MadPlanet's Gameroom

Texas Pinball Festival Right Around the Corner

2012-01-27T15:00:00.000-06:00

My usual gaming habit is to wildly bounce between consoles, computers, arcade, retro, current-gen, etc. with no real rhyme or reason, but lately I've been hitting the Spider-Man pinball pretty much exclusively so forgive me if my posts are a bit pin-centric for a while. Along those lines I'd like to point out to you fine folks that the 2012 installment of the Texas Pinball Festival is rapidly approaching - March 23-25 - a mere two months away!

The Festival is being held at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine, Texas which is on the north side of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That's like a 5-hour drive for me so... not exactly right around the corner, but I've been considering making a road trip to this thing ever since I discovered it a few years back and since for me personally 2012 is the Year of the Pinball, well, I do believe I'm finally gonna make it happen this year! Gnome and Mik - can I expect to see you guys there? What? Atlantic shmatlantic c'mon, hop on a plane and you'll be there before you know it. Fallguy, you only have to cross the Red River so that's completely doable - I'm putting you down as an attendee right now. And Onion and Twiggamortis, you guys are no farther away than I am so I'm marking you down as well.

With two months to go the games line-up is still preliminary, but it's already shaping up quite nicely with tons of great pinball machines (surprise!) including a premium and four limited edition models of Stern's soon-to-be-released AC/DC pin.

Steve Ritchie, the designer behind Stern's Spider-Man, also designed AC/DC so I'm guessing I might like it. There will also be a lesser, but still decent, selection of video games which will include some rarities like Quantum (1982), Lunar Lander (1979) and Gun Fight (1975). Over 250 games on free play all weekend!

Speaking of Steve Ritchie, he is going to be making an appearance and will be signing autographs, so I think I might bring my Spidey translite and get him to autograph it. I'm wondering if I need to bring my own pen for something like that or if they will set him up?

George Gomez will be their special guest speaker on March 24 - he is behind some great pins like Monster Bash, Corvette, Revenge from Mars, Lord of the Rings, Batman and the new one from 2011 that I just played recently for the first time - Transformers. There will also be pinball technicians, hobbyists and vendors giving seminars and/or selling their wares as well.

Speaking of Transformers - there will be several pinball tournaments going on throughout the event and one of the tournament machines will be a brand new Transformers Pro and after the tournament is complete it will be raffled off with proceeds to benefit the American Red Cross.

I'm normally not a big buyer of raffle tickets, but I'm getting one (or quite possibly three) of these. And even if you don't win the Transformers the raffle tickets qualify you for many other drawings throughout the weekend for prizes like translites, t-shirts, pinball DVDs, magazines, flyers, etc.

There is also going to be a swap meet on March 24 starting at 8:00 AM. I might swap some of my time at that for another hour or two of sleep, but it goes through noon so I'll check it out.

Should be fun so I'll see you there!

Festival Hours
Friday, March 23: 5pm-1am
Saturday, March 24: 10am-1am (swap meet from 8:00am-Noon)
Sunday, March 25: 9am-2:30pm

Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center (in the Texas Grand Ballroom)
1800 Highway 26 East
Grapevine, Texas, 76051
Reservations: 1-800-984-1344

My Very First Pinball Machine!

2012-01-23T01:40:00.000-06:00

I didn't mention it at the time, but my previous post about Marvel Pinball was a bit of foreshadowing as not quite two weeks ago a couple of gentlemen delivered my new 250 pound member of the family - the Stern Pinball Machine Spider-Man!

I've always wanted to own my own pinball machine and now, following an arguably foolhardy expenditure of funds to a gentleman in Georgia, that dream has become a reality. I was going to make my own gameplay video, but as you know I'm a sucker for game trailers and Stern made one of their own for the machine when it came out in June 2007 (to coincide with the theatrical release of Spider-Man 3) so I decided to go with that instead:

The machine was designed by Steve Ritchie and programmed by pinball champion Lyman Sheats. I'm not exactly a pinball industry expert so I admit that I hadn't heard of either of these two guys until I happened to catch the pinball documentary Special When Lit a while back in which they were both featured so I was surprised when I discovered later that they were responsible for Spider-Man.

Kevin O'Conner did the artwork for the cabinet and the first thing that grabs your attention on the machine is his great looking backglass:

I might have positioned the super villains so that they were facing Spidey in attack mode instead of radiating out from the center, but debatable nitpicking aside I really like it. Check out that foreshortening and dynamic action! I bet Kevin read "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" when he was younger. I still have my copy.

If only I'd stuck with art maybe I could be creating artwork on pinball machines too! But I digress...

The Spider-Man pinball is based on the movie franchise and combines pieces from all three movies, most importantly the four super villains that Spidey fights in them - the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Sandman and Venom. Each of the villains has his own scoring area and strategy shots on the playfield and you must defeat all of them to wage "Battle Royale".

There are a ton of different modes and scoring opportunities in the game, but I don't think it would be too interesting for me to document all of them in detail here. I will just talk briefly about the four super villains to allow me to include a photo of these nicely detailed toys.

In the upper-middle part of the playfield is the Sandman. He stands behind a motorized bank of three targets and you must hit all three to cause his protective wall to drop and start the first Sandman Stage - "Slammer Time". Now you can hit Sandman himself or his "whirlwind of targets" and every time you do the yellow flasher lamps light up, big punch sounds and Sandman dialogue pump through the speakers and some digitized footage from the movie shows on the display. After you've hit him enough times Sandman raises up off the playfield to reveal the hole he was guarding. When you sink the ball into the hole you complete "Slammer Time". Sandman then lowers down to again protect the hole, the 3-bank wall of targets rises back up and the ball is launched straight up and over an arch called a web-slinger back onto the playfield for play to continue. This also sets up the next and progressively more difficult Sandman stages - "Subway Storm" and then "Dunes of Doom".

In the middle right part of the playfield is my favorite villain/shot on the machine - Doctor Octopus. Doc Ock starts in a raised position over a hole and when you sink a ball in it to start "Fusion Malfunction" he lowers to block it and a red flashing lamp glows as the movie scene plays - "Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts" then the ball launches straight up and over a webslinger back onto the playfield. When you hit Doc Ock the next time the ball bounces off him and a magnet below the playfield stops it cold in the middle of a picture of the sun, all the lights go off, the red flasher glows and you hear "the power of the sun, in the palm of my hand" then the lights come back on and the magnet flings the ball back at Doc Ock and then towards you as a 2-ball multiball ensues. This is one of my all-time favorite pinball sequences - just so cool. The other two Doc Ock stages, "Bank Bust" and "Armed at the Dock", introduce a few new twists.

Venom is in the back left corner of the table and to reach him you have to make a somewhat challenging cross-field ramp shot with the upper right flipper. When you are able to hit it solidly enough to hit Venom's target his blue flasher glows brightly and Venom screams out to start the "Goo On You" stage where you have to hit Venom's ramp several times to complete it as a timer and your bonus points for the stage quickly run down. Venom's two other stages are "Brock's New Suit" and "You Ooze You Lose" (spelled 'Loose' on the sign).

The final villain, the Green Goblin, is on the lower left side of the playfield. He is hovering on his goblin glider over five pumpkin bomb targets. Once you have hit all five targets "Unity Day Festival" begins. You have to hit the targets six more times to complete the stage, with the Goblin shaking in pain after each hit. The other two Green Goblin stages "Suffer the Children" and "Godspeed Spider-Man" introduce other twists such as moving lit targets that you have to hit.

The sound for the machine is outstanding. Hard pumping tunes for the various stages that really seem to flow well with the playfield action. Great sounding movie dialogue is also seamlessly sewn in at just the right times. Stern also hired J.K. Simmons, the actor who played J.Jonah Jameson in the movies, to record a wide variety of pinball-specific dialogue in-character so they all have that J.Jonah Jameson edge to them - "Extra ball is lit! What are you waiting for?!", "Who do you think you are? Spider-Man?", etc. works perfectly.

And in my opinion the machine is gorgeous - the artwork, the lights, the cool movie scenes that play on the dot matrix video display. A real spectacle. Mix all that with my old comic book loyalties to the subject matter and the fact that it is a really fun pinball machine to play and it goes at or near the top of my all-time favorite pinball machines list - along with the likes of Medieval Madness, Scared Stiff, Monster Bash and Lord of the Rings. Suffice it to say I love it! I also recently learned that Pinside members rank Spider-Man as the 10th best pinball of all-time (just a hair below Scared Stiff) on their weekly updated list of top 100 pinballs. So it's somewhat reassuring to hear that my high regard for the machine is not inconsistent with the views of pinball insiders.

So anyway, if you happen to be in a movie theater or somewhere and see this pinball in the corner you ought to go pump a few quarters into it and give it a go. It's a lot of fun!

Oh - as I was putting this post together I stumbled across a nice interview with the designer Steve Ritchie in the June 2007 edition of the dearly departed GameRoom Magazine. Popbumper.com has the interview posted online here if you care to check it out. See ya!

Spidey's Got Such a Supple Wrist!

2012-01-06T08:45:00.000-06:00

It's no secret that I like arcades. Historically I have spent most of my arcade time on video games and just a passing amount of attention to their older brother the pinball machine. But in recent years I have refocused a good deal of my attention to these wonderful machines. I think a big part of the reason for this is that I have visited more and more retro arcades and started getting my fill of a lot of the more commonly recurring classics like Asteroids, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, etc. Don't get me wrong I still love those games but at this point I've seen them enough that I'd rather trade some of my time on them for some time with the silver ball. Also, one of my friends greatly prefers pinball over video games and is very knowledgeable about them and after quite a few pinball matches I'm guessing some of that interest probably rubbed off on me as well.

Thanks to the unfortunate demise of my beloved 60GB backwards-compatible PS3 and my subsequent purchase of a 320GB Uncharted 3 Bundle PS3 (that was on sale) I am currently a member of Sony's PlayStation Plus. One of the benefits of membership is that you get to download a free PS3 game each month and the game of the month in December was Marvel Pinball. I haven't paid much attention to console video pinball games in a long time so I didn't even have it on my radar before I got it as a freebie but I must say I am quite enjoying it and would heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys pinball, arcade style video games, or Marvel comics - and especially to those individuals like myself who are a fan of all three!

Playing it reminds of my first experience with a video-oriented pinball game which was Video Pinball on my trusty Atari 2600 (cue wavy curtain flashback effect). Much like driving games, video pinball technology has come quite a ways in 30 years but the general gameplay mechanic remains more or less the same.

Hey, she may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts kid! I guess I liked it so much that I asked my parents for it twice because I have 2 copies of the cartridge at home.

And speaking of pinball from my childhood, I was recently over at my mom's house and I brought back a box of old goodies (I always leave my mom's house with a box of old stuff) which included a Viewmaster, an 8-track tape player and carousel, a Star Wars jigsaw puzzle, and Wildfire Pinball - a handheld pinball game released by Parker Brothers in 1979. Did anyone else have this thing?

I think it was actually my brother's so I didn't play it nearly as much as I did Video Pinball, but I figured it would fit nicely in the game room on the shelf next to the Merlin and the Game Boy.

Fast forward to maybe 8-9 years ago or so when I discovered Visual Pinball, a freeware pinball simulation program. When coupled with PinMAME (which emulates the pinball ROMs) it allows you play pretty much any real pinball machine you can think of right on your computer - basically the pinball version of MAME. If you are interested in pinball and have never tried Visual Pinball you ought to check it because it is cool! (and free!). The tables that this community of pinball enthusiasts have developed are very impressive. Be forewarned though that it is even less user-friendly and documented for the novice to set up than MAME. Here is a video with some very brief glimpses of a bunch of Visual Pinball tables in action:

And finally this brings me back full circle to Marvel Pinball - released late 2010 by Zen Studios and finally checked out by me just last month. It is like Visual Pinball on steroids. Here is the trailer:

It has the same authentic-feeling pinball play and great realistic physics of Visual Pinball combined with some really cool animated 3D action by the super villain set pieces that of course wouldn't be possible on a real pinball machine. The art/graphics are gorgeous and the sound is very good. The game comes with 4 tables installed - Spider-Man, Iron Man, Blade and Wolverine. They're all good but my favorite so far is definitely Spider-Man. Least favorite is probably Iron Man. That mirrors reality because I love the real Stern Spider-Man pinball but have never really cared a whole lot for the Iron Man.

The gameplay, if you enjoy pinball at all, is very addictive. Like real pinball it is simple to play but challenging to master. You basically only use 3 buttons - the left and right shoulder buttons for the flippers and the X button for the launch which you can vary to try and get skill shot points. As a pinball fan I can definitely say this game feels like the real thing with the added bonus of the realistic interaction with the various villains on each table who are bent on bringing you down. For instance on the Spider-Man table that includes Mysterio hitting you with hallucinogenic gas which reverses your flipper controls, the Green Goblin flying around and throwing exploding pumpkin bombs/pinballs on the table and Doctor Octopus grabbing your pinballs with his mechanical arms. Each villain attack feels like something you might see on a real pinball table even though the action is too complex for it to actually be mechanically possible outside the video world. Other features include online multiplayer play and several different camera angles you can choose. You can also nudge the table with the motion detection of the controller, although I found that particular control to be somewhat difficult to use and mostly just distracting so I pretty much ignore it.

I already liked this game quite a bit when I first started playing it last month despite a slight lag on the flippers which annoyed me, but then I remembered my TV has a "game" setting so I turned it on and that fixed the lag - so now the game went from really good to great! If you aren't in PlayStation Plus the main game with 4 tables only costs $10 and in my opinion well worth the money.

They also offer a Fantastic Four and Captain America table as downloadable content for $2.99 each with one for the Hulk in the wings. I just love these little video trailers so here are those.

Finally, in mid-December they released a DLC 4-pack of tables called Vengeance and Virtue that features Ghost Rider, Moon Knight, Thor and the X-Men which costs $10. I collected Ghost Rider, Moon Knight and X-Men comics back in the day so I'm particularly curious about those. Here is a look at the Vengeance and Virtue pack - I might just have to get it at some point.

So obviously I think this game is pretty darn good. One of the things I like about PS+ is that it basically forces me to try out games that I most likely wouldn't have ever gotten around to trying out otherwise. This has introduced me to a few stinkers, but has also allowed me to find a few gems as well, of which this is one. If you think pinball is boring and repetitive then you should definitely stay away from it as it wouldn't be for you, but if you like pinball like I do then this game is definitely worth buying.

Mario!

2012-01-05T15:46:00.000-06:00

Hello folks and a 4-day belated happy new year! There seems to be a pattern emerging with me wishing folks a happy holiday 4 days after the holiday actually occurs. Oh well, as anyone who's ever waited for me to arrive at a party or at work or for an appointment will tell you - I'm typically late. Always have been, and if past performance is any indicator, always will be.

I'm working up a post on my new game Rocksmith (spoiler alert - I like it!) but haven't finished it yet so today's post is admittedly a gap-filler to keep my posting wheels rolling.

As I've mentioned before, I missed out on the NES gaming craze so I never developed much love for Jumpman, er... Mario. And frankly there is such a tremendous amount of love for him out there from Nintendo fans that I grow a little weary of him sometimes, but nevertheless I stumbled across these 2 Mario-related videos the last few days that I thought were worth a nod. If only I could learn that there Twitter gadget I could just tweet a link, but for now I'll just have to make do with an embed post!

First from Dorkly.com is an early meeting between Mario and his slimy agent.

And, yet another floppy drive music video - this one from Silent's Homepage. I don't know why these fascinate me so, but this one features an entire symphony of (i.e. 8) 3.5" floppy drives belting out the Super Mario Bros tune. Enjoy!

Tic-Tac-Noooo!!!!

2011-12-29T14:25:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas to all and to all - well, to all a 4-day belated Merry Christmas that's what! I've got so many gaming irons in the fire at the moment and so precious little time to play with them lately. But I will be hitting them pretty hard in the next couple of weeks so expect me to babble on about this and that with a little more regularity pretty soon. For today, just a little rant about a ridiculous little game that everyone knows, but nobody plays - Tic-Tac-Toe. Or possibly noughts and crosses to my friends across the pond. There is a reason this game is on my mind which I will touch on in a moment, but for now a brief history.

Tic-Tac-Toe has been around forever. Invented by the ancient Egyptians - probably. Possibly even cavemen. I really don't know and refuse to google it. But suffice to say it has been torturing human children for a long time. In the old days the ancient Egyptians had to use the sand, or possibly papyrus if you were well off, to play, but 20th century technology ushered in the fantastic new world of electronic tic-tac-toe!

1952: "Noughts and crosses" (or OXO) was developed at Cambridge University, England for the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer and is widely accepted as the very first graphical computer game. If you'd care to play a game of OXO just like it would have played on the EDSAC you can even download a program that simulates the EDSAC and try it out: http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/

1976: Seeing the consumer demand for a home electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe, Fairchild Semiconductor releases the cleverly-titled "Tic-Tac-Toe" for the Fairchild Channel F video game console. But a public clamor arose - "I can't carry my Channel F around with me! Where's my portable version?!" (I've played the Channel F version. It's Tic-Tac-Toe i.e. utterly without value).

1978: Parker Brothers releases Merlin the Electronic Wizard - a handheld toy with six different games built into the unit. Game #1 of course is Tic-Tac-Toe. I still have my old Merlin. Maybe it is because I was already 9 years old when I played with it, but I clearly remember thinking that Tic-Tac-Toe was completely worthless even back then. The other games were pretty cool though. As with the EDSAC and the Channel F, some clever gent has developed an online simulator that will allow you to try out a Merlin. It's actually kinda cool if you ever had one as a kid: http://www.theelectronicwizard.com/

1980: Finally, someone puts a new spin on the age-old game when Atari releases "3D TIC TAC TOE" for the Atari 2600. The game is almost marginally playable which puts it head and shoulders above the classic Tic-Tac-Toe. Kudos Atari!

Then companies finally realized that electronic tic-tac-toe was a supremely stupid idea so they stopped making them. Years went by which brings me to the reason for this post if anyone is still reading. For Christmas I bought my wife an iPad2 and I was on the app store downloading some apps for her when I stumbled across "Tic Tac Toe" by Optime Software LLC. Currently version 2.17 - really? They couldn't nail it with version 2.16??). The app weighs in at a hefty 16.1 MB. 16.1MB for tic-tac-toe!!! Chessmaster 2000 is rolling over in his grave.

"Put away your pencil and paper - now you can play Tic Tac Toe on your iPhone or iPod Touch for free. Tic Tac Toe Free is the first full-featured, free Tic-Tac-Toe game for the iPhone and iPod Touch!"

Apparently it offers 1-player, 2-player, and network play. Network play? Wow. How incredibly bored must some sad individual be to want to jump online and fire up some good old tic tac toe?

and for only $0.99 you can upgrade to Tic Tac Toe Plus HD!!! I'm holding out for the 3D version.

So I typed in tic-tac-toe on the search box and sure enough, the app store is LOADED with them! Many of them are free but a lot of them are actually charging $0.99 and some even more than that. Very few of them offer any new twist on the game because all of them agree that it is a "timeless classic". No. Chess is a timeless classic. Hangman is a timeless classic. Scrabble is a timeless classic. I might even be convinced that solitaire is a timeless classic. But no sir. I don't care how long it has been around. Tic Tac Toe is not a timeless classic.

So in the immortal words of W.O.P.R.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"

My Latest Retro(ish) Purchase - the GB USB 64M Smart Card

2011-12-14T01:48:00.000-06:00

Most of my gaming time the last 2-3 months has been spent on 3 newer AAA titles - Gears of War 3, Uncharted 3 and Batman Arkham City. I enjoyed them all, but as per my usual routine I am now chasing that current-gen gaming binge with a palate-cleansing drink from an older vintage. And for the last few days that involves a formerly forgotten and neglected Game Boy and a new hardware addition to the retro arsenal - the EMS GB USB 64M Smart Card (catchy name eh?). Mine was an impulse purchase from Kitsch-Bent for $38.

The package came with the Smart Card and a mini CD with installation drivers and a file transfer program. The card is not plug-and-play nor does it come with a setup/installation program, so you have to manually install the new hardware and browse to the drivers on the CD, but then you are good to go.

The card is in the shape of an original Game Boy cartridge and has a small mini-B USB port at the top where you can connect it to your computer via a USB cable and transfer Game Boy and Game Boy Color ROMs from your PC onto the cart, thus allowing you to play them on your actual Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Unfortunately, you can't drag and drop files onto the card like an external USB drive, but their included file transfer application is very easy to use, if a little slow on the transfer speed.

You can of course play the same GB/GBC games via emulator on your PC, but I have very little interest in doing that. I mess with emulators fairly often, but almost never for any of the portable systems. No, the only way I'm ever going to see most of these games is on a real Game Boy to get a more authentic experience.

"If you're so into authenticity then why don't you just buy the real Game Boy carts then dude? They're cheap these days!" Well, generally speaking I do prefer to play real carts on real hardware and I do have a stack of GB/GBC carts I bought at dirt cheap prices on Craigslist, but the fact of the matter is that I'm not much of a portable gamer even on my newer devices like my PSP and iPhone and even less so on my Game Boy. So there is virtually no chance I'm going to go out an buy many more Game Boy games even if they were at giveaway prices. Plus, given my relatively low interest level I really don't want to have to deal with their storage demands on my ever-shrinking space either. But that being said, my interest in gaming history does provide me with enough curiosity to want to spend a little time shuffling through these old Game Boy ROMs that are taking up space on my hard drive. And if I DO happen to stumble upon an old game that I really like a lot well there's a good chance that I might just track down a boxed copy of that one off of eBay for my "Game Boy Collection".

"Well you know you can play those ROMs on a GBA don't you? Or by emulator on a DS. Then it's backlit so it's better." Yeah and that is good enough for a taste, but I decided if I was going to spend a decent amount of time checking out this long list of games I wanted to try them on the original hardware. Somehow having to play these primitive games in a well-lit room on a gray brick that forces me to dial in the contrast on a little green monochrome screen lets me appreciate the game more even though the visual product is arguably inferior to what I could get on other platforms.

I've been playing with it for a few days now and it works great. This little card prompted me to pick up my GB that would have otherwise just continued to sit on a shelf gathering dust and occasionally making me wonder why I bought it in the first place - even as I still occasionally look for a cheap Game Gear, Lynx and Neo-Geo Pocket Color knowing full well they will be begging the same questions later. I'm currently in the A's and I can tell you from just a few minutes of gameplay on each that Amazing Penguin and Amazing Tater are pretty nifty little games, while Amazing Spiderman utterly sucks.

One potential problem is that all games utilize the same sram to store the .sav file, which basically means that if you store any game-save information to the card it will be overwritten with new save information when you start playing a different game. I'm not sure yet if you can copy your .sav files back to your PC so you can reload them to continue later, but my curiosity on the great majority of these games is satisfied with just a few minutes of play so personally I don't really need any major multiple .sav file support or workaround. It would have been a nice feature though.

The card is advertised as a "64M" card which has confused some folks into thinking it has 64 megabytes (MB) of storage capacity. In actuality it contains 64 megabits (Mb) which translates to only 8 MB. This doesn't sound like much space at first, but only a few Game Boy games were as large as 1MB (e.g. Pokemon), many were only 32K (e.g. Tetris) and most fell into the 128K to 256K range. So you can easily store about 50 Game Boy games on there and if you go for the smaller ones you could even fit over 100. Game Boy Color game files are larger, so the card can only hold about 5-10 average-sized GBC games give or take. The card is split up into 2 separate banks or pages and you can save 4MB of files on each page. When you turn on your Game Boy the list of games on the first page is displayed. To see the second page of games you power cycle the Game Boy by turning it off and then quickly back on, then the second page of games will appear. Then you just scroll down and select which game you'd like to play and have at it.

Apparently a lot of people who buy this card use it to load LSDJ (Little Sound DJ) a program that turns a Game Boy into a programmable 4-channel, 4-bit music workstation that LSDJ-aficionados use to explore Game Boy chiptunes or create their own. It even came with a LSDJ sticker to apply to your card. You can see a random LSDJ music video here. Looks kinda cool and has a fairly large online community so I might check out the LSDJ scene later, but for now I'm content to just speed-date a bunch of old games that I would have otherwise completely ignored. I'm off to Alien Olympics.

Turkey Shoot - The Day They Took Over

2011-11-23T17:02:00.019-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving folks! For turkey day I thought I'd put the blog crosshairs on an obscure little arcade game called Turkey Shoot. A pretty predictable seasonal choice I suppose but the game is pretty rare - reportedly 450 were made and apparently very few of those still exist - so I'm guessing most folks out there haven't played it.

