Category: Gaming

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Gaming

CGE Saturday highlights

Lappy 386
Here’s how I’m bringing you these exciting, action-packed reports.

Swimmy time in Vegas
Here’s someplace I’ve gazed upon fondly with great frequency, but just haven’t had a chance to visit.

Odyssey2 goodies
I brought a few things to loan to the CGE Museum, including – what else? – their Odyssey2 section.

Brown Box
Ralph Baer’s Brown Box prototype. We’re not worth.

Brown Box
Somehow I’ll get a handle on it.

Vintage video game figures
I brought some vintage video game toys too, but they weren’t still in their packages like these puppies are, so mine are on display in my room. 😆

Overhead view of CGE
Overhead wide angle view of the whole show floor, taken from the skybox. (It may not look crowded, but there was actually quite a crowd.)

Lasercade
A CGE exclusive release, programmed in the ’80s, unreleased until now: Lasercade.

Warlords
The famous DP Living Room, ready to play a game of Warlords. If only I’d had three other people with me at the moment…

Jay Smith
Jay Smith, inventor of the Vectrex. His keynote speech was absolutely fascinating – in addition to creating one of my favorite underdog game systems, he also worked on propulsion systems for the Apollo lunar module (!). He could’ve talked for three hours and I still would’ve been listening.

Garry Kitchen
Garry Kitchen at the Activision panel.

David Crane
David Crane (Pitfall) at the same panel.

Brett Weiss' book
Brett Weiss’ incredibly tasty new book. Kudos to him for getting it written and published. And wow, textbook binding. Total class!

Running down a dream
I admit it – before they admitted folks to the show floor, I ran down two whole rows of arcade games with the fisheye lens on. It looked kinda like this.

Arcade games
This is just one of those rows. Those are some rows.

Al Alcorn
Pong engineer Al Alcorn’s keynote. This year he had a Powerpoint presentation and tons of pictures he had left over from the early days of Atari.

Drexel923 vs. the Mystery Box O' Crap
Nick “Drexel923” takes a good-natured ribbing from his neighbors at the CGE auction after winning the auctions on not one but two Mystery Boxes O’ Crap – literally, cardboard boxes resembling the question block marks in Super Mario, containing either treasures that you paid too little for or insanely common stuff you paid way too much for – which contained…well…crap. At least he got a free beer for his trouble.

The tapes
Add five hour-long tapes of auction action to this stack, and this is what I’ve shot since I’ve been here.… Read more

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Gaming

Lying on the floor in the transit lounge

What a ride. I’ve never flown out of XNA before. What they call a “departure gate” I call “Bob’s unpainted garage.” Wow. Denver was even stranger – it’s like we dropped out of the sky on approach (largely because of the mountains, I suspect), and the flight from Denver to Las Vegas was about the roughest flight I’ve ever been on.

Here’s my spacious, palatial boudoir for the weekend:
My hotel room at the Riviera
…okay, not that spacious, or palatial, but it’ll do.

I’ll report back later from the Alumni Dinner.… Read more

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Gaming

Invade the Arcade!

On Wednesday, some of my friends and I swooped down on the 1984 Arcade in downtown Springfield, Missouri – a good 3 hour tour (a 3 hour tour) one way from my house – to check it out. To be honest, it was better than I imagined.

It’s a fairly unassuming location across from the YMCA. Springfield’s downtown area was much more active than I thought it would be, and at several points during the afternoon and evening the arcade had quite a crowd (and quite a young crowd at that).
1984 Arcade in Springfield, Missouri

Now you’re talkin’.
1984 Arcade in Springfield, Missouri … Read more

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Cooking With Code Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Fun and/or games

This week marks the official launch of yet another WordPress-ified section of the site, this time an archive for the literally hundreds of videos accumulated for Phosphor Dot Fossils over the years. It’s not the most elegant solution for handling that material, I’ll admit, but it does help me to get away from coding every PDF article twice over and then doing dumbass things like forgetting to change the template code (which is why every Apple II game looked and sounded uncannily like Ghostbusters for the longest time 😆 ). You can do a search by title and look at video of, say, every port of Zaxxon for which we have video. It’s actually kinda neat – give it a try. In time I’ll also add back in stuff such as the maruqee artwork and other artwork elements that used to be part of the now-defunct Arcade Artwork Archive section. See? Even in the digital world I’m a pack rat who never throws anything away. I decided to go ahead and launch this monster this week because, plain and simple, it cuts down on extraneous coding and goofball Ghostbusters mistakes.

Speaking of old games…guess what? I’m goin’ to CGE! It’s official. But there’s a catch – you probably won’t see me much outside of the keynote speeches, which I’ll be taping for a project that the CGE organizers will let you know about Very Soon. (Well, okay, I’ll spill: I’m producing a DVD, possibly a multi-DVD set, of this year’s show. Keynotes, alumni dinner, auction action, show floor, you name it. The current plan is for the whole shebang to be available around Christmas. So hey, there’s my major post-production project to be working on after Evan gets here. Funny how that works out, eh?) So think of it as a working vacation. Still: it’s a trip to CGE that I literally didn’t have in the budget, so it’s nothing but a huge treat for me. Hanging at the Expo with an all-access pass, doing what I do best (aside from kicking your butts at Galaga), what could be better? And I’m still going to 1984 Arcade in a couple of days with Rob, Brian and the gang, so July really is kinda like my last hurrah before baby time hits me like a loaded diaper.… Read more

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Critters Gaming Home Base Television & Movies

Big Fun!

