LazyGameReviews

LGR - Doom on a Digital Camera

Got a fun little video for ya! This one is just what it says on the tin: Doom running on a digital camera. Specifically a Kodak DC260 from 1998!

I've been meaning to do this ever since my "Doom on a Calculator" video blew up, but only got one of the required cameras earlier this year. Kept putting it off in favor of more involved projects, but with it being Thanksgiving week here I needed something simpler so this seemed like a good one.

Hope you enjoy, and have a good holiday f...

LGR - The Sims 4 Discover University Review

Well dang, this pack ended up taking longer to experience than I thought! By the end I had around ten hours of footage to sort through on this one. I've always enjoyed the college-themed Sims packs and this one is no exception, it's got some meat on its bones.

Got a few small things to tweak, rearrange, and re-do, but it's more or less the final video that'll go up on Friday. Will update the embed once it's complete as usual. EDIT: done.

And with that, ...

LGR - Recording CRT Computer Monitors

EDIT: The video has been updated to (hopefully) the final version! Mostly minor tweaks and edits, along with a new outro. Lemme know if you see anything wrong though.

Got another couple of videos in the works right now that are more detail-oriented and scripted, so in the meantime I figured I'd put together this little project: how I record CRT computer monitors! Emphasis on computer monitors. There are several nicely-made videos about recordi...

LGR - The Monorail All-In-One Windows 95 PC

Got this one finished just in time for tomorrow!
It's been quite an unusual week over here so it ended up taking a bit longer than expected to get this one completed, but y'know, so it goes. Also ended up uncovering an increasingly amusing story surrounding the history of this machine and the company behind it, so there's kind of a mini Tech Tales packed in here as well.
Anyway, this is the Monorail PC. Specifically the Model 133 from 1997! A fascinating Windows 95 computer indeed, and ...

LGR - Black & White Review

Got an early look at this one for ya!

No background music, missing plenty of gameplay from the latter half, but yeah. Mostly there. Will update the embedded video with the finished version tomorrow night, if all goes well.

EDIT: the video embedded above is now complete! Finalizing captions now. Have a happy Halloween!

Still really enjoy this game, as weird as it is. God games like this one are a rarity in the grand scheme of things. Hope you dig ...

LGR Oddware - Essential Reality P5 Glove

So this is... a thing! An enjoyably odd thing indeed.

Can't say I'd ever seen this before it was given to me at VCFMW last month. The P5 is a "3D virtual controller" that works a lot like a mouse with a few extra inputs. Bending your fingers clicks the mouse buttons, moving your hand moves the cursor, and certain games even support rotation and movement along the Z-axis!

...kind of. In theory. Haha. This is Oddware after all and this isn't very well-known for a reason. Still, qu...

LGR - Doom II 25 Years Later: A Retrospective

Well then, THIS has been a long time coming!
I'd planned to have this complete for Doom II's 25th anniversary on October 10th, but life happened so it got set back a week. However, I think the extra time paid off since I was able to provide it some valuable extra hours of work.

Hope you enjoy this early version of the video! It's not 100% complete yet, there's some missing music, placeholder gameplay, and a few lines that will be reworked. I'll edit this post with the final...

LGR Thrifts - Episode 43

【Ｌｅｔ＇ｓ　ｇｏ　ｔｈｒｉｆｔｉｎｇ！】

LGR - The DOS Compatible Apple Power Mac 6100

Got another LGR classic computer thing for ya!

This one is the Apple Power Macintosh 6100/66 DOS Compatible from 1995. Yeah, it's a hybrid of both PowerPC and x86 architecture that lets you run Mac OS and MS-DOS simultaneously on the same machine!

While there were a number of DOS compatible systems Apple made in the mid-90s, this one in particular attracted me due to its form factor, Intel 486DX2-66 processor, and Sound Blaster 16 chipset.

It has its caveats and quirks to...

The Unlicensed 1997 Need For Speed Addon: We All Need Extra Speed

Had a good number of requests to cover this after the most recent donations unboxing, so here we go! Thanks again to David for sending this rarity my way.

Extra Speed, to my knowledge, is the only unauthorized add-on pack to The Need For Speed for MS-DOS PCs. So in this video we're taking a look at the contents, including custom tracks, modding applications, a PCX photo collection, and shareware racing games. Also tried my hand at quickly making my own custom track fo...

