Ah Retrograde, a Commodore 64 game released by Thalamus in 1989. The Rowland Brothers, of Creatures, Creatures 2 and Mayhem in Monsterland fame created this game and it shows. Presentation is top notch. Some would say that this is a repetitive shoot ’em up but I love it. Nice mix of flying around shooting aliens and then a bit of a break with the underground bits. I love the graphics and the sound is a delight. The gameplay is very simplistic, especially underground but the flying weapons are super! Just make sure you have an autofire on your controller. My […]
Ireland
The Glorious Twelfth
Tim and Naomi of the Irish Passport Podcast visited Northern Ireland in July to experience the marching season in all it’s “glory” for their latest episode. It’s a great episode, showing the stark contrast between the neighbourly and friendly people they met during the day on the 11th, and the hate fuelled crowd who descended on the area that night for the bonfire. You’ll find lots of images of the bonfires that night on Google Images but this Dailymail article (yes, yes, I know) has lots of images and reporting. I visited Northern Ireland in the summer and really enjoyed […]
Games
You Have To Win The Game
What game? No, that’s the title of a free game on Steam and on the Commodore 64! The C64 version can be found here on CSDb while the Steam version is here. The Steam version works on Windows, Mac and 32 bit Linux! A comment on the original announcement post links to what could be a port to something called FreeBASIC which is available here. The game is a very hard platform game where you have to collect all the items in the game to complete it 100%. The CSDb page has some spoiler comments so beware of those if […]
Music
The Firm: Serious Fun
The FIrm are “a novelty band” according to their Wikipedia page. They released fun, mostly silly songs in the eighties. In the late eighties they released an album called “Serious Fun” which included a song most people who grew up in the eighties will recognise, Star Trekkin’. My parents bought that album and I remember dancing around to that song so long ago. 🙂 There’s a bunch of other songs on the album too but unfortunately the album itself appears to be very rare and only a few of the following songs can be found online: Star Trekkin’ Girls Got […]
Photography
Sony a7iii: AEL in Manual Mode
One of the Facebook groups I’m part of is Sony a7iii/a7riii setup Tips. It’s a relatively quiet group but it’s chock full of great tips for Sony’s latest cameras. One of those tips was posted yesterday and Daniel Ockeloen, the group administrator, made a video of it which I have embedded above. In manual mode, the AEL button can be used to maintain the exposure while you change settings. With AEL activated changing the shutter speed will change the aperture and vice versa. In effect it’s the same as going back to Aperture or Shutter Priority modes but it does […]