craigslist part two

Until I get a proper game bit screwdriver, my store bought Virtual Boy will remain out of the oven and out of commission. Luckily, I happened across a pretty good deal on a Virtual Boy on craigslist last week! I got a perfectly working system with four games and a carrying case. I already had two of the games (Red Alarm and Vertical Force) and the other two are kinda weak (Galactic Pinball and Golf), but I was able to haggle the price down to something in line with what a similar bundle goes for on eBay. It would've been nice if he'd mentioned that it was originally a Blockbuster rental unit (man, did that neoprene shade stink! Luckily a wash in hot water remedied that) that still had gunky security stickers on every part (some lighter fluid made short work of that mess), but I suspected as much from the carrying case in the photo he posted. It also would've been nice if he'd mentioned that the stand is being held together by electrical tape, but that's a common weak spot of the system, so again, no real surpise. The fun part was when I met the seller; he's a nice old guy who was never really into video games but really likes 3D :)

So I now have two Virtual Boys, a custom carrying case, two AC adapters, one battery adapter, ten of the 14 games released in North America (still need 3D Tetris, Jack Bros., Nester's Funky Bowling, and Waterworld), and I may be picking up the Japanese-only release of V-Tetris later today (an entirely different game from 3D Tetris).

Just about all of the time I've spent playing games lately has been with Wario. Virtual Boy Wario Land really is fantastic, but a little short so I'm trying pace myself with it. It has reminded me of what the original Wario gameplay is like though, and I'm seeing that Wario World, while still a simplistic side-scrolling brawler with hints of exploration and puzzle solving, is much closer to the series' roots than I originally thought. The transition to 3D and the greater focus on combat feel like changes for the worse, but it's still fun and captures a lot of what Wario is all about.

I've been fighting with a Xerox WorkCentre 5675 at work for the past little while. It suddenly started hanging on print jobs without giving any specific errors, so I went through the settings and tried a few different combinations with little luck. Next was a driver update which didn't do much better, so I blew everything up and let Xerox's automated installer do everything (new TCP/IP port, drivers, settings, etc...). I got it to the point where things were working most of the time and I was able to clear the queue remotely if it did run into a problem, but that wasn't good enough. I called a Xerox technician in to give things a look, and he upgraded the firmware and wiped a few parts down. Everything was still wonky when I came back the next day. So I've now changed the machine's IP and it's name on the network while reverting back to the drivers it was using when this all started, all manually, and it seems to be holding up. If things are screwy again tomorrow, I'm wiping my hands of it and letting Xerox take over.