My seasoning-packet weekend.

Last night I bought a bunch of meat and vegetabables and stuff and decided to make an attempt to really cook, kinda.

Wanting to try something new, and not having recipes on hand, I decided to buy some of those cheap seasoning packets with the recipes on the back, and then buy whatever ingredients were listed.

So Friday night, I made sweet & sour pork. That pretty much sucked, but I sure did make a lot of it. And I had to chop up a bunch of stuff to make it. So I've got about three servings of that left in the fridge.

So this afternoon, I made sloppy joes. That was much easier, and smelled great, and worked out pretty well, and I've got about five more sandwiches' worth left in the fridge.

Now if I make any more stuff I won't have anywhere to put it, or I won't be able to finish what I have.

Maybe I should have a party one of these days...

Gremlins and Goonies

I'm watching the Goonies on TV right now.

It's one of the movies that translated to a really good video game on the Atari. Not to be confused with the lame NES version, of course. In this game, you controlled two of the characters from the movie, going through various parts of the movie. The first level involved you slipping past Ma Fatelli to get into the underground tunnel through the fireplace. One of you had to lure her out with the counterfeit money machine, let the other one through, and then slip through yourself. It helped if you had a friend around playing the second player, so you didn't have to switch between the characters throughout the level. And in the last level, the one on the ship, one of the characters you played was that big deformed guy, and he couldn't be hurt by members of the Fatelli family. There were a lot of puzzles to solve, and when I was twelve, I was very impressed with it.

It reminds me of another great 8-bit game that was based on a movie: Gremlins. We all remember the rules of owning a Mogwai: expose them to water and they'll multiply, expose them to sunlight and they die, and if you feed them after midnight, they turn into evil Gremlins. These three simple rules provided for a great classic video game, where you wandered around the house retrieving Mogwai, and avoiding and exterminating Gremlins. Puddles of water would multiply both Mogwai and Gremlins, meaning either a potential bonus or more trouble. Food strewn about the house, sometimes by default, sometimes thrown from a fridge or popcorn machine, would mutate any Mogwai that found it. And the time limit to the level was, of course, sunrise. This came out for the Atari 5200 and the Commodore 64, and it was hax0red to work on the aTARI 8-bit.

For those of you with Commodore emulators, download Goonies. I'll post the Gremlins link later; I recommend the Atari 5200 version anyway; the Atari had a higher clock speed so the game, with all its software sprites, had a better frame rate.