Voiding your Sears warranty from 1977. As a follow-up to yesterday's post about my newly-acquired Tele-Games console, I thought I'd make a short video demonstrating some of the console's circuit bending capabilities. I've only fooled around with toy keyboards before, but the same circuit bending 'rules' apply: open the machine, grab an insulated metal lead, and connect arbitrary points on the circuit board. And if possible try to avoid any power leads so you don't short-circuit ...
In my day, the console *was* the controller. As part of my 'Videogames and Procedural Media' course at VCU, I've been fortunate enough to have been allocated a modest budget to assemble a videogame 'lab' in the Kinetic Imaging department. As part of my videogame history unit, I wanted to find an early all-in-one console like Pong to demonstrate in class. These are hard to come by in the wild, but we lucked out and found a Sears Tele-Games Pinball Breakaway ...
Despite its weird sci-fi veneer, Atari 2600 shooter Yars' Revenge is one of the greatest sports videogames ever made. Sorry Pitfall, Adventure, and Defender. No offense, River Raid, Ms. Pac-Man, Combat, and Asteroids. Yars' Revenge is the Atari 2600's finest game and, for my money, one of the best-designed sports videogames of any generation. Yes, sports game. Let's break it down. The Basics Yars' playfield arrangement and basic mechanics are dead simple. The player pilots the Yar, a 'fly simulator under direct user ...
Deleuze in the Diving Bell I read B.K. Evenson's Dead Space: Martyr novel per the recommendations of some reading group friends. For those who know me, this might be a surprise, since I generally despise and/or ignore videogame stories. In most cases, I can't even follow them through the course of an entire game. Don't ask me what Gears of War is about. I don't know. Nonetheless, I played and enjoyed the first two Dead Space games, I like sci-fi and ...
You know the drill: if you've landed here first, you'll likely want to read Part I (at least), Part II, and Part III. We're continuing our analysis of spatial vectors in opening screens of NES videogames with four more titles dated between 1987 and 1990. The first is the 'sequel' to Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros. 2 Genre: ...
If you haven't already, please see Part I and Part II of this series. Now that we've established a formal vocabulary, let's take a look at a series of Famicom/NES games that present interesting variations of the patterns seen in Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. I've arranged these chronologically by their Japanese release date to show how quickly conventions changed between 1985 and 1990. ...
In Part I, I introduced the concept of spatial vectors as they apply to the opening screen of Super Mario Bros. (If you haven't done so, read that article first, or little of the following will make sense.) Before reviewing other NES examples, let's take a look at the original inspiration for the vector concept. The image above is from Joystick, an innovative but short-lived magazine that, as far as I can tell, ...
A design study Poring over NES and Famicom games for the past year and a half has led to a lot of thinking about game design structures, especially those that cue players about how to move through two-dimensional spaces. I was the kid in the 1980s who read through the manual prior to play, but anecdotally I think I was an outlier. Most of my friends wanted to dive in immediately. Boxes were tossed away, manuals lost. Designers had no assurance ...
An informal genre survey. Pen-and-paper roleplaying games are a fascinating genre, hovering somewhere between storytelling, board games, gambling, genre fiction, and statistics. And thanks to their topsy-turvy status in mainstream culture, they are a genre that must continually revise and redefine themselves. A game played largely through conversation, with few visual aids beyond a character sheet and (maybe) a map and figurines, pales in comparison to the virtual vistas, decorative customization, and orgiastic statistical management of World of Warcraft, despite the ...
Every Cold Run post in a single, tidy package For those of you clamoring for links to every Legend of Zelda cold run session in a single post, get ready for satisfaction: