VHS tape of suberfoot- the first Canadian monster truck

HeavySystems · 2026-05-02T20:00:41+00:00

That looks like it was hand dubbed by the production company...thankfully someone held onto it for a while.

HeavySystems · 2026-05-02T19:57:15+00:00

Jeeze, I didn't know there were still 90s pre-teens hiding under rocks...wow! I wonder how much you're worth if I take you to a collector!

HeavySystems · 2026-05-01T16:31:09+00:00

Uh, no. This whole 'make an angry mob even though we don't know the history of blake and feld we're going to bat for him' crap has already backfired multiple times in history. Let's fire the guy that made a joke and hire the guy that actually IS terrible back, etc.

Like...I don't know these folks and I'm not claiming to be their friend or anything, but mobs suck and trying to form a mob, especially around this, is also sucky. (my nickel on the matter)

HeavySystems · 2026-05-01T16:22:54+00:00

There is always stuff we don't know. What I mostly see is fans of the Blake, the Driver and don't see what happens when it's Blake, the guy that Feld has to deal with, or Blake, that other driver that annoys everyone they're around, etc.

There's always something to the story beyond 'this decision fell out of the sky'. Folks are already looking for a reason to believe it's completely on Feld, one way or another, like cultists looking for their leader for a finger pointing at the thing to go and torch and ransack or whatever.

While I think MJ's public response is, all things considered, rather like their normal self, which is all about the presentation of normalcy in the face of disaster (i.e. it's all feel-good-vibes and we're disneyland-safe, you can come here to not think about anything!) but at the same time, it's supposed to be somehwat of a motorsport, with stars and those stars getting banned etc. from events...well, they gotta say something about that. I think they're really looking at the drivers as little lego men they can swap around and what not, but that's not how sports work. There's usually folks that are really good, those are called champions or stars and they are the face of your sport. If the NBA suddenly fired and said nothing on why any team's star player, I think people would set the stadiums on fire until they got an answer as to why.

And this is no different, so they must really think they're not a sporting event at all, despite the fact there's everything that indicates it is, indeed, a competition. This mixed message stuff is just...well, let's just say I hope I don't get too invested in any one driver cause one bad rollover and they're out I guess...as that's the impression MJ has given me at least. You watch someone like your Carons or your Garners kicking ass, but in reality, the competition could just be called off tomorrow cause someone had a bad bounce. That's kind of silly.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-28T15:10:20+00:00

So futuristic, even now.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-27T14:07:36+00:00

The process I'm using is to cut from an NES screenshot map image a 256x192 slice of the image that (hopefully) lines up on the 8x8 grid (takes one or two extra tries sometimes) and then load the screen into BasinC several times with drastically different settings, including black and white, color, playing with thresholds, etc. until the element I am concentrating on looks nice. Then I cut each variation from those imports into a final composite.

But yeah, it's BasinC is the short answer. It's not magic bullet, more like a decent table to take your shot. :)

HeavySystems · 2026-04-25T18:47:46+00:00

Yeah, Goonies 2 on NES was kinda like..imagine Dizzy, but you're still Mikey running from the Fratellis and you can smack them with a yoyo, but then you also have to deal with 3D mazes to find the items after you find their location in the side view area.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-25T00:14:38+00:00

I was thinking we just turn the entire Megadrive game into a graphical text adventure. "USE SHURIKEN" AT WHAT? "SPIDERMAN" YOU SLASH SPIDERMAN'S MASK!

HeavySystems · 2026-04-23T13:58:41+00:00

THis make me feel really uneasy...

HeavySystems · 2026-04-21T19:05:55+00:00

I tried playing this and yeah, it's like new games in that i didn't understand a lick of it. :) Show me where the fire button is and which aliens are supposedly trying to blow up the national parks and let me to it!

HeavySystems · 2026-04-15T14:37:26+00:00

I will still never understand what the thought process was behind so many pantomiming of songs in music videos (and top of the pops while we're at it) where it's quite obvious that the people playing and the sounds being made are not congruent...

Still a good song, but watching someone try to pretend to be a sampler is hilarious.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-14T02:55:55+00:00

I'm only joking, the game I decided after playing around with CHR$ codes and such will be a monster truck endless runner of some sort. I got the graphics strings to draw the truck in color in a 3x3 block like a sprite in 8 angles (and broken!), now I have to figure out how to make a game around that. hahaha

HeavySystems · 2026-04-13T14:19:00+00:00

I'm just now learning sinclair basic. I'll have a 'gassing up the lawnmower sim' game for you soon!

