Interesting Drug

Adventure Classic Gaming - Adventure game puzzles we have known and hated. “A vivid example of puzzles falling into this trap, to the point of parody, is in Shadowgate. Although the game is largely…

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While at NVision a few weeks back in San Jose, I got a chance to chat in detail to Jason ‘Textfiles.com’ Scott (pictured, left, in his natural habitat), who was at the event ahead of wandering off to Penny Arcade Expo to shoot MC Frontalot videos.
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Following his article on Atari’s genesis, game historian Fulton returns with an amazingly detailed piece on Atari’s ‘golden years’, from the rise of the Atari 2600 through Asteroids and Battlezone.
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Planescape: Torment is inarguably one of the greatest RPGs ever created, and even though nearly ten years have passed since its release, people are still talking about it - including lead designer Chris Avellone, who recently spoke about the game with BellaOnline.

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OK, so you probably would have been a little upset to find that the “Wii hard drive” you bought after reading about it on gaming and anime site NeoCrisis was, in fact, a picture of an air conditioner (sadly, the story has now been removed). But think about the plus side! Think of how your rage would just melt away when you were hit with the tear-freezing power of 3000 BTUs streaming out of the Yamazen portable air conditioner!

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Ever since the iPhone App Store launch last month, we’ve been on the hunt for apps we can load on our fancy phones and not forget about immediately. Occasionally something pops up but, sure enough, we manage to forget about it in a matter of days. But here … this is different. Frotz we’ll keep around for a long time.

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With the impending demise of the iconic publisher Sierra, I figured it would fruitful to look around the office and see what items I could find that relate to the publisher/developer’s beginnings.  It’s interesting that once I decided to keep an eye out for a specific company, I realized that I had a lot of things I could relate to it. Makes me wonder how much I will regret not photographing absolutely everything I come across, since most of it ties directly to some potential theme. With that said, I’m going to dive into the first segment of a two-maybe-three part series on the beginnings of Sierra.  The first installment will look back on Sierra before it was Sierra, when it was a small company called On-Line Systems that started on the kitchen table of Roberta and Ken Williams.

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Fluffypants made this great Duck Hunt lamp and posted it on Craftster! She gutted the zapper, wired it up, made a cardboard replica of a cartridge for the base, and decorated the shade with fun foam.

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GCG Op-Ed: Writing Off Game Writers:

GameCareerGuide.com has just posted an op-ed that declares the game industry undervalues writers. It’s written by Lee Sheldon, a writer and designer of commercial video games and assistant professor at Indiana University. Writing off game writers, he says, is good for no one. It’s not just the industry at fault, he says. Game development schools take the same limited view, which is effectively suppressing a talent pool that is in dire need of creative nourishment, …

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Saturday Timewaster: Pandemic 2 [Timewasters]:

Ever wanted to decimate the world’s population or see if you could develop a super-bug that would leave the globe in utter pandemonium? If the answer is yes, browser-based Pandemic 2 is your game; even if the answer is ‘uh, no,’ it’s an interesting way to while away some time. Watch as your customized disease of choice is let loose on the world, then use your ‘evolution points’ to mutate the perfect delivery method for a global pandemic — the goal is to have a trail of devastation (and bodies) left in your wake. There are two different modes, ‘realistic’ and ‘relaxed,’ so if you’re not sure you’re ready for a realistic onslaught, you can try your hand with the easier mode.

Pandemic 2 [CrazyMonkeyGames via IndieGames]

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Soft Drinks Inspired by Cartoons and Video Games:

Energy Fiend has a neat write-up of 11 drinks inspired by cartoons and video games: Link - Thanks James!

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Classic Video Games done in LEGOs:

Those tiny blocky bricks are the perfect medium for translating pixelated classic games into 3D meatspace!

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Portable NES in a NES cartridge:

Filed under: gameboy hacks, handhelds hacks

Fresh off the tips line, [Jake] sent in his portable NES project. We’ve seen quite a few portables, but we love that the entire thing is built into an old NES cartridge. It’s got 99 games and some clever control placement. Three N cells nestled in the former connector slot power the system. You can see more pic over at [Ben Heck]’s forum.

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Tic Tac Toe Reinvented, Gets Mirror Upgrade [Tic Tac Toe]:

It doesn’t take long for kids to learn that when it comes to Tic Tac Toe “the only winning move is not to play.” But there’s something iconic about the game that means it keeps coming back. And designer Shahar Peleg has crafted such an unusual version I’d be tempted to pop it on my desk: it’s mirrored, so the pieces are halved until you place them on the grid. Not as high-tech as cloaked chess, but simple, and surprisingly eye-catching. [Peleg Design via Yanko design, DVICE]

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An exhaustive look at Game & Watch:

Filed under: Culture, Nintendo DS, Galleries

It’s time to take a look back at Nintendo’s first foray into handheld gaming, nine years before Game Boy (and three years before Famicon/NES). Researchers at DS Fanboy have compiled an exhaustive rertrospective on the Game & Watch, in addition to interviewing two dedicated collectors. As is commonly written, know your roots.

(Via Joystiq.)

Tainted Tie-Ins: Worst Movie Games Ever:

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Ever since they first fooled around in the Atari era, movies and videogames have had a troubled relationship.

Movies based on games — like Super Mario Bros. and Postal– deliver pure cinematic dreck, yet somehow games based on movies up the crap ante. Slapped together on tight development schedules by B-list teams, movie tie-in games rarely crawl out of the hole of mediocrity. Quite frankly, they dream of being mediocre.

Adding insult to injury, they sell enormously well. The NPD Group reported in June that the PlayStation 2 Iron Man game was May’s seventh best-selling U.S. game.

Here’s our list of the 10 worst movie-to-game translations in history, with input from a Wired.com reader poll. If it seems heavy on retro games, just remember that things used to be a lot worse.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Atari 2600 owners who ripped open their Christmas presents in 1982 were probably doubled over in glee at the prospect of jumping into the fedora of America’s sweetheart, Harrison Ford, and going on an adventure as Indy. Instead, what they got was a game that we might charitably describe as “ahead of its time” but after a drink would call “ridiculous.”

Not only were the graphics completely inscrutable — can you even tell which of these abstract objects is supposed to be Indiana Jones? — but the game was impossible to understand unless you pored over the instructions. Woe betide you if they ended up in the trash bag with the wrapping paper.

“Indecipherably bad graphics, unintuitive ‘gameplay’ (if you can even call it that) and the worst possible control scheme ever,” writes commenter Sakimori.

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Star Wars (Namco version)

A long time ago (1987) in a galaxy far, far away (Japan), the development house behind Pac-Man decided to try its hand at creating a Star Wars game for the 8-bit Nintendo system. For the most part, it’s a mundane side-scrolling game in which Luke hacks away at enemies with his lightsaber and dies a lot. But you know that things have gone horribly awry when he enters the Jawa Sandcrawler after about five minutes of gameplay to find Darth Vader, who transforms into a scorpion.

No, really. Luckily for everyone involved, this game was only released in Japan.

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Back to the Future

Screwed up though it was, Namco’s version of Star Wars was more or less faithful to the movie insofar as Luke Skywalker does, at times, use a lightsaber. If we were to apply the same sort of thinking to the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Back to the Future, we would necessarily determine that the film starred a young man who spent all his time being assaulted on the street by killer wasps, girls with razor-sharp Hula-Hoops and men wearing pink. Back to the Future’s controls were so shaky that players felt like they were as drunk as the people who programmed it.

Even the jump to 16 bits didn’t help the series. “Shonky controls and mediocre graphics were just the start of this atrocity that really did seem like it had traveled through time from the past,” wrote an anonymous Wired.com reader about Back to the Future III for Sega Genesis.

Back to the Future was just one of the flood of execrable movie-to-game releases foisted on an unsuspecting public by the thankfully dead Acclaim Entertainment. (We’ll see them again before we’re finished with this dreadful expedition.)

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Nausicaä Kiki Ippatsu

This is another game that only saw release in Japan, but its worldwide impact has been tremendous. The developers at Tokuma Shoten, tasked with creating a game based on animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s breakout smash Nausicaä, turned a film about nonviolence and environmentalism into a vapid shooter.

As the story goes, Miyazaki was so enraged by the game that Studio Ghibli never had anything to do with videogames ever again. Sure enough, no game projects have ever been released for any of the studio’s later films, like Princess Mononoke or the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. Maybe that’s all for the best.

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Friday the 13th

Yes, it’s another inscrutably bad movie-to-game translation courtesy of our good friends at Acclaim Entertainment. You all remember Friday the 13th, that horror film about camp counselors who throw knives at Yetis that burrow up from beneath the Earth. At least the Back to the Future games kept epileptic Marty McFly constantly moving toward the goal.