LGR - The Sims 4 Realm of Magic Review

FINALLY. Like two weeks after launch 😶

I think this is the longest time it's taken me to cover a Sims pack since 2008. So ah, I guess it's fine all things considered. Still, I prefer to get these out much sooner but oh well.

Only got back last Friday from my trip to Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, so yeah. I decided to hang around the area as a small vacation since I hadn't been to Chicago in a while and I needed a bit of a break after the show. Honestly I still n...

LGR - Opening Stuff You Sent Me! September 2019

Dang, it's been a minute since one of these went up. Last donation unboxing video was all the way back in April! The year of 2019 continues to fly by at an alarming rate.

But yeah, I'll be outta town for a little bit so this is scheduled to go up tomorrow morning while I'm gone. That also means no LGR video next week!

As you may have seen posted elsewhere by now, I'm headed to Vint...

LGR - Epson Apex 100 PC from 1989

Greetings folks! Got a lovely retro computer to share with you today. I know, I know, uncharacteristic coming from me but I figured I'd shake things up...

All right so, sure, the Apex 100 is "just" a Turbo XT clone from thirty years ago, but I genuinely do enjoy this one. The Epson Apex line was sold right alongside the Epson Equity in the late 80s, but it were intentionally designed to be worse than the Equity series. The idea was to offer a low cost PC to sell in the wider r...

LGR - Acer Ferrari 4005: The $2,000 Laptop from 2005

I've had this thing for I don't know how long now, haha. Simply bought it for the Ferrari branding of course, because Ferrari. And also because it has some beefy specs for the time that allows it to run Windows XP games like a boss.

Yeah I always remember drooling over this range of machines in the mid-2000s, with its Rosso Corsa paint job and carbon fiber accents. But good grief was the price astronomical back then, at least for me. Spending two grand on a laptop when I could barely a...

LGR - Thermaltake CircleFire 5.25" Kit from 2004

This is a "professional multimedia kit?" Mmkay. Regardless of what the boastful marketing copy says, I think not, haha.

No, this is a cheaply-made 5.25" drive bay device that plugs into a PC's sound card output. It packs some interesting features: stereo VU meters, LED peak indicators, and even an integrated chrome speaker!

But does any of it work? Well. It's a chintzy Thermaltake case mod from 2004 that's decorated like a Guy Fieri shirt, so the deck truly was stacked ...

LGR - The Sims 4 Moschino Stuff Review

Welp, this pack exists.

LGR - Ion Fury: A New 3D Realms Build Engine Game!

Wasn't able to post this early due to a review embargo, but that has now been lifted!

Ion Fury is something I've been looking forward to getting my hands on ever since first hearing about it at PAX 2015. It's a new game using the same tech as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood, and it is downright legit.

LGR Update!

Greetings! Welcome to one of those personally unfulfilling weeks of making LGR where all content production bottlenecks behind the scenes. This happens frequently but I decided to do a little write-up about it this time.

Lemme just say that I'm not asking for advice, or sympathy, or even complaining exactly. I know what has to be done after a decade of doing it! But yeah, I'm always asked about the YouTube video creation process so I'm gonna spout some words about the current goings-on...

LGR Q&A - Answering Your Qs with As, Questionably

Here's the result of the recent Patreon Q&A session! Fifty-something inquiries submitted by patrons on the $5+ tier 👍

LGR Oddware - Audible MobilePlayer from 1997

Fresh Oddware for ya! This time it's the MobilePlayer from Audible, a digital spoken word player from 1997. Yes, the same Audible known for audiobooks these days. Yet this is from the days of 28.8k dial-up modems and predates the first mass-market MP3 players. And it wasn't even sold in stores, the only way you could get one was by ordering directly from the company!

And it holds a whopping two hours of audiobooks! By compressing everything down to 8-bit 8kHz sound files that are store...

Building a New IBM XT Clone! The NuXT Turbo PC

Got a fun little project to share here: the Monotech NuXT Turbo XT Clone.