Turkey Shoot was released by former arcade and pinball giant (and one of my favorite developers) Williams back in 1984. Like most game developers of the mid-80's, Williams' dystopian view of the future involved a mysterious plague transforming humanity into turkeys with a penchant for crime. The game provides the backstory:

The year is 1989, one year after the great gobble blight which plagued the world. One third of earth's populace was transformed into turkeys by the ailment. The side effect of turkey transformation is a tendency toward violence and comradery between these turkeys to organize for rabble-rousing in the urban areas. In February of '89, a group of specially trained agents (the Turkey Terminators) was formed for the sole task of destroying the turkey menace. As a Terminator you must be mentally and physically prepared for a series of missions complimentary to your skills. Good luck and strength to you!

The game has a gun mounted to the cabinet like on an Operation Wolf or Terminator 2 Judgement Day but the gun operates as an optical/light gun to move your reticle around the screen. The criminal turkeys scurry about in all directions committing various crimes and your job of course is to shoot them to turn them into cooked turkey dinners. In addition to your gunfire once per mission/level you can hurl a grenade at the turkeys to take out several in one blast. Also, once per mission, you can hit your GOBBLE button which clucks out a turkey call that freezes the turkeys in place for a couple of seconds, allowing you to try and pick them off before they start running again.

Each mission is a little different - in the first one thug turkeys are robbing the theater box office and trying to make off with the bags of loot. In the second mission you guard against multiple thefts by thug turkeys and boss turkeys. In the third mission pilot turkeys fly suicide missions into a helicopter and you have to shoot them before they hit it - and so on. Every 8th mission there is a bonus round where you have 15 seconds of rapid-fire shooting and unlimited grenades to blow away as many turkeys as possible without harming an innocent bystander.

Later on cops start making the scene to help but just get in the way because you have to avoid shooting them, cyborg mechano-turkeys show up that can only be taken out with a headshot, turkeys disguise themselves as businessmen and start grabbing hostages so that you have to shoot the turkeys without hitting the hostages and so forth. When a turkey escapes with the loot, dive bombs the helicopter, or an innocent bystander is injured you have "fowled up" and you are only allowed 3 fowl ups at which point the game is over. It gets very difficult very fast playing it on the real cab so the games don't last long at all - which is of course by design. The Turkey Shoot manual even states that "...thorough field and factory research has shown that two-minute games both satisfy players and also keep the quarters flowing." So don't plan on playing for much longer than a couple of minutes.

And my favorite part - at the end of each level a fan blows a bunch of real feathers all around inside the glass in front of the monitor! Those kinds of offbeat physical features always make a cab stand out in my mind. So. even though the gameplay is fairly routine, the wacky nature of the game and the unique feather feature of the cab bump it up to pretty cool in my book. I wish I had taken a video of the feathers flying to post when I used to play it at Joystix because they eventually sold it off and now I suspect I might not ever see another one.

If you can make your way through 100 missions you have defeated all the turkeys and the game is over, but accomplishing that on the real arcade cab seems impossible to me. Unfortunately, given the nature of the gun and the feathers feature, Turkey Shoot is one of those games that is nowhere near as fun to play on MAME as it is to play on the real thing, but someone did upload a MAME video of the game onto YouTube so check it out below. They made it look much easier than it really is because they cheated by enabling rapid-fire on all levels, but they did complete all 100 missions of the game which is still impressive. Now I'm off to eat some ham and dressing (don't really care much for turkey). Later gents!

Another Year Another HAAG Arcade Expo

2011-11-18T00:15:00.000-06:00

Well, almost a month since my last post. Too much work lately interfering with my playtime and of course with my chit chat time here on the Gameroom too. I have finished several games in the past month both modern and retro and am just getting way too far behind in my little online gaming journal here so I am taking a break from work to drop a few words and pics about my visit this last weekend to the Houston Area Arcade Group's Arcade Expo.

This was the 10th installment of the annual event here in Houston, Texas and as always a good time was had by all. Over 200 arcade, pinball and console games all on free play, after the initial purchase of the tickets of course. $20 per day or $30 for both days. Entering the hotel and looking around I saw the usual oddball mix of folks with the occasional stormtrooper from the 501st Legion, X-wing pilot from the Rebel Legion, and ghostbuster from the Houston Area Ghostbusters thrown in for flavor. My favorite? The stormtroopers of course!

The first room room is where they have all the vendors, the REALLY old arcade games (e.g. bat and ball games, flipperless pinballs and shooting galleries), an XBox 360 hooked up to a Kinect and projected onto a giant screen, the tournament games, and a large collection of various old consoles and computers set up with individual monitors and games just waiting for you to sit down and play. I played a little Apple IIe, VIC-20, Odyssey 2, Intellivision - pretty good stuff.

As in previous events Atari Age had a nice presence at the show with several homebrew carts available to play - and maybe buy which is what I intended to do but completely forgot to go back and look into it. Last year's homebrew cart that caught my eye was Halo 2600 - the Atari's version of the modern Xbox classic (that you can try online here). This year's prize was Juno First.

Juno First is a pretty obscure arcade game released by Konami in 1983 but if you've never tried it you should pull it up on MAME because it's pretty cool - think Defender mixed with Beamrider. And this Atari 2600 port by Chris Walton of Glasgow, UK is an excellent translation. Assuming you don't have a copy of the cartridge you can download the game here and give it a go on Stella. The author himself posted the file for download so I'm assuming he won't mind.

As I walked into the main arcade I recalled the noise. But unlike Joystix which assails you with music to the point where you often can't even hear the game you are playing, the HAAG Expo hits a much happier balance between arcade sounds and 80's music pumping through the sound system. So although it is still very loud, I find the HAAG arcade sound levels to be much more tolerable and historically accurate than Joystix.

All my favorites from the last show were there again like Quantum, Track & Field and Varkon. As always I discovered a few new ones that I quite liked - this time the honor fell to Sega's pinball Apollo 13 and the Terminator 3 pinball. The unique thing about the Apollo 13 pin was the multiball when 13 pinballs flooded down on your flippers at once. It was pretty wild!

Oh, and it's not game-related but I came home with a bag full of goodies too. I won a VHS tape of the Doctor Who episode Warriors of the Deep (points off for starring Peter Davison instead of Tom Baker but still free is free), and I bought a big stack of comics for 25 cents each, a marquee for the old obscure arcade game Shark Attack for $5 and a little spinning/exploding death star toy for $1.

If you are in the Houston area this time next year I highly recommend you check out the Expo. Never hurts to plan ahead you know. See you there!

Alfred Challenge Maps

2011-10-19T16:22:00.002-05:00

Like a lot of gamers out there I'm about to start playing Batman Arkham City. I pre-ordered mine from GameStop because, even though I am not typically a pre-order kind of guy I knew for sure I was going to buy it and love it so I figured I might as well get the freebie. GameStop's came with the Joker's Carnival Challenge Map and I like Joker better than Robin (Best Buy's pre-order came with 2 Robin challenge maps).

But I'm not here to discuss pre-ordering. And don't get me started about that BS unlockable Catwoman content that you have to buy the new game to get the one-time use code for. Like I mentioned to Fallguy I am more tolerant of that one-time pass crap for the online play on sports games that get some tiny incremental update each year (especially since I pretty much never buy those), but locking legitimate 1-player campaign content that is apparently a fairly integral part of a story-based game? C'mon guys. Oops - I started getting started after all.

No I just wanted to share with you the challenge map that you could have expected had you pre-ordered Arkham City from Bed Bath and Beyond. Shamelessly pilfered below from the fine gents at Dorkly - the Alfred Challenge Maps:

Arcades and the Ladies

2011-10-12T21:59:00.000-05:00

If there's one thing my old arcade flyers have reminded me of it's how much chicks dig arcade guys. Especially back in the 70's and 80's. Back in those days when a guy walked into an arcade he could fully expect to see at least one hot arcade groupie - or as they preferred to be called - "arcade escorts" standing at each cabinet just waiting for him to come and play with them. It was a simpler time. It was a sexier time. It truly was the golden age of video games. Of course that was before Congress passed the Arcade Fairness Act (AFA) of 1990 that allowed women to actually play the games themselves rather than only participating in the supporting role of escort. It was the just move to be sure, but still I am saddened that by the time Street Fighter II hit the scene you rarely spotted even a single escort in the arcades anymore. The proud tradition of the arcade escort rapidly faded into history and now few people recall them or their seductive cosplay at all. I salute you arcade escort.

New PS3 Commercial - Michael

2011-10-09T17:11:00.001-05:00

Shortly after my last post about a video game commercial that annoyed me I saw the new PS3 TV spot below that I quite liked so I figured I'd do another quickie video post on here to share it. It features characters from some of my favorite PS3 titles like God of War III, Uncharted (3), Resistance, Infamous, Metal Gear Solid 4 and more. Reminded me of the old Dreamcast commercials that pulled a bunch its games' characters together except those were typically humorous and this one has a more dramatic flavor. Check it out.

Uncharted 3 Commercial for Subway

2011-10-06T01:46:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't seen it yet there is a new commercial for Subway Sandwiches starring Nathan Drake of the PS3 Uncharted franchise. Uncharted 2 is pretty much my favorite game on the PS3 but rather than react with a "hey check it out a mainstream commercial with Nathan Drake in it!" my gut reaction was more a disappointed "what the hell? Oh c'mon.". I realize everything is a cash grab to the big game companies, but somehow seeing the hero of my favorite game on the PS3 reduced to hawking 5 dollar foot longs left me feeling like a Subway sandwich maker had just stuck his big fat ungloved thumb right in my meatball sandwich before handing it to me.

I guess the bit of what I assume was entirely new animation when Drake was talking to the camera wasn't too bad, but I winced when I saw him running through the same scenes I'd already seen several times on trailers except this time carrying a CGI'd Subway cup and sandwich.

I'm pretty sure that if, many years from now when the PS3 is considered retro, I go back and watch this video again it will bring a smile to my face. But for now while it's fresh it just left me with a slight case of indigestion.

What the Hell is Up With This Arcade Flyer?

2011-10-04T13:27:00.000-05:00

Arcade flyers used to have some nice looking babes on them hawking their electronic wares so when I saw an arcade game called Sexual Trivia I figured it would be pretty steamy. I was quite wrong. For some reason the Kinky Kit and Game Company of Hollywood, Florida decided to go a different route with the spokeswoman in this case apparently being a child sporting a Strawberry Shortcake outfit and blue shoes.

"Sexual Trivia - It's statutorific!" WTF? I mean how old are those girls? Like 12? Of course I've seen the studies from U.C. Berkeley that demonstrated that approximately 60% of the population of Hollywood California are pedophiles so that's old news, but et tu Hollywood Florida? A quick scan of the comics in the local newspaper from the sick fucks at Hollywood, Florida confirms my fears.

And there were dozens more like it. So beware - avoid Hollywood Florida at all costs. Go to Orlando instead. Yes, Orlando is brimming with pedophiles as well, but they have some pretty cool theme parks you can check out. Just keep an eye on your kids.

Rick Carter's Nibbler High Score Record Revisited

2011-09-18T14:14:00.000-05:00

Recently I posted a piece on Rick Carter's new world-record on the arcade game Nibbler - and even more recently I noticed that a few pieces of it were quoted in the forum over at Classic Arcade Gaming (dot com). CAG is a website all about classic arcade gaming (guess that could have gone without saying) which for some reason I have yet to really explore, an odd oversight on my part given my love for classic arcade gaming. In fact I am about to rectify that oversight if I can get this work finished up - damn real-life syndrome!

Anyway, there were a couple of posts over there about the feat and Rick Carter himself (the record-breaker) chimed in with some insider's thoughts on his effort. I thought it was interesting as it reminded me that not only does playing a game for 49-50 hours straight take a lot of skill and stamina, it also takes quite a physical toll on your body. Here is what Rick Carter had to say about the day:

"thx for all of the above and all the congrats all over guys!

It was surreal. I think any marathoner that gets up into the 48+ hour range it gets surreal. I had to reach down within my gaming soul to hit the billion. I experienced in the last 50 million something I never have felt in gaming...taking myself well beyond the "wall", resisting everything my body was telling me and mentally persevering. I was told I was so focused on the game I was standing about the last 10-12 hours of gameplay. I had no idea. I also was barely drinking anything...definitely wasn't eating anything. My body still is paying me back for that now! I am slowly getting my hands back...but my dexterity still is compromised.

At 900 million, I still was playing very well and had 90-100+ men. I was very tempted to take a 40-death break(about 10 minutes) before the final push to 1 billion. I did not take this break though thinking I no longer would be able to build the men back up or even maintain them. I could tell my hand was about shot.

At 950-960 million I was at 50 men and saying I could no longer hold the joystick. It was too painful. I then started holding it in a semi-palmed manner. The ball in my palm and last few fingers semi-wrapped around the side for leverage. However, it took some adjustment for this where I was losing lives but I did manage to get pretty proficient at clearing specific waves with this new hold...but some moves I just could not do well with this new hold.

I started the billion point game at 10:28 pm Thursday. I had arrived ready to play at 12:10 pm that day. I also had played about a 4 hour game to 83 million when something happened to the board where the game had to be reset and boards swapped out. Richie Knucklez fortunately had 3-4 sets of boards so was able to find another one that worked. Props to Richie for all the time he spent getting the game ready and fresh components for the controller installed just before the event.

After the first 83 million game, Richie told me to go to hotel and reset the next day. I would have except I had to work Monday...so I did not really have the option of starting Friday and playing into Sunday. I would not be able to go back with less than 1 day of rest after a Nibbler marathon.

It took far more out of me than my previous Q*bert marathon of 61+ hours in December 2010.

Some asked me what my next marathon would be....I am considering Q*Bert again...perhaps Richie can get a second system (even if just a loaner) and George and I can go head-2-head...starting exactly same time!

You guys could go stat crazy...have the 2 screens shown side by side for the broadcast... # deaths by each shown...etc. would be interesting and think motivate both of us to keep the gameplay at a high level with increased chance of reaching the 67+ hour time record...and perhaps even break the 33+ million Q*bert score!"

A Long Hard Look at - Bank Panic

2011-09-15T10:29:00.001-05:00

Featuring another arcade game today - a really nice one that I discovered quite some time ago on MAME and then actually got to play in person for the first time when I went to Funspot last year - Bank Panic!

Bank Panic! was developed by Sanritsu Denki in 1984 and manufactured/distributed by Sega/Bally-Midway. You've probably heard of the other arcade game that Sanritsu developed that same year - Appoooh. Stop lying, you've never heard of Appoooh.

Bank Panic! is simple to pick up but quite fun and gets challenging quickly. Gets the blood pumping after a while like a good game of Robotron or Chicken Shift. Tastes like a video game version of hot hands (anyone?), the gameplay is similar to Hogan's Alley but more sophisticated and a far superior control scheme. Hogan's Alley apparently came out the same year but I assume production on Bank Panic! predated it. Anyway, I would say it's a bit like the love child of Hogan's Alley and Tapper if you will. Or don't. It's entirely up to you really.

You are the town deputy and you are stationed inside a huge, apparently circular, bank where it is your job to protect the good townsfolk and their hard-earned money from the no-good scallywags who approach the teller windows with pistols drawn and the intention of absconding with the bank's loot. The fiends! The bank has 12 doors leading to the outside and you are looking directly at 3 of them at all times. You can change which doors you are facing by pushing the joystick left or right to position yourself accordingly.

Every so often a bank door will open and most of the time it will either be a customer with money who will make a deposit or a no-good bank robber that you must fill with lead by hitting whichever of the 3 buttons - left, middle, or right - corresponds with the doorway in which the robber is standing. But you have to be sure to shoot him before he shoots you or, quite obviously, you are dead. You can shoot the baddies on sight, but that is considered "unfair" so you get extra points for waiting until they draw to shoot. But don't be too trigger happy because you don't want to accidentally shoot one of the kind patrons who sometimes, Lord knows why, like to dress and act a little like one of the robbers when they open the door to apparently see if they can fool you into blowing them away by accident - but oh do they let you have it if you do! AND you lose a life to boot. When you lose 3 lives the game is over.

At the top of the screen there is a status line/HUD that shows all the doors, which 3 doors you are facing, which doors have already taken in money, and how close the next customer (or robber) outside is to approaching each door so you can quickly position yourself to meet them if you like. Once you take in money from every door at least once the level is completed and you go to the next level which is the same except faster.

They do mix in other stuff too to trip you up - some robbers hide behind a customer and shove them out of the way to shoot you, some bob and weave to make it harder to shoot them, some robbers takes 2 shots to kill instead of 1 so you have to make sure they go down after the first shot or else they can still plug ya, sometimes a kid (or little person?) shows up with a bunch of hats on his head and you rapid-fire shoot all of them off for bonus points, sometimes customers are tied up and you have to shoot the ropes to release them, and sometimes the evil-doers set a bomb on a door and you have to get over to and shoot the fuse off before it blows up. All variations on the same theme really but they add a nice variety to the play. A few other tidbits here and there too like if a robber gets to the door and you don't get there to shoot him they can sometimes steal back money that has previously been deposited, but if you get there in time and shoot him he'll drop it and you get it right back.

I like the unique but simplistic shooting controls and the twitch gameplay. The only real drawback is the music which is a simplified arcade version of Dixie that just drones on and on - that gets a little annoying after a while. Oh yeah, another thing that annoyed me a bit - when you are playing two player they don't display your opponent's score while it is your turn so you don't know exactly how many points you need to beat them until your turn is over - that seems like a stupid oversight.

My high score on MAME is 161,900 if anyone cares to challenge it, but if you're not a MAMER-type Bank Panic was ported to the Sega SG-1000, MSX and the Sega Master System. I tried the Master System version and it is an excellent conversion. I've never owned a Master System but I must say that when I try an emulated game on it I'm almost always impressed with the quality.

There were also a few clones made such as Silver Gun for the ZX Spectrum (Spanish) and Bang Bank for the Atari XL/XE (in Poland).

But the more well-known clone was West Bank.

West Bank was released for the MSX, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. Since my personal preferences of those 4 systems generally runs to the CBM side of the street I tried the C64 version and it was indeed a very nice clone.

It played more or less like the original with a few exceptions - notably it didn't have the little radar for each door showing when customers/baddies were approaching outside and it added a nice little bonus round where after every bank level you are called out by a trio of banditos that you must face down in a gunfight. The timer at the top of the screen counts down from 5 to 0 then the 3 baddies will draw their guns on you in random order and try to plug you. You have to wait for them to draw (fair play and all that) and then you gun them down. Has some nice animations too and provided a few new colorful characters - here are a few from the instructions screen:

"Jack Vicios, the sponging swindler of the West. Don't hesitate - shoot whenever you see his face.

Julius, the dandy. He is a box of surprises; he may give you a bag of gold or he might shoot you. Take things very careful with this one.

Bowie, the dwarf. He is a constant practical joker. Make holes in his hats, but take care that the bottom hat doesn't conceal a bomb or you will lose a life."

I even came across a magazine advertisement in the February 1986 issue of Crash where Gremlin Graphics was running a contest to see who could invent a new baddie. Winners received a free West Bank sweatshirt!

My only real complaint with West Bank is an area that I usually enjoy on the C64 - the soundtrack. The whiny old west music really started burrowing into my skull.

And clones are still being made today apparently - there is an updated version called Westbang that has been released for the iphone. I've never played and probably won't but it looks nice.

But updated graphics or no, standing in front of the original cabinet banging away at the 3 buttons is the way to go. Unfortunately I haven't seen one outside of New Hampshire so you might have to make do with one of the ports or West Bank which is OK because are all solid games for a bit of quick-hit old west fun with the same flavor. I still enjoy coming back to the game on the MAME cab from time to time. I give it a 7.6.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance - Weak!, Cool!, ...OK

2011-09-11T18:00:00.001-05:00

Several new games I'm interested in are going to be released in the next couple of months, but in the meantime lately I've been playing through a few other current-gen games that have been sitting on my shelf for a while. Yesterday I finally made my way around to trying Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the Xbox 360, which I bought quite a long time ago packaged with Forza Motorsports 2 for like $8 - I used to be a big fan of superhero comic books and I figured hey 2 games for $8 you can't really beat that.

Ultimate Alliance is an action RPG where you control a team of 4 superheroes - interchangeable with like 10 backups - and are trying to beat, kick, and zap your way through a colorful variety of Marvel Universe backdrops and ton of bad guys to get to Dr. Doom who is trying to take over the world - or something to that effect. I elected to jot down my thoughts immediately as I played it and it turned out to be a bit of a roller coaster ride of pleased versus displeased for me. Below are my unaltered trains of thought after 1 hour, 4 hours, and 6 hours of play. Well, unaltered save for a bit of editing to shorten - I do tend to get rather wordy sometimes - maximum verbosity and all that. Yes believe it or not it was longer before I chopped it. And yes, I realize that it is still way too long to expect anyone to read it but there's no turning back now so here it is.

Hour 1 (Weak):
Well the graphics look decidedly PS2/XBox-gen which is a little discouraging for a current-gen game even one that is several years old. The speech acting isn't too bad but the dialogue is SO pathetically juvenile that even the best voice over wouldn't be able to get much out of it. When the NPCs talk to you in non-cut scenes it shows a little DOS-style picture of the face of whoever is talking next to a transcript of what they are saying with a little 'push A to respond with this canned response" continue mechanic - wow - that doesn't even taste like last-gen that is more NES/GBA.

OK there's an obstacle that we have to navigate around, well no problem Iron Man can fly, so easy enough to... hmm - his jet boots seem to have an altitude ceiling of about 8 feet off the ground - well that doesn't make sense. The camerawork is rather clunky - lets you pan from left to right halfway decently but you get nothing out of up and down. And a couple of time the camera didn't switch to the proper angle so you see your guys disappear around a corner and then you are staring at a wall hearing the sounds of battle in the next room.

And why the hell do all these characters keep writhing around so much when they are standing in place telling me things? Radioactive Man is practically giving me a table dance. And I don't find him sexy at all. Way too muscly. Oh - and as with a lot of these kinds of team-oriented games where your AI teammates get all up in your space I find myself playing a lot of a game I like to call "get the hell out of my way". I've also already played one brief round of "I'm stuck in the fucking corner".

One nice thing I noticed is that if I decide to start smashing a random piece of conduit or machinery out of nowhere, my team is understandably puzzled for a moment but then starts beating the hell out of it too in support. I like that kind of loyalty - don't ask me why - just hit it!

The story? Virtually nonexistent. I don't have to have a good story to enjoy a game, but don't pretend to sell me a story and then just sew together a bunch of mediocre-to-boring gameplay missions because that ain't gonna cut it. BUT all that being said it isn't like it's unplayable and I have always been a comic book fan (and more of a Marvel guy over DC) so I really want to like this game. So even though so far it almost seems like a beta I'm going to hang in there with it. It definitely seems to be more tailored toward kids as opposed to adult gamers though.

My beginning rating = 6.2.

Hours 2-4 (Cool):
[MadPlanet really wandered off the path into a lot of comic book jibber jabber here - Editor]
OK I decided to go a bit more hipster and switch out some of the Marvel Universe flag-bearers on the team for some of the lesser known B-siders off the bench.

Right off the bat I pick Moon Knight because I used to collect his title back in the day. He doesn't even have any powers he is just a strong but slightly mentally unstable man who has learned many fighting styles with which to kick ass and since he is fortunate enough to be rich he can also afford all kinds of expensive gadgets, vehicles, and weapons - OK he's basically Marvel's version of Batman. Moon Knight does have a pretty cool back-story though - he is a former mercenary who was left for dead out in the desert after one of his mercenary gigs went south. He finds his way into an ancient tomb where he collapses at the foot of a statue of Konshu the God of the Moon (is that a real Egyptian god? note to self - Google later) and dies. Then, a bit later, he is resurrected by Konshu to fight injustice - or maybe he's just nuts - either way he slips into a costume styled on the moon-crested hoodie look that Konshu pioneered and now kicks criminal ass - mostly the lesser grade hoods - not Galactus or anything.

Scrolling through the bench warmers I see... Elektra - meh she's fairly obscure and hot but I was never a big Daredevil fan. Iceman? Yeah maybe back in the day before the X-Men movies and all the cartoons - now everybody knows that guy. Colossus - yeah - I always liked Colossus and he only has a bit part in one the X-Men movies so he's still relatively obscure - OK added Colossus to the team.

Hey they have Luke Cage! Or his full name as I used to know it - Luke Cage, Power Man! He looks a little different now - more normal-looking clothing, but obviously still one bad mother fucker. Luke Cage was the only dude bad enough to be able pull off the look he sported back when I collected Power Man and Iron Fist in the late '70s - early '80s. How many guys can walk around in a bright yellow silk puffy shirt unbuttoned to the navel with blue skinny jeans, a chain-link belt, and a sterling silver tiara headband and still look ready, willing and able to really fuck you up if you even think about saying anything.

That, gentlemen, is self-confidence. My hat's off to Mr. Cage - I never even had the nerve to wear my bolo-tie that I bought back when I was in my country music phase in the early 80's. I think I may have worn it to a Dwight Yoakam concert once (hey didn't you get one too FallGuy or am I imagining that?). So anyway YES Luke Cage you are on the squad. Dude you just keep on dressing like you want to dress and to hell with society's so-called rules!

Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for the Power Man and Iron Fist movie. It is the tried-and-true odd couple formula spiced up with a good dose of 70's pop culture and a liberal sprinkling of ethnic/cultural stereotypes. Felix and Oscar, Starskey and Hutch, Tango and Cash - Power Man and Iron Fist. Both New Yorkers - one is a bullet-proof bad-ass street-smart take no shit black dude from Harlem with a heart of gold but who has no problem notching your skull with his chain link belt if you eyeball him on the street. The other is a quiet contemplative overly-docile wealthy white pacifist who when pushed far enough will be happy to demonstrate to you in fashionable green and yellow spandex with ribbon accents that not only is he an expert in the martial arts, but he can also literally make his fist as hard as freaking iron so when he chops your ass with it there can be no doubt that it is going to fucking hurt in the morning. Oh the hijinx they got into. Hell I bet Quentin Tarantino already has it on his short-list of projects.

But I digress - back to the game. Still need one more - OK Ms. Marvel you're up. Moving on.

So right away I'm fighting a guy as Moon Knight. The game plays some heavy fight music when you go into battle and at first it seemed goofy, but now that I've put myself more in the right frame of mind I kinda like it. After Moon Knight beats this nameless goon he yells out "another victory for you Konshu!". OK more terrible dialogue but it resonated with my comic past and now this stuff has almost morphed into a "so bad it's kinda good" type of deal...

Hmmm - I see the characters all have various XP and stats and gear that you can equip and level up etc - so it's an RPG too eh? (I didn't realize that at the time) OK, a little deeper than I first thought - might be cool. Oh shit I just saw an unlockable hidden option in Luke Cage's outfit - I bet it's that classic puffy shirt/jean ensamble. Hell that's almost enough right there to keep me going. OK switching to Luke Cage.

"You lose small-fry!" - Luke Cage after chain-slapping one dude unconscious.
"Next time - run away!" - Luke Cage after smashing one guy's face repeatedly into the ground.
"Guess that means... I win!" - L.C. after... well you get the picture.

Luke Cage does excellent work.

My mid-way rating = 7.8

Hours 5-6 (OK):
Well I have thoroughly enjoyed holding guys off the ground and punching them as Luke Cage and hey Ms. Marvel can kick some ass too, but the the initial shine of the comic book connection is beginning to dull a bit for me. Although I still find the game to be pretty decent and could very well come back to it to finish, the gameplay is getting a little old so I might not. The RPG elements seem to be a little tacked on and you really don't need to even pay attention to them at all to play the game so despite the extra details and options it is really just more of an action game. It basically feels like a Diablo-skinned version of the old 2D X-Men arcade game which is fine but I've never been a huge fan of the beat 'em up brawler. My favorite part was actually reminiscing about Power Man - so maybe I'll just go dig a few comics out of the closet.

I will say that this another of those games that I feel like would be better if you played multiplayer with some friends, but as is often the case I don't know anyone that has it and am not into playing with random strangers online - so I can only base my opinion on the single-player game experience I had. Either way though I got about 6 hours of pretty good fun out of it for $4 so I feel like I got my money's worth.

My final rating = 7.3

Dow Plummets - Stock Brokers Shoot Tanks

2011-08-18T21:37:00.006-05:00

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost another 420 points today. Oh if only someone made an arcade game about stock brokers jumping out of Wall Street buildings where it was your job to position a trampoline below them to bounce them from certain death into a waiting ambulance - how awesome would that be?! Well not that awesome it turns out - but in my never-ending quest to play every arcade game ever made now seemed the perfect time to hit up "Wall Street".

Wall Street was produced by Century Electronics in 1982. What? Never heard of Century Electronics? Well not many have, although it's possible that some of our European readers may have played the Ocean port of one of their other arcade games - Hunchback. Their body of work goes quickly downhill after that though.

There are two different levels in Wall Street - creatively named "City" and "Maze". "City" is the only level that makes any sense - it's not much fun - but it makes sense. In the City level you maneuver a safety net / trampoline left and right to catch stressed-out guilt-ridden stock brokers that have leaped to their deaths. You position the trampoline under them and they bounce off at varying angles and heights depending on how they hit the trampoline. You can continue bouncing them around for points but if you can position it so that they hit near the right side of the trampoline you can bounce them over into the waiting ambulance for big points and one step closer to completing the level.

I guess it is a bit of a cross between the arcade games Kick (aka Kick Man) and Clowns. Or - a complete and utter ripoff of the old Nintendo Game & Watch "Fire" where you are saving people jumping from a burning building. From what I read online Fire came out the year before Wall Street.

If you're able to unwisely save enough of the slimy brokers before the Dow Jones Index reduced to zero you move on to level 2 - "Maze" (I hope the guy that came up with these names got a bonus that year). Maze is where the game really falls apart. You are now the stock broker (I think) and apparently after being saved you a) discounted the promise you made to God on the way down of being a better person and b) determined to make your money back as quickly as possible. So you are running around a maze to find bags of money - people's savings that you bilked them out of no doubt - that you must pick up and deposit in your safe. Unfortunately for you, the military has had quite enough and instead of a fiscal bailout have decided to simply kill you this time. And they're done screwing around so they send out a battalion of tanks to do the job, but luckily you had the foresight to bring your anti-tank RPG with you to work this morning so you're good to go. In true Tutankham fashion you can only shoot left and right, not up and down, but it's quite easy. This is a complete throwaway level.

If you're wiley enough to grab all the money in the maze and not get killed by the tanks well then it's back to level 1 for more "City". And actually the second round of City is a little better as multiple brokers start jumping off the buildings at the same time, so it gets more challenging and almost even a little fun. And rescue helicopters start making an appearance on the third time through the City level that you can try and land the brokers in, but I lost interest in the game before I was able to get that done.

And oh lord the music. Grating bleep bloop renditions of Oh Susanna, Dixie, and what I'm pretty sure is Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (..they go uppity up up, they go downditty down down - am I the only one who knows what song I'm talking about here?) The music made me want to jump off a building myself.

So... I had to play it to rate it and check it off my list because it's what I do, but I certainly wouldn't advise you to make the same investment. My rating? A lowly 4.0.

New World Record on Nibbler

2011-08-01T16:35:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend there were new world record high scores set on four different arcade video games:

Frenzy: Joel West with 4,933,702
Snake Pit: Mark Alpiger with 317,350
Tron: David Cruz with 14,007,645
Nibbler: Rick Carter with 1,002,222,360

[*12/26/2011 Update: Tim McVey took up the challenge and recaptured his high score crown on Nibbler by crushing Rick's score with 1,041,767,060. Congrats Tim and thanks for setting the record straight about the bogus passing out story!]

Congrats to all those guys, but since I've never been overly interested in the first 3 games I'd like to chat a bit specifically about the fourth one - Nibbler.

Hats off to Rick Carter who took a little over 49 hours to amass that score. 49 hours! That breaks the old high score of 1,000,042,270 set by Tim McVey way back in 1984.

Nibbler was the first game to support a billion point score and to spotlight this Rock-ola offered a free Nibbler machine to the first player to turn the game over by scoring a billion. The early favorite to surpass the mark was U.S. National Video Game Team member Tom Asaki, who came close but failed in attempts at Walter Day's Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, IA (once when the joystick broke after he had scored 793 million points). Tim McVey (not Timothy McVeigh!) had six unsuccessful attempts before he finally broke the billion-point barrier with 1,000,042,270 points. To commemorate the achievement Ottumwa declared January 28, 1984 as Tim McVey Day.

Tim McVey held the official high-score record for the next 27 years until Rick Carter broke it last weekend. McVey tried to one-up himself in 2009 but only mustered a paltry 648 million. But now that he has officially been dethroned by Carter I'm guessing he will come back out of retirement for another shot.

And now to the game itself - Nibbler is another one of those arcade games that I discovered on MAME and enjoyed but still have never actually seen in person - not even at the ACAM. Pac-Man fever was still running rampant when Rock-Ola released it back in 1982 so it's not surprising that it is a simplistic maze-based eat the dots type of game controlled only by a 4-way joystick - but it far from a Pac-Man clone.

In the game you play as Nibbler the snake and must slither around a maze eating the food that is scattered about. You must eat all the food in the maze before time runs out but with each piece of food you eat, Nibbler gets longer and ultimately starts getting in his own way. If Nibbler runs into his own body or if the time runs out he loses a life. Once you've eaten all the food the level is completed and a new maze full of food begins. Don't ask me what kind of food it's supposed to be - apparently a radioactive fruit of some sort because it radiates with a multicolored glow. I saw someone call the food/dots "croutons" online once, but I have no idea where the hell they got that from - maybe the manual who knows.

Anyway, to make things more difficult the uranium-soaked fruit is evidently laced with methamphetamines because you cannot stop Nibbler and he just keeps going faster and faster the more he eats. He does pause very slightly every time he runs into a wall to let you gather your thoughts but he's tweaking hard so like any good meth head he is off and running in a split second, consequences be damned!

Obviously the gameplay is pretty redundant, but it is somewhat addictive and the mazes change up a little at each level to add a little variety. The second you look at the graphics you say - oh this must be from 1982. Or at least that's what I said when I first played it. Is that wrong to not only think that but to actually say it out loud to myself while I'm sitting alone playing it? The sound, though not great, is tolerable for a while. But it doesn't take long for the 8-bit rendition of La Cumparsita to wear on the nerves. If they'd let the song play on I think I'd have liked it fine but it only loops the first couple of bars over and over and over like a broken record until I just want to tango into the kitchen and stuff my head in the oven. The microwave oven.

The game isn't nearly as easy as you might think. Since you can't stop you have to strategically think ahead to plot your course as Nibbler keeps getting longer and faster and it gets quite challenging very quickly, assuming you aren't Rick Carter, which I am not - my high score is a mere 52,170 (casts eyes down in shame).

Nibbler was ported to the Apple II in 1983 and the Amstrad CPC in 1984. So if you're not a MAMER you might want to check out those ports. In 2005, JMD developed a freeware themable clone of the game (the Amstrad CPC port of the game anyway) for the Sega Dreamcast - although I've never seen that one.

Overall I think it's a decent little game with a certain charm. Reminiscent of the old Snake games that have been around forever but all Pac-Manned up. To me it tastes like Anteater (although Anteater is the superior game) with some Tron light cycles thrown in, except there are no ants or MCP hooligans trying to kill you - just your own ever-growing body. I don't hit this game on the MAME cab very often but will brink it up every great once in a while for a quickie. I give it 6.9 bulimic boa constrictors out of 10.

Portable Arcade Cabinet for Enduro Racing

2011-07-31T04:28:00.000-05:00

Wanted to share this video I found tonight on Game Set Watch in case you guys hadn't seen it yet.

Brazilian artist Rafael MSP made a very nice sit-down arcade-style driving cabinet built around the Atari 2600 game Enduro. Enduro! I thought that was pretty wild. And as if that isn't impressive enough - he built it so that it would be portable. So now if he's ever in the mood for some Enduro on the go he just opens up the swanky custom Atari Enduro briefcase and pulls out the pieces like an old-school Iron Man unpacking his armor.

I thought it was pretty darn impressive and cool. Of course it makes me feel kind of bad about myself since he built all that to play Enduro racing and I don't even really want to get off my ass to go to the kitchen and get a Dr. Pepper. And I'm thirsty.

Check it out:

Barcadia in Houston, Texas

2011-07-28T21:32:00.001-05:00

Well, this post probably won't be of much interest to anyone living outside the Houston area but my gaming pursuits lately keep leaving me with thoughts of "meh - that's not really post-worthy" and as a result I go a month or so at a time without posting anything. Well I'm not goin out like that! Post or die!

Mrs. MP and I were eating lunch at the 59 Diner last weekend before heading out on a little birthday road trip to Austin to play some vids and pins at Pinballz when it occurred to me that it was a perfect time to check out Barcadia, the still relatively new bar in midtown that serves up not only alkeehawlic beverages but some classic arcade games and giant-sized Jenga as well. I had my usual hesitation about checking out a downtown bar and the associated risk of potentially being surrounded by a douchey/hipster crowd, but trepidation be damned I was ready for some games and some afternoon beer - after all I was on vacation!

Parking was limited along the curb but there was a big dirt lot across the street with plenty of space, although strangely there was some loose barb wire on the ground in the lot. Not sure what that was about but we didn't run over it so OK.

First thing I noticed when I walked in was that the place was pretty small. It was fairly early in the afternoon so there weren't many people and only a couple of people were playing the games, but it didn't seem like it would take too many people to get unbearably crowded in there. Anyway, I moseyed on up to the bar and ordered a brewski to kick things off.

I saw a few guys commenting online that the bartenders were jerks but the guy that was there when I went was quite friendly. Everyone was pierced and tatted but cool. I think some people just like to bitch on sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor.

So now - the games! The good news is that they had a pretty good collection of 15 old classics and 2 different multicade machines, the bad news is almost half of them had significant mechanical problems that interfered with their play The games included:
Asteroids Deluxe (I didn't play this one because people were on it but appeared to work fine)
Defender (the Reverse button was broken - ever tried Defender without being able to turn around? It's aggravating)
Dig Dug (the up direction on the joystick worked about 10% of the time - also aggravating)
Frogger (out of order)
Galaga (graphics were messed up and everything was in red - weird)
Ghosts n' Goblins (Worked great! Still hard as hell but that's normal for G&G)
Mario Brothers (I didn't play this one)
Mortal Kombat (I didn't play this one)
Ms. Pac-Man (I didn't play it but looked to work OK)
Multicade (I assume this worked but multicades have lost some of their appeal for me since I have one at home)
Paperboy (Am I the only person in the world that hates this game? I think I am. I didn't play it)
Phoenix (Worked fine and is still a fun classic. Spent most of my playtime on this one.)
Popeye (Never cared much for Popeye so I didn't play this one)
Star Wars (Worked part of the time but sometimes the tie fighters would distort and flatten out which made them a lot harder to shoot)
Street Fighter II (didn't play SFII - although it is one of my all-time favorites)
Track & Field (worked but one of the run buttons on the P1 side was broken so it was a little shaky)
Williams Retrocade (meh another retrocade - would be fun to play with friends over beer though)
Skee-Ball (not a vid but classic fun anyway - 1 of the 3 machines worked fine).

So I was a little disappointed that several of the machines were buggy, but they were all in pretty good shape cosmetically and if they would just put a little more work into them it would be a nice mix of old games with the multicades for flavor. Also, I heard that you had to pay for the games but when I went everything was on free play - they had outfitted the machines with buttons on the front that you pushed to insert credits. So I didn't feel cheated since the games were free anyway and the beer selection was pretty decent for a small joint.

The only problem with the whole 'drink beer while you play games' deal is the same exact issue I have with it at Joystix - there's just nowhere to put your beer while you play! You have to leave it on a table or the bar which isn't exactly nearby.

So, in a nutshell, I thought it was a decent little joint and I definitely like the idea of a bar with retro arcade games, but they really need to work on their games to get them all working right for me to consider returning. Even then I don't really see myself making the drive downtown with Barcadia as the target destination, but if I was already downtown with friends I wouldn't mind stopping in sometime so I'm officially adding it to the Arcade Journal.

The Lone Man Who Gave His Soul to Gaming - or - I Love Japanese Video Game Commercials

2011-07-20T14:35:00.008-05:00

A recent post on Gnome's Retro Treasures featured Chu Chu Rocket - a neat little game for one of my favorite consoles - the Sega Dreamcast. More than the game itself, the post reminded me of the Japanese TV commercial I saw for it on YouTube whose song (the melody anyway) stuck in my head despite the fact that I didn't have any idea what the heck the guys were saying at the time:

My Japanese friend Hiroshi translated the commercial for me today - thanks Hiroshi!:
Chu chu rocket, save the mice
Chu chu rocket, cats are scary
Chu chu rocket, rocket is great
Zoobababaaaam!!
xyz puzzle chu chu rocket 2,800 yen, cheap! Dreamcast. (He said he couldn't quite catch the xyz part. He also informed me that in Japan "chu chu" is considered to be the sound that mice make - like "squeak squeak" is in the US).

And that sent me back to YouTube to watch another few old Japanese video game commercials I recalled seeing. I've always enjoyed those commercials - so exuberant and over the top. I never saw any of them back in the day of course but only discovered them much later after the birth of the internet and when the internet begat YouTube.

Most of my favorites were, as one might guess, developed by Sega and I was going to embed a bunch of them here from the SG-1000, to the Mega Drive, to the Dreamcast but then I rediscovered one of my absolute favorite Japanese commercial advertising campaigns - Sega's Segata Sanshiro - and immediately deleted all the other embeds out of respect to the one true master.

Segata Sanshiro was a martial arts master who cherished his Sega Saturn so much that he made it his mission to travel the world - or at least Japan - and beat into submission all those who did not play the Sega Saturn often enough or with sufficient respect. I like Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man in the World" - but if I was starting a super hero team of advertising icons Segata would be my first draft pick. Sega did it first and did it better.

I had seen a couple of the Segata Sanshiro commercials before, but last night I stumbled across this one awesome video that chronicles Segata's birth, rise to power, and tragic end as he gives his life to protect the very board members of Sega who are ushering in the Dreamcast and thus ending the life cycle of his beloved Saturn. I defy you to watch his tragic death and not shed a tear. It is an opera-worthy climax. And in the usual random full-circle meaningless coincidence style that I love, Segata (whose real first name is Hiroshi) is killed by a missile that looks quite similar to the rocket in Chu Chu Rocket - well I guess they all do really... His last words as he clings to the missile in deep space - "You must play Sega Saturn... You must play Sega Saturn... You must play Sega Saturn!". And then the end - oops, guess that was a spoiler.

This stuff is pure gold. If I saw these commercials back in the day I probably would have bought a Saturn and gotten back into console gaming a decade before I bought my PS3. I even put the mp3 of his theme song on my iphone (thanks SegaShiro!) - hell it kept reverberating inside my head anyway - Segata Sanshiro! Segata Sanshiro! Sega Saturn Shiroooooo!! Rest in peace Segata Sanshiro.

and if you didn't get enough Segata Sanshiro from the official music video - here is a little clip of a cover of the theme song by Segarocks - a Japanese Sega tribute band.

Meteor - My Favorite Asteroids Clone

2011-07-05T00:30:00.001-05:00

I was going through some older games on the MAME cab to see which arcade game from the 70's I felt like writing about and given that one of the all-time great arcade games was from the 70's AND starts with the letter A it didn't take long at all to come across Asteroids.

Well, I'm pretty sure everyone currently reading this is quite familiar with the arcade classic Asteroids so I won't bore you with my thoughts on that game other than to say that I am a fan and unlike some I've spoken to I prefer the sequel Asteroids Deluxe to the original. But no - this post is to give a shout out to an Asteroids clone called Meteor. There were a few clones and bootlegs of Asteroids when it became popular and they all play pretty much identically to the original, but it was the go-get-'em attitude of the sales staff at HOEI International that really turned me on to Meteor. I envision the brainstorming session to produce the flyer for Meteor went a little something like this:

Manager of Flyer Production: "OK Marvin. We've got this game Meteor that we ripped off from that new game Asteroids and I've never seen either one because that ain't my job. What is my job is getting these flyers out the door to move these units. So what have you got so far? What's the point of the game?"

Flyer Engineer: "To destroy salling meteors"

MOFP: "To destroy what?"

FE: "Meteors. As they sall by. And destroy salling UFO too."

MOFP: "You mean SAILING meteors? I mean sailing is an odd fucking choice of words to describe a meteor, but it makes more sense than SALLING. Pretty sure salling isn't a real word. Let's just make it 'Destroy deadly meteors'."

FE: "Yes sir, we'll make that change."

MOFP: "OK what else? How do you destroy the meteors? Are you firing up at them like Space Invaders or what?"

FE: "No sir. You fire in all directions."

MOFP: "All directions? Are you sure about that? I've seen video games and you're usually at the bottom shooting up at things."

FE: "Yes sir. In this game the space ship rotates 360 degrees so you fire in all directions."

MOFP: "OK well confirm that with the guys downstairs. Make sure it is OUR spaceship that rotates and not the enemy UFO and then make that point clear on the flyer because that is gonna to throw a lot of people off. And spice it up with some impact buzzwords like NEW! EXCITING! EMERGENCY! ESCAPE! and use lots of exclamation points - that kind of stuff. That it?"

FE: "We also want to include a picture of the evil galactic emperor that sent the UFO and meteors to destroy us. As you can see from the sketch he is a reptilian being from..."

MOFP: "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Goddammit Marvin, you may be a hell of a programmer but you don't know shit about making a sale. You think guys want to see lizard aliens? No! Listen. Change the lizard to a hot lookin' broad - and make sure her tits are showing and BAM we're done! What other new games we got? I'm on a roll!"

FE: "Um - her... tits sir? You mean you want us to have her wearing a tight uniform that accentuates..."

MOFP: "Who cares about the uniform? A couple of leather straps and a choke collar and the uniform is good to go man. Marvin. Let me be clear. When you come back in here this afternoon with the mockup of the flyer in your hand, it better have a hot blonde... no... make that brunette... It better have a hot brunette on it with both her tits out or you can start looking for a new fucking job. Now get out of my office."

And the rest was history.

Arcade Games of the 70's: Clowns

2011-07-01T19:14:00.000-05:00

No 'on-this-day' segue here - just thought I'd ramble a bit about a really old favorite of mine that I used to play on my Commodore 64 - or maybe even on my VIC-20, I can't remember - and I never actually realized it was a port of an arcade game until I accidentally rediscovered it one day on MAME a few years ago. That game is Clowns. If you are one of those people with a fear of clowns (coulrophobia - gotta love Google) then the C64 game box is gonna scare the livin shit out of you because they managed to squeeze a half-dozen of the grinning maniacs on the front.

Clowns was released by Midway in January 1978 and was apparently a ripoff of Exidy's arcade game Circus which was released the previous year (and subsequently ported to the Atari VCS), but in the bitter Clowns versus Circus rivalry I'm down with the Clowns baby.

Clowns is a simple 2-D single-screen black and white game, but uses blue, green, and yellow horizontal overlays for color. It is sort of like Breakout with gravity and slightly better graphics - and I do mean slightly.

In the game there are 3 rows of balloons floating horizontally along the top of the screen and you control a see-saw at the bottom of the screen that can go left or right. There is one clown standing on the see-saw and soon a second clown comes barreling his crazy ass off an elevated platform and you have to position the see-saw correctly to catch him and launch the other clown into the air to collide with and pop the balloons. Each balloon nets you points with the balloons at the top level being worth more than the ones at the bottom. When the clown comes falling back to earth you move the see-saw under him and launch the other crazy bastard into the balloon-filled sky to bounce around and burst some more. These clowns really hate balloons. Once you burst all the balloons of a particular row/color you get bonus points and then a new row appears to replace it. The clowns hurtle through the air faster and faster and if you don't get the see-saw under the flying clown in time to catch him - well, that's a dead clown. And the circus only has so many before it's game over.

As you would expect from such an old game, the sound effects and the graphics are both very simple but surprisingly satisfying (except for the jarring noise to alert a player when he gets a bonus jump - not a fan of that). The game is pretty addictive so the replay value is good (if you're me anyway) and although the 1-player play is OK, like most old games it really shines when you have 2 players competing (turn-based play rather than simultaneous).

I finally got a chance to see a real Clowns machine in person when I made the pilgrimage to the American Classic Arcade Museum in New Hampshire last fall. I managed to snap a picture of this young man as he sidled up the game to start clowning around. Look at how joyful he is to find a real Clowns!

But that joy quickly turned to rage when he discovered the game was broken! The poor sap wanted to play it so badly he even inserted a second token which the machine politely swallowed as it had the first without any sort of compensatory entertainment return whatsoever. It even went so far as to taunt him with the screen in play, but the see-saw was frozen in place so the suicidal clowns just jumped blindly off the ramps to their doom.

The gentleman was escorted from the premises by arcade security and forced to cool down over a turkey dinner at Hart's Turkey Farm Restaurant down the street. I never knew there were so many different meals made out of turkey. But I digest.

David Nelson holds the official record for Clowns with 61,390 points on June 1, 2004. So far my best effort has only netted 19,320.

Assuming you're playing it on MAME (and not the real thing) be sure to play it with a trackball, spinner, or mouse. If you try to play it with a joystick you are going to completely hate it. I booted up Clowns on the MAME cab before writing this and discovered to my dismay that the colors were gone. I guess the devs got rid of the workaround code that added the color. Now I have to wait for someone to add it back in as an artwork file. You'd be surprised how much 3 little plastic strips of color adds to a black and white game.
I give it 7.4 insane clown posses out of 10.

Oh, and in addition to my VIC-20/C64 version, Clowns was also ported to the Bally Astrocade in 1981 as the combo-pack Clowns and Brickyard. There were several other ports/clones in the Circus/Clowns "genre" as well.

Circus by Exidy in 1977
T.T. Acrobat by Taito in 1978
Acrobat TV by Taito in 1978
See Saw Jump by Sega in 1978
See Saw Jump II by Sega in 1978
Circus Atari for Atari 2600 in 1978
Clowns & Balloons for Atari 400/800 and TRS-80 Color Computer in 1982
Stunt Clown (public domain) for Atari 400/800 in 1983
Monkeys and Balloons for Atari ST in 1988

There have even been a couple of modern-day remakes of the game based on the Atari 2600 Circus Atari that you can download for free - Circus Irata and Circus Linux.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Armor Attack and the Anti-Draft Sentiments of Tim Skelly

2011-06-20T22:51:00.000-05:00

According to my handy dandy "This Day in Tech" feed it was on this day in 1840 that Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for his dot-dash telegraphy signal system known as "Morse Code". So it seems a nice opportunity to chat a bit about one of my favorite old vector arcade games that actually contains genuine Morse code in its sound effects - Armor Attack!

Vector game specialists Cinematronics released Armor Attack in 1980 and also licensed it to both Rock-ola and Sega for release as well. The game takes place on a single screen which shows a top-down view of a bombed out urban landscpape in which you, and a friend if you happen to have one lying around, control a small jeep and must drive around the war-torn city avoiding the tanks and attack copters that are trying to kill you while trying to bring them down with return fire of your own. You can bring the copters down with a single shot if you are good enough to hit them before they shoot you while they circle around the playfield, but the tanks take two shots to polish off. Your first shot immobilizes the tank but it will still turn its turret and continue to shoot at you until you are able to administer the coup de grace.

Being an early vector game, the graphics were simple monochrome wireframe, but like a lot of early video games it used overlays to give the illusion of more sophisticated graphics. In fact the buildings behind which you take cover from attacking enemies are not even present at all electronically - they are represented ONLY by the graphic overlay, but the code was written so that they provided cover and obstacles just the same.

Armor Attack was controlled entirely by buttons - no fancy shmancy joysticks here! I have always been strangely attracted to games that are controlled solely by buttons without any joysticks (e.g. Astro Blaster, Asteroids, Rip Off) so this one is right up my alley control-wise. You control the jeep pretty much the same way you control the spaceship in Asteroids except that when you stop pressing on the gas, inertia doesn't keep carrying you forward - you more or less stop on a dime. And you can make some really nice tight turns too to avoid enemy fire. Here is the control panel.

I don't recall ever actually playing this game in the arcades but I saw the artwork one day on the MAME cab and checked it out and suddenly I had a new one for my favorites list. The graphics are simple and the gameplay is admittedly redundant with just a single-screen that in true old-school arcade fashion just keeps getting harder and faster until you die, but the game is strangely addictive and never really gets old to me. One-player mode is fun, but it also offers a two-player co-op mode where you team up with a partner to kick tank and copter ass together which adds a new dimension to the game. The sound effects are excellent too for 1980. High replay value - at least for me it is - I give it an 8.0.

So what about the Morse code you ask? Interesting story. The U.S. government had reinstituted the draft registration during the game's development and Tim Skelly, the game's designer/programmer, was a longtime opponent of the draft. So to voice his anti-draft opinion Skelly encoded the message "don't register" into the repeating morse code beeps you hear in the game. Skelly discussed it in the following interview piece.

Armor Attack was done at a time when I felt I had worked out a few things about game design. I was just trying to do an artful update of one of the earliest video games, "Tank." Everything went smoothly. There were only two problems. One was that (again and again and again!) (Jim) Pierce wouldn't allow the mirror technique used in Warrior to be used here for a background. Pierce and (Papa Tom) Stroud (the owners of Cinematronics) were cheap, cheap, cheap! With every game they took away one more color from the cabinet art because each pass cost a few pennies more. Check it out. If I had done one more game the artwork would have been black on black!

Like Warrior, I just didn't have the drawing time to draw the (very important!) background outlines on the screen during the game. (They can be seen by themselves in the test mode for alignment.) So, the clever solution that management came up with was to use the same kind of overlay that was used on Star Castle. The problem was that the overlay wasn't covering/coloring anything but black! That's why the playfield for the game is either black or slightly-greenish-black. Ah, well. It worked well enough I guess.

A second event occurred about the time I had just started the game. We heard through the grapevine that Atari had completed a tank game and was testing it in the Bay area. Obviously we were concerned. One of the management guys went through the phone books for the bay area and called every arcade until he found the one with the test game. (He used a cheesy hillbilly accent. It was pretty funny.) We flew up immediately. When we got there we spotted the game, which turned out to be 'Battle Zone.' Since it was 3D and mine was top-down with entirely different game play, we went ahead with our plans, despite how good we thought the Atari game was. But that's not the funny bit. While everyone else was checking out 'Battle Zone' I wandered around the arcade like I usually did, looking for games I hadn't played. I found one and really got into it. It, too, was an Atari test piece, but none of the management guys thought much of it. Funny, I really thought 'Missile Command' would make it. ;>)

At the time I was finishing the game, the (US) government decreed that every male of draft age had to register, even though there was no draft in effect. This pissed me off (old draft resistor), especially since my buddy Scott Boden was someone who had to sign up. I wanted to use morse code sounds in Armor Attack, and I knew morse, (old boy scout) so that's real morse code in the game beeping out "dontregister." I was also assuaging my own conscience, since I had heard that Atari had sold Battle Zone to the Army.

Armor Attack was ported to the classic vector home game system Vectrex in 1982 - and when I finally buy me one of those beauties I will also be getting a copy of Armor Attack.

Tom Larkin holds the official high score record for one-player on Armor Attack with 2,009,000 points on September 25, 1982.

NES Music Video

2011-06-16T13:30:00.000-05:00

Hello out there blogosphere. Been quite busy at work lately so although I have managed to squeeze in a LITTLE gaming here and there I haven't had time to do much posting about it. And by much I mean any whatsoever. But I have a nice quickie one today to get back in the swing of things.

Sebastian Bender, the guy who made the Game Boy music video that I posted about a while back has made another one over at his site Gnarl-o-Rama. His musical instrument of choice this time is an NES. He's blowing on cartridges. He's clicking zappers. He's rubbing the case ridges like a hillbilly on a washbboard. He's doing it all!

And you know how you always wondered if a copy of Super Mario 3 could be used as a kazoo? Yes. Yes it can.

So if you liked the first one then check out the new one below. Reminds me of the Rockit music video by Herbie Hancock sans synthesizer. I know - I'm old.

Uncharted the Movie, Still a Chance!

2011-05-27T15:20:00.000-05:00

Yes, Sony and their open-door policy regarding my personal information and credit card numbers has been irritating me a bit of late. But at least for the moment they went from goat to hero for this old gamer when I heard that they had, in essence, fired the idiot director David Russell from making the upcoming Uncharted movie - which apparently is no longer upcoming, at least for now.

From the article in yesterday's Variety:

"A pair of tentpole-sized studio projects have lost their helmers, as David O. Russell exited "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune" over creative differences with Sony".

Word is that Sony is now searching for a new writer/director for the movie and the casting is starting from scratch. I don't even care anymore whether or not it's Fillion playing Drake. I'm just glad they are restarting to try and hopefully stay a little closer to the storyline instead of Russel's opium-fueled vision of a globetrotting family of treasure protectors - or whatever the hell it was. And of course, the big win here for mankind at large, is that there is just a little bit less of Marky Mark Wahlberg in the movies. I think everyone can agree with me, even Mark himself because I have to believe he is filled with self-loathing, that less Marky is good for everybody.

So thank you Sony. I salute you. Now seriously, stop giving away my credit card numbers.

Majestic Twelve (Super Space Invaders '91)

2011-05-18T18:53:00.001-05:00

I saw a documentary on the History Channel about the Majestic 12 - the alleged code name of a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials supposedly formed by Harry Truman in 1947 to investigate UFOs following the incident at Roswell, New Mexico. Now whether or not there is any validity to that story is debatable but it gave me an excuse to boot up the ol' MAME cab and finally complete the old Taito arcade game Super Space Invaders '91 (called Majestic Twelve - Space Invaders Part IV in Japan).

Super Space Invaders '91 was released in 1990 - don't ask me why it wasn't called Super Space Invaders '90, I never could figure out why they do that with cars either. It is the third arcade sequel of Taito's 1978 seminal classic behind Space Invaders Deluxe in 1979 and Return of the Invaders in 1985. Two more arcade sequels would follow - Space Invaders DX in 1994 and Space Invaders '95 - The Attack of the Lunar Loonies in 1995, but '91 might just be the best of the bunch.

Super Space Invaders '91 features the familiar gameplay of the original but with nicely updated graphics and a multitude of new invaders and improved sound effects. The game also introduces several new features to the series including power-ups, bonus rounds, boss battles, and the excellent added option of 2-player simultaneous play to really give it a new twist.

The power ups are dropped from the mother ship crossing the top of the screen if you are able to hit it. Power ups include the Buster Laser (a vertical laser that can vaporize multiple vertical columns of invaders), the Hyper Laser (vaporizes the lowest horizontal row of invaders), Shield Up (strengthens your ship's shields), Arm (creates physical shields like in the original Space Invaders that block enemy shots but you can move them up with your lasers to collide with enemies, Power Up (rapid fire laser shots), Fire Flower (a missile that blows up in a flowery explosion), Destroy Beam (my favorite - multiple bright tracers shoot out and slither rapidly all over the screen destroying everything in site, and Time Stop (a giant butterfly floats onto the screen and all the enemies freeze in time allowing you to blow them away with impunity).

There is a wide variety of invaders as you progress through the levels - complete with different background graphics, and this time the invaders have more attack patterns than the simple left all the way to the end, drop down, right all the way to the end, repeat. Some invaders widen to twice their original size when you blast them so you have to blast them some more, some split into two invaders, some attack in a circular vortex pattern (kind of like the black hole level in Gorf except with a bunch of them instead of 1 at a time), some dive bomb you, some disappear into the right side of the screen and reappear on the left side of the screen, and some break away from the pack and conduct their own separate pattern.

You no longer blow up from a single shot, your ship is equipped with shields that can absorb several shots before you explode. And unlike the original game, if the invaders reach the bottom and land on earth the game isn't over, you just blow up and lose a man.

There is also an enjoyable little cattle mutiliation bonus round where flying saucers abduct your cows for their damnable alien experiments and you have to blast the saucers without accidentally hitting your bovine buddies. If you manage to shoot the saucer without blasting the cow he oddly floats safely back to the ground for bonus points. Extra points are earned the higher in the sky the saucer is when you hit it. This little bonus level plays a lot like the old 1980 Namco arcade game called King & Balloon.

This version also adds several boss battles - I think there were 4 different ones (damn - I should've kept better notes). The bosses looked different but the fights were all pretty much the same - avoid their fire and shoot them in their small vulnerable spot which was intermittently open to fire. The bosses were not that difficult to beat but like the cattle mutilation bonus round provided a nice break from the regular invader blasting.

Co-op play adds a whole new dimension to the franchise to try and keep the gameplay as fresh as possible. Co-op shooters are one of the few arcade games that my wife actually enjoys playing with me so we joined forces to complete the game.

After we completed the arcade version I tried out a few of the ports - Super Space Invaders was also released on the Master System, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Game Gear, XBox, PlayStation 2, and PC (as part of the Taito Legends 2 compilation on the last 3).

The nice thing about these gallery shooter games, they translate well to a variety of systems. The Master System version included a nifty little introduction where a communique was being transmitted to you from Central Space Command (or whatever it was called). It played very well and was pretty true to the arcade version.

For some reason the Speccy version decided to make the background the same color as the invaders which gave it a monochrome look. Maybe this was done due to technical limitations, but it made it a little difficult to see all the invading going on.

The Amiga version was particularly solid - staying true to the arcade version but also including additional animations and storyline details before, during, and after the game that weren't on the original arcade version. Oh, and the Amiga introductory theme song is pretty cool too - it incorporates the game sound effects into the song.

Now, this is a Space Invaders game, so the gameplay does get repetitive after a while, but all-in-all this is a solid facelift to the age-old classic and I've come back to it on several occasions. For me the original arcade game is the definitive version and I'd rate it a 7.9.

I couldn't find the official arcade machine record high score, but according to Twin Galaxies, the high score for Super Space Invaders '91 on MAME (without continues!) is 382,290 by Brandon Y. LeCroy. My best effort so far without continues is only about half that.

If you like vertical gallery shooters like Space Invaders, Galaga, etc. and get a chance to play one of the versions of this game I suggest you check it out.

Crush the Castle!

2011-05-18T00:02:00.001-05:00

OK - I know I lazily embed these videos from Dorkly way too often, but this one led me to try a nifty little online flash game that I'd never played before so... I gotta do it. Like I've mentioned before I'm not a portable gamer and I avoid phone games pretty much altogether, so I've never experienced (nor do I expect to ever experience) the casual gaming phenomenon known as Angry Birds. But I'm not against spending a few minutes on a free online flash game.

Like the Tiny Wings bird, I was unfamiliar with Crush the Castle so I googled it and gave it a play. Turns out it's a nice little physics-based online game wherein you control a trebuchet to sling various projectiles at castles to bring them to the ground and crush the royal subjects within. The structural integrity of some of the castles is extremely suspect and they fall easily, but some of them are quite sturdy and some of them actually require a little bit of puzzle solving as far as what area to target to bring it down. Then a map pops up and you move on to the next castle. Your projectiles upgrade after a while to multiple boulders, then larger boulders, then a bomb. There are some other features too like building your own castle etc., but like most online flash games I found it amusing for a while - long enough to destroy all the castles on the map in this case - but not interesting enough to entice me to fully explore all the features. But like I said, a fun little waste of a few minutes at work so try it out HERE.

Killzone 2 (another FPS), and Hogan's Heroes

2011-05-15T15:24:00.009-05:00

I just got around to completing Killzone 2 for the PS3 (thanks Fallguy - I think that's all of them now I'll ship 'em back). It was a serviceable FPS game, but nothing memorable. I don't really understand how it got such high ratings from most reviewers - on Metacritic it got a Metascore of 91/100. Me, I give it more like a 73/100.

You play as Sergeant Sevchenko (a fact it took me a very long time to realize) and are bringing the space war to the Helghast planet. I don't know the history of this war since I never played the first Killzone, but according to your own government's propaganda anyway the Helghast started it. OK fair enough. And that's pretty much the story - kill all the Helghast baddies and work your way up the boss chain to Vasari - the head big bad daddy - basically Future Hitler of this army of Space Nazis.

However, even though the uniforms, symbols, etc. all had a decided Nazi flair to them, for some reason all the Helghast spoke with an English accent. Does this mean that a London scientist invented the universal translator that enabled me to hear the Helghans swearing at me? Or maybe the future British were allies or collaborators with the Helghast? Maybe there is even some sort of connection to Grand Moff Tarkin - that overconfident member of the Imperial English aristocracy that stubbornly refused to evacuate the Death Star in his moment of triumph (should've evacuated Moffy). I dunno.

And of course when I talk Nazis, well I'm gonna talk Hogan's Heroes. Colonel Radec, the no-nonsense sadistic Helghan officer was, as far as I'm concerned, modeled after Major Hochstetter - the no-nonsense Nazi who was always busting Colonel Klink's balls. And maybe Vasari, the leader of the Helghast, was supposed to make me think of Hitler, but to me he was the long-lost brother of one General Burkhalter - another of a long list of Nazis that enjoyed busting Klink's balls and was always throwing around that threat of sending Klink's ass to the Russian front.

...and of course the vast array of almost identical Helghast soldiers who march single file into their role as cannon fodder are all the loveable Sergeant Schultz, except of course that they are constantly cursing at you and have an unrealistically optimistic expectation of killing you.

The AI of the enemies is pretty poor and the AI of your squad mates is even worse. They are constantly getting in your way while simultaneously barking at you to get off your ass and follow them. And you can't shoot them - I tried. I emptied full clips into their eyes in frustration and blood flew everywhere but not a scratch. By the way, all FPS games should, by default, have friendly fire enabled. Nothing breaks up the realism of a firefight worse than when you accidentally fire a round into a fellow soldier's head and he just yells something stupid at you like "OK! that hurts!" or "don't shoot at me, shoot at them!"

And the guys were CONSTANTLY swearing. It's not like I'm offended by cussing. Fuck. See? It's just that the cussing was so relentlessly forced and the dialogue was so juvenile it just seemed silly. Kinda like Starship Troopers if you've ever seen that movie - except sillier. And all the steroid-soaked characters were so interchangeable - like Gears of War with its soul stripped out.

The various levels and minimal cut scenes felt generic and gave virtually no sense of progress - so much so that I think if you randomly mixed up the play order of the levels you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

And I kept hearing about how great the graphics were but they didn't look particularly good to me. Even for 2009 when it actually came out. Like the rest of the game the graphics seemed average.

And that's it in a nutshell - Killzone 2 wasn't bad but I'm forced to damn it with faint praise. It was passable. Decent. Average. In my opinion, there really just wasn't much to Killzone 2 to set it apart from all the other war-based first person shooters out there. An OK shooter but basically forgettable.

Now, understand that I'm only referring to the single-player story campaign here. I didn't even play the online multiplayer which I of course realize is the target audience component of the modern FPS game. I know a lot of FPS guys don't even play the single-player story and would tell me that I'm missing the best part of the game, but I just don't really enjoy the online deathmatch stuff that much anymore. Back when I played the first Resistance on PS3 I quite enjoyed it. Then when I got Modern Warfare I still enjoyed it but maybe a little less. And my interest in the online multiplayer has just continued to wane since then until now I am at the stage where I just won't buy a FPS game unless the story component sounds like it is enough up my alley to merit buying it on its own.

So anyway - it sounds like I'm trashing the game, but I'm not. It was a decent middle of the road shooter. Just nowhere near as good as I had heard and not quite good enough to prompt me to try the multiplayer, replay, or want to buy Killzone 3.

Thunder, Thunder, Thundercats... HOOOOOOO!!!

2011-05-07T15:18:00.000-05:00

I recently saw a picture (on Dorkly again) of the comic Carrot Top juxtaposed with his twin brother Lion-o of the Thundercats.

If you don't remember the Thundercats it was the 1980's cartoon about the race of humanoid cats from the planet Thundera, led by their Lord Lion-o in regular battles against the evil Mumm-Ra. Thundercats came out quite late in my cartoon-watching youth so I wasn't a die-hard fan or anything but I did see enough of them to figure out that I hate Snarf - the Jar Jar Binks of the Thundercats. Here is the intro for the cartoon.

I thought I recalled seeing an ad for a Thundercats game in one of my old gaming magazines and sure enough there was one - released in 1987 by Elite for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga and Atari ST. So I gave the C64 version a go.

The game is basically a horizontal scrolling hack and slash game along the lines of Shadow of the Beast or maybe Ghosts and Goblins (but not nearly as good). You are Lion-o and are trying to rescue several fellow Thundercats and recover the fabled Eye of Thundera from the evil clutches of Mumm-Ra and his henchman. You run, crouch, jump, slash, and shoot your way through a number of different levels, one of which even allows you to pilot a laser-firing air-car. The game seemed like it would be quite easy at first glance, but it turned out to be pretty damn difficult - mostly due to to sluggish controls that almost never gave you time to slash one guy at your front and then turn around to kill the dude heading your way from behind even though it looked like you should have plenty of time. This was extremely frustrating to the point where my wife got sick of hearing me yell out cusswords and basically told me to shut the hell up.

In a nutshell here were my reactions to the game - number of plays approximated:
Try #1: Nice theme song. Game looks kinda weak, but easy enough to run through quick. Wow dead already - OK guess I'll actually try next time.
#2-5: Dang, this game is actually pretty challenging. And better than I initially thought. Not bad. What the hell are those things? Pigs?
#6-7: OK. New joystick - this one should work better than that old Atari joystick. What the... dammit!
#8-10: OK! Another joystick switch. My old Gemstick should do the trick! Arrghh! Why the hell does Lion-o vaporize any time one of these guys even just barely touches him? Are they antimatter or something? Stupid!!
#11: Goddamn this game. Fuck it - I'm switching to the Trainer mode with unlimited lives so I can at least see all the levels and then cross it off the list.
#12: Bored. Wanted to hang in there till the end but screw you Mumm-Ra. I'm done.

I've always felt that way about cheats for infinite lives. Even on great games (which this isn't) it just makes the game boring. So I gave up before the ending but I saw online that the ending was extremely lame. Basically the last level was a fight with Mumm-Ra not much different from other fights then this dazzling ending screen was revealed.

Lame.

If you care to give the game a go you can try an online Java version at Vizzed.com. But like I mentioned before the best part about the game is the theme music played at the opening screen - pure SID goodness. I discovered that the tune was actually created by Rob Hubbard, somewhat of a legend in the Commodore 64 music scene (yes, there is still a C64 music scene). A guy posted the entire song on Youtube with screenshots from the game so check it out:

Oh, and finally, I came across a review of the game in the December 1987 edition of Zzap!64 magazine. If you care to read their review from back in the day you can click below - they gave the game 74%. I wasn't quite that generous.

Take That To Shut You Up, Mario

2011-05-06T00:30:00.001-05:00

Another little arcade video from Dorkly.com that I'm retweeting - except I don't tweet so...

Come to think of it - why the hell DID Donkey Kong always climb away with the girl? What was he afraid of? Never really thought about it - but makes no sense at all.

Do these Dorkly videos look choppy for you guys? Sometimes the embedded video does for me, but not natively on their page. Didn't know if it was just me and my trusty 286 or everybody.

Is the 3DS For Kids?

2011-05-05T00:25:00.000-05:00

Damn. I just read over this before hitting 'Publish Post' and it is definitely an overlong sleepily-worded ramble, so I completely understand if you choose not to read it folks. But I'll be damned if I'm going to have written all this only to delete it (I do that fairly often actually) - so screw it here it is.

I heard that Sony Playstation CEO Jack Tretton recently ruffled Nintendo fanboy feathers in a Fortune magazine interview by essentially saying that the 3DS was for kids. "Our view of the 'Game Boy experience' is that it's a great babysitting tool, something young kids do on airplanes, but no self-respecting twenty-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those, he's too old for that."

Well, I'm sure there will be TONS of twenty-somethings playing them on airplanes and although I do in fact own every iteration of Game Boy (bought used for pennies on the dollar years after they originally appeared), I cannot really argue the basic underlying premise of Tretton's statement regarding the general nature of Nintendo's target demographic for its handheld systems. Or any handheld system for that matter. Don't get me wrong - in addition to my Game Boys, I also own a PSP and am on the lookout for older handhelds like a Game Gear, Lynx, DS, etc. if I can find them dirt cheap, but the idea of playing any handheld in public feels juvenile to me. Then again, I've never been much of a portable gamer anyway even when I was younger so I pretty much never play them even at home, and I'm rarely in public situations where I even have an opportunity to play them either so it really just has never been part of my world - but still, if I were riding the metro to work one morning and had 30 minutes of ride time to kill I'd feel kinda funny breaking out the PSP for a little Chains of Olympus action. And it's just not really something I would feel like doing. But then I'm not twenty-something - I'm forty-something.

So yeah - I wouldn't have worded it in such an alienating and insulting manner but I generally feel that handheld gaming devices are more for children than adults. That includes Nintendo AND Sony. But additionally, Nintendo has historically targeted a younger audience on all its systems than its competitors. That's one reason I always tended to go with another system - the Genesis over SNES, PS3 over the Wii, and the PC was the old standby over pretty much all of them. I'm not casting stones at so-called childish activities - I'm sitting here watching an episode of Batman Beyond right now and earlier tonight I was playing Thundercats on the C64. I'm just saying, me and Nintendo never quite clicked.

So anyway, I got my first hands-on look at a 3DS this last weekend when a friend of my brothers broke it out at a restaurant (he's 30-something by the way). I'm a gadget guy and I must say I thought the 3D effect was pretty cool. He showed me some 3D photographs he took that popped out of the screen and then he took a picture of his girlfriend and turned it into a shooter game where I was trying to shoot down multiple copies of her head that were flying around the screen. Weird and quickly tiresome even for a minigame tech demo, but still, I found the effect technically impressive.

So even though my interest level in portable gaming is minimal as is my interest in Nintendo in general it did pique my curiosity a bit. So when I found myself (much to my chagrin) in Wal-Mart yesterday I decided to check out their 3DS display.

Let me just say that when there is a store display to show off 6 of the 3DS' library of games and the first 3 are Nintendogs titles, well that's not gonna reel in this old gamer. "But they are totally different games dude! That's the French Bulldog, Toy Poodle, and Golden Retriever editions! Plus now they have cats!". Yeah. Still.

I'll just put the 3DS on my list of portable devices that I'll buy one day on Craigslist or eBay when the price drops to the $20-$40 range - and since this one starts at $250 I'll probably be a 50-something when I finally get one.

Oh well, now that Nintendo has made me feel even older, let me see what Sony's PS3 Move display has going on.

Goddamit.

Street Fighter II Bonus Round With the Car

2011-04-25T17:06:00.000-05:00

OK - I'm risking insult from Pungent Onion by mailing it in with another "look at this embedded video about Street Fighter II that I found" but screw it.

If you never played Street Fighter II well you probably won't find this little video amusing at all (looks around room warily for Onion), but if you DID play it you will recall the wonderful bonus rounds woven in between battles where you tried to either a) beat the hell out of a parked car or b) smash barrels that rolled down at you from elevated ramps.

The whimsical guys over at Dorkly spun the former off into a little video with Blanka as a meter maid that I thought was amusing. I've got to learn how to make my own animations so I can do stuff like this.

Chicken Shift - My Favorite Arcade Game Controlled By Only Two Buttons

2011-04-21T01:40:00.000-05:00

Well, the last post was about an obscure arcade game that I discovered on MAME and have never seen in real life that stinks. So today let me introduce you to an obscure arcade game that I discovered on MAME and have never seen in real life that is quite fun. Chicken Shift!

Chicken Shift was released by Bally-Sente in 1984. A little background on Bally-Sente - in 1983 Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, bought the arcade game company Videa, renamed it Sente, and made it a division of his Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatre company. When Bushnell left Atari in 1978 he was forced to sign a non-competitive agreement that had kept him out of the video game business for several years but now his banishment was up and Bushnell planned to use Sente to re-enter the arcade market with a splash with several ideas like the Sente Arcade Computer I - one of the first arcade systems to use interchangeable "cartridges" (swappable PCBs).

Unfortunately for Bushnell, Pizza Time Theatre was struggling and by 1984 was forced to file for bankruptcy so the Sente division was sold to Bally Manufacturing - and from that union the lovely baby Chicken Shift was hatched.

I love the simplicity of this game. Just check out that control panel - one big fat blue button labeled "blue things" and one big fat red button labeled "red things", and that's it!

And the instructions printed on the panel tell it plain and simple - "Red buttons shift red things. Blue buttons shift blue things." Not since the days of Pong's "Avoid missing ball for high score" have I seen such concise gameplay instructions.

The game consists of three distinct types of levels and each one has blue and red items that you activate (switch between two states e.g. up or down) by pushing the blue or red button, respectively.

In the first level type there are chickens along the top of the screen laying eggs that roll down into a series of interconnected chutes some of which have red or blue pipes at various places and when you hit the matching color all the pipes of that color switch states - e.g. an elbow pipe that is pointing to the left flips to point to the right. As eggs approach the colored sections you need to be sure they are in the proper position. If you don't have the pipe facing the right way when an egg approaches the egg falls and smashes onto the floor below and after three eggs are smashed a swarm of termites spills out of a big box the farmer hung on the wall (rather poor planning really) and the termites eat all the wooden chutes - and there goes one of your three lives. If you succeed the eggs roll safely into egg cartons that are located at the bottom of the screen and when the carton is full the level is complete. It sounds fairly simple but it gets quite hectic very quickly when multiple eggs start coming at you full blast.

In the second level there are chicks hopping along a few rows that have blue and red platforms that you flip up/down and in/out. It is your job to position the red and blue things so that they lower the chicks to the lower floor and also serve as a barricade to stop the little dolts from wandering off the end of the platform and falling to their death. If you can guide them all the way to the window they hatch and fly out to sweet freedom. When all the chicks escape out the window the level is complete. This level is my least favorite of the three types of levels.

In the third level type chicks are hopping along platforms at the bottom and you use red and blue flippers to flip them over onto other platforms over and over until you eventually get them flipped into the safety of the nests waiting for them along the top of the screen. Strangely, when the chicks land in their nests they instantaneously transform into adult chickens. For some reason the volume really kicks up a few notches on this level which is annoying, but I have no way of knowing if it was that way on the original game or if it is just a MAME bug. You get points for each nest you fill and when they are all filled with a chicken the level is complete.

After you successfully navigate the third level type play comes back to the first type although the pipeline is more complex this time with more and different kinds of moveable pieces and more fast paced eggs being rolled at you which increases the difficulty level. That same approach is shared by the other levels as well and play continues to get more difficult as you go in true arcade fashion.

You get a 1000 point bonus if you complete a level without dropping any eggs/chicks. And there are other little details that affect your strategy too like bonus points for shifting the pipes and directing the eggs to a certain side that is lit up. The graphics for the game are pretty good for a 1984 game but aren't going to knock your socks off. The sound is decent too although the theme music does get old after a while. Of course the reason to check out this title is the gameplay. This kind of puzzle-driven gameplay is timeless and a lot of fun - or at least for me it is.

So I highly recommend you check out this obscure little game, but if you can't find a copy of the compilation Bally-Sente's Greatest Arcade Hits, well that's because Bally-Sente didn't HAVE any arcade hits and therefore none of their games got ported to any system. And I have no earthly idea where a real Chicken Shift machine might be so if you want to try it out you should download the ROM and boot it up on MAME. Since the controls are just 2 buttons it translates quite nicely into play with a regular keyboad so you really have no excuse.

A few Google searches confirms that there isn't very much on the web about Chicken Shift - but I did find a rather amusing Chicken Shift FAQ by Nathan White, the current holder of the high score on Twin Galaxies of 159,280. My high score so far is only about half that at 73,290. Let me know if you beat it!

Barrier - My Lowest Rated Arcade Game

2011-04-15T22:40:00.036-05:00

I often play randomly selected games on my MAME cab and I try to always assign a personal rating of 1-10 to the games I play. And out of a LOT of games so far the lowest rated game I've played is one called Barrier. The game derives its name from the impenetrable barrier it erects between you and enjoyment. And since I was subjected to it I'm going to share the misery and subject you to it too.

The flyer describes the game. "Avoid the forces of evil by evading diamond shaped alien forces. Are they supernatural or intergalactic? No time to tell. A second's hesitation means instant destruction. Each forward move scores a point for the good guy!...". Huh? What the hell does that mean? Well, as meaningless as that sales blurb is it adds more depth to this game than it merits.

Barrier was a vector game released in 1979 by Vectorbeam. The game used a large X-Y monitor that was too large for the cabinet so 70% of the monitor was actually covered by the bezel. This only allowed a small triangular playfield to show through.

In Barrier you are a triangle at the front end of a 3x10 grid that leads off into the screen in pseudo-3D fashion and you must use 4 directional buttons to navigate your way forward though the grid while avoiding the diamonds that are trying to collide with you. If they touch you you die. When you reach the far end of the grid your triangle returns to the front of the grid and you keep on going.

So basically this is a full-size arcade version of the old Mattel handheld football game except it runs vertically (in a half-ass 3-D into the screen sorta way) instead of horizontally.

And in fact, I just discovered from reading Tim Skelly's History of Cinematronics and Vectorbeam that is EXACTLY what it was intended to be. Tim Skelly was an arcade designer and programmer with Cinematronics and recalls:

"Somewhere around the time I was finishing Starhawk, we hired Rob Patton as a second game programmer. He stayed busy learning the system while I was working on Starhawk and Sundance. One day Jim Pierce walked into the lab with a Mattell handheld football game. This was the first handheld game and extremely popular, despite being incredibly simple, with just a few LEDs for a display. Jim thought we should turn it into a video game. I told him that it would certainly stink as a video game and would probably mean a law suit from Mattell. He forgot about it for a while, but when it became clear that Rob had run out of things to do, Jim talked me into letting Rob program it strictly as a learning exercise. That game was Blitz, later Barrier. To make Jim happy, we put it out on test. It did very poorly, to put it nicely, and we stuffed it in the closet."

Vectorbeam had released the successful game Speed Freak and was in the market for another game to keep the assembly lines running, but they didn't have any ready so they approached Cinematronics to see if they had any they were interested in selling. Cinematronics sold them Barrier, and in the words of Tim Skelly, "laughed our asses off about it". After extremely poor Barrier sales (surprise!) Vectorbeam ended up selling all its assets to Cinematronics.

Old-day arcade corporate sabotage or just a sucky game and a stupid company? I don't know but the back story is the most interesting part of the game because Skelly was right, it stinks as a video game.

The gameplay, graphics, and sound are all pathetic so if you happen to have a full set of MAME ROMs and have never gotten around to playing this one, well go ahead and play it once just in case you ever encounter some dude who actually remembers this wart. But then quickly delete the files so no Barrier viruses are spread to other games.

The only positive thing I can say is that the bezel artwork is kinda cool - picturing a hooded evil looking individual that I can only assume is a Vectorbeam executive beckoning desperately for you to put a quarter into this turd as their company was circling the drain.

And in case you're curious I originally rated this game 1 company-crippling games out of 10, but then I revisited it and decided if you had 2 players and you were both high and/or drunk then it might be slightly better than punching each other in the nuts so... I upped it to 1.5.

Game Boy Music Video

2011-04-11T12:04:00.000-05:00

Once again the guys over at Botchweed pointed me to a pretty cool video. This guy used percussive sounds (and just a little electric buzz) from his original Game Boy to make a music video in the same spirit as those guys from Stomp that do it live with trash can lids and paper bags etc. Check it out.

I Too Always Thought Chun-Li Was Hot

2011-04-10T15:43:00.006-05:00

Keeping my personal string of daily posts alive, here is a quickie post of a comical little Street Fighter II video that I stumbled onto over at Dorkly.

Questprobe Featuring the Hulk

2011-04-09T21:06:00.134-05:00

I came across an interview with adventure game godfather Scott Adams in an old copy of Power Play magazine which was focused on the Questprobe series of games - illustrated text adventure games where you played as a Marvel Comics superhero. More specifically the article was about the first Questprobe game featuring the Hulk since that was the only one out at the time.

I played a lot of Scott Adams' adventure games on my old VIC-20 and loved them and I was heavily into comic books back in those days so I remember being pretty optimistic about this game back in 1984. I honestly can't remember if I had an original retail copy of it or just a backup (I admit it - I did that sort of thing sometimes), but I do remember being disappointed in it. Probably because by then I think I was already knee-deep in the more complex narratives and more sophisticated parser of the Infocom titles. So, although the simpler stories and 2-word parser games seemed pretty awesome in the VIC days they had lost some of their edge as the mid-80's approached. In fact I don't recall ever actually finishing it. I think I may have gotten stuck somewhere and/or lost interest a little and just moved on to another game like one of the Zorks or something like that. So I decided to finally go back and finish the game to check it off the list.

In the game you are Bruce Banner - and the Hulk of course when he gets cheezed off. You start the game off immediately in a jam - tied to a chair. No explanation or story or anything but obviously you need to get up so "bite lip" and bingo bango you turn into the hulk and break the ropes. You use that little mechanic a lot. Unlike the previous Scott Adams adventure games I had played, the Hulk was illustrated so in addition to the text description you could actually see what was going on. The graphics are certainly nothing to get excited about but were probably pretty good for 1984. No sound.

Notice how they put the trademark (Tm) symbol after the Incredible Hulk's name. That was on there every single time his name is mentioned and it annoyed the heck out of me. They did the same with Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and Ultron, whose surprise appearances in the game were spoiled at the very beginning with their names listed to show that they were also Trademarked. Was that really necessary? I'm assuming that is something that Marvel insisted on. Anyway, like a lot of the really old adventure games the story was basically a flimsy excuse for you to recover all the "treasures" - in this case 16 gems and the all-important Bio-Gem. In fact the story didn't even really tell you anything about the gems - you just started coming across them so you KNEW you had to pick them up and a sign in one room politely informed you to Leave the Gems Here. Useful bit of info.

In the game you meet the "Chief Examiner" (remember how you used to have to "examine" everything back in the day on text adventures?) who is apparently behind the situation you are in and in fact you see him at his desk working on the next Scott Adams adventure game, so I assumed at the time that it was supposed to be Scott Adams. The game also lets you refer to him as "Scott" and the article in Power Play further confirmed my assumption.

In conjunction with the game, Marvel Comics even released an actual comic with a more in-depth account of the story. At least that is what I've heard - I never ready any of the Questprobe comics. Maybe I'll track down a cbr/cbz of it and check it out.

They planned to release a game and comic every 3-5 months for a total of about 12-13 games, but they only got around to releasing 3 of them - #1 with the Hulk, #2 with Spiderman, and #3 with the Human Torch and the Thing. Scott was working on the fourth title featuring the X-Men when his company Adventure International declared bankruptcy in 1985.

So how did I like the game playing it 27 years after it was produced? Meh - looks like I had it right the first time - disappointed. Oh well, what did I expect? I was disappointed back in the 80's and the feeling remained. I did KIND of enjoy going back and playing it from a nostalgic standpoint but the game just didn't hold up very well at all. Plus, there were a couple of dead-ends you could easily fall into which would basically make it so that you couldn't complete the game by collecting ALL the treasures which was annoying.

Hard to rate, but I'm thinking maybe 4.5 pairs of torn purple pants out of 10. Overall, it just seemed like a much more diluted effort than I had seen before from Mr. Adams - of course I had played the previous games when I was a pre-teen or early teen and computer gaming was in its infancy or at least early adolescence so my historical perspective is probably a bit skewed by my age and the state of the industry at the time.

So I wouldn't exactly recommend it to someone in this day and age. If you wanted to try out some of the pioneering Scott Adams titles to see what the early days were like I would recommend trying some of the older ones like Adventureland, The Count, or Voodoo Castle instead. But if you DID want to check out the Hulk you have plenty of platforms to choose from - it was released on Commodore 64, DOS, ZX Spectrum, Atari 800, and Apple II computers. And of course there is always emulation and so-called abandonware if you like that sort of thing. Plus it is quite short so it wouldn't take you very long to experience. And, unlike the pre-internet days of my first experience there is actually a walkthrough for the game that you can use if you do get stuck - HERE. So feel free to Bite Lip.

Petroglyphs and My First Xbox Game

2011-04-08T11:21:00.000-05:00

The next day of our recent RV trip found us wandering through Petroglyph National Monument outside Albuquerque, New Mexico looking at petroglyphs carved into the rock centuries before by American Indians and later by Spanish explorers.

...and if you take that middle petroglyph and flip it upside-down it looks a lot like a certain game company logo.

Yeah - that's how I decided on my next post. Gotta point the ship somewhere before I can start sailing right? So does this mean that the Pueblo Native Americans of the region actually played Day of the Tentacle centuries before it was released? Probably. But I'm ashamed to admit I never played that particular classic (it's on my to-do list though!) so I can't talk about it.

As I'm writing this searching for direction I'm also watching a documentary on Dragon*Con - a huge fantasy sci-fi convention in Atlanta and I see Stormtroopers everywhere - so I steer the ship toward that shining Death Star. I'm a huge Star Wars fan and so it's no surprise really that my very first Xbox game was a LucasArts game set in the Star Wars universe - Star Wars Battlefront.

I was very late to the Xbox party. After the original PlayStation, I took a long hiatus from gaming (other than MAME) until I got my PS3. So I completely missed on the original XBox and all the other consoles of that generation. Then about 3 years ago or so I traded a guy my X-Arcade Tankstick for a modded original XBox, and the first XBox game I picked up was a used copy of Star Wars Battlefront.

Before Battlefront the last Star Wars game I played was probably Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600, so when I booted up Battlefront it was pretty damn impressive. I found the attention to detail from the Star Wars universe to be pretty remarkable. Graphics were excellent and the sound was incredible with all the immediately recognizable sounds of the Star Wars universe captured - be it the scream of a Tie Fighter or the spitting of a blaster. And you can pilot any vehicle you find - AT ATs, tie fighters, X-wings, speeder bikes, snow speeders - anything. I mean - how cool is that?! I remember seeing a tie fighter sitting there the first time and I just walked around it to check it out thinking 'hey that's cool'. Then I boarded it and started flying around blasting guys and it became 'holy shit that's awesome!'. Vader makers appearances, Luke makes appearances, this game has it all.

The gameplay is pretty repetitive - there aren't any side missions or minigames or puzzles or anything extraneous like that - just the simple goal of capturing all the other team's checkpoints or killing them all off before they do the same to you. Before launching into each battle you get to see a cool introduction to the scenario made from real clips from the actual movies and a narration of the goal from a prominent goodie or baddie.

The single-player campaign was fairly short and didn't really have much of a linear story to it - it just puts you in the middle of the various big battles that took place (and some that COULD have taken place) during the Clone Wars in episodes 1-3 and the Galactic Civil War in episodes 4-6. The various exotic planets in the Star Wars universe (e.g. desert planet Tatoine, the cloud city of Bespin, the Ice Planet Hoth, the forest planet of Endor) are all so unique and over the top it translated into really cool and varied battle maps. You can play as any of a ton of different character types on the good guy sides (e.g. wookies, rebel X-wing pilots, Gungans) or the bad guy sides (e.g. imperial storm troopers, shock troopers, tie fighter pilots, attack droids).

The brevity of the single player campaign may have been a drawback when it was released in 2004, but at this point it keeps the the experience short enough to be just about right (for me anyway) for a cheap older title. I did miss a few things I'd gotten used to on newer games like running faster and melee attacks - like a Wookie wouldn't just toss a storm trooper through a window if he was close enough to grab him? C'mon. But still I quite enjoyed it.

Unfortunately you can't play the online multiplayer anymore since they shut down the original Xbox Live last year, so that cuts heavily into the replay value, and there have been several other installments in the franchise that I assume have improved on the formula, but if you haven't played any of those, you can pick up a used copy of the original for peanuts these days for Xbox, PS2, or PC and if you like Star Wars and shooters like I do then you'll like this one.

Now I gotta think of a game to associate with the Petrified Forest National Park...

Bioshock Anti-Drug Posters

2011-04-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Shawn at Botchweed for pointing out the series of Bioshock anti-drug posters posted over at Dorkly that warn against the dangers of plasmids. I thought they were pretty cool. Of course I was drunk at the time so who knows. I love irony.

Roswell, New Mexico and Wacko

2011-04-06T18:35:00.000-05:00

Day 2 of the RV trip saw us driving through the town of Roswell - the little town in New Mexico where in 1947 the U.S. military recovered a crashed flying saucer along with the bodies of its alien pilots. Mogul shmogul - Jonathan Frakes said it's for real and that's good enough for me!

So today's semi-randomly chosen featured game is - no not Area 51 - Wacko! Ever heard of it?

Wacko was released by Bally/Midway in 1982 and has some unique features that make it stand out to me as a pretty cool game. The first thing you'll notice as you approach the game is the wacked out angle at which the entire cabinet slants. Check out the picture in the flyer below.

It's not just the marquee, the entire control panel is slanted so that the right side is a full 3 inches lower than the left side! In fact the slant of the control panel actually caused problems with the operation of the trackball so they had to install the trackball upside down in order for it to work properly.

The other unique feature of the game is the trackball/joystick combination controller. You use a trackball to 'krooz' around a lunar landscape in the the flying saucer of the breakfast-cereal-named alien Kap'n Krooz'r, and use the joystick to fire Robotron-style at cartoonish monsters ambling about.

Compared with other games released at the time the colorful cartoony graphics were quite impressive. Originally Midway planned to use a wizard shooting cute animals, but decided to go dark and shoot monsters instead. Then they switched the wizard to Kap'n Krooz'r (ugh) who was the main character from another Midway game called Kozmik Krooz'r. Midway hoped he would catch on as a popular mascot/franchise like Pac-Man did, but unfortunately for them it didn't quite work out.

To destroy the monsters you have to shoot them in matching pairs - there are two of several different kinds of monsters running around so for example, you would shoot a green dragon with your first shot which causes him to stop and shake for a couple of seconds and then you have to shot the other green dragon before he stops shaking for both of the dragons to be destroyed. If any monster touches you of course you die.

It sounds a little like a kid's game I suppose, but as the levels progress the rules get more complicated and it quickly get very challenging - if you shoot a dragon with your first shot but hit a vampire with your second shot the two creatures switch top halves resulting in two mutants that you have to unmix before you can kill them. Further levels introduce even more challenges.

I had never seen a Wacko machine before until I bumped into one at Joystix here in Houston one day, and I've pretty much played it on every return trip since then. Wacko was also featured fairly often on the TV show Starcade, either as the game that the contestants were playing or as the arcade prize.

Wacko was designed and programmed by Steve Meyer who, I discovered upon writing this, also designed and programmed Tapper and Timber, two other unique favorites of mine.

This is another game I wouldn't mind adding to my personal collection of arcade machines - if said collection ever begins. And what do you know, a working Wacko is currently being offered on eBay for the not too unreasonable buy-it-now price of $995. Of course shipping costs on that bad boy are gonna eat your lunch - but if you live in Connecticut and can pick up locally well that's something to consider. Check out the auction HERE.

Wacko wasn't ported to any consoles at the time, but in 2004 it was included in the compilation title Midway Arcade Treasures 2 for Microsoft XBOX, Nintendo Gamecube, and Sony Playstation 2. It was also included in the 2006 Midway Arcade Treasures Deluxe Edition for PC. You can pick those up dirt cheap and I assume it should play pretty well with a dual analog joystick setup - of course the best way to experience it is with the real trackball/joystick rig so if you're in Houston on the first or last Friday of the month check it out at Joystix (if it's still there).

Pinballz Arcade in Austin, Texas (and the Quest for Sea Wolf Complete!)

2011-04-05T14:22:00.003-05:00

Greetings fellow video game enthusiasts! Sorry for the long delay since my last post, Mrs. MP and I spent the last 9 days or so wandering semi-aimlessly around the American Southwest in an RV. A nice respite from the dull daily demands of work that have now refixed their grip upon me.

But just because I was knee-deep in non-electronic nature don't think for a minute that I wasn't able to work in SOME gaming. The very first day of the trip brought us through Austin which provided the perfect opportunity to check out the great new arcade up there - Pinballz!

Pinballz opened late last year in a 13,000 square foot facility and boasts a huge collection of new and old video games, pinball games, redemption games, and other arcade favorites like foosball, skeeball, air hockey, etc. and I'll tell you right now that I am already looking forward to my next visit.

As the name implies they have a GREAT selection of pinball machines. As I walked around I immediately saw all the classics - Medieval Madness, Twilight Zone, Addams Family, Taxi, Tales of the Arabian Knights, Gorgar, Fire!, Doctor Who, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Attack from Mars and tons more. They also had all the latest ones such as Iron Man, Lord of the Rings, Elvis, Batman the Dark Knight, Indiana Jones, Big Buck Hunter and Avatar. I didn't see the brand new Rolling Stones pin anywhere yet but I would assume it is on their buy list.

I even got to play a fun pin I'd only seen once before in a Baltimore crab house/arcade called Twister (based on the movie). It has a fan mounted to the back that blows when the storms pick up and a spinning magnetic disk that spins like a tornado and redirects the balls that cross it. What's really cool is when you get a 5-ball multiball and all the balls get magnetized to the spinner and it spins around like wild until the bundle flies apart and balls go everywhere. Amazingly my wife beat me at it on three straight games - and by beat I mean SLAUGHTERED! She was like a Twister savante. She played as if she could play the game with her eyes closed, in fact I'm fairly certain she did just that on several occasions so I have no idea how she defeated me so handily, but she absolutely crushed me. Her unprecedented victories lent a unique twist to the visit - and hopefully also helped her cope for the evening with my incessant need to play games.

All the pins I played were in excellent condition - they looked and played great. So needless to say, if you like pinball you should most definitely check out this place if you get a chance. You can see their current list of over 80 pinball games HERE.

But as much as I love pinball I've always been more of a video game guy and thankfully they had over 50 of those on hand as well! You can check out their full list of video games HERE, HERE and HERE. There was a nice variety of games and just like with the pins, most of the arcade cabinets were in excellent condition.

All the video games required at least 2 quarters to play which was a bit of a turnoff for me since back in the day when I did most of my playing everything was a single quarter - so pushing in two of them removed me from the nostalgic ambience a bit, but no big deal. I was happy to donate my 50 cents per play. If anything maybe it encouraged me to play a little harder like back in the day when 25 cents seemed like a little more money than it does now.

