u/twirpobloxias

So I am a big fan of old horror movies like the child's play and chucky movies and Friday the 13th or Halloween but also really old horror movies like Nosferatu and the oldest known Frankenstein movie adaptation from the early 1900's but I am also interested in airing indie horror movies as well from small talented creators with permission of course.

I live outside Halmstad in southern Sweden and I would like to make a late night television channel that airs only horror movies at night from 12:00 to 4:00 and becomes a horror themed 80's style weather channel during the day with vintage music and Amiga style graphics from a real Amiga 1000 with movies being broadcasted from a VCR.

I have done some research into what is needed for it and one of them is the needed broadcasting rights for whatever movie I will be showing during the night and the channel won't be operating 24/7 and only during Fridays and Saturdays when people are most likely to watch it.

At the moment I don't have the funds to do it but later on I want to do it once I have the funds and time to set everything up and find or found a group that is willing to become a broadcast organisation that can apply for permission to broadcast these movies it would be quite fun.

So I have been interested in eventually getting myself a Sega mega CD primarily for the games like Ecco Sonic CD Final fight and Batman returns but also for it's ability to listen to audio CDs from the TV speakers which might not seem that interesting nowadays but the thing is that back in the day this was unheard of and I distinctly remember booting up a Sega mega drive and mega CD emulator on my original Xbox as a kid in the early 2010's and playing some of my parents old CDs from the 90's on it and it was magical.

Not to mention that being able to own your music on disk is way more important than ever in the age of streaming where music that would otherwise be lost forever is preserved for a long time and this also applies to gaming especially because recently Microsoft and Sony decided they don't want you to own your games anymore by discontinuing physical disks entirely.

In my home town Halmstad there is also a store that sells CDs and vinyl records but also retro games called Backlist games and records and I even found a broken Sega game gear there once with dead capacitors that I didn't buy because I am not good with soldering due to poor motor skills.

So I have been recently looking at all kinds of videos on games that I would want to have after I have gotten a region free Sega mega drive and an rgb scart cable so I can play all the Japanese and american titles released for it on a real CRT . I am 25 years old and from Sweden where the mega drive was very popular like in the rest of Europe unfortunately it was before I was born. But luckily I experienced the greatness of the console through a modded original Xbox with tons of built in games on a huge Sony Trinitron as a child and it was incredible being able to play all kinds of Sega mega drive games on it and it even had the Sega CD functions of being able to play Sega mega CD games from real discs and play music from CDs .

As an adult with enough money to buy myself a CRT and a Sega Mega drive and real cartridges I am glad to say I know where to get cartridges consoles and a CRT from at a retro game store in South Sweden called TV spels hörnan or The video game corner.

There is a physical video game shop in the southern parts of Sweden in a town called Smålandsstenar called TV spels hörnan or the video game corner in english and they are run by a young guy with his dog and it has been active since the the early 90's and he is really nice and knowledgeable about all kinds of video games and facts about games and video game consoles and I am thinking of buying my first Sega megadrive and a few Sega megadrive games from there and he even offered to order a rgb cable for my crt television if I call him a week in advance before I travel to smålandsstenar so that way he has the cable in stock in time for when I arrive after I have saved up enough money to buy both the console and games.

Good physical game stores are increasingly rare in this digital age we live in so finding such a good one close to where I live is a real blessing and not having to go online is so much better because you can actually see the consoles and even try the games in store to see if they work.

So I have once or twice played sinistar on mame and it is one of the scariest and hardest arcade games from that time mainly because the main antagonist sinistar a flying robotic head is not just huge he is also very fast and can kill you just as fast and he has a very loud scary voice.

Basically the premise behind sinistar is that you are a space ship and you have to mine crystals called sinicrystals from asteroids by breaking apart the asteroids to make sinibombs that have to be used to kill sinistar once he appears which only takes mere minutes and he makes himself known with lines such as "I am sinistar" and "run run run" besides that there are also small ships that try to kill you while you mine the crystals from your ship.

My take on this game which I have wanted to make in pygame as I do know basic python syntax is that I want to introduce RPG like elements like gaining levels and being able to use upgrades like shields which is a feature that comes from the game asteroids and additional weapons that make it so that you can take additional hits but only a maximum of 4 hits and faster mining of the crystals and make killing the other ships take less time as they are significantly buffed compared to the original game with more hp and deadlier weapons but at the same time the game gets harder each level and I still want it to be just as hard as the original game if not even harder as I really enjoy brutally hard games like Rainbow islands.

If I do end up making it I want to release it on ich.io for anybody to play

So I noticed that in the USA there is a new sodastream machine called the fountain with special flavour bottles and it looks so cool and I really want one although I recently bought a sodastream Gaia for 400 SEK or 40 USD and I am sad that it's not available in Swedish stores neither online or physical stores which is what I prefer anyways because I can actually see and touch the models on display and get a feeling on which one to buy.

Apparently though it doesn't have built in cooling so cooling the reservoir in the fridge overnight is a must to get cold drinks or by adding lots of ice to the reservoir.

It's also a very expensive machine at a cost of around 200 USD which is significantly more than my Gaia .

What is this model like for those of you that have one and is it really worth the money?

What are some similar machines that are available on the European market that won't require importing it from the US?