It's a very professional-looking MicroATX motherboard featuring a 10MHz 8088 that switches between three clock frequencies on the fly, 640K RAM plus 192K UMB, XT-CF card and extra high density floppy interfaces, (S)VGA graphics up to 512K, four 8-bit ISA slots, an AT2XT converter for PS/2 keyboards, Sergey Kiselev's Micro 8088 BIOS, negative 5-volt rail handling so you can use modern ATX PSUs, and yeah man.
2019-07-27 13:39:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Opening the LGR YouTube Play Buttons (and improving them)

Yeah, so confession time: I've never really done anything with my YouTube rewards. Barely even opened them. Got my 100k play button plaque six years ago and my 1 million at the start of this year. They're nice but I dunno, trophies are weird to me.

But then after the ten year anniversary of LGR passed by I decided, "yeah, I guess these are worth displaying," and dug them out of storage along with my old VHS-C camcorder.

So let's unbox both of them and hang them up in ...

LGR - Sierra On-Line's IBM PCjr

If you saw my Computer Reset video earlier in the month then you'll probably recall that we found something pretty incredible: an IBM PCjr with a rare hard disk add-on, crammed into a box labeled Sierra On-Line!

And yeah, turns out it's legit. Sierra employee Robert Fischer worked for them back in the late 80s through the mid 90s as an all-around "tech guy," having his hands in everything from quality assurance to hardware maintenance. And this PCjr was one of the machines he ...

LGR - 1996 Sega Digio SJ-1 Digital Camera

Another video that's been in the works in some way or another for about a year. Finding the camera itself was the beginning of the journey, but tracking down the software/serial cable package proved a bit trickier. Darn you Sega for selling the two things separately a couple decades ago 😑

But yeah, happy to share another retro digital camera episode! These are always fun but when it's an obscure Sega product that's even better. The Digio SJ-1 is a fascinating device and it's been on...

LGR - Computer Reset. 38k sqft of retro computing!

Had this in the works for a couple months now and it's finally done! Computer Reset in Dallas, Texas. Legendary.

This place is mind boggling.

A massive warehouse of vintage computers. Seemingly endless retro hardware and software that hasn't been touched in ages. Way more than is even shown here, it's like nothing I have ever seen in my life. What a trip! And it's finally done now after sitting on the footage for two months.

I don't even know what to say except I'm PSYCHE...

Q&A!

It has been a long, long time since we've done an LGR Q&A. Let's change that! With a whole decade of the show having just passed by it seems like the perfect time to me.

Ask anything you want and I'll answer it honestly! Within reason of course. Only one inquiry per person, please. And to keep things interesting, avoid yes/no questions and things like "will you review/cover X" :)

This'll eventually be in public video form too, so if you don't want your Patreon username shown...

LGR - Just Bought My First Arcade Game!

EXCITEMENT.

Fulfilling a lifelong dream, I am now the proud owner of a 1980 Atari Missile Command cabaret cabinet 😀😀😀

So here's a quick video about it!

I've got future plans for the machine on LGR of course, but I was just so psyched to have it in my house and share a little bit of the joy that I had to put this little overview together last night.

Hope that your week goes well, folks! In between commanding missiles, I'm fully committed to finishing a rath...

LGR - Celebrating TEN YEARS

Wow.

A decade of LGR has officially occurred.

And I had no idea what to do, haha. So I've made a kind of retrospective video using the original VHS-C camcorder that I used back in 2009! And yes this a 4K video in a 4:3 aspect ratio, because it only made sense somehow.

Here's to another ten years! Or whatever happens really. I am here for all of it. Hope you are too :)

LGR - The Sims 4 Island Living Review

How many Sims 4 packs is this now, 177 or something? Ha.

Anyway yeah, been working on this since Sunday. It is... an expansion pack! Yep. Not great, not terrible. Maybe a 3.6. Like a chest x-ray.

Cool cool, sooooo with that outta the way it's onto working on the 10-year anniversary video for LGR! Got a fun little gimmick planned, stay tuned.

LGR - Tempest Replicade Mini Arcade Machine

Got a pretty straightforward LGR here video for Monday! It's Atari's Tempest from 1981, but in sixth-scale playable replica form. Love the details on this thing. That coin door, ahh!

I was pretty excited to set this up once I got home from E3, so I recorded this straight away and edited it all together this afternoon. Nothing too crazy going on, just a neat recreation of an arcade favorite I've been excited to share ever since buying it at the show last week. Hope you enjoy!

Tiny ...