Games and Memories

Wandering through videogame_tales brought back a lot of memories and nostalgia, and at the same time a desire to search out and play these old games...

I spent some time reading about Ecco the Dolphin about a month ago, courtesy of kjorteo's comments. Apparently I was never privy to the actual storyline as I discovered that there's a story about aliens coming to harvest the Earth for its food, and Ecco has to use an Atlantean Machine to go back in time to save them? Wow, since this was before the internet I guess I never found out. Now I kinda want to play it! But I get this vague feeling that the commercial from back in the day actually had That Alien Head in the video. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's a bit of a spoiler, innit? ^^

There's apparently a whole lot of extra stuff that was left behind in the game that was never accessible and unfinished - a stage after fighting the Alien, called The Stomach. Eww.

There was a first-person adventure game that was rather gory and gruesome (way back in the days before Mortal Kombat) featuring Elvira. I wonder if any of my friends played it? Well, apparently you can wander in a small area of the game, which is apparently part of the actual Horrorsoft website (who are the original developers).

For some reason, when I first started writing this post to myself, I had written down Psycho Fox and Decap Attack. Decap Attack seems to fit with the "gross" end of the spectrum of games, but I have no idea why I wanted to look up Psycho Fox, because I never had a Sega Master System and never played this game before in my life.

While I'm rambling, anyone remember Boogerman? I used to love Interplay games. it's too bad they folded. What are the people from that now-defunct company doing now, I wonder... (an interesting comment on that video states that Naughty Dog made this game before they were Naughty Dog.)

Smartphones

Eventually, I'll put up a post about Anime North (It'll be short, but with pretty pictures, I promise!) but in the meantime I've had my mind on other things. Recently, it's been smartphones, and that even came up during the convention.

I've been thinking about upgrading from my "dumbphone" to an Android. As I'm with Virgin Mobile and I've been getting monthly "kickbacks" into my account, I have about $50 stored up in there. It's not much, but I figured I could use that as credit towards a smartphone.

Now, Virgin Mobile's selection for Androids is pretty weak. There's only four phones. And of those phones, one of them (the Galaxy 550) looks small and old, so that's right out.

I tweeted this morning asking if people would suggest one over the other, and jonofthewired gave me a little insight, in telling me that the Incredible S and the Galaxy S are better units, and they seem to be higher-powered than the other ones (and look prettier, too). This is also reflected in their cost, in that if I were to purchase one outright without a plan, I'd be shelling out $500. I checked them out today, and the Galaxy S looks pretty sweet and sharp, but the HTC Incredible S was not powered-up so I had no idea what it looks or feels like. (Which is not exactly a good way to sell a product!)

Now, the problem comes with the cost. I can get these phones for cheap if I latch myself into a 3-year term (I've been on a month-by-month prepaid plan for the past 2 years), and I found out that I can get a plan without the data - but that I would have to spring $200 for the phone.
- I'm currently paying $20 a month for a 200-minute plan (and $5/month is "kickback" into my account). I've had that phone for 2 years, I've talked for 28 hours total over that 2 years, which means I hardly use an hour per month on this phone. (!! This thing's practically new still.)
- The talk/data plan they offer would be $40 for basic data (100MB) and 150 Anytime minutes.
- A fairly-good-deal I was musing over would be a 100-minute plan with unlimited-talk evenings/weekends for $25/month, with no data plan (and I disable the 3G on the phone). Not too bad, and adding the $200 smartphone cost would only add $5.55 to the monthly bill, so I'd go to about $30-32, but that does technically double my phone bill.

Now, Virgin's also got a deal going on until June 3rd (end-of-day on the 2nd, actually - which is tomorrow!) where if I buy one of those smartphones, I'd get either $50 or $100 off, and I have that $50 in credit from my two years of service, so a smartphone wouldn't cost me much at all, it'd just double my monthly fees for three years.

So yeah, right now though, I'm going to wait a bit. The current deal ends in 2 days, so maybe they'll have a new offer on Friday. Maybe they'll have new smartphones. Plus, if I look forward to COBS, it may require me to be on the phone more (which means "new job gift" for myself), or conversely, I will be earning less so I might want to save my money (which means I'll stick with the KRZR for a bit longer). Craigslist has not been useful for this - everyone's selling their smartphones for their full retail price.

Thoughts?