If I had to name the top three video game consoles in terms of their importance and influence on the video game industry, it would be the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and the PlayStation. The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine of course covered the latest one of those and 1999 may well have been the peak year for that system. They hype was already starting to swing towards its successor, the PS2 which would be released the following year. The September 1999 issue includes:
Features
Final Fantasy VIII - Follow-up to Square's enormously successful and outstanding Final Fantasy VII. While I played VII I never played VIII but it can be hard to live up to expectations.
Battle of the Brutes - A look at two of the biggest football games on the PlayStation, Madden NFL 2000 and NFL GameDay 2000 as well as a talk with the teams behind each.
WipeOut 3 - A preview of the third game in this futuristic racing game for the PlayStation. Think F-Zero but with more realism and weapons.
Table of Contents from the September 1999 issue of the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine
Departments
Letters - Topics from readers this month include Ape Escape, violence in games, the Resident Evil movie, two lasers vs. one in DVD drives, and more.
News - An interview with Phil Harrison, vice president of third-party relations and research and development for Sony Computer Entertainment America, EA pursues Michael Jordan license, Bleem makes it to retail, an update on the PlayStation 2, three Southpark games coming to the PlayStation, and much more.
Previews - Previews this month include Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions, WipeOut 3, Wu Tang: Shaolin Style, Jet Moto 3, Mag 3, Xena: Warrior Princess, Vigilante 8: Second Offense, Thousand Arms, Bass Landing, Hot Wheels Turbo Racing, Tomb Raider: Last Revelation, Knockout Kings 2000, NBA ShootOut 2000, Dune 2000, You Don't Know Jack, Gekido, Army Men: Air Attack, Dan O'Brien Decathalon, Die Hard Trilogy 2, Fox NHL Championship 2000, Rady 2 Rumble, South Park, Quake II, Fear Factor, and Fox NBA Basketball 2000.
International - A look at games recently released or coming soon in Japan. These include Chrono Cross, Geppy-X, Goo! Goo! Soundy, Vagrant Story, Pepsiman, and Space Invaders 2000.
Reviews
Driver - An action adventure game centered around driving.
NFL Blitz 2000 - A pretty good football game from Midway.
NFL Xtreme 2 - A not so great football game from 989 Sports.
Rising Zan - A 3rd person 3D action game featuring a samurai gunman.
Sled Storm - A snowmobile racing game.
Soul of the Samurai - A pretty terrible 3D adventure game.
Tarzan - A 3rd person 3D action game featuring Tarzan.
Tricks - Tricks, strategies and codes for tons of games including 3Xtreme, Rushdown, Fisherman's Bait, Invasion From Beyond, MLB 2000, Syphon Filter, Ape Escape, Big Air, Moto Racer, Need For Speed: High Stakes, Rally Cross 2, Army Men 3-D, T'ai Fu: Wrath of the Tiger, Driver, WCS/nWo Thunder, Lunar: Silver Star Complete, R-type Delta, Destrega, Croc 2, and more.
Back cover of the September 1999 issue of the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine
Inflation still isn’t letting up, and it’s a top concern for Americans right now. But we just learned of yet another way surging prices are hurting families—leading them into huge amounts of credit card debt.
“More Americans are racking up credit card debt as inflation pushes up the cost of food, utilities and other staples,” CBS News reports. “60% of credit card holders have been carrying balances on their cards for at least a year, up 10% from 2021.”
“59% of Americans who earn less than $50,000 a year carry a credit card balance from month to month,” the reporting notes. “The percentage drops slightly to 49% for those who earn between $50,000 and $80,000 and dips again to 46% for people making $80,000 to $100,000 a year.”
This is a serious problem for many families.
"It's even harder to get out of debt when it's spending on necessities that got you into that position in the first place," Creditcards.com analyst Ted Rossman told CBS. "These expenses aren't easily avoided."
Americans now owe $887 billion in credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s up 13% from 2021!
Credit card debt is nothing to sneeze at. Because of the way it’s structured, it can quickly become exorbitantly expensive and ultimately cost much more than the original purchases.
“Credit card debt accumulates when you don’t pay off your credit card in full by the end of each billing cycle,” NationalDebtRelief.com explains. “When the balance is carried over to the next billing period, interest accrues in the form of the annual percentage rate (APR). APR is the percent of interest charged on purchases, cash advances, and balance transfers, and it compounds. This means that interest grows on top of interest and the longer you take to pay off a debt, the more you’ll owe.”
The website offers one illustrative example that shows how quickly credit card debt can spiral out of control. If you borrow $10,000 on a card with a 25% rate and only make the minimum payments, you will ultimately have to pay back more than $30,000—and it’ll take almost 30 years!
Thanks to inflation eroding their paychecks and sending their expenses skyrocketing, many American families are finding themselves facing this potential scenario. And it’s important to remember that this isn’t some abstract economic phenomenon. The federal government caused inflation through its reckless fiscal and monetary policies during the pandemic.
It printed trillions of new dollars out of thin air and ran up multi-trillion-dollar deficits on wasteful “stimulus” spending. The inevitable result of this flood of dollars chasing the same number of goods (or even a smaller number) was always going to be higher prices. And that’s exactly what has happened.
But, as the credit card debt problem shows, the second-order consequences of the government’s bull-in-a-china-shop interventions are playing out far beyond just price hikes. It will take many years of study for us to fully understand all the different ways these reckless policies are hurting American families, but one thing is clear: the bill that ultimately comes due is going to be a big one.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
None of the slides in this set are labeled or dated though they were probably taken in the 1960s. These appear to be family photos with the first few featuring babies (the stroller in the first pic looks a lot like my first stroller though I was probably born ~10 years after these were taken). The last features grandma smoking a cigarette. It seems like everybody smoked then.
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
Electronic Gaming Monthly was perhaps the most popular and certain one of the longest lasting video game magazines in the U.S. The first issue came out in the late 1980s and it continued publication into the 2000s. The August 2002 issue includes:
Features
Miyamoto's Angels - Referring to Nintendo's popular franchises Metroid, Mario and Zelda. This article previews the new games coming soon in those franchises to the GameCube and Game Boy Advance including Super Mario Sunshine (GameCube), Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3 (GBA), Metroid Prime (GameCube), Metroid Fusion (Game Boy Advance), Legend of Zelda (GameCube), and Zelda GBA.
The First GameCube and Xbox RPGs - Morrowind for the Xbox (but honestly, your better off playing it on a PC) and Lost Kingdoms for the GameCube are a couple of the first major RPGs for those platforms.
Table of Contents from the August 2002 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly
Departments
Editorial - Looking at trends in video games, both good (adult themes in games) and bad (poor licensed games...but this has almost always been a trend).
Letters - Letters from readers about Tony Hawk 4, cel shading, Star Wars games, the Final Fantasy movie, and much more.
Press Start - The top news this month includes highlights from E3, and update on the PlayStation 2's success, Microsoft pushes online gaming with the Xbox and new games like Unreal Championship, Nintendo pushing new games in major franchises but lacks online presence (Phantasy Star Online is the only online game at the time). For the GBA, more games are being released that make use of the GB/GBA link. Get extras in Animal Crossing and Phantasy Star Online.
Gossip - Quartermann speculates on rumors including Sonic retiring from Adventure games; Rare to start developing games for multiple systems; Doom III for the Xbox; and more.
Review Crew
PlayStation 2
Aggressive Inline - Like Tony Hawk games but with inline skates.
Britney's Dance Beat - A pretty terrible music based game.
Dropship: United Peace Force - A combat vehicle sim in which you not only pilot aircraft but drive ground vehicles as well.
Endgame - A light gun game that you probably don't want.
Freekstyle - Kind of like SSX but with dirt bikes in instead of snowboards.
Legion: The Legend of Excalibur - A Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance like action/RPG that unfortunately does not live up to that comparison.
Fire Blade - A 3D combat helicopter arcade game.
The Mark of Kri - A 3D action adventure game that earns EGM's 'Game of the Month'.
MLB Slugfest 20-03 - A baseball game on steroids.
MX SuperFly Featuring Ricky Carmichael - A motocross sim with unrealistic physics...but fun to play.
Shifters - A not so great action/RPG.
Xbox
Test Drive - A continuation of the Test Drive series that I started playing on the Commodore 64. This one is comparable to Burnout.
Crazy Taxi 3 - A great sequel in a great series.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - An excellent RPG from the PC world. The Xbox version is excellent...it's just that the PC version is better.
GameCube
Bomberman Generation - There have been a great many Bomberman games over the Years. This is one of the better ones.
Lost Kingdoms - A new and somewhat unique RPG for the GameCube.
Tricks - Infinite grenades in Resident Evil, play as Laura Croft in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, several secrets for Jedi Starfighter, increase the size of your stolen-car collection in GTA3, Bonesaw in Spider-Man, strategies and clues for Eternal Darkness, unlock hidden wrestlers and arenas in Wrestlemania X8, plus tons of codes, GameShark codes, and questions answered by the Game Doctor.
Back cover of the August 2002 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly
President Joe Biden unveiled a sweeping plan on Wednesday to let delinquent student loan borrowers transfer tens of thousands of dollars in debt to taxpayers. If he were a biblically minded leader, Biden would have used his nationally televised press conference to repent of his role in creating the student loan crisis in the first place.
Biden’s student loan bailout lets individuals write off $20,000 in unpaid student loans if they received Pell Grants or $10,000 if they did not. The plan is open to households that make up to $250,000 a year or individuals who make $125,000. It would also reduce the number of people who have to make student loan payments at all, as well as the amount and time they must pay before US taxpayers pick up the tab for their full loan.
While much of the commentary has focused on students who refused to make their loan payments, few have discussed how successive presidential administrations set those students up for failure. The federal government largely nationalized the student loan industry in 2010 via a piece of legislation related to Obamacare, the “Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.” The US government now holds 92 percent of all student loans — and the nation’s total student debt has more than doubled, from $811 billion in April 2010 to $1.748 trillion in April 2022.
