Mezrabad

Um, was the seller able to get your cabinet out of Houston quickly enough? Cat 3 Hurricanes like to eat arcade cabinets for breakfast.

Hey, sure! sorry I didn't see this message until now. I'll get right on it.

Wow, I hadn't thought about it that way. Sheesh! Mahjong variants are as numerous as grains of sand on a beach! On the other hand, I could limit myself to US Releases with the occasional Mahjong if it came well recommended. Too many games. I'm going to have to live a long time.

It does look like a port of the Ace Arcade from 1976 though. Greetings, Manuel Hey! It sure does! Damn, see? That's the trouble with limiting myself to one branch of the videogame family tree - home videogames - when simultaneously also developing were computer videogames, handheld (and tabletop) videogames and, of course, arcade videogames. I'm not seeing/talking about the big picture. Maybe I'll go through the arcade videogames of the 70s after I go through the home videogames of the 70s. Maybe not. Maybe I'll just take the route of pretending I was a shut-in all those years and never saw an arcade videogame. Heh. Of course, I was refering to the airplane portion of the Atari VCS Combat, but it would be stepping out of the scope of the blog to refer to a game that didn't exist yet. Ace looks like a much closer relative, though. Hey, the controls look like that of a tank game! Interesting.

What the FRACK? He not smart enough for Special ED so they make him stay in the regular classes? That makes NO sense!!! I fume with you. On a positive note, congrats for the praise you've been getting! My wife teaches and I know it means a lot to her when someone takes the time to compliment what is essentially a huge part of her identity. At least you have something to smile about as you make those 210 26-page long booklets.

Emergent gameplay, maybe? Nothing in the design or the instruction manual that says "Grab a magnet and travel with the bridge downwards though the whole map". How about moments when the bat flies through with the arrow and kills the dragon for you? How about when you get swallowed by a dragon and then the dragon gets picked up by the bat and you fly around the universe? Playing that game late night in whatever year I got it was very exciting for me. Here was a multi-screen universe in which "going" somewhere meant having to go through other places. There was "travel time". Having to "go find the black key" to get in the black castle by searching for it "somewhere else" gave the game a sense of "place". This wasn't a game I was playing on my TV, this was another place in which I was moving around in by controlling a square using a mechanism hooked up to my TV, which I saw through my TV. I was taking part in a quest in a place that existed beyond my living room. Honest. This game was designed to be a graphic analogy for the first text adventure game "Adventure". Warren Robinette described it as such in a powerpoint presentation which I can no longer find . He said he wanted to translate typed phrases like "go north" into a simple joystick direction. "take object" or "drop object" translated into the simple act of bumping into something or pressing a button to drop it. Instead of typing "use sword to slay dragon" you actually did it. Likewise to use a key. You weren't selecting an action from a menu, you weren't typing in the correct verb-object combination you were doing it. Think about it: no lifebars, no menus, no inventory screen, no overlays of any kind, just you and the environment in which you struggled to survive and triumph. Any other games come out like that recently? Yeah, Ico. Any others? None that I can think of. There were also other things wandering around this little universe performing functions outside your range of perception. If you leave an object out, the bat might take it and replace it with something else, perhaps an object much less needed than the one you left when you go looking for it. Dragons wander around looking for something to guard. You may think, "okay, the dragon is guarding x, I'm safe from that one" but suddenly you see the bat fly by with x and the dragon chasing it. Suddenly the dragon is now chasing you and you don't have your sword? What do you do? How do you trick him? Can you grab the bat and "convince" the bat to pick up the dragon and "save" you? THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE THIS when it came out. NOTHING. Not at home at least. Sure, there were text adventures on your TRS-80 or Apple ][ which you owned if you were lucky enough to have a parent into personal computers, or even Aklabeth if you were really lucky. But, an in-color graphic arcade adventure? Simple enough to play an entire game of in 10 or 15 minutes? NOTHING LIKE IT. It was simple. It was elegant. It was the first. It had endless replay value for me then and now. Maybe it isn't for everyone, but respect the design in its historical context and that should be enough to make you go "cool" even if it doesn't make you want to play it for hours on end. damnit, I took too long to write this so some of my babbling is redundant. live with it and grow.

yes! Umm, as a picture of my TV with Gunfighter on it, sure. (I have no video-in device. I may need to get one soon.)

