisWorks became AppleWorks and lived for many more years, Claris Organizer was bought by Palm and renamed Palm Organizer, and Claris Emailer and Claris Home Page were abandoned (sorry).
- "30 Days to the Perfect Mac": the flagship article. Basically, it tells you to get rid of extensions, documents, and extra copies of software you don't need, optimize performance, and make backups.
- The Holiday Games Spectacular 3, with the "Hype-Meter". Tomb Raider II and Myth II: Soulblighter topped the list at 11. Redneck Rampage came in last at 2, with Nightfall and Yoot Tower coming in at 4.
- An article on Mac OS 8.5.
- Another copy of the PCfx! advertisement.
- Starcraft review.
- Building a shoot-'em-up game in Flash 3 (gee, Flash games sure have gone a long way)
- An article that accidentally runs its text into an advertisement (whoops)

PCfx!

Welcome to comp/mag, the companion to Blue Skies and Nintendo! In this blog, there'll be scans of miscellaneous old computer stuff: scans of magazines, as well as a blurb of information on it.

This is intended to be of both Mac and PC stuff (I'm biased toward Mac, I'll admit that), in terms of computer games and general computer stuff. My first post is taken from one of my old blogs: an ad for the "PCfx!" It's kind of a good start: a PC card for a Macintosh. Here's what I wrote last time around:

First off, let's get one thing straight. This is NOT about the PC-FX, the Japan-only sequel to the TurboGrafx-16. This is about something ENTIRELY different.

When I was younger, my family only used Macs. I didn't mind it...the graceful Macintosh was a lot cooler looking than the Windows flavors available at the time, except with one minor difficulty.

Most games were available on PCs.

By the time I actually came to this sad truth, there was only one option other than getting a full PC. It was a product called Connectix Virtual PC with a promise to put a virtual PC in your Mac. It had previously made the Virtual Game Station (a commercial PlayStation emulator) that seemed to run OK, so why couldn't VPC open a world of games I never knew? Unfortunately, my family never bought it, and one of the reasons became painfully clear: it was much slower than an actual PC. Unless I really wanted to play Minesweeper or some early DOS game, let's face it...I was out of luck.

But I found out a far more awesome example...things called PC cards. Sadly, despite being faster than VPC, they were discontinued as expansion slot-less computers (like the iMac) took over (and more Mac ports of PC games became available). So I gave up. Years passed. Eventually OS 9 was completely obliterated and Boot Camp appeared, which although being a great solution, rendered OS 9 in a position of emulators. However, during that time, I found out that PC cards were not only super-expensive, but also not as fast a PC.

In late 1998/early 1999 Mac magazines (such as MacAddict) published ads for Orange Micro's "PCfx!", a card designed for game playing.

Pretty awesome, huh? And where'd those list of PC games come from? They stopped at F, but I'd like to see the whole list. If I was a bit older in 1998, that would've been the coolest-looking thing since sliced bread, and I would beg that Mom and Dad order it off a catalog (MacPowerhaus was one such catalog vendor, not the maker of the product) so we could install it in our Mac clone PowerWave tower right away. $650 for an awesome thing would run all the games we wanted, right? Wrong!

As you can see (click it to make it larger), the "PCfx!" would've been a disappointment in many aspects. You could play 1997-era games and 2D games, but it wasn't enough to run the latest games of 1998, and certainly not of 1999. At that rate, a little more could pay for a much faster actual PC. Given that the PCfx! was one of Orange Micro's last PC cards (the OrangePC 660 was faster, but more expensive), it was no surprise that PC cards fizzled by 1999 (the fruit-colored iMacs had no expansion of any kind). Orange Micro made other peripherals after the PC cards died, but it too perished in 2003.

Today, the PCfx! is no more than a memory, and an obscure one at that. You can read a mirror of Orange Micro's official description on it, and a comparison with the high-end Orange Micro card, the 660, which was also more expensive: the lowest-end configuration you can buy would set you back $750.

