Bad news and good news

All right, first the bad news. So I'm a little bit ticked off right now. Why would that be? Well, the short answer is I won't be able to do a review of KidPhonics in the near future, as I thought I would.

Now for the long answer.

So, as is the case with many of the games and stuff I've talked about, I don't actually own a physical copy of KidPhonics. I managed to come across a disc image of it through... questionably legal means. Now, here's the thing: it was the Mac version. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course; there's a wonderful Mac emulator called SheepShaver that I use for all my old-school Mac needs. It was a .SIT file, to be used with the StuffIt Expander program and nothing else. I have a copy of it running on SheepShaver, and it works well enough. I expanded the file and discovered that the expanded file was not in the correct format: instead of being a .ISO image, it was a .TXT file. It was "[name omitted to protect privacy of website I went to].iso.txt".

So, okay, obviously I couldn't use this. Fixing it was easy enough, I just changed the extension so that the ".TXT" part wasn't there, and it worked fine. ...Is what I would have said if it were true. But nope! It gave me an error that it wasn't recognized or couldn't be read or something like that.

So, I went to the site where I downloaded it originally, and I noticed there was an alternative download link. Unfortunately, by "alternative", they meant a file-sharing site where I had to specify twice that I didn't want priority downloading, and then it asked me to either sign in with social networking, or create an account with them. Nothing doing.

So yeah, unless I happen to come across either a genuine copy or an ISO image from a different source, there will be no KidPhonics review in the near future. This is why I said in my post from two weeks ago that I didn't want to make promises.

But fear not! The good news is all is not lost! I have a backup plan: Franklin's Activity Center! I'm very excited about this one, since I actually have a physical copy of it, so I can actually capture photos of it (and possibly video too). It's especially exciting since there are no screenshots or anything from this game online. That means, of course, that for the first time in the history of this blog, I will be providing the first online screenshots for it!

So, are you guys excited? Anyone else remember this game? What other obscure computer games do you think I should review? I'm always open to suggestions.

Expect Franklin's Activity Center later this week. See ya then!

-Johnny