I had a blast playing the rare oldies like Tempest, Space Invaders Deluxe, Black Widow, Tron, Metal Slug 3, Gyruss, and Narc (an old favorite of mine from the late 80's) and even played a couple of games that I had never played before like Quasar and the arcade version of Feeding Frenzy, but by far the jewel of the collection for me was Sea Wolf.

I think Sea Wolf is the oldest coin-op arcade game I specifically recall playing - probably back in the late 70's at a campground our family used to go to when I was around 9 or 10 years old. I have been looking for a working Sea Wolf for a while and even my pilgrimage to the American Classic Arcade Museum in New Hampshire didn't prove fruitful (they had one but the monitor was bad). But once inside Pinballz I turned the corner to my left and there she was in all her old-school glory.

Sea Wolf was originally released by Midway way back in 1976 as a video game update to the 1970 electromechanical Midway game Sea Devil (which was itself the offspring of the 1966 game Periscope). The game is basically a single-screen vertical shooter in which you fire torpedoes from a submarine to destroy enemy ships that raced across the surface of the sea. Naturally, smaller faster vessels were worth more points than the slower larger ones. The ocean was also littered with mines that would serve to block your torpedoes and allow the enemies to escape unscathed.

Sea Wolf has a unique cabinet with a periscope that you looked through (Battlezone-style before Battlezone) and rotated left or right to aim your torpedoes which you fired by depressing the button on the right periscope handle.

The sound effects are very simple but awesome with the radar ping, the motor of the PT boats whizzing across the screen, the whoosh of the torpedoes being fired and the rumble of the explosions.

The graphics are black and white (hey it was 1976) but Midway added a blue overlay to provide the ocean color (so basically everything is blue). Back-lit transparancies were reflected inside the scope to show the target crosshairs, number of torpedoes left, and a reload light that flashed when you have launched all five torpedoes after which point you would have to wait momentarily while your men reloaded 5 more torpedoes. Onlookers could see the action on the ocean but only you could see all these indicators through the periscope. The explosions were displayed similarly with clearly drawn yellow and orange jagged displays (kind of like the "Bam!" "Pow" shapes that flashed on the old Batman TV show after Bats slugged the Joker). These old-school non-video features are faithfully simulated in MAME as long as you have the required artwork files installed and it definitely adds to the game so if you play MAME download the artwork files and play it! Just note you want to use an analog device for aiming - I use a trackball at home but a mouse should work just fine.

The game is time-based. You have an alloted amount of time (typically 70 seconds) to destroy as many ships as you can before the game is over. If you reach a certain score (4000 points I believe) bonus time is awarded. Also, Sea Wolf was one of the first arcade games to save and display the high score (until the machine was turned off). I have heard that the 1974 game Speed Race was actually the first, but I haven't been able to find that one yet to confirm that for myself. The game was ported to the VIC-20 (which I owned but have no idea where it is now), the Commodore 64, and the Bally Astrocade.

The game was followed by Sea Wolf II in 1978, and by a current-gen arcade version in 2008 which came in both a sitdown and upright model.

All the games also had price tags on them so if you couldn't get enough play time in on your visit you could always just buy it and take it home. The prices looked to be on the high side with a lot of prices hovering around the $2K mark, but like I mentioned before they WERE generally in excellent condition and the prices seemed to be fairly close to what I've seen at Joystix in Houston too so not too unexpected.

They also had a snack counter that sold things like water, energy drinks, and chips and are reportedly on the verge of opening a full-service place in-house called Mikki’s Replay Café that will offer food and drink - including beer and wine if you are so inclined (which I often am).

So I have to say I thorougly enjoyed this place and wish them the best of luck because I fully intend to plan return visits in the near future. If you enjoy arcade games or pinball and live anywhere in Texas - yes even you El Paso and Amarillo folks out there (hey you've got a car don't ya?!) then you simply MUST check out Pinballz Arcade.

And be sure to tell them MadPlanet sent you. They won't know what the hell you are talking about, but it would greatly amuse me if you did so.

ADDRESS:
8940 Research Blvd., Suite 100
Austin, TX 78758
Phone: 512-420-TILT (8458)
E-Mail: info@pinballzarcade.com

[Updated 5/26/2011 with new extended hours]
HOURS:
Monday: Noon - 10:00 PM
Tuesday: Noon - 10:00 PM
Wednesday: Noon - 10:00 PM
Thursday: Noon - 10:00 PM
Friday: Noon-1:00 AM
Saturday: Noon-1:00 AM
Sunday: Noon-10:00 PM

Leprechaun

2011-03-17T00:27:00.000-05:00

Happy St. Patrick’s Day folks!

Now, admittedly, I’m not overly knowledgeable about the patron saint of Ireland, but his holiday encourages me to celebrate by drinking copious amounts of beer and putting Flogging Molly on the jukebox - that’s my kind of holiday brother!

In honor of the day I thought I would feature a unique little Irish-themed arcade game that I saw when I was at the American Classic Arcade Museum last October – Leprechaun.

Leprechaun was introduced in 1982 by Tong Electronic as one of the Moppet Video series of games that targeted a younger audience than the typical arcade rat. The cabs were a little under 4 feet tall, only weighed 110 pounds, and the difficulty level of the games was reduced so as to make it more amenable to the average 4-8 year-old.

In the game you play as a boy running around a forest searching for gold. You gain points by touching the trees which changes their color (and slows your pace as you are walking through them) and then you complete the level and get bonus points by diving into the pot of gold. Of course the wiley leprechaun is out to stop you so he chases you around and if he touches you you're dead. He also occasionally picks up the pot of gold and moves it. There are a couple of houses or similar structure on the screen that you can duck into to escape the leprechaun momentarily - you go in one house and you come out the other.

I'd never even heard of this game, but I stumbled across it in the kiddie area at the ACAM and the tiny size of the cab caught my eye so I popped in a quarter out of curiosity.

I wish I could say it was a gem and you gotta check it out, but no - it sucked. It was pathetically easy and excruciatingly boring. I didn't even finish my game, I just left it there on auto-pilot. And there wasn't even a kid around for me to let play and be the big shot - darn!

Jean Baudin holds the official record for the game with 412,690 points on June 8, 2001. There is even a picture of him on display at the ACAM – at least I assume it was him. I don’t know how long it took him to get to that score but I salute his fortitude for hanging in there on this dull and mind-numbingly easy game - I couldn't do it. Apologies to any Leprechaun fans out there – but c’mon, you know it’s true.

After I got back home I read that Leprechaun had a big-boy version called Pot of Gold that was the same game but in a full-size cab and with increased difficulty, so I pulled it up on MAME to see if I liked it any better.

Nope it pretty much sucks too- just sucks a little faster. But the increased difficulty at least adds a little challenge, so if you are above the age of 5 and feel the need to check out the game go with Pot of Gold instead of Leprechaun. Just be sure to take a few shots of Irish whiskey first to grease the wheels a bit and don't expect to find a new favorite because, well, it is just like Leprechaun.

Mommy, Why is That Man Taking Pictures in the Washateria? (and Strikers 1945 Plus)

2011-03-12T14:14:00.001-06:00

When I was a kid I spent a decent amount of time in arcades - when I could actually get to them. But in my pre-driving days I was more often relegated to the offerings within walking distance of my house. The primary destination of my strolls in those days was the neighborhood washateria. I played several great early 80's games there like Gorf, Astro Blaster and Star Castle. And the convenience store next door had more classics like Defender, Tempest and Pole Position so it was a decent little gaming corner.

I visited that same washateria a while back when I was in the old neighborhood and although it still displayed the same "Video Games" sign out front I was disappointed when I went in and discovered it was a lie - no video games in sight.

So I struck out there, but it stirred a curiosity within me which has led me to develop a rather odd habit of late. If I'm driving around in no particular hurry to be somewhere and I happen to see a washateria I will often pull in and go inside to see if they have any arcade games. And more often than not they do. What kinds? Well it varies, but I can tell you that I have had more than enough of Ms. Pac-Man and Neo Geo Puzzle Bobble.

I pretty much never see any games from the 80's (other than Ms. Pac-Man and the occasional Galaga) but every once in a while I stumble across an uncommon find from the '90s. Last weekend Mrs. MP and I were driving down Westheimer in Houston and I spotted a washateria so I ducked in and saw an arcade machine in the back with a Windjammers marquee. Windjammers is kind of a glorified pong with frisbees - not a GREAT game but I'd never seen one in the wild so I went over to check it out. Turns out it wasn't actually Windjammers but was something better - a dandy little vertical shoot 'em up from Psikyo called Strikers 1945 Plus.

Strikers 1945 Plus is sort of a cross between 1944: The Loop Master and Gunbird 2, which is pretty high praise in my book. If you've never played any of those 3 shooters I suggest you add them to your list of games to check out.

At the outset of Strikers 1945 Plus you choose between 6 different planes each with signature attack moves and special weapons. The gameplay is pretty much standard 1942 fare - nothing particularly innovative but great execution of the formula. You acquire various weapon power-ups by shooting the red enemy planes, pick up bombs to use and gold bars for points. In addition to your regular shots - which depending on your power-ups can be a very impressive display of firepower - you also have a "supershot" which gets charged as you shoot enemies and you deploy by holding down the fire button for a second or two and then releasing it. The bombs call in some sort of squadron or giant bomber - again depending on your plane - that typically block enemy fire for a few seconds while also shooting away at the baddies.

Like most shoot 'em ups there isn't really a story - just blow the hell out of everything unlucky enough to get in front of your guns.

If you've never played a "bullet-hell" game before then you might be intimidated by the huge amount of glowing death slowly making its way toward your plane, but Psikyo makes their bullets large and glowing pink or blue so they stand out well against the background to help you avoid them. And this game isn't quite as hellish as some I've seen. Colliding with any of the bullets is instant death, but if you collide with the enemy fighters it doesn't kill you it just progressively removes any power ups you may have acquired.

You can continue by pumping in more quarters which is fine, but it also keeps adding to your score which is an approach I always disliked. But the final number on your score is increased by one with each continuation so the high score table will tell if your score was a result of crazy skill or deep pockets.

All-in-all it is typical Psikyo - pretty graphics, chaotic fire, nice sound, and the most impressive 2D explosions you'll see on any arcade game.

Strikers 1945 Plus was also released for the PSP in 2009 although reviews were not very positive. Personally I can't see how you would be able to successfully navigate your way through all the bullets with the small screen and d-pad or tiny joystick nub, it's challenging enough with a full-size arcade screen and controls. So if you have a gamepad or joystick to use I suggest you check it out on MAME. The ROM file is rather large - about 75 MB - if you want to download it you can get it here.

Charlie Sheen Winning at Call of Duty: Black Ops

2011-03-08T13:19:00.000-06:00

How much cocaine can Charlie Sheen snort in one sitting? Enough to kill Two and a Half Men...

If you have watched any of the recent lunacy that is Charlie Sheen you might find this video the guys over at IGN made amusing like I did. Thanks to Stee at Botchweed for pointing it out.

Some of the sound bytes are so insane it is hard to believe he truly said them, but I heard most of them actually fall directly out of his drug-addled head before I got sick of listening to him so it's really him.

More Call of Duty: Black Ops Videos

Dead Space 2 and Game Difficulty

2011-03-08T00:41:00.000-06:00

I completed Dead Space 2 last night. I liked it quite a bit but near the end I was pretty much ready for it to be over. I completed 14 of the 15 chapters on the "Zealot" difficulty setting (the most difficult) and there was this one part right before the endgame where I kept getting killed over and over again. It was annoying the hell out of me so even though I was very near the end I said screw it and changed the difficulty level to "Casual" so I could go ahead and get through and see how the story wrapped up. I won't throw out any spoilers but turns out chapter 15 is VERY short. So after I completed the game on Casual and saw how little I actually had left I went back to a previous save before I switched difficulty levels and went ahead and completed the game on Zealot. It actually wasn't that difficult after I was armed with the foreknowledge that there wasn't much left and I could really cut loose with my ammo and stasis.

But it made me think about my selection of difficulty levels on games. I used to always play my games on the normal or default difficulty level even when a more difficult choice was available. Then somewhere along the way I switched over to always selecting the most difficult level available. And although some games on the most difficult level did prove challenging - like God of War III if I recall - most were more or less doable without TOO much trouble. But there were a few parts in Dead Space 2 where I got killed quite a few times before I got through them and it started to interrupt the flow of the game. The emotions of frustration, anger, and impatience that I felt at those times were not really compatible with the fear, panic, and dread the game's story was supposed to be immersing me in.

A while back I finally got around to playing Kung-Fu Panda which came with my XBox 360. It's not a game I would have purchased and I didn't really take it too seriously so I played it on Easy mode to just blow through it. And what do you know I quite enjoyed that little game. The absence of any significant challenge did not impede my enjoyment of the game. Now I'm thinking I might switch back to Normal difficulty on my games for a while and see how that goes.

So I'm curious - when presented with the option of choosing a difficulty level, which do you typically select?

The Cardapter for the VIC-20

2011-03-02T22:35:00.039-06:00

[Updated: 3/5/2011]

OK this is starting to get annoying. First I got hoodwinked by the fake Atari Foghat 8-track and now this!

I was familiar with Colecovision's Expansion Module that let you play Atari 2600 games on the Colecovision and I had heard of the Intellivision's System Changer too, but when I came across this old magazine advertisement for the "Cardapter" for the VIC-20 it was totally new to me.

It was supposedly designed by The Computer Works and manufactured and distributed by Cardco, Inc to "explore a new galaxy of entertainment pleasure with your VIC-20 computer". Well that may be a bit of advertising hyperbole, but it would allow you to play Atari 2600 cartridges on your VIC-20 and I thought - hey! I've got a VIC-20 and lots of old Atari games - this thing would be cool! (I've also got 2 working Atari 2600s but that's beside the point).

So I started searching high and low on the internet to see if I could locate and buy this obscure little device. But it didn't take long to discover that these things were nowhere to be found. Then I stumbled onto a forum where they referred to the Cardapter as a famous piece of vaporware in the classic computer scene. Even though these ads ran in a number of magazines it appears that they may never have actually been manufactured. At least no one on the internet seems to have seen one anyway. So it's just a cool little old ad for a device that never existed I guess.

Damn - I have to start reading magazines that were published within the last 10 years.

[Update:]

I came across another ad for the Cardapter in the Spring 1983 edition of Commodore Power Play which offered the device for $89.95.

Sorry Cardapter, fool me once...

But a few pages later in the same magazine was an ad for a different product that also offered a way to play Atari 2600 cartridges on your VIC-20! And this one shipped with a free Atari cartridge to boot! It was called the Game Loader from Protecto Enterprizes - and I had actually heard of them before!

My curiosity was stirred once again and I hurried off to do some searching. And... according to the experts on the net this one was never actually manufactured either. Dammit!

Still I did find another ad where the Game Loader was being sold along with several other items from Protecto that I know definitely existed - so maybe it's out there SOMEWHERE...

Ah screw it - I'll keep playing Radar Rat Race on my VIC and if I feel like playing Chopper Command I'll just break out the real 2600.

End of line.

InFAMOUS 2 Will Have User-Created Levels

2011-03-02T21:40:00.000-06:00

I mentioned before how I quite enjoyed the 2009 PS3-exclusive title InFAMOUS and was strongly considering buying the sequel that is set to release in June of this year. Well, yesterday I heard that developer Sucker Punch sweetened the pot by taking a page out of the Little Big Planet playbook and providing the tools to allow user-created content. Here is an excerpt of what they had to say about it on the Playstation blog yesterday:

"We thought inFAMOUS 2 would be better if it didn’t end—if you never ran out of missions and mini-missions to play and things to do. So… we spent the last two years adding a User-Generated Content feature to the game. With User-Generated Content, inFAMOUS 2 players can build new missions, then share them with the world. I think you’ll all quickly discover that while building missions is a lot of fun, seeing people play and enjoy those missions is even better!

There really aren’t a lot of limits to the sorts of missions you can build. Sure, you can build the sort of missions that will ship on the inFAMOUS 2 disk. Mission creators have access to the same set of characters, creatures and props—so if you want to set a pack of Hive Lords rumbling after Cole through the streets of New Marais, you can do it. If you want to have Cole and Zeke face off against Nix and Kuo, you can do it.

If you want to bend the rules of inFAMOUS 2 to create new kinds of missions, you can do that too. Wish I2 had pure stealth missions? No problem, you can create stealth missions. Looking for more of a challenge? Try taking away some of Cole’s powers—see how the player does facing a platoon of Militia wielding only his Amp. Or add an old-school platforming challenge, or a race, or… I could go on all day.

It’s pretty easy to do missions that are more like mini-games, too. Skeet shooting? No problem. Disc golf? Assuming you’re happy tossing around cars instead of Frisbees, sure. How about a mission where Zeke just tells you bad jokes until you shoot him? Um, yeah, you can do that, too.

Building missions is only half the story, of course—we make it super easy to upload your missions to the network, so other players can see your cool new missions. User-generated missions show up in the world just like regular missions. When you walk up to them, you see the PSN tag of the mission creator, plus extra information like the mission’s current rating. And back at Sucker Punch headquarters, we’ll be watching—missions that get high scores will get promoted to the Sucker Punch Featured Missions list, and those missions will end up just about everyone’s copy of New Marais."

They released a little video as well:

Looks pretty cool to me. I was still a little on the fence before but I guess now it's settled. I'm going to buy Infamous 2.

Yars' Revenge Rebooted

2011-03-01T18:52:00.000-06:00

Atari is rebooting a few old Atari 2600 classics, and one of them is an old favorite of mine - Yars' Revenge. In fact I have this commercial playing on my emulator frontend at home before it boots up the Atari 2600 menu.

Lord help me I fear I probably looked a lot like that kid at that age - just darker hair.

I like it when old franchises from the arcade and early consoles of my youth get a reboot nod, but I'm often disappointed in the product. So I'm trying to decide if the new Yars' Revenge (or Yar's Revenge now it appears) looks like it will be worth downloading or not. I think I would have preferred if they had stuck with the 2D shooter model and just given it a new HD facelift with some new features, but they went with a 3D rail shooter along the lines of Panzer Dragoon or Rez. Here is a video of some of the gameplay:

Did you notice when she activated her shields they used that same multicolored static affect as the safe zone in the Atari 2600 version? I thought was a nice tip of the hat. The new Yar's Revenge is scheduled to be available sometime this spring on the Playstation Network and XBox Live. It will cost $10 which is right at my limit for gaming curiosity micro purchases so I might just get it.

Ubisoft's We Dare

2011-02-28T11:41:00.000-06:00

I noticed that Ubisoft has caused a bit of a stir with the impending release of their new minigame title for the Wii and PS3 called We Dare, which is described as a "...sexy, quirky party game that offers a large variety of hilarious, innovative and physical, sometimes kinky, challenges." Check out the trailer.

Well, I agree that the ladies in the commercial do look sexy but beyond that... meh. Seems like the gameplay is too lame and awkward for a party game and too goofy and contrived for sex-play. And just what the hell is so laugh-out-loud funny? Oh sure, anything can be an outrageously funny sex-game if you are high as a kite! Have you ever tried Resident Evil 2... on weed? Pure hilarious erotica.

But in all fairness, I'm a middle-aged married old fart so I'm probably not the target demographic here. I suppose if it were a first date or something and you could convince the girl to bend over your lap for a spanking like that then yeah that could be a decent physical icebreaker, but I just don't see it happening outside of a Penthouse forum letter. Unless of course you slip the girl something extra in her drink like those two wiiild and craaazy guys obviously did!

The game is currently slated for release in Europe and Australia, but Ubisoft reportedly told IGN that it would "absolutely NOT see release in the United States". Unfortunately Americans are entirely too sexually repressed to appreciate the forbidden erotic pleasures of We Dare. So sorry, you Americans will just have to be satisfied with whatever sexual gaming devices you already own.

Anteater

2011-02-23T00:50:00.004-06:00

I was reading Gnome's recent post about his brand-spanking new copy of Oil's Well, a great computer game by Sierra, and it reminded me of the old obscure arcade game that came out the year before the original Oil's Well that I assume was the inspiration for it - Anteater. And since Anteater is my second favorite Stern arcade game (Berzerk being number one of course) I thought I would do a post about it.

Anteater was released in 1982 by Stern and apparently licensed to Tago Electronics for release. It is one of those favorites of mine that I discovered on MAME - I've never seen a real one in person - and based on the pics of generic Anteater cabs I've seen and the arcade flyers like the one below - it appears possible that maybe ALL of the Anteaters were sold as conversion kits from Tago. I'm not sure, but either way it is a really enjoyable game that seems simplistic on the surface but actually has a fair amount of strategy involved.

In Anteater you play... anyone? anyone? an Anteater... and you extend your tongue throughout a large underground maze to catch and eat ant larvae, ants, and other creepy crawlies for points. The controls are simple - a single 4-way joystick to slowly probe the maze with your tongue and a single action button to rapidly retract your tongue back to your mouth. Stationary ant larvae are scattered throughout the maze in Pac-Man fashion for you to freely chomp for 10 points each with no fear of immediate reprisal, but ants are also patrolling the maze and are none too pleased with your activities. You can eat the ants (for 100 points) by running your tongue straight into them head-on, but if an ant touches any other part of your tongue while it is extended it delivers a painful bite to which you are apparently deathly allergic because it kills you right off. Not sure how that sort of hypersensitive tongue evolved on an Anteater, but there it is. So while you are sliding your tongue all around the maze you have to constantly be aware of ants approaching your tongue in the rest of the maze and if you see one coming you have to either retract your tongue to get out of the way or try to eat the ant before he gets to you.

The worms are a little different than the ants in that they have some sort of noxious substance on their head that kills you if you taste it head-on - so you have to hit them from behind to eat them (200 points). Although for some inexplicable reason they have absolutely no effect on the rest of your tongue so, unlike the ants, you don't have to worry about the worms running into you, just don't lick their head and you're good.

At the bottom of the underground maze there are two queen ants - they are fat and juicy and totally defenseless and if you eat them they are worth a whopping 1000 points each - but more importantly each time you eat one it destroys all the bugs on the screen. So you should save them for when you need to use a smart bomb to keep from getting killed.

After you complete a few anthills caterpillars start making an appearance too, but they are just ant-wannabes so treat them just like you would an ant - eat them however you like and don't let them touch any part of your tongue except the tip.

By far, the scariest member of the bug family in this game is the spider. As you play a level the sun is moving across the sky and when darkness falls the spider comes out. The spider can not be eaten and will follow your tongue down to the tip to deliver a killing bite when it gets there. So when the spider comes out your only choice is to either haul ass and finish eating all the ant larvae left on the screen to finish the level or eat a queen ant to kill the spider before he gets to the tip of your tongue.

At the end of each level you get an "ant times worm bonus" which is just what it says - the number of ants you ate multiplied by the number of worms you ate then multiplied by ten to make it respectable. Then the anteater wanders off to another anthill and starts again - with a change in color pallete for each new level. Every 20,000 points nets you an extra anteater.

Anteater was also released in Germany as "Ameisenbaer" and in the UK as "The Anteater" (not sure why the addition of the word "the" makes it more British but that's what I read). The original creator, Christian Oberth, followed up by writing a clone himself for the Apple II and Atari 800 in 1983 called "Ardy the Aardvark" and a prototype was created for the Atari 2600 in 1983 but was never released. Sierra Online's Oil's Well was also released in 1983 with a different premise but very similar gameplay (drill head drilling for oil instead of tongue eating bugs). A port was also released for the Commodore 64 in 1986 called "Aardvark" which was technically a port of Ardy, but Anteater begat Ardy begat Aardvark.

Freddie Morrish holds the world record for Anteater with 219,320 points on October 9, 1983. When I booted up the game last night to grab a few screenshots I actually hit my current high score (on a MAME cab) of 52,300.

I'm quite fond of Anteater. Yeah it is repetitive but I find it fun. There is something satisfying to me about slowly progressing in a considered manner taking out ants as I descend into the maze punctuated by brief hectic periods of action when ants are coming at me from multiple directions at once. The graphics are pretty simplistic but serviceable with some funky lime-green, orange, and hot-pink colors to give it a unique flavor. And the music? Well, the only good thing I can say about the music is that it is sparse, because what there is of it is bad.

Overall, I give Anteater 7.9 ant-bitten swollen tongues out of 10. If you are a MAME guy I highly recommend you check it out and if you beat my high score let me know!

Foghat on the Atari 2600?

2011-02-18T12:49:00.001-06:00

On my way to work today I was listening to a classic rock station and I heard the song Slow Ride by the 70's group Foghat TWICE. I would be hard-pressed to name another Foghat tune but I was very familiar with this one as it is the very first song in Guitar Hero III (the only Guitar Hero that I own).