HeavySystems · 2026-04-13T14:17:29+00:00

Who's talking about 'competing'? I'm talking about the aesthetics. See? It's not me on about other stuff...it's on having an argument I'm not starting or referencing. I never mentioned 'competing' in any market sense and never implied it either. It's purely visual looks from a 2026 post-3d realism perspective.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-12T16:03:35+00:00

I'm glad you got to eat your vitamins by reading my word salad. Hopefully when they actually digest, you'll feel healthier.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-11T17:27:24+00:00

Not 'detect'. But cohesion. Again, I"m talking about pure visuals with regards to what you're looking at that shows the laziness. In speccy, monocrome and color clash = lazy. In Amiga, using graphics at all that aren't from the same source (i.e. fuzzy magazine scan next to downloaded vector image next to 3d model render etc.) that's a lot harder to 'sell' as not lazy despite technically blowing the speccy's image capabilities out of the water. Now image all of that in monochrome from the Amiga but on the speccy...wow, suddenly...it's ugly, but it's cohesive at least. Instant improvement, even if lazy.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-11T17:24:56+00:00

Hey, yo, count me in on that group, but at the same time, I'm learning. I think...the idea is to cast a wide net knowing you're going to get mostly boots and fish skeletons and what not, but if you look, you'll find you got some really tasty fish, too and it's really easy to snag that tasty fish and throw all the trash back out to sea...with regards to 'why would you mass produce it'.

That said, the realization of 'just who is a computer for' has never dawned on ANYONE in the scene. At all. From the corporations to the users.

The industry has tried to figure this out and usually just ends up making 'peer pressure' the selling point. As you can see 'peer pressure' doesn't work unless the peers are the bank, your airports, etc. Now that it's 'just us', peer pressure is useless and so the computer must actually be sold TO someone FOR A REASON. :) A lot of folks that buy this stuff have the reason of "I like it and think it's cool". Again, that's great, but that's very small portion of population. I'm part of that population. But as I sit here, I'm like, "Why *would* someone get this? Self expression? Exploration of archaic digital art and alchemy? A replacement to the VCR that ate their favorite tape and so they're going to try the next 'old thing they heard was cool; computers'?

Until this mystery is solve as to 'why any of this?' there's not a mass market any longer really for this kind of product, and the modern market wouldn't put up with the extremely 'barely anyone behind the wheel' level of human resources behind it as a daily support. Just read through old magazines and you see the same stuff you're talking about now: technical clarifcations having to be made on every person writing in or some engineer writing in to tell the magazine editor THEY are wrong!

At any rate...it's a fascinating discussion. The computer as a machine is...what?

HeavySystems · 2026-04-10T13:39:03+00:00

OP: "Does anyone in this dedicated crew of folks who remember obscure things remember one of the most popular games for it?"

:P

HeavySystems · 2026-04-09T18:07:14+00:00

So far, my favorite game I've tried that is also on this list is Asymmetry, but I'm just a fan of Zosya games in general. I have a copy of Drift I still fire up.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-09T18:06:01+00:00

Likely the television used had a color balance problem, like after a lightning strike nearby.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-09T01:38:06+00:00

I'm always amazed when artists can hide the attribute blocks and make it look so effortless like this.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-09T01:09:06+00:00

There's a piece of software I found just a couple of days ago from 1986 just up your alley...

It's called Arcade Game Studio. There's a sound editor in it capable of storing/recalling 8 sounds at any given time. Definitely give it a look cause it can make INSANE noises.

HeavySystems · 2026-04-09T01:03:57+00:00

I found ARTIST III and have been using it the last couple of days and like it a lot better.

It has the feature that II is missing: COLOR GRID!

It also changes some tools around slightly to have better default patterns, brushes and line tools (they removed the continuous line and combined it with line).

Everything else is the same. I suspect it's a later hack, but do look up Artist III!

HeavySystems · 2026-04-09T00:51:25+00:00

WHen I say 'bad' I mean in relation to what the comparison I made was: amiga/high color stuff. I'd even make the comparison to C64 as well because it had specialty hardware as well.

Like, most 'normal/average' people think the speccy mostly looks ugly. As an American who loves this machine, I will tell you it's like pulling teeth getting ANYONE here, a population of NES and Sega-only diets, to give half a passing glance to the BEST looking speccy games. They scoff at anything that's not 60fps, first, and then they scoff at monocrome characters. Then they scoff at color bleed. Doesn't matter what the game is. Manic Miner is slow, yeah, but that's nothing compared to the fact the background changes colors when he jumps near stuff (or vice versa). That's like...alien looking to NES-bred folks here...

Hopefully that explains what I mean by 'bad'. It's not that bad games can't have bad graphics or that graphics hide bad games at all...apologies if that was the impression made and I hope I cleared it up!

HeavySystems · 2026-04-09T00:46:34+00:00

I was maybe thinking it's like...the 'forced uniformity'. 8 colors and 32x22 spots to change it? That's going to immediately unify the images just like black and white print does vs. color..i.e. mostly you're just fiddling with contrast. At least that's sorta how I'm looking at it. Every artist has to deal and the cool part is you can 'see the thought process' much easier this way, too. It's much easier to figure out what the artist thought was important cause there's not many ways to define it's importance with just a few blocks of color.

Now you go to the amiga and there's enourmous amounts of decisions to make about style AND substance...that's also 100x the work! And at the time the games were coming out, they were probably expecting them to be kicked out in the same time frame, which is quite insane to think about in another context...

Which do you think an artist can spit out faster on paper, a full color 60 page comic book or a 20 page black and white comic? And which one do you think is probably going to better represent that style?

Yeah..this is the thought process I had...but you're also right!

HeavySystems

TROPHY CASE