Making a failed attempt at nonlinearity, Friday the 13th mostly left players to wander around the identical screens that made up the virtual version of Camp Crystal Lake, listening to exactly four bars of the worst sonic torture ever devised until they died. Technically it was possible to finish the entire game in three minutes, and we feel terribly sorry for anyone who spent the time to learn how.

“I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen anyone do anything besides run around and die,” writes reader (not the real) Bob Dole.

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Seven Samurai 20XX

Wired.com reader Fnord called this PlayStation 2 game “a generic-to-bad brawler game that was trying very hard to be Ninja Gaiden, shoehorned and chopped and hammered into something that tried to resemble the plot of one of the best movies ever made.”

We simply call it an atrocity. Akira Kurosawa wasn’t even five years in his grave, and already his son Hisao was whoring out his classic films to the highest bidder, allowing Japanese pachinko-maker Sammy to turn Kurosawa’s samurai masterpiece into a campy futuristic fighting game. It’s embarrassing to even say this game’s title out loud, let alone play it.

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Total Recall

For all of Acclaim Entertainment’s sins of the 8-bit era, perhaps none was so unbelievably ham-fisted as Total Recall. Turning R-rated films into games for children had to have been hard work, but that still doesn’t explain why the gameplay of Total Recall consists of a gorilla that is supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger being kidnapped by bearded midgets in pink jumpsuits, dragged into alleys and kicked in the knees. To death.

Everything about this game is hilarious, except for the fact that children spent actual money on it back when the dollar was worth something. Also, there was no three-boobed alien hooker.

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Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game

Quick, what’s a worse idea than turning Street Fighter II into a live-action movie? Turning said live-action movie into a videogame. Hey guys, there already is a Street Fighter videogame, and it’s awesome. We don’t need one starring Raul Julia. But Raul Julia we get.

Isn’t it amazingly sad that this talented actor’s final appearance is in a videogame where he (his stuntman, actually) gets to serve as a punching bag for a squad of B-list actors? Besides Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue, there’s also Ming Na, and seeing her jump around in a tiny China-doll dress shouting horrifically mangled Japanese catch phrases more than makes up for how preachy Mulan was.

Bonus points: When Street Fighter: The Movie came to the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, it was so bad that it wasn’t even published by Street Fighter creator Capcom. Instead, it carried the logo of — you cannot make this stuff up — Acclaim Entertainment.

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Enter the Matrix

Every now and then, there’s a movie game that is supposed to change everything we know about movie games. This is inevitably followed by the backlash that results when these massively hyped projects turn out to be just as crappy as their predecessors.

Reviewers agreed that the only reason to play Enter the Matrix would have been to watch the extra footage from the Matrix Reloaded shoot, a desire that simply watching Matrix Reloaded should have cured. Otherwise, it was an utter mess.

Even sadder? In a past life, lead designer David Perry was responsible for one of those rare-as-a-unicorn good movie games: Aladdin for the Sega Genesis.

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Wired.com readers might not have enjoyed the Raiders of the Lost Ark game, but Steven Spielberg liked the Atari 2600 title enough that he asked its designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, to design a game based on his upcoming film E.T.

In time for the film’s release. Which was six weeks away.

Faced with an impossible deadline, Warshaw sequestered himself away in his Atari office, emerging just a month and a half later with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It’s not the single worst videogame ever created, but it lives in infamy as the videogame industry’s first high-profile disaster. Again, let us look back at children opening their presents one fine Christmas morning in 1982, and watch as they attempt to maneuver E.T. around the game screen, only to fall into a pit that they cannot escape from, no matter how many times they try. Repeat until tears are flowing steadily and Mom takes the game back to the store.

There are many urban legends about E.T., and all of them are true. Atari manufactured 4 million copies of the game and found itself stuck with 2.5 million leftovers, which it buried in a New Mexico landfill. But E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains one of the best-selling Atari 2600 games of all time, proving the old adage that people will, in fact, buy any videogame with a movie license on the cover, no matter how terrible.

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Gibson launches Guitar Hero lawsuit:

Claims patents have been infringed.