And it reminded me of an ad I saw a while back for a Foghat 8-track that was also an Atari game. So I googled it and found the ad. Mik, you thought that family on your 2600 boxes was crazy - check out this guy. Hard to tell if he is having the greatest time of his life or is in excruciating agony!

I was interested in searching out and possibly buying this unique product that was an Atari cartridge on one end and a Foghat 8-track tape on the other - but other than the image there wasn't much info out there. Then I found the apparent source material from which the image seems to have sprung - this article from the Van Gogh-Goghs website. A minute or so of exploring this web comedy site told me for sure that this ad was just a fake. Darn!

But at least the search did lead me to discover a different type of Atari game cartridge that I had never seen before - the double-ender. These fairly rare 3rd party cartridges had two separate ROM chips - one at each end of the cartridge. So if you inserted it into your Atari 2600 one way you had one game and then you could flip it around and you had another game. Not sure if that is more practical really than just buying two separate cartridges, but pretty cool anyway! Plus if you are ever out on a boat and your motor goes out you could paddle back to shore with the cartridge. Look how long this thing is! A quick scan of eBay shows several for sale ranging from around $14-$35 with shipping.

...and as often happens to me in my video game wanderings - this research circled back around to another game that I just recently took a look at - Custer's Revenge. When I did that previous post, I had read that the company PlayAround had purchased the rights to Mystique's "adult-oriented" 2600 titles and re-released them as 2-in-1 cartridges - one of which was "General Re-Treat / Westward Ho!". Westward Ho! was just Custer's Revenge with a different title, but in General Re-Treat, Custer was the one on the cactus and you played as the Native American girl trying to get to him. Radically different gameplay...

But what I didn't realize at the time was these re-releases were actually these so-called double-enders. So I leave you with a couple of pictures of their classic double-ender "General Re-Treat / Westward Ho!" that I found on the excellent Atari website - Atari Mania. Enjoy!

Munchman for the TI-99/4A

2011-02-14T19:52:00.043-06:00

[Updated 2/16/2011]
On this day in 1978 Texas Instruments patented the first "micro on a chip" - or so I'm told from several "on this day in history websites". So I thought it would be a nice time to do a quick post on the ONLY Texas Instruments TI-99/4A game that I remember ever playing on the real computer back in the day - Munchman.
Obviously, Pac-Man was incredibly popular in the early '80s so virtually every system had its own clone of the game and Munchman was the TI-99/4A's version. I never owned a TI-99/4A but I remember they always had one on display at the local Sears store, and whenever my parents would go to Sears I would typically park it over in the computer/games department and play until they got finished looking at whatever the hell adults look at in Sears (I still don't know). The game that I usually hit there was Munchman.

Munchman

It was released in 1982 for $39.95 and was pretty much exactly the same as Pac-Man except that, in an effort to avoid litigation, Texas Instruments made it so that instead of eating dots the main character ran around the maze laying chain. And you had to interconnect a chain throughout the entire maze to complete a level. So it was sort of the negative-zone version of Pac-Man. You could control your "munchman" with either the keyboard or a joystick. Frankly I think the gameplay of Munchman was more derivative of Pac-Man than K.C. Munchkin was, but K.C. is the one that Atari actually sued. Go figure.

I remember being impressed with the graphics - they were simplistic but sharp and colorful and on a white background which was unique - it kind of reminded me of the colored pen and ink designs I used to make on the Spirograph when I was younger.

Munchman on the TI-99/4A

Spirograph Design

I also remember being impressed with how smooth the animation was - much more fluid than Atari 2600's much-maligned 1982 port of Pac-Man.

The "ghosts" in Munchman were called Hoonos and the "power pills" were Texas-shaped T.I logos. There were also a few minor differences in gameplay aside from the cosmetic differences - every 20 mazes the maze becomes invisible with no trailing chains and you must eat all the T.I. logos to progress. I admit that I never got to level 20 in the store but read this online prior to this post. So I guess it gives me something to work toward. Also, the Hoonos become faster, more agressive and smarter with each successive level so the game becomes more and more challenging as you progress.

I was recently reminded of Munchman from Gnome's excellent review of the TI-99/4A game TI Invaders (a cool Space Invaders clone). He mentioned the Win994A emulator which I found to work quite well so I officially added it to the list of emulators on the home gaming cab. And Munchman still stood up quite well for a 1982 Pac-Man variant. So if you care to give Munchman or any of the other old TI-99/4A games a try but don't happen to own the system why not install Win994A and download a few old TI-99/4A games from gameternity.com and give them a go. If you discover any other TI-99/4A gems be sure to let me know!

[Update: I originally linked to oldcomputers.com for the game ROMs but I forgot I had problems running theirs so I switched it to the gameternity.com directory which ran fine. My Apologies!]

Shark! Shark! for the Intellivision (and Feeding Frenzy for the Xbox 360)

2011-02-13T23:40:00.023-06:00

I was reading through some more old gaming magazines and I came across an old review for the Intellivision game Shark! Shark! in the November 1983 issue of Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated. For some reason I always enjoy reading the reviews of these old games that were written when they were new. Here is a copy of the review if you care to check it out (summary: they quite liked it).

I had heard of Shark! Shark! but never had the opportunity to play it back in the day. But the article included a screenshot of the game which immediatey made me think - hey that looks a lot like an old-school version of Feeding Frenzy - a fun little Xbox Live Arcade game I bought dirt cheap on a used compilation disk (it cost me around $2 for 6 games).

Shark! Shark! screenshot

Feeding Frenzy screenshot

My curiosity was sufficiently piqued that I decided to give Shark! Shark! a try. This was one of those lower-tier curiosities that didn't quite spur me to hit eBay for the original game to play on my Intellivision II, but with the Bliss emulator and an Intellivision controller-to-USB adapter that I bought from Retrozone a few years back it emulates the original experience very well.

It only took a minute of playing Shark! Shark! to conclude that yes indeed, Feeding Frenzy is pretty much an uncredited ripoff of the Intellivision original. In the game you control a fish swimming around in the ocean eating smaller fish for points. After every 1000 points you grow in size which allows you to eat even bigger fish for more points. If you touch a fish that is bigger than you then YOU get eaten - makes sense - so you are constantly swimming around to avoid larger fish, sharks, jellyfish, seahorses, lobsters, and crabs that would love nothing more than to excrete your undigested remnants through their waterproof ani.

I don't know if you ever get large enough to eat the shark straight on but you can sneak up behind him and bite his tail and if you can manage to bite him at least three times (more as the levels progress) without him chomping you then he dies and sinks to the ocean floor (Feeding Frenzy stole this exact same gameplay mechanic too). Also you can eat the lobsters that jump up at you from the sea floor, but only if you bite them on their way back down. If they hit you on the way up you're sushi and you start over as a small fish. You start the game with 5 small fish and you get a free small fish for every shark, crab, or lobster that you manage to kill. You also get 3 "darts" where you are able to kick in a burst of speed to either catch your prey or avoid your predator. The overlay shows 3 different darts but they all seemed to be the same speed so I don't think there is any difference.

Shark! Shark! Overlay

At the end of the game it plays a nice little song and displays the high score. One bit of trivia - Mattel was going to play "Mack the Knife" when the game was over (with the lyric "Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth dear...") and even put together a nice arrangement for the prototype but when their lawyers tracked down the song owners to obtain the license they discovered it was owned by Warner Communications - the parent company of their arch-rival Atari. So they trashed that idea and wrote an original tune instead.

The graphics were decent for an Intellivision game and I thought the sound effects, although simplistic, did a pretty good job of simulating an underwater experience. Also, it offers a cool 2-player simultaneous competitive play where you can eat smaller fish to grow but can also eat your opponent if he is smaller. That is a nice variation that I don't think is even offered by Feeding Frenzy.

Overall I enjoyed the game and think it would make a good addition to an Intellivision collection. I only have 2 complaints - 1) the action is a little too slow to develop in the early parts of the game and 2) the gameplay is virtually 100% based on 360 degree movement and that damn circular control pad on the Intellivision controller has always driven me nuts. So it makes it a little tough to control sometimes - for me anyway. But that is a system controller issue rather than the fault of the game itself.

If you don't have an Intellivision and don't care for emulators - Shark! Shark! is included on the excellent Intellivision compilation - 'Intellivision Lives' which is available for the PC, XBox, Gamecube, Playstation 2, iPhone, XBox 360, and Nintendo DS. I have it on the original XBox but I am rather intrigued by the DS version which uses the bottom touchscreen to simulate the original overlay controller action and the upper screen for the monitor.

Intellivision's Utopia on the Nintendo DS

One last note. Writing this I discovered that the original design for Shark! Shark! was created by Don Daglow while he was Director of Intellivision Game Development. Daglow, along with Eddie Dombrower, wrote my absolute all-time favorite baseball video game (and one of my favorite PC games of any genre) - Earl Weaver Baseball. He also wrote the first ever baseball computer game on a PDP-10 mainframe in 1971, the excellent Tony LaRussa Baseball in 1991, and a number of other Intellivision classics, but for me Earl Weaver Baseball is the true feather in his cap! Daglow's design for Shark! Shark! was enhanced and programmed by Ji Wen Tsao, one of the first female video game programmers in the industry.

Chessmaster

2011-02-10T23:54:00.001-06:00

On this day in 1996 (just barely posted under the wire) IBM's 'Deep Blue' became the first computer to beat a reigning world champion at a game of chess, beating international grandmaster Garry Kasparov in Philadelphia. So I thought a quick Chessmaster post was in order.

I was introduced to the franchise on my trusty Commodore 64 with Chessmaster 2000 and I rather enjoyed playing that game.

More often I would play my brothers instead as I preferred the element of human competition and the associated joy and agony of victory and defeat, but still I did enjoy playing the computer too.

Over the years I tried a few other computer chess games but didn't care for any of them. I'm not talking about games like Battle Chess or Archon - but just standard games of chess. With a game like chess you wouldn't think that there would be that much of a difference between different franchises, but for me all the ones I tried paled in comparison to Chessmaster. But I moved on to other games, other systems, etc. and my love affair with Chessmaster faded into the past.

Then about 3 or 4 years ago I sold some old paperbacks to a Half-Price Books and I noticed a boxed copy of Chessmaster 10th Edition on the shelf for $6.95. I hadn't played any computer chess in years but I had about $7 in store credit so I bought it. And it is now on my list of PC favorites. It is one of those rare games that I almost never play, but do love, and can pick up and play a game pretty much any time without it ever really getting old. And although the incremental improvements between successive versions of Chessmaster may be minor, I hadn't really played one in about 15 years so the improvement over the last one I saw was HUGE.

It had all kinds of beautiful fully animated boards you could use, online play, customizable opponent personalities, chess academy, just tons of different features. And one pretty cool item they included with the 10th edition was a pair of the old-fashioned red and blue 3D glasses that you could wear and switch the screen to 3D mode so you could play in amazing 3D! The effect was pretty cool too. Although admittedly I did tire of wearing them fairly quickly and resorted to my standard 3D eyeballs. Still, I did appreciate their effort to include a feelie with the game to set themself apart from other games a little. After all chess is not exactly that exciting of a draw to the masses so anything to spice it up a little. I can't remember the last time someone asked me if I preordered the new Chessmaster or saw a Chessmaster cardboard promotional display at Gamestop.

They've made a few more since my 10th edition (released in 2004) but my recommendation if you have any interest at all in chess is to grab a copy of the 10th edition which can be had for dirt cheap since it is a few versions old at this point and you will basically be covered for computer chess for the next decade or so. And if you don't know chess but want to learn the chess tutorial features of the game are excellent. It might not be as sexy as most games out there, but with essentially infinite replay value, Chessmaster 10th edition makes it onto my "desert island" list of games.

Dead Space 2 and the Church of Unitology

2011-02-09T21:30:00.000-06:00

I love science fiction and I love horror movies - so it is only natural that I love the survival-horror 3rd person shooter Dead Space. I played the first game on PS3 and I played MOST of the rail shooter Dead Space Extraction on the Wii (still have to go back and finish that one). I even rented the movie Dead Space Downfall and downloaded and watched all the animated comics from PSN. So it's no surprise that I am quite enjoying playing the new sequel creatively named Dead Space 2 (damn not even a colon with a subtitle?). I've put maybe 5 hours into the game so far and it has already scared me into and back out of arrhythmia on several occassions.

The perspective and gameplay are reminscient of Resident Evil IV, so if you've played that classic you might consider this Resident Evil IV in space. You play as engineer Isaac Clarke who, 3 years after the events of Dead Space 1, wakes up on the Sprawl, a formerly densely-populated space station built on Saturn's moon Titan. I say FORMERLY densely populated because it is now overrun with necromorphs who are quickly and efficiently killing the remaining good people of the Sprawl and converting their corpses into more necromorphs who must be dismembered to be killed (the trusty ol' headshot just pisses them off). So wake up and try not to get killed before you can figure out exactly what the hell is going on and how to escape!

Just like the first one, the atmosphere of the game is dark and quite scary, with a big part of the spookiness coming from Visceral Games' masterful handling of the sound effects and music - it really accents the environment perfectly, especially when piped through a surround sound system with all the lights off (my favorite way to play scary games). But none of that is why I posted about a game you can read about in a million places right now - I just felt compelled to chat a bit about what I found to be the creepiest part of this game - the Church of Unitology.

In the first Dead Space you get brief inferential glimpses into the Church of Unitology through the text, video, and audio logs of its members that you stumble upon aboard the mining ship Ishimura. And that was creepy enough. But in Dead Space 2 you actually wander through their church on Titan exploring their indoctrination center, seeing their recruitment posters, listening to their audio logs, viewing their museum exhibits, gaping up at giant statues of their revered founder Michael Altman, and generally just witnessing numerous first-hand examples of the creepiness of this religion which is like an ultra-dark/hellish version of Scientology (apologies to any Unitologist readers).

One of the many recruitment posters you'll see

The Unitologists worhip the Marker, a double-helical obelisk with unusual powers to infect people's minds and DNA that serves as the source of this whole nightmare. You can see the Marker inside the egg being held up in the Unitology poster above. Symbolic of the Marker allowing these people to be reborn as one - or something to that effect.

The Marker

I have always found religious zealots to be rather creepy to begin with, but the Unitologists really take it to the next level by embracing the idea of being horribly killed by necromorphs to experience the bliss of the unique brand of afterlife they offer - becoming animated pieces of a mauled and mutated corpse whose sole purpose is to convert other corpses to the same. But of course that credo isn't going to attract too many new members so the controlling arm of the church spins it and talks about the ideals of unity and "convergeance" when in actuality their ultimate religious goal is to convert all humanity into the undead necromorphs whom they consider to be the next holy evolutionary step for humanity.

One thing I will give the church credit for - beautiful architecture. They've proudly incorporated the Marker into their columns and towers, but also more subtly into other stylistic touches as well. Subconsiously I began looking for the holy Marker everywhere as I wandered around. And now I'm seeing the Marker all around me! Sunday morning my wife made me breakfast and when I looked at the plate this is what I saw.

The Bacon Marker

She doesn't know anything about the game at all but that piece of bacon fried up like that and for some reason she decided to stand it upright on the eggs. Eggs... THE MARKER IS IN THE EGG. I can feel the old me slipping away as I am bathed in the warm unifying glow of the Marker. But why the look of concern oh non-believer? Just open yourself up to the Marker and you too will see.

If you would like to learn more about our wonderful religion and the eye-opening teachings of our founder Michael Altman, please find a comprehensive collection of information about Unitology HERE. Come and join us. We're waiting for you.

Altman be praised!

1541 Floppy Drive Music

2011-02-06T23:12:00.001-06:00

[Updated October 3, 2011]
I FINALLY got my Commodore 64 up and running this weekend and although I didn't have a chance to play any of my games yet (damn work and Superbowl parties!) I did format a new 5 1/4" floppy disk on my 1541 disk drive (ah for the days when "floppy" disks were truly floppy!).

The noise that the drive heads made reminded me of a couple of little homegrown programs that somebody wrote way back in the day (I think I downloaded mine from a local BBS) that vibrated the floppy drive heads at various speeds to actually play songs from the vibration itself - sans speakers! Does anyone else remember this?

I didn't really want to subject my "new" 1541 to that sort of punishment right off the bat, but I thought someone out there might have a video of it on YouTube and of course, they do. Check out "Bicycle Built for Two" on the Commodore 1541 drive - it's pretty low so you might need to turn up your volume.

And as I was searching for that video on YouTube I was pleasently surprised to discover that someone did the same thing for a 3.5" floppy drive. And this one gets a little extra nerd cred since it is playing a lot cooler song - Darth Vader's Imperial March from Star Wars.

...and finally, I would be remiss in my overview of the data storage hardware music scene if I failed to mention that someone has apparently brought Anakin's dark tune to the current generation by hacking a hard drive to play it.

[10/3/2011 Update - I came across this new video by a gent (er - I assume a gent) named SileNT. SileNT gives us yet another Imperial March played on floppies but the new twist is that he has two floppies wired together to play two separate parts simultaneously so you get a full melody. Pretty neat stuff.

Tutankham

2011-01-30T02:49:00.000-06:00

I'm afraid I'm not politically informed enough to be able to intelligently discuss Hosni Mubarak and the revolutionary demonstrations taking place in Egypt. But Egypt was in all the news, so I grabbed that thread and wove it into a much more trival discussion of the old arcade game Tutankham.

Konami created Tutankham in 1982 (and licensed it to Stern for the U.S. release). The game was originally to be entitled the more historically accurate 'Tutankhamon', but when the developers decided to change from a horizontal monitor to a vertical one they had to lop off the '-ON' to allow the title to fit on the narrower screen width. Why couldn't they have just reduced the font size of the title graphic? I dunno.

Even though I never saw the game in any of the arcades back in those days I was very aware of its existence due to a nice ad for the Atari VCS (Atari 2600) version that often appeared on the back cover of several of the comic books I was reading at the time.

In fact, I didn't even realize this was a port of an arcade game until I stumbled onto it in MAME a couple of years ago. I always just thought it was some Atari game. Here is an amusing old commercial for the Atari port.

In Tutankham you wander around the maze of King Tut's tomb trying to find as much treasure as you can while avoiding the bats, snakes, and monsters that are trying to kill you. In addition to your agile maneuvering you are equipped with a laser gun with which to shoot the creepy crawlies down. Don't ask me why they went with a laser instead of the more historically conventional handgun - cooler visual and sound effect I suppose. Also, for some reason you can only shoot to the left and right - not up and down. This little detail makes absolutely no sense and quite annoyed me at first, but it introduces a little more strategy into the game since you are basically helpless when you go up or down vertical tunnels, so I warmed up to it.

To complete a level you have to find the key or keys needed to open a large door at the end of the level and then you move on to the next maze. You also get bonus points depending on how quickly you are able to complete the level. Here is a little video of the gameplay.

Oh - and I almost forgot the secret weapon. Just like I always forget to use it in the game which pisses me off every time. You have a flash bomb that you can use once per level or once per life that destroys all creature on the screen. Don't let them go to waste!

I may not have been aware of this arcade game growing up, but a lot of other people out there apparently consider it a classic. It's one of the 6 arcade games featured in the famous 1982 Life Magazine photograph of the 'video game world champions' with the 5 others being the more universally recognized arcade classics Tempest, Defender, Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, and Donkey Kong.

I finally got a chance to play the actual arcade game last October at the Houston Area Arcade Group Arcade Expo and although it didn't grab me at first, it did grow on me. The game is quite challenging but enjoyable. And I like the Robotron-esque dual-joystick controls.

In addition to the Atari 2600, Tutankham was also ported to the Colecovision and the Intellivision. There was also a prototype created for the Odyssey 2 that was not published. Computer ports were also released for the Atari 800, Commodore VIC-20, ZX Spectrum, Tandy Color Computer, and TI-99/4A. As if that weren't enough it was also released in 1983 as two different handheld LCD games and more recently for the Nintendo DS and in Game Room on Xbox LIVE and Games for Windows - LIVE.

So, if you'd like to check it out I would recommend trying it on MAME with some sort of dual joystick controller if possible, but as you can see there are a number of ports you can try too. In particular I was impressed by the Colecovision port - now THAT was a great system for arcade ports back in the day.

Oh - and if you want to own a real one check out the eBay auction for one for $550.

Custer's Revenge

2011-01-25T21:57:00.015-06:00

Earlier today I was reading an old copy of Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated from 1983 that was discussing the uproar surrounding the then-contemporary game Custer's Revenge. If you've been around the video games scene for a long time you've probably heard about this notorious game for the Atari 2600. Even though the game is terrible it is noteworthy for the controversial splash it made so I thought I would do a post on it.

Right off the bat I do have to begrudgingly award the game an extra point for the hot babe on the box - she looks a lot like Salma Hayek - and I have always been a sucker for Salma Hayek. Salma, if you are reading this - call me. But I digress.

Custer's Revenge was released in October 1982 by the Los Angeles company American Multiple Industries (AMI) under the brand name Mystique / Swedish Erotica for the Atari 2600. In the game you play as General George Armstrong Custer who, in accordance with 7th cavalry regulations and the battlefield custom of the time, is completely nude except for a hat, hot pink scarf, and cowboy boots. He is also sporting a foot and a half long bitmapped erection. Sorry - but there is just no ignoring that monster once you see the screenshot.

See?

Custer's goal is to make his way across a dusty plain, avoid being killed by arrows, and hook up with a lovely Native American maiden on the other side of the screen who has a 2D rack so big it makes Lara Croft look flat-chested.

If you are able to successfully navigate your way through the arrows (and attacking cactus on if you play games 3 or 4) you are able to begin peace talks with the lovely lady by rapidly hitting the joystick fire button to "score". And that is all there is to it.

The game was immediately met with outrage from womens' rights groups and Native American groups as well as critics of the video game industry in general. Protests were staged outside of electronics shows where the game was being demonstrated.

The depiction of the sexual act was inflammatory enough but the artwork with the Native American girl tied up and the use of the word "revenge" in the game's name seemed to indicate that the sex was rather non-consensual - although AMI president Stuart Keston insisted that both parties were indeed consenting adults. In fact, Keston was so comfortable with the content that he said he let his 11-year-old son play the game. "There's no violence or venereal disease - we have entertainment in mind."

I've played the game on the Stella emulator out of curiosity and I can say for a fact that the game sucks. Not because of the alleged depiction of rape but simply because the game is just no fun. But as is often the case, the negative press given to the game back in the early 80's actually increased sales and AMI reportedly ended up selling 80,000 copies of the game.

And if YOU want to own one of those copies for yourself you can get a sealed version of this conversation piece off of eBay for just a little over what it was going for in 1982 at http://cgi.ebay.com/VINTAGE-ATARI-2600-MYSTIQUE-CUSTERS-REVENGE-SEALED-CIB-/130478276428?pt=US_Vintage_Video_Games&hash=item1e611c7f4c

Oh - and I also just found out that a Brazillian company called Mysticca actually made a remake of the game in 2008. I haven't actually tried it myself so I can't vouch for it at all - but if you want to check it out you can download it from http://rapidshare.com/files/154097400/CusterRevenge.zip

Goblin War Machine

2011-01-23T15:06:00.000-06:00

I just discovered (thanks to a review on Botchweed) the Goblin War Machine - a free flash game from indie developer Big Block Games. The grayscale 2D graphics and physics-based destruction gameplay reminded me of Limbo which I rather enjoyed and of course I've recently been in "destroy everything in sight with a wry smile" mode from playing Pain, so I checked it out.

In Big Block's own words: "Smash! Crash! Drive, destroy! The Goblin Horde is on the rampage. Outfit your War Machine for maximum devastation, and plow straight through the nearest human village. Just don't expect those pesky humans to take it lying down..."

You start off the game with the standard war machine but for every villager you crush, shoot, or otherwise dispatch, you get a skull and after you complete each level you can use the skulls as currency to purchase and install upgrades to your war machine to further maximize your killing efficiency. And although it is ridicuously easy to cruise through these levels I can confirm that if you waste too much time hanging around the little villagers can indeed destroy you. And at the end of each level a darkly humorous little narrative pops up to let you know how many villagers were left alive i.e. how well you performed. The game features achievements, unlockable levels as you go along, and progress saves online.

Like most online flash games that I've seen the game is EXTREMELY simple so it is easy to pull up and play online for a few minutes of mindless fun. Won't be something you'll play for hours - but I wouldn't expect a free flash game to be in that category. I enjoyed it for what it is. And did I mention it is 100% free?? How can you complain with a price tag like that? Check it out on Big Block Games' website.