The Failure of Nintendo 64

An interesting article from NextGen on the 20 Reasons N64 Can Fail (after 10 reasons why it could be a success). Some of the reasons are real: some are just Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

1. The fact that was Nintendo was late to the 5th Generation Party, releasing the Nintendo 64 in 1996 instead of 1995, was likely a given: it gave Saturn and PlayStation a head start, but Nintendo 64 needed the extra time (not to mention 1995 was the time when a slew of great RPGs were released on SNES, including Chrono Trigger and EarthBound).

2. The N64 was expensive, but PlayStation didn't win on cost basis. It won with better games. Oftentimes, cost is irrelevant, unless it's REALLY high (PS3, 3DO). I don't think this was the reason N64 did poorly.

3. Not really true. The N64 did have noticeably better graphics, and kids obviously cared enough.

4. Very true. Once the "kiddie" reputation took hold, it was a matter of time before N64's demise. This stayed with Nintendo until the release of the Wii.

5. Not quite true. There were plenty of PlayStation games and Nintendo 64 games alike.

6. That WAS true. Cartridges are more expensive to produce than CDs, and it was a flood of cartridges that caused the market to crash in 1983. Sierra's bad experience with Atari was the primary reason it never became a Nintendo licensee.

7. Probably related to the above, but not a major factor.

8. Yes. The gaming industry at the time wanted long, cinematic CG scenes: which made things like Final Fantasy VII a great success. But barring cutscenes and voiced tracks, there wasn't more "game" that needed the storage capacity of a CD.

9. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. That is all.

10. Very good point. I don't remember what the "Dream Team" was, but third parties in general produced very poor games. Of course, having Spectrum HoloByte went nowhere: what we ended up getting was Glover.

11. DEAD WRONG! Nintendo's brand loyalty kept them afloat even today.

12. Again, being Nintendo won't win the console wars, but it will help a lot.

13. Also true. Though it's related to "why cartridges are bad"

14. Never stopped the Wii from becoming a runaway success.

15. Ah yes, my favorite part: the DD64! First off, it's not Sega 32X: that was a hastily-made add-on so that Genesis owners could (in theory) get 32-bit action without upgrading to the Saturn. But the DD64 was designed from the beginning, hooking in at the bottom of the console. The DD64 is a story in itself and DID fail. Alternatively, it would've been better methinks to have the DD64 to begin with: sturdier "disks", built-in clock, higher storage capacity, what's not to love? Heck, put in 8MB of RAM to solve for the "transfer to other cartridges" basis, and problem solved!

16. Yes!

17. No! (and no, the $500 network PC market DIDN'T exist: ask the Pippin)

18. This plagued/plagues Nintendo of America a lot, even years down the road.

19. No, this had nothing to do with it.

20. Yes, this one did affect Nintendo (but got Sega worse)

In conclusion, Next Generation was wrong. It was a success, but not a big one: and hey, it pretty much knocked Sega out of the race.

The Game Boy Advance that Never Was

Originally done 6/12/09


Our first post comes from the October 1999 issue of Nintendo Power. Check out those dimensions on the screen...that's smaller than the current GBA screen. Nintendo did show a video camera (which was cancelled around 2003) that would've been a super-updated version of Game Boy Camera, but no GBA Internet ever surfaced (possibly due to the failure of Game.com, Tiger Electronics' game console).

Relaunch

Welcome to Blue Skies and Nintendo. It was originally meant as an analogy to the old NES sites (like the famed |tsr's nes archive) for the N64, and also referencing a trip to Florida I took in 2004, but it never got past one scan (as seen above) and an article why I thought Yoshi's Island DS was a crummy sequel to the original Yoshi's Island.

The relaunch mainly includes magazine scans (in a way, kind of referencing tsr's later project, the original Magweasel, before it became his manga/game blog), which is actually what BS&N was to be in the first place. Stay tuned...