Part of the reason the figures have surged — and students start life so indebted — is due to progressive policies that made it impossible for most people to ever pay off their student loans. In their haste to have the US taxpayer underwrite the maximum amount of college tuition, they transformed most student loans from a fixed-rate loan — like a mortgage or car loan — to a plan based on the student’s post-graduation income. Gradually, the borrower’s share of his college loans shrank, while the taxpayer’s increased.
The first income-based repayment plan — the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, established in July 1994 under the Clinton administration — required students to pay up to 20 percent of their discretionary income for 25 years; any remaining balance would be paid by taxpayers. The George W. Bush administration passed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, which let graduates pay 15 percent of their income above 150 percent of the federal poverty line. The Obama-Biden administration reduced that to 10 percent and wrote off unpaid undergraduate loans after 20 years under a series of new loan policies between 2012 and 2014.
These policies made student loan debt effectively permanent and unpayable.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) spelled out the process in a thorough, February 2020 report. CBO researchers followed college graduates who began paying off student loans in 2012. “By the end of 2017, over 75% of those borrowers owed more than they had originally borrowed. By contrast, the median balance among borrowers in fixed-payment plans decreased steadily,” they noted. “Loans are often repaid more slowly under income-driven plans because the required payments are too small to cover the accruing interest. As a result, borrowers in such plans typically see their balance grow over time rather than being paid down.”
The federal government took over nearly all student loans, forced students to make years of payments only to fall further behind, then handed the enlarged debt to the US taxpayer. The ill-advised policies began as far back as 1978 with the Middle Income Student Assistant Act, which let all college students accrue student loan debt. A series of bills expanded this web of indebtedness to an ever-larger percentage of Americans — and Joe Biden supported every single legislative misstep. He also made it all-but impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, ensuring that graduates’ hopelessly accumulating loan payments went on endlessly — and that college administrators continued to collect.
If someone wanted to destroy a generation’s hope in their ability to get ahead, he couldn’t have devised a better system.
As the French wag said, that policy is “worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.” The majority of student loans are now income-based according to the CBO, and the loans the government would issue between 2020 and 2029 will cost taxpayers an estimated $82.9 billion. All this ignores the fact that Uncle Sam has proved a poor accountant. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in July found the Department of Education predicted that student loans would generate $114 billion for the federal government; they instead lost $197 billion — a $311 billion error, mostly due to incorrect analysis.
Only the federal government could lose money on an industry that has grown at four times the rate of inflation. As Milton Friedman once observed, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand.”
And, of course, those calculations didn’t consider the possibility that Biden would transfer a hefty part of that amount to productive US taxpayers, who cannot default from compulsory taxation.
Biden and former President Barack Obama should repent for fastening this debt burden to the younger generation, then increasing the unfathomable national debt for all Americans. President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday afternoon should have seen him bow before the audience, whisper a “mea culpa,” and offer the write-offs as an act of restitution and reparation for the bad policies he supported for more than four decades. To fit proper biblical restitution, the payment would have to be made to the 75 percent of students who took out government-created, income-based student loans since the Obama administration — especially those who made their payments. He would also have to have the legal and constitutional authority to redistribute other people’s money, which he does not. But if he did, that arrangement would at least be fair.
But in the Bible, repentance (μετάνοια) means to change one’s mind and behavior. Biden’s new student loan bailout did not represent heartfelt repentance but hard-hearted defiance. Instead of turning the ship of state back toward safety, Biden cried, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Rather than abandon the income-based student loan bondage he and Barack Obama designed, he further reduced the minimum payments to 5 percent of new graduates’ discretionary income, raised discretionary income to 225 percent of the poverty level, and let students transfer their unpaid loans to taxpayers after 10 years. That will consign even more graduates to a life of hopeless interest-service payments and force taxpayers to eat an even larger percentage of defaulted, inflated debt.
That only makes sense if the progressives intend to collapse the system, as many believed they designed Obamacare to force the US healthcare system into a death spiral, and replace it with a government-run socialist alternative. Obama admitted he favored socialized medicine in 2008. “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” Obama told a campaign rally. But for the moment, he would tinker with the existing system until Americans “decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”
Is it possible this is the next step toward government-funded college? Whatever it is, it is not the road back to economic sanity.
Biden and Obama should repent. And if they will not humble themselves, voters should humble those who support their immoral policies at the ballot box.
Rev. Ben Johnson is a senior editor at the Acton Institute. His work focuses on the principles necessary to create a free and virtuous society in the transatlantic sphere (the U.S., Canada, and Europe).
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
etting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
lick the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
None of the slides in this set are labeled or dated though they were probably taken in the 1960s. The first photo is of a dog sitting in the chari. The next features a shot down a beach but I don't know where. The third was taken on a dirt road. The final photo is of a mountain somewhere and looks like it was taken through a telescope.
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
