I stumbled across the Starcade website the other day and about lost my lunch. The clothes, the goofy contestants, the oh so cool games from the 80s.

For those of you not old enough to remember, video games used to be played at a place called the “arcade“. We would actually leave our house and go play games with friends from all over town at the mall, or Putt-Putt, or even the bowling alley. The only draw back was that you needed to get a ride and usually had to take your kid sister, or brother, and watch her spend all your extra tokens because she sucked at ski-ball and wouldn’t leave you alone until you gave her more.

Starcade came out on TBS in 1983 while I was still in High School. Being po’ and living way out in the country I didn’t get to the arcade all that much until I started driving. Then you couldn’t get me to leave. Anyway, Starcade only ran in 83 and 84 and it featured some of the coolest games out at the time, along with some of the coolest hair.

The premise of the show was that you would answer a question Jeapordy style, first one to buzz in got a shot at the question and the bonus points. Then each contestant would play a video game for 60 seconds (then 50 then 40 and finally 30 for the grand prize). That score was added to your quiz score. Highest score at the end of the show got a chance at winning their very own arcade game. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a prize that would make a kid wet himself more than having your own Donkey Kong in your bedroom.

The show didn’t last all that long. Partly because the video arcade craze was already starting to die out with the NES hitting shelves in 85 and partly because the show really did sort of suck. It’s never been really exciting to watch someone else play a video game. Try sitting through someone struggling with GTA to see just how boring it can be.

If you think you are up to it, you can head over to the Starcade episodes page and try to sit through an entire episode without wondering if you will ever get that time back.

Anyone have a Dragon’s Lair or Star Trek Vector Game (sit down preferred) sitting around they want to get rid of?

Abandoned Roller Coaster

It’s rare that I hit the stumble button and am presented with something I think is really cool, fortunately, tonight was a good night..

This series of photos is from an abandoned amusement park that I can only assume is in Japan.. I just wish that there were more pictures..

Check out the rest in the series..

http://home.f01.itscom.net/spiral/t_rando/t_rando1.html

And of course the site appears to have been hammered by Digg again.. Let’s hope it comes back up soon.

I’m not entirely convinced that we can call these things “planes” given the fact that they don’t actually fly.. To travel they rely on ground effect forces that allowed them to “fly” a few meters off the ground at serious speeds and while carrying enormous loads.

My favorite has always been the Caspian Monster. Everything about it just looks lean and fast. With 8 jet engines up front it actually reminds me of the jet trains and how they were pulled along the rails.

Designed to carry over 100 tons of cargo at speeds of 250 miles per hour, they were intended to be used on the Caspian and Black Seas as military transports. But what really amazes me is that as late as 1985 these things were still being funded. Originally 120 planes were planned, but in the end only 4 were operational (3 A-90 Orlyonok and 1 Lun-class) when funding was pulled..

In the early 1970s the Russians followed the American jet train research by sticking two Yak-40 turbo-jet engines to the lead car of an ER22 train. The SVL (high-speed laboratory car) was intended to be used on the Troika Express and during testing is was able to reach speeds of 180mph (250km/hr)..

Like it’s American counterpart it never really went any further than that.. We can only guess, but I suspect that the only more expensive than trying to fly over dirt would be trying to fly over dirt on rails.. Jet fuel costs, noise levels, and probably just the fact that this is plane old silly contributed to the closing of the programs in both countries..

It’s a real shame that when projects like this end there is no budget for storing them for later viewing.

I love weird tech, and it’s really hard to beat the weirdness that the cold war created here and in Russia.. I grew up at the tail end of the cold war that Ronald Reagan, all praise his name, helped bring to an end while I was still in high school.. Anyway, where was I?? Oh, right, jet powered trains.. Really, jet powered trains..

In 1966 New York Central converted a Rail Diesel Car in to a jet powered train by adding a pair of General Electric J47-19 turbojet engines.. Normally these engines sit under the wing tip of a Convair B-36D intercontinental bomber.

To help the train cut through the air better a large nose was added to the train. Apparently it was pretty fast too. It reached 184mph on it’s way to Ohio. Not too bad for a train in the 60s..

The jet trains don’t end here. I found a Russian version made just a few years later.. But more on that in a few days..

I don’t say that very often.. It’s sort of anti everything I try to do.. But it’s time..

I have been a partner at ForTheWeb.Com since it was founded more than 7 years ago.. We started out as a small web design and hosting firm with 4 partners in Northern California and we have done a lot of good work in that time.. The company has grown and evolved in those years.. But somewhere along the line it quit being “fun”.. A couple of years ago we lost our first partner.. Personality conflicts and other issues kept coming up and three of us decided to buy the fourth out..

With that came more change and some growth.. But lately the “job” has stopped being fun.. It became something I dreaded doing and the extra hours spent on it, above my passion for designing jewelry, just left me tired.. And being a bit of a take or leave it kind of guy, I chose to leave it..

It’s always tough to leave something, especially something that isn’t “finished”.. Over the last 20 years I’ve owned or managed 11 businesses.. Some of them successful, some not so much.. ForTheWeb falls in to that vague middle realm.. The company makes money, has great clients, but doesn’t offer much fullfillment other than that..

This is an amicable parting of the ways, and I expect Shannon and Joel to do quite well in the future with ForTheWeb.. But my days of banging out code for food are behind me now.. Well, except for a couple of pet projects that is - you didn’t expect me to quit cold turkey did you??

I put up another old web site this week.. This one features the wonder and joy that is Robotech.. If you don’t know what it is, there’s probably nothing here for you to see, for those of you that know it, you might like a few things I gathered up over there..

I found proof that the hero actually started his career as a pilot by killing an innocent civilian, and my first fanfic, the MinMei one, that actually got me some serious hate mail which I found absolutely hysterical.. But then at the RoboCon (yes I went like any good fanboy) there were some people there that had lost all touch with reality..

The site itself has a few old school tech ideas in it, some of them actualyl still work.. The Java Applet video player may squeel it’s ass off whel it loads so be prepared to grab your volume control, and there are some pretty bad midis playing through the whole site (hey that site hasn’t seen any love for more than 5 years).. But the ‘cool’ thing is the multiple onMouseOver call.. It’s not a big deal now, but this was one of the first sites that I’m aware of to use a single mouse over to control 5 different elements on the screen.. Hey, it was cool back then.. We could tell by how many people stole the code and left the written by tags in there..

Like the VrE Online site, I think it’s sort of cool to look back at a snapshot of what we were doing on the web years ago.. I’m going to use that as the reason to not ‘fix’ anything instead just being too lazy..

Fey

Many years ago I was part of a group that was really bleeding edge for a lot of things.. In ‘94 we spun off a game magazine called VrE Online.. For about 2 and a half years we published reviews on games and hardware on BBS’, electronically on floppy, and eventually on the internet.. It was a lot of fun and we learned a lot about a lot of things, especially game companies pulling advertising when you pan their games..

Since I’m starting this site all over from scratch I’ve decided to pull the archive of VrE Online out of the crate and put it back up, warts and all.. I haven’t bothered to fix anything except for a few show stopping URL issues.. I also put together a quick and ugly page with a complete list of all of the downloadable version I could find.. If you are interested in seeing where we started in the very early days of the web, the last update was in 1996, check it out over here at vreonline.feydakin.com..

I also need to thank a few of the people that really were a huge part in making the magazine happen.. Louis Stice, Andy Hardison, Jeff Godemann and Craig Crowder were there through some pretty hard times and made all of it bearable.. Thanks guys..