Daily Archives: September 30, 2019

Photo-A-Day, Video Game

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening – First Impressions


Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00273

We just received The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for free from Nintendo to play with and review. Opinions are our own.

I never played the original version of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening when it came out on the Game Boy and Game Boy color. I had a Game Boy and The original The Legend of Zelda game was one of my favorite games. I wonder why I had never played or heard of this particular Zelda game before. So, I went into this game with no pre-conceived notions or ideas about the game. This was a brand new and exciting game for me.

Immediately I felt like I was playing the original Legend of Zelda game. You start out by waking up on an island after a boat accident. You are in the home of two characters, Tarin and Marin. They nursed you back to health and managed to secure your shield. You have to go and find your sword. From there you go through a series of tasks to help the village. Link’s ultimate goal however is to gather 8 special musical instruments so that he can wake the Wind Fish. What is the Wind Fish? I am not exactly sure but Link cannot escape the island until he wakes this Wind Fish. Gameplay is fun and there are even side-scrolling parts to the game. Most is overhead view and Link has to solve a ton of puzzles but that is half the fun of a Zelda game. I’ll be doing a video walk-through of the first part of the game on my YouTube Channel later on so keep ont he lookout for that.

Music, Technology

Crank Up The Mix Tapes with the Ion Audio Boombox Deluxe Bluetooth Speaker

ION Boombox Deluxe Bluetooth Speaker Lifestyle Image 1

The reviewer has been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and/or received the product/service at a reduced price or for free. All opinions are my own.

I’m a child of the 80’s and back then having a Boom Box was a big deal. With one you could bring your music with you all over the place, like the beach. Summers were spent listening to music at the beach, riding our bikes up to the music store to buy more cassettes or cassingles and repeating the process over and over. I still have a couple of cases of my old tapes from back in those days. They include many of my favorite musicians and also so many mix tapes. I used to make mix tapes all the time and friends would make them for me as well. I still have them but would like to convert them over to be able to listen to them on my phone. I’d also like the option of playing those old tapes again and listening to them as they are. That’s where the ION Boom Box Deluxe comes in.

ION Boombox Deluxe Bluetooth Speaker

With the ION Boom Box Deluxe, which you can pick up at Best Buy, you can not only play your old cassette tapes again but you can do so much more. The ION Boom Box Deluxe is a Bluetooth Speaker and can play music that you have on any of your bluetooth enabled devices like phones. It is also a full-featured classic boombox that can play your entire tape collection. You can even record to cassette tape, you know you have a blank cassette tape hanging around somewhere. It might be super fun to have the kids see what they can record on a tape. It will blow their minds! There is a built-in microphone for recording or you can record from a line in of an external source.

Is the ION Boom Box Deluxe loud? You can crank up the tunes with the two robust full-range speakers powered by 14 watts of system power and a powerful bass. Time to party!

ION Boombox Deluxe Bluetooth Speaker Lifestyle Image 3

There is definitely a retro look to the ION Boom Box Deluxe but it has many modern features. It can stream music wirelessly from any Bluetooth®-enabled device and it has USB playback capability to handle virtually any other music source. You can control the bass and the treble to have your own preferred playback. You can also take that old tape collection and convert it to digital files on a USB stick. Then maybe I can finally part with all my old cassettes and clear up much needed space.

ION Boombox Deluxe Bluetooth Speaker Lifestyle Image 2

One of the biggest issues with having a boombox as a kid was how many batteries it ate up. You used to have to put in about 6 D batteries and they would just get chewed up so fast. ION Boombox Deluxe Bluetooth Speaker has a 10hr rechargeable battery and it can also run off AC power. The rechargeable battery means that you can take it anywhere. That way you can show off that retro style of yours. If you want to get even more retro then tune in to your favorite radio station with the AM/FM radio and try making a mix tape of your very own.