A History of Gaming Platforms: Atari 2600 Video Computer System/VCS:

Gamasutra’s A History of Gaming Platforms series - following the Apple II, C64 and
Vectrex - continues with a look at the seminal Atari 2600, the undisputed star of the early console rush - at least until the Great Crash of 1984.

Space Invaders 30th Anniversary Bath Towels [Space Invaders]:

NCSX is now taking pre-orders for these lovely Space Invaders 30th anniversary bath towels; if you’ve been waiting to complete that retro game-themed bathroom, here’s your chance. Orders will be shipping in mid-to-late June, and are retailing at $19.90 a pop.

Space Invaders 30th Anniversary Bath Towel [NCSX via Bits Bytes Pixels Sprites]

Throw the hippest gaming parties with Tetris ice cubes:

Filed under: Culture, Retro, Puzzle

We suppose that they’re technically ice tetrominoes, but that just sounds so much less hip. Next time you have friends and colleagues over for caviar and Rock Band, keep their cocktails cool with these Tetris-themed ice “cubes,” fashioned like those seven shapes made famous by Alexey Pajitnov’s classic falling block puzzle game. Of course, you could always make them yourself, but nothing says swanky like flexible silicone trays.

Unfortunately, the designer states on his website that the “Tetrice” tray hasn’t been put into production yet, but that he’s currently seeking out companies to produce it. We hope he finds one soon, because we’re already planning our first fancy soirée: black tie only, and you must bring your own controller.

[Thanks, GreasyGuide]

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Commodore 64 Games Hit Virtual Console In Europe:

Representatives from Nintendo of Europe have confirmed that classic 8-bit computer the Commodore 64 will become the latest addition to the Wii Virtual Console - although currently only in Europe. The first two titles to be available via the Virtual Console will be Archer MacLean’s International Karate and Uridium by highly acclaimed British programmer Andrew Braybrook. Both titles were originally released in 1986 and will be sold for 500 Wii Points each (£3.75/$5.00). Further regular …

Filmakers to Produce E.T. Landfill Documentary [Documentary]:

Some Auburn University students are planning a documentary on the famed E.T. landfill. The landfill, which many still claim is an urban legend, has been widely discussed in video game circles for years. Now our intrepid filmmakers are out to find the legendary dumping ground with their film E.T.’s March.

We are proud to announce our upcoming documentary, E.T.’s March. Over the course of a week this March, we will go on a road trip from Auburn, AL, to El Paso, TX. From there, we will take the actual path those fourteen trucks took that fateful day, into the heart of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Along the way, we will take in the video game culture of our great country. The documentary will be released for free via the internet this summer.

Good luck guys! Hopefully this doesn’t turn out to be another Al Capone’s Vault.

E.T.’s March Official Site

R4 Cartridge Discovered in GameStop Ad [GameStop]:

Kotakuite razmig snapped this rather interesting photo at his local GameStop. In a sign promoting the Nerf DS case, he noticed something a little strange. Right there in the case, nestled among the other games is an R4 cartridge. For those not in the know, the R4 is a popular product that will allow its users to download and play DS games illegally through the use of a Micro SD card. Mind you, the cartridge itself is technically not illegal, but given GameStop’s hard stance on this type of thing and Nintendo’s recent crackdown on piracy, I’m rather surprised this ad made it through. Having been a graphic designer, I know these things get looked at by a number of people before it goes to print and I would think someone would have caught it. Guess not.

Guitar Hero Carabiner Rocks Little [Toys]:

Activision’s Guitar Hero licensing fest continues as they team up with toy maker Basic Fun for the Guitar Hero Carabiner. This pocketable Guitar Hero is about 7-inches long—75% smaller than the original controller—and it folds up even smaller to prevent dreaded unintentional pant-tenting.

But we’re left wondering, why the hell is that neck attached in the first place if you aren’t using the frets? The LCD streams notes ala Guitar Hero, but the frets tower above the system, unused and waiting to scratch someone’s elbow bad. Do we really need the whole guitar if we aren’t using it?

Songs include Smoke on the Water, Rock this Town, Cherry Pie, Killer Queen, You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’, Miserlou, Heart Shaped Box, Message in a Bottle, Jessica, and Surrender. And at $14.99, we can only assume that those songs absolutely rock through the system’s tiny speaker.

Pocket Sized Guitar Hero Arcade Game [ChipChick via Technabob]

Koopa Troopa Sand Sculpture [PIC]:

Supporting a mad plumber’s obsession with murdering innocent turtles.