Steel Battalion owned! | Bought TI-89 Titanium

. Yesterday, I drove to Game Stop /w my new Zen Touch cycling playlists for me so I could keep my eye on the road. Interstates can be dangerous cause everyone is doing 80 MPH. Seriously. The Minnesotan county sheriffs aren’t pulling drivers over not. I didn’t see a cop by me. I didn't know quite what to buy I bought Steel Battalion for $120. It takes 5 minutes to set up and 3 minutes to put away. This is the same game Gamespy gave the score saying this is single best peripheral any 3rd party had ever released in video game history! The problem is not the controller, but where to store it because it has 40 switches and buttons. Sammy USA (Japanese arcade manufacture’s North American branch) makes the toughest controller. Steel Battalion costs $200 new and it's still popular after 3 years. So I first was looking for a place to store this bulky hardware in the corner wall.


Look at the huge arcade stick!

Steel Ballition is anything but cheap. In the simulator you learn by dieing. Game Spy had it right. Graphics are 9.0 out of 10. Using the stick must be 9.5 out of 10. In Steel Battalion your government is at war. B52s bomb the VT (Virtual Tank) hanger. Now begins the VT start up sequence. There is a button on the arcade stick to close the pilot department, one to start it, one button to start the ignition and you've got a heads up display that takes up half the screen.


The TI89 Titanium and TI83 Plus side by side. They play Calculator games too.


TI89's OS screen.


$160 to do addition. Look ma, my calculator is on steroids!

While in the city I also spent money on a Texas Instruments 89 Titanium. It has a Motorola 68000 CPU. Not the low end TI83's Z80. I remember this cause Sega Genesis ran a Motorola 68000 to power it. So my calculator is just as powerful as a Sega Genesis. The TI83 didn't have a GUI at start up. I was running OS 1.14 on my TI83 and upgraded it to OS v1.18. Then the TI-89 had OS v3.01 so I've backuped the programs installed on it via TI Connect (Win32 software) installed OS v3.1 and installed the retail software again. You can run games on these things. Texas Instruments makes the best calculators in the world. These last a few decades. Possibly the only reason a TI calc would stop working is if you have battery acid in the battery department or dropped it off a three story building! My dad reimbursed me $90 for the TI-89.