Elvira - Mistress of the Dark (and Pain for the PS3)

2011-01-21T17:42:00.005-06:00

Las Saturday night around 2:00 AM or so I was flipping through the channels and I happened across Elvira, Mistress of the Dark hosting "Elvira's Movie Macabre". Does anyone else remember Elvira? She looked pretty much the exact same as I remember her from 25-30 years ago. I'd never seen the movie she was hosting - the Werewolf of Washington - but it starred Dean Stockwell (from Quantum Leap and more recently Battlestar Galactica) as a White House press secretary who gets bitten by a werewolf in Hungary and then brings some good old fashioned wolfman terror back with him to D.C.. Classic B-grade horror flick with a bit of political/social satire mixed in for good measure (it was released in 1973 in the middle of the Watergate scandal).

The movie was so bad it was good. It reminded me of how much I used to enjoy watching these old, and often cheesy, horror flicks. And I liked Elvira's periodic comic relief during the movie too - so I decided to start catching the show. But anyway what's the gaming angle here? While wandering around her website I came across this video that informed me she was a downloadable character in a downloadable PS3 game called Pain.

Seemed an oddly dated choice for a playable character and the game itself is a bit off the beaten path too. I quite enjoyed a somewhat similar concept on a level in Trials HD for the 360 and of course I am always looking for a good sign from the cosmos telling me try a game completely out of the blue so I downloaded Pain, along with the Elvira playable character of course, and gave it a go.

The main part of the game is called PAINDEMONIUM where you basically launch yourself with a giant adjustable slingshot into a downtown city (or other downloadable environments) and try to wreak as much havok as you can by smashing your body into various objects, people, and animals for points. You can strike various poses in the sky for style points or to squeeze through tight spaces and you can also grab things to either hang/swing from them or to throw them at other things. Normal movement after you launch is determined by the Havok physics engine, but you can control your direction somewhat in mid-air and you get something called "OOCH" that let's you muscle your body one direction or without having to hit anything. The ooch meter refills after a few seconds as long as you keep moving. Once per turn if you shake the controller it powers up "Super Ooch", its stronger cousin. Once your momentem has stopped, your ooch is spent, and your limp body has come to a hault following whatever mayhem you have wrought a timer starts and if you don't move in 15 seconds that turn is over. At that point you have to hope a car runs over you and drags you down the street or a giant doughnut rolls into you and knocks you into a crate full of explosives - both of which are distinct possibilities - and if you can get some motion again the timer starts over.

I found the dialogue and sound effects to be pretty amusing too. Sophomoric humor to be sure but it worked for me. Oh and there are a lot of other downloadable characters too - I've got my eye on you George Takei - Ohhh my!

And that's about the size of it. Yeah, not the most cerebral game in the world but for a $10 downloadable game I find it pretty entertaining. And it is actually quite amazing how much various destructive content the guys at Idol Minds included in this thing. There are other oddball levels and features too that like 1) MIME TOSS - you have to grab a mime in mid-air and fling him into panes of glass to see how quickly you can smash them all, 2) FUN WITH EXPLOSIVES - where you try to cause as many explosions in 3 launches as possible, 3) PAIN BOWLING - bowling except you are the bowling ball and things are exploding around you to screw up your throw, and 4) SPANK THE MONKEY where monkeys keep popping up everywhere and you have to nail them as fast as you can.

There are several other modules you can buy if you like although I won't be doing that. There is an online and local multiplayer mode too, but I already feel like I've written way too much about this brainless little game which I am little embarrassed to admit I enjoy for some brief quick hit fun.

Oh plus I dig the theme song which I can only assume is entitled Pain. The only lyrics are "P-A-I-N, P-A-I-N PAIN!". [Updated 5/9/2011] I just found the song for download HERE.

Mario Saves the Princess

2011-01-19T11:35:00.000-06:00

Qickie mini-post here. As loathe as I am to further promote the overexposure of Mario I found this little video that Seth MacFarlane (of Family Guy and American Dad) made about when Mario saves Princess Peach and found it pretty amusing. Apparently it's been around for 2-3 years so maybe everyone else but me has already seen it but hey it was new to me!

Your Mom is Going to Medium Disapprove of Dead Space 2

2011-01-18T01:07:00.001-06:00

Well Dead Space 2 is set to drop on January 25 and I will definitely be getting it as I thoroughly enjoyed the first one. You may have heard about EA's Dead Space 2 commercial that was televised during Saturday's playoff game between the Packers and Falcons. In it EA served up some self-created controversy by inviting a panel of mothers in to provide their feedback on a "new video game" while they privately recorded the whole thing on hidden cameras for the commercial. Then they showed the moms the goriest parts of Dead Space 2. My favorite quote from one of the mothers was "It's not a game. It's a dangerous mind-numbing, mind-altering, demonic weapon!"

Apparently it did cause somewhat of a controversey as the usual spectrum of knuckleheads chimed in on the internet with their diametrically opposed and unwavering opinions. I don't care about that nonsense, I just wanted to point out one particular mom who, although she ultimately didn't approve of the game, had fun with it and was very nice and actually rather comical in her response, as opposed to some of the more rigid mothers who were simply sickened and outraged by this filth.

I present to you participant #0124:

Arcade Blast in Garrison, Texas

2011-01-11T16:15:00.001-06:00

A rather belated yet still quite cheerful happy new year to all! As I’ve mentioned on here before, I am a bit of an arcade freak, so for my first post of 2011 I'd like to give a shout out to a tiny town arcade that I discovered at the very end of 2010 - Arcade Blast in Garrison, Texas.

The day before New Year’s Eve Mrs. MP and I and the Onions were heading to the small East Texas towns of Jefferson and Marshall to wander through some antique shops, check out Christmas lights, and basically just kick back and enjoy the small-town charm. As we were driving on highway 59 about 18 miles northeast of Nacogdoches, we passed through the tiny town of Garrison and I noticed a sign out of the corner of my eye “Arcade Blast Old Fashioned Soda Fountain”. Hmmm… I thought to myself, that looks intriguing, but it’s getting kinda late and we don’t really have time to – WAIT THERE’S A GIANT MONKEY OUT FRONT WEARING A T-SHIRT! Brakes locked, tires screeched, and an acrid cloud of smoke billowed out from beneath the car (please scratch scratch n’ sniff #2 here) as we skid to a halt in the parking lot to check it out.

The arcade was inside an old building that I can only assume is/was a Farmer's Supply Store based on the sign. It was a bit like a small town general store inside with some miscellaneous odds and ends for sale - except things appeared a bit disorganized and there was a lot of open space so perhaps they had only recently opened and were still getting things in place. Or maybe that's just how they roll. Either way is fine by me but the place might benefit from a little work inside. Not work on the actual building itself though - I like when new places move into older buildings and leave that old feel in place. New buildings are boring.

We were the only ones in the place and the guy that was working there was very friendly. They had a cool old-fashioned bar to sit at and eat ice cream, pizza, and various other food items - none of which I had time to try and so cannot really comment on. I also noticed an assortment of other interesting items such as a theater-style popcorn machine, an air hockey table, a big screen TV, and a jukebox - which I presume worked but have no idea (see aforementioned lack of time). But of course the tie-in here is the arcade cabs - of which they had the following 10:

Ms. Pac-Man (1981)
After Burner (1987)
Vindicators (1988)
Neo-Geo MVS 4 slot (1989) - Bomberman Panic Bomber (1994), 3-Count Bout (1993), and 2 others I can't recall
Revolution X (1994) - Out of order
Die Hard (1996)
Egg Venture (1997) - No sound
San Francisco Rush the Rock - Alcatraz Edition (1997)
Pac-Man / Ms. Pac-Man / Galaga 25th Anniversary (2005)
Global Arcade Classics (2010) - Multicade with 80 games

Not a bad little selection for a little joint in a bump on the road - according to the 2000 US Census the town of Garrison is just under 2 square miles and has a population of 844. They still have a lot of unused space too so hopefully they will add more old arcade games to their inventory. We played a few quick games of Vindicators which is a nice little co-op tank game that I played once before in 1984 (arcade in Missouri), Bomberman Panic Bomber which is a split-screen Tetris-ish puzzle game (except with bombs) that I had never played before but was kinda fun except supposedly Onion's controller was a little messed up (that was his story anyway), and Egg Venture which is a light-gun shooter where you basically see who can shoot the most "bad eggs" while shooting the fewest "good eggs" - apparently all the bad eggs had experienced ocular misfortunes because they were all sporting eyepatches, which was quite fortunate otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell the damn things apart. I'm normally not much on light gun games but I rather enjoyed this one - very simplistic but fun with the 2-player simultaneous competition a-la Big Buck Hunter. Unfortunately the game didn't have any sound so they need to fix that.

All in all I thought it was a nice little joint. Not a target destination, but definitely a nice rest stop on a Highway 59 road trip. So if you happen to be driving on 59 just north of Nacogdoches be sure to stop by, have a root beer float and play a few games to help these guys stay in business. Just don't blink when you pass through Garrison or you might just miss it.

I Can Still Smell It

2010-12-28T12:52:00.001-06:00

Greetings all - I hope you all had a great Christmas and are preparing to hoist a few to ring in the new year. And if you aren't, well that's OK, I will drink an extra one for you. It's no problem at all I assure you!

A couple of posts back I talked about the iSmell and it's wonderous but unrealized powers to bring smells to gaming. Well my brain wouldn't let go of it right away so I did a little more websearching and discovered a few interesting factoids. Since the whole point of dabbling in this blog thing was to chronicle my opium-fueled gamer visions I thought - why not share. And so, here is a jumbled collection of what I found.

I mentioned in the last post about the scratch n sniff card included with the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

I discovered that there was another game that used this same gag - Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail. In Love for Sail, there was a scratch n sniff (called the CyberSniff 2000) that the player was prompted to smell at various points throughout the game. I found an interview with the game creator Al Lowe on JayBot7 that provided the following delightful exchange:

Jason Surguine: And include the CyberSmell 3000 [I was close]

Al Lowe: And CyberSniff 2000!

Jason Surguine: I don’t even want to know where you got some of the smells. [The CyberSniff 2000 was a scratch-and-sniff card that came with Larry 7]

Al Lowe: You know, that was one of the most fun things about developing that game; researching and finding the company that makes Micro Encapsulated Odors. We called them up and had this hilarious phone call with this woman who, I’m sure, her normal day consists of people doing straight-business things.

And here these two wacky game designer and producer call her up and ask:

‘Yeah, have you got a good fart smell?’

I also discovered that both FIFA 2001 and Gran Turismo 2 for the Playstation came on scratch n sniff CDs. FIFA 2001 smelled like turf and GT2 smelled like burning rubber.

Hideo Kojima apparently wanted to coat the disks for his 1988 PC game Snatcher with a chemical that, when heated by being inside the computer, released the smell of blood into the air to enhance the immersion with the "stench of a murder scene." Konami nixed the idea.

And last, but not least, I found a BBC video about a company in Birmingham that is giving the iSmell another go. Some of the delightful odors featured are garbage, body odor, hosipital, and burning rubber. I'm starting to see why this never gets off the ground - nobody ever includes chocolate chip cookies or roses, they always go straight to the BO and burning rubber! That's just a poor business model. Anyway you can check out the video of that in action HERE. PEACE!

Damn You RARE COLECO TELSTAR COMBAT COMPLETE IN BOX

2010-12-20T19:47:00.002-06:00

When I was a little kid - after my Mom and Dad got Pong for the family but before the old Atari 2600 - my little brother and I put in some serious time on an awesome little dedicated console by Coleco called the Telstar Combat!. Does anyone else remember this thing?

This beauty of a system had two separate sets of dual grip tank controls that allowed one player to pilot a white tank and one to pilot a black tank. Every time you shot your opponent you got a point. Also, on at least one of the 4 switchable options there were mines strewn about and when the opposing tank ran over one of your mines you got points for his foolhardiness. It was a predecessor to the classic Atari 2600 title Combat - which remains one of my favorites for that system .

I found a tiny little video clip of the game on YouTube below:

Well every so often I check eBay for this long lost system of my youth in hopes of snagging it but in a few years I've only seen it come up once before for a broken one. Well today I FOUND IT! And apparently I'm not the only middle-aged bastard with fond memories of this thing because with an hour left there are 11 bids and the cost is up to $410! I'm nostalgic, but not THAT nostalgic. It hurts not to bid too because it is complete with the box and manuals and everything - you can check out the auction HERE. But $410? C'mon man, my Mom said she paid like $15 for the thing way back when. Damn. Guess the search continues...

The iSmell - Smellovision for Video Games

2010-12-19T13:57:00.012-06:00

I was perusing an old issue of the Official Dreamcast Magazine (July/August 2000) and I happened across this article about the iSmell - a product by a company called DigiScents that was going to revolutionize gaming by not only hitting your eyes and ears with sensory input but your nose as well. I thought it was interesting so I checked into it a little more.

The iSmell was developed in 2001 and used a cartridge (like an inkjet printer) that contained a number of different chemicals that could be mixed in various combinations and amounts to produce a wide variety of scents. The company had reportedly indexed the required recipes for thousands of common odors. The formula for the mixture would be embedded within a game (or other application) and sent to the iSmell via a USB connection. The chemicals would then be mixed in a chamber and dispersed into the immediate area with a small fan.

Here is what the device looked like - a shark fin on a disk. I couldn't find any reference of the product ever actually hitting production so I assume this was a prototype.

There were a number of promising demonstrations, but apparently the product never got of the ground and now the only references to it I found on the internet were mocking it as a horrible product. But I don't know, I think it would have been kinda cool. They say that scents trigger memories and emotional responses more than any other sensory input - so wouldn't it help thrust the player even deeper into the virtual world of the game? Wouldn't it be more immersive if you could smell the smoke of the burning building that Nathan Drake is trying to escape from in the upcoming Uncharted 3? The smell of the flowers that you were crawling around in during the fight with Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3? The faint whiff of an unseen monster in Resident Evil or Dead Space that got stronger as he approached? The dank underground smell of a cavern in Zork?

In 1986, the Leather Goddesses of Phobos came with a scratch and sniff card and at several parts of the game it would tell you to scratch and sniff scent #1, #2, etc. I rather enjoyed that little novelty, and if modern tech could expand it and make it a passive inclusion rather than an active one that required you to stop playing to experience it that would make it even better.

So, assuming the product functioned properly and software developers supported it in their games, I think may have actually bought this product that never actually saw the light of day.

The Top 3 Best Games About Janitors... #1

2010-12-13T00:23:00.005-06:00

[UPDATED 4/17/2011]
I got a little sidetracked with work and Christmas parties, but it's time to finish off this list. Recall that my #3 janitor game was the text adventure Planetfall, my #2 was the point-and-click adventure Space Quest IV, and so now without further ado - ok perhaps just a bit more ado - my #1 favorite janitor game of all time - MDK.

MDK is a 3rd person shooter that was developed by Shiny Entertainment and released in 1997 for PC, Macintosh, and Playstation. I can't speak for the Mac version, but I've played the PC version and the Playstation version and I prefer the PC version for the superior graphics and controls.

In MDK you play as laboratory janitor Kurt Hectic working for Dr. Fluke Hawkins aboard the Space Station the Jim Dandy. The earth is invaded by alien marauders who are stripping the planet of its mineral resources with gigantic rolling alien cities called "minecrawlers". Dr. Hawkins fits you with his newest invention, the "coil suit", which provides you with armor, a built-in parachute, an arm-mounted chain gun, and a head-mounted sniper rifle and you head planetside to take out the alien trash! Not exactly an original idea for a story, but the oddball characters and details make it seem fresh.

There has been a lot of debate over what MDK stands for and I won't go into it all those details - but after reading an interview and viewing a promotional video for the game it seems clear that most MDK fans at the time were correct - it stood for Murder Death Kill. But Shiny apparently didn't want to scare off any commercial sponsors (apparently they had a toy deal in the works) so they stuck with the abbreviation and then played up the hooplah when everyone kept asking what it really stood for. You can check out the concept proposal video that the developers put together to try and sell the game and Murder Death Kill is clearly shown in it.

This is the first game (I believe) that allowed you use a zoomable sniper rifle - so you could focus in on an enemy far away that had no idea you were looking at him and then pop him right between the eyes. Of course these days pretty much every shooter out there offers that feature, but back in those days it was truly unique and I thought it was really cool at the time.

Most of the game is played in the style of a run-and-gun/platformer, but it incorporates several other gameplay elements as well. At the beginning of each minecrawler level Kurt plummets to earth and must avoid the enemy radar and missiles (think of God of War III when Kratos is plummetting downward by that chain), you sometimes remote-pilot a bomber which gives you a top-down sky-view and lets you bomb your enemies (I've seen this mechanic used in a couple of Modern Warfare games), there is a snowboarding-esque sequence where you shoot you enemies while you sliding, Kurt sometimes does a little luging where he has to grab powerups on the track, and there are the sniper parts I already mentioned, I'm probably forgetting some others but the point is that it has a variety of mini-games in it that breaks up the run-and-gun gameplay to keep things from getting stale.

I actually played a little of MDK before writing this and I still liked it. Today, the graphics are somewhat dated of course and maybe a little more polygonal than I recall, but they still look great. There is a bizzare futuristic look to the graphical style with transparent surfaces and dark areas with glowing neon beam of light - hard to describe really but it has a unique look to it that is instantly recognizeable to anyone that has played the game.

Another thing I remember very fondly is the sound. The gameplay sound effects themselves - the shooting of the chain gun, the jibber jabber of the aliens, etc. were fine but nothing special. Where the game shined was in the mood music. The music was superb and really added to the mood of the game throughout. The game songs were even released as a soundtrack CD.

Overall the game was just kind of bizarre - a bit trippy. And it had an offbeat comedic tone that I quite enjoyed (big Monty Python fan here). That unique flavor is what made it stand out in my mind versus a lot of other run and gun games of the time. When you beat the game a music video plays that stays true to that trippy nature - check it out:

They did make a sequel, which I also own, but like a lot of my games, I have yet to make my way around to playing it. I've read that some people like MDK 2 more than MDK and I've also read that a lot of people like the first one better. One of these days I'll check that one out. But for now, if you haven't played the original MDK then you really should.

You can find the game on Amazon and eBay, you can probably find it on some abandonware sites too, but you are probably best off just downloading it legit from Good Old Games where it is only $5.99 which also includes the manual, wallpaper, and the original soundtrack I mentioned that by itself would cost you $9 on Amazon. So it seems like a great deal. Heck I might even re-buy it myself.

[UPDATED 4/17/2011] - I stumbled across a video of the French song that Ulala chick sang at the end of the game and this one thankfully included English subtitles. So now, a mere 14 years after I first beat the game and saw the video, I finally know what that chick was saying. The song is Non Non Rien N'a Changé (No No Nothing Changed) and is apparently an anti-war statement. This version is by Les Poppys. Enjoy.

Uncharted 3 out November 2011

2010-12-12T12:44:00.000-06:00

I didn't catch the VGA show last night, but one of the high points for me would have been the release of the full trailer for the upcoming game Uncharted 3. Along with Arkham City, Uncharted 3 is one of my most anticipated titles. I loved the first two games and I'm sure I will love the third one too. Uncharted 3 is scheduled to be released November 1, 2011. Here's the trailer.

Video Games | Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception | VGA 10: Exclusive Debut Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

More New Flyers at the Arcade Flyer Archive

2010-12-09T11:07:00.002-06:00

Ah French video games. Where the flyer for even a simple Tetris-type puzzle game shows a buxom blonde with her nips taking a peek at the world. Vive la France!

As you may know, I'm a sucker for old arcade game flyers and I saw that The Arcade Flyer Archive just added 45 new flyers to their online collection. And of course if you are running MAME with a frontend that has a flyer viewer (like moi) then you MUST download them post-haste. Possiby even pre-haste. Well, presumably they will be added in to the next batch of flyerpacks when version 0.141 of MAME rolls out - so you might not need to download them but you can at least give them a peek.

By the way, in a previous post I included a link to TAFA for the new MAME flyer packs (through the current MAME version 0.140), but TAFA immediately started having bandwidth issues with everyone downloading these huge files so they now reside at progetto-SNAPS - a great Italian site that is an awesome resource for all sorts of supplemental MAME files like flyers, snapshots, cabinet pics, control panel pics, etc. Viva Italia!

The Top 3 Best Games About Janitors... #2

2010-12-08T19:49:00.002-06:00

In yesterday's post I talked a bit about the Infocom classic Planetfall, the 3rd best game of all time in one of the most underappreciated genres of gaming - the janitor game. For today's entry I'd like to mention the first "point and click" adventure game I ever played (I think) - the 1991 hit Space Quest IV - Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers.

In SQIV you play, not surprisingly given the title, as Roger Wilco, who is 50% bumbling janitor and 50% heroic adventurer. At the beginning of the game Roger is relaxing at the local space bar when he is accosted by the evil Sequel Police who deliver the message that your enemy Sludge Vohaul (apparently from previous SQ games that I never played) has some nefarious plans to take over the universe and he wants you good and dead first, but before the Sequel Police can administer the coup de grace you manage to break free. Then a couple of mystery guys open up a time rip that you jump through to escape. The time rip deposits you in the far-flung future of Space Quest XII (noted on the status bar at the top of the screen) and that's where you take control and begin your quest to figure out how to survive in this world and how to get back to Vohaul and defeat him before it's too late!

That's the gist of it anyway. If I recall, I found this game to be somewhat difficult and although I quite enjoyed it I don't remember actually finishing it. I think I got stuck somewhere and eventually just moved on to something else. Hey don't judge me! Back in those days you couldn't just hop on the internet and Google up a walkthrough to get past a tough spot you know! Sierra On-Line sold hint books, but I never bought any of those (I did buy an Invisiclues one time for Zork II to see what they were all about - but that's another story). So actually I think I will be buying this game myself and giving it a good honest try to play it through to completion for the first time.

If you've never played a point and click adventure game it is all driven by the mouse and drop-down menus. You move Roger around in the world and interact with various items and characters by simply pointing and clicking. Sierra went to great lengths to provide a huge amount of detail so you can examine and interact with almost anything and with multiple senses too - sight, smell, taste, touch - a different kind of open world game.

Here is a little vid of the gameplay from the beginning of the game (they stripped out the opening movie part). This is the updated version released in 1992 on CD which featured full speech - I played the old silent floppy version.

One of the reasons I liked the game so much is the same reason that I liked Hitchhiker - the humorous tone throughout the game. The game is always making jokes and although it can get a little tiresome from time to time, overall it is pretty amusing and a refreshing change from the mood of most games. But the thing I really remember is how gorgeous the graphics were at the time - especially on the cut scenes which were essentially like watching a cartoon. It took full advantage of the 256-color VGA cards that were the leading edge of video cards at the time. Also, I read that it was one of the first games to utilize motion capture technology.

Another unique feature I had never seen before - in the game when you go back in time and are playing within the world of Space Quest I, the graphics and sound revert to the more primitive style of that 1986 game. There is even a scene during this part where some monochrome alien baddies give Roger a hard time for his superior graphic stature - "Well lookee here - if it ain't mister look-at-me-I'm-in-VGA". (Apparently their response changed based on whatever type of video card was actually being used). I don't know if Sierra actually invented this gag, but Metal Gear Solid IV for the PS3 recycled it years later when Snake was dreaming and you got to play a little of the original PS1 Metal Gear Solid in the properly reduced resolution. So I'm thinking maybe Snake owes a slight tip of the hat to Roger for that.

I've also heard lately about the arcade minigames hidden in the new Call of Duty Black Ops, to which I've seen a few GTA fans respond with "ho-hum hidden arcade minigames - Rockstar already did that", to which older Dreamcast fans similarly respond "punks - you ever heard of Shenmue?" Well, almost a decade before that you could mosey on up to an arcade game in SQIV, drop in a quarter, and play a game of Ms. Astro Chicken. So SQIV (and actually SQIII before that, I discovered) get some props for that bit of "open-world" immersion that so many these days attribute to Rockstar.

I stumbled across this commercial for SQIV that apparently aired around Christmas in 1991. The quality looks like it was filmed through a soapy fishbowl, but I've always enjoyed watching old game commercials and trailers so I'm stickin it in here in case someone else feels the same.

So I felt like was rambling a bit there - but the bottom line is that this a cool janitor game and considered somewhat of a classic in PC gaming circles, so if you haven't played it you might consider checking it out.

Where do you buy? As I was writing this I checked out eBay and I see that someone is selling the original 3.5" floppy PC version complete with box, manual, and disk with a current bid of only $0.99 ($4 shipping). Note that if you do decide to purchase this item it is possible we might engage in a bidding war.You can also buy the collection of all the Space Quest games (1-6) - on eBay for $7.84 (shipping included) - click HERE for that one. And they also offer it (bundled with 5 and 6) at Good Old Games for $9.99.

Tomorrow - the stunning and controversial janitorial finale that everyone is sure to be talking about. Stay tuned!