Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (September 1999)

Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (September 1999)

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}

Read more: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2022/09/23/official-u-s-playstation-magazine-september-1999/

How the Government is Causing a Credit Card Debt Crisis

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. 

WATCH: 🤦‍♂️ Nina Turner's most absurd communist tweets (Brad Reacts)

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

How the Government is Causing a Credit Card Debt Crisis

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1117-1120)

See the previous post in this series here.

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.

boot (August/September 1996)

boot (August/September 1996)