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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(Via Blue’s News.)

I recently stumbled upon a Flickr account in which someone has
managed the impressive and noble task of scanning the complete
contents of several Sears and Montgomery Wards Christmas catalogs. The
sight launched me screaming headlong into the dusky realms of
nostalgia; back before the days of free two-day shipping from Amazon,
the Sears Catalog was the definitive masterwork on
consumeristic accessibility — or inaccessibility, if you were a kid
like me and couldn’t afford to buy the merchandise splayed loving
across the catalog’s 500-plus pages.

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That didn’t stop me from looking, though. I can’t even begin to
guess how many hours I squandered at my grandparents’ house, poring
over page after page of enticing game systems and G.I. Joe dioramas,
apparently with the conviction that the intensity with which I
scrutinized those items would somehow determine the likelihood of
them showing up under the Christmas tree.

Sometimes, it even worked! I stared at the G.I. Joe MOBAT so hard
that Santa took pity and dropped one under my tree that year.

Looking back at the catalog now, of course, provides an interesting
perspective on classic gaming that you can’t really glean from any
number of essays or retrospectives. The 1983 catalog, for instance,
was published at the peak of the Atari boom (which came right before
the Atari crash — we didn’t buy enough of the games listed in this
catalog that year, it seems). In those days, gaming was teetering
between becoming an enduring entertainment cornerstone and simply
washing out to be one of the novelty fads that swept America in
those days, a digital Pet Rock. As a result, the ‘83 catalog actually
lists fewer systems and games that remain recognizable in this era
than it does forgotten hangers-on and quasi-videogame cheese. 

The portable games to the right, for instance, are pretty much what
those of us who couldn’t afford a Game & Watch
had to settle for. They weren’t really video games, you see, but
operated with simplistic, motorized, physical mechanisms — not unlike
pre-video arcade games. Even in 1983, they were interesting for about
three minutes, and then you felt sad because you could have spent
those three minutes playing Cement Factory or even
knock-offs like Epoch Man.

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width="253"/>Much more interesting is the Dungeons &
Dragons portable game across the page from the depressing
faux-games. While I have fairly clear memories of just about every
game in the catalog, I don’t recall the D&D handheld at all. From
the gameplay description — move through the maze and shoot a dragon
with an arrow — it sounds pretty much Wumpus. Hell,
I even see a little bat in the upper right hand area. Yeah, it’s Wumpus.

Chances are pretty good I saw this back in the day and promptly wiped
it from my memory after feeling betrayed and angry about the game’s
lack of a hot monk chick in a fur bikini and an adorable baby unicorn
companion. Not that the D&D cartoon was particularly accurate to
the table top game upon which the show was based, but I’m going to
hazard a guess and say it was more authentic than this LCD game.

I guess whatever disappointment I may have experienced wasn’t too
scarring, though, since just about all I play these days are
portable RPGs — some of which are far more faithful to D&D than others.

[…]

(Via 1UP’s Retro Gaming Blog.)

People who own a Kindle and an iPhone are in luck: Amazon has published a Kindle application on the iTunes Apps Store, so now you’ll be able to read Kindle books on your iPhone.

The program grabs books you already bought from Amazon and lets you read samples and buy e-books directly from your iPhone. It even supports auto-bookmarking, so you can start reading Gravity’s Rainbow on your Kindle, head out to the mall, then continue reading from the same ePage on your iPhone.

Also: It’s free.

The Kindle is a big improvement over my e-book reader, which consists of a Texas Instruments calculator you duct tape onto whatever book you’re reading. The Stevedle can do math, and if you type "58008" into it, then turn it upside down, it totally looks like "BOOBS."

Source

[…]

(Via G4 TV - TheFeed.)

In the West, Fallout 3’s advertising campaign tried to keep things classy. So it is in Japan, with the release of these Fallout 3 shirts designed by…Famitsu.

Yes, the magazine/website Famitsu. There are three designs to choose from, each coming in two colourways, and the best part is, some of them keep with the radioactive theme by glowing in the dark.

Before you lunge for your credit card, though, know that thanks to the current economic climate (and its effect on exchange rates), they’re going for around $45 (plus shipping) each.

Fallout 3 [ebten]

[…]

(Via Kotaku.)

(Via GameSetWatch.)

hhavensteincw writes “On Monday Google detailed new plans to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. ‘Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written,’ Google said in a blog post. ‘It’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.’ For example, Google noted the availability of an original article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 about the landing on the moon.” When you search the news archive for, e.g., “Chicago fire” or “Rosenberg trial,” a significant fraction of the result pages cost money to view.

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(Via Slashdot.)

submitted by greentriangle to reddit.com
[link] [38 comments]

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(Via reddit.com: what’s new online.)

(Via Gamasutra Feature Articles.)

The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.

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(Via Neatorama.)