Found even more treasures during the Great Clean-Up Of The Baby’s Future Room Wednesday, including my long-lost tape of the original Fox promos for the 1996 Doctor Who movie. I’ve put those up on the site here, just click each of the “preview” buttons to see the various promos Fox ran in 1996. Damned if they didn’t make it look exciting, eh? (And hey, if you like Doctor Who trailers, you can’t miss this one – if ever you don’t dig a trailer from the new series, just come back to this one again. 😆 ) I also found a heap of PAL VHS tapes of such things as “I Was A Doctor Who Monster”, “K-9 Unleashed” and “Who On Earth Is Tom Baker”, all of which I promptly dubbed to a DVD for safe keeping. I’m fond of that now-nearly-extinct breed of fan film/documentary hybrids that Myth Makers excelled at.

The trip to Springfield’s 1984 Arcade is still on, and just a week away. I can’t wait for that. I may have some other Big News in the next few days as well, stay tuned!

Got some swim time in on Wednesday night, then we came home and I proceeded to whip up both dinner and the next day’s lunch for both of us all at the same time. Well, all three of us. That Evan is a hungry little bugger. As usual, I didn’t get near any fireworks – I fired up the fireworks graphic demo on the Christopher Tumber Vix / Tsunami Vectrex homebrew and let it run all day. When other people did start blowing stuff up, Xena was ready to come inside. (Smelling me cooking may also have had something to do with that.) I was getting pretty irritated with some kids who were shooting off fireworks insanely close to our overgrown pasture, when all of a sudden it stopped, and yet I kept seeing flashes of light outside – lo and behold, it was the nightly thunderstorm to the rescue. With all the rain we’ve had, it’s probably too damp for there to really be any legitimate concerns about someone burning down my land, but it’s just the principle of the thing.

I’m just elated with the news that Catherine Tate will be back as Donna for all of the fourth season of Doctor Who. That just about makes up for the hash that was made of Martha’s character development (to say nothing of that finale…oy vey! Sleep, Data, sleep! Am I the only person who thought that Eccleston’s Doctor would’ve wiped the floor with John Simm without a second thought?). But Catherine Tate? I can get behind that, and not just because she’s delicious. She’s not 20 years old, she’s not impossibly stick-figure thin, and she doesn’t have an unrequited love thing going on with the Doctor… yay, she might come across as a real person. I loved that character in The Runaway Bride, although I fully understand that I’m probably in the minority there. (That episode, and the first one with Martha, air this Friday night on Sci-Fi, so hey, you tell me.) I know that I’m just an American who hasn’t suffered overexposure to Catherine Tate via her comedy show, but I just thought she was really cute, and the character was a nice departure from anything we’ve seen in the show before, old or new. And as for Kylie…well…ask me again after Christmas.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Gaming Music

Chillin’ like Obi

Here’s Oberon, chillin’ in my wife’s portable cooler bag:
CHILL, MAN 😆

So apparently the results of yesterday’s listening were as followed: almost no movement at all for the whole Carl Stalling Looney Toons music CD, but switch over to the Moody Blues, and the little guy started kicking. A lot. Whether this means “more cartoon music” or “more Moody Blues” or “make with the Katamari music”, there’s no telling.

In other news, I’m trying to round up a raiding party of folks from the Digital Press and Retroputing forums to storm the castl…erm, I mean, visit 1984 Arcade in Springfield, MO, on July 11th or 12th. (Leaning toward the 11th for a variety of reasons.) I’ve been wanting to go there since last year, but Rob’s recent visit has me positively salivating to go there now. In a way, this is going to be my “last fling” before I have to start preparing for baby on an almost full time basis. And if the kiddo likes these old games as much as I do, I’ll bet there’s another visit to 1984 down the road.

I wonder if they have a TV ad? 😉 … Read more

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Critters Funny Stuff Gaming

Pictures of a weekend

Not much to say here; just some pictures from my weekend:

Olivia snoozin'
Olivia’s entry in the Cutest Kitten In The House contest. She really cranked up the cute after seeing little grey girl’s pictures.

Fellowhip of the Ring
A mass-mailing from a local church. Holy proofreading, Batman!

Help waned at our fellowhip!
Presumably whoever put that together answered this call for help.

A nice new pile o' games
My latest influx of new (but old) games from a trade with scooterb23 of the DP forums, along with other trades and goodies I’ve picked up this year (Supercharger and Stella Gets A New Brain, among numerous other items, not shown here). Early this year, before we knew we were expecting, my wife made a comment about how much I spend on my old video game collection. I think so far this year, I’m up to about the $20 mark, most of that spent in shipping stuff out for my end of the trade. 😆… Read more