{"id":1049,"date":"2006-04-15T08:32:09","date_gmt":"2006-04-15T12:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2006-04-15T08:36:04","modified_gmt":"2006-04-15T12:36:04","slug":"the-cement-factory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1049","title":{"rendered":"The Cement Factory"},"content":{"rendered":"

E<\/span>arlier \"Game<\/a>this morning, I was trying to find references to an older LCD game from Nintendo. While I was not aware of its actual name, I was sure that it was from Nintendo, it was an LCD game and it featured the Mario Brothers<\/em>. My search key included ‘1983’ (which was the year I [we] bought it in). To make a long story short, via Wikipedia’s ‘Nintendo’<\/a> history, I ended up at ‘Gameboy’<\/a> and eventually, ‘Game & Watch’<\/a>. That rang a bell and here it is: Mario’s Cement Factory<\/a>. Note that the image at Wikipedia shows the ‘table top version’ (which I recognize too: those were the ones that were sold in toy stores, while the LCD versions were generally sold in jewelry\/clock<\/em> stores).\n<\/p>\n

But yes, it must have been 1983 or 1984, when I (we) decided to buy it and that was the very first Nintendo I’ve actually seen: I was familiar with ‘Donkey Kong’ (The Game & Watch handheld came with a neat 2 screen version), but most likely that one was out of the price range. It’s also the first time I got familiar with the ‘Mario phenomenon’, which returned to TV and silver screen in the mid 90s, much to my surprise. If I had told the little kids that I had a ‘Mario’ game in the Eighties, it would have been a shocking revelation. (Interesting to see that Mario’s ‘gaming career started with the ‘Donkey Kong’ game<\/a>, which was 1983 too).\n<\/p>\n

There are countless of memories to this thing, but looking back it does not make sense I ever played this thing. I beat the highscore so many times, it eventually got boring. I think, after that, it served as an alarm clock (who knows if it still works).\n<\/p>\n

1. Note that I frequently mix ‘I’ and ‘we’, because of the fact that computer accesories were normally acquired together with Alfons.
\n2. The handheld itself was actually pretty nice and sturdy, particularly because of its shiny<\/em> burgundy wine aluminium front\/cover.
\n<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this morning, I was trying to find references to an older LCD game from Nintendo. While I was not aware of its actual name, I was sure that it was from Nintendo, it was an LCD game and it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}