You're right! At least a painful dental procedure would leave us with memories of real pain, which does imply a degree of stimulus, a quality which this system lacks. Your example better illustrates the effect of the RCA Studio II library because, like the experience in your example, it induces seemingly unending streches of time filled with brain-numbing ennui.

You forgot to mention that a pub is a terrific place to hole up with one's mates when the town is being overrun by undead.

Also chiming in with "what a great blog!". Really enjoying it. Glad to see it still going.

Yes! That's exactly what I was doing late at night. I was playing hockey with myself. I liked setting it up so that the goalie and the opposite paddle had the puck between them on fast speed. That repeating-pinging was hypnotic. I thought I could hear additional rythms within the audible beeps. You know? Like the silence had a rhythm, too.

Awesome information. Truly a great game, though I haven't spent nearly enough time with it.

Thanks! It's comments like this that will give me the strength to get through the RCA Studio II. PONG believe it or not. It came out for the Home in 1975. There are so many Pong systems that come out after that (1976-1978) though, so I'll just play the Original and the three or four variants I already have (Odyssey 100, 200, Hanimex 777 and National Instruments Adversary). I really want to find and play a Coleco Combat and a Tel-star Arcade. They're not out until 1977, I think. So I have a little bit of time. After the brief Pong exploration, we'll move into the programmable era with the Fairchild VES in 1976, followed closely by the RCA Studio II. The RCA Studio II is the way of madness and despair. There are dark times ahead for us all.

What a cool idea! I never thought of doing that and the ergonomiclessness of them had been one of my reasons for avoiding purchase. I have the Commodore 64 stick, and while the collection and emulation is excellent, the stick is annoying to use. Maybe I'll try to build a nice wide base for it. Thanks for sharing your idea!

Up for sale is Percepts (R8) for the Magnavox Odyssey. Got the cards, both overlays and the instructions. The cards and overlays are in good shape. The Instructions are in excellent shape, except for a centimeter start of a tear on the fold crease. I can send pictures if requested, though give me time to actually take some. PM me your best offer if you are interested. No lowballers, please. Thanks. (I"m Chronogamer on eBay and have (84) 100% positive feedback.)

I'm glad someone else understands! I did the same thing with Link. I played Wind Waker before playing any of the others. I was about to start the game over again (this time with the color camera) and realized, wait! I can't do this! I've never finished the first Zelda! Then I crawled back into the little mania you see me expressing these days.

I absolutely see your point. Someday in the future, I'm sure the shreads of my sanity and/or wallet will stitch themselves together and talk me out of this. Untill then, I'll just be taking it game by game.

Actually, I owe him a quarter per game and I have to pay him at the end of every "era". Which means I owe him for the pre-VCS era. (though there were some RCA Studio II games that even I couldn't find it in my heart to force him to play. *shudder*) He makes me pay in other ways, too, sometimes with junk food. Usually he only asks me to play a game of his choice with him. Often, this means we play Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube and he kicks my ass. Sometimes, when I've had him play a particularly painful-for-him Odyssey game (he just didn't "get" Analogic and was frustrated to tears.) he just flat out won't want to try another (once bitten, twice shy, I guess.). that's when I have to start offering bonus cash and/or snacks as incentive. He's a pretty smart kid, and knows not to exploit this because he's begun to realize that not everyone on the block has the selection of games (modern and retro) to which he is privy. I know the blog is only up to 1973 at this point, but in our "lab" we're up to 1977. Thank the gods we can finally play Atari VCS games! He's genuinely enjoying those and has actually requested to play Surround/Chase a few times. We're on a bit of a hiatus now while I try to get the blog up to date, Ebay the stuff from pre-VCS and find the stuff for the coming years. (I think we may have to give the APF MP1000 a miss, unless somone can lend me theirs.) Anyway, thanks for the comment.

This sounds really cool. Just reading about programming the VCS is making me want to get into it. Guess that makes me a masochist!

Thank you! I'd like to appear gracious and humble but I've got to admit the first thing I did was yell to the rest of my family "Hey! Another person likes my blog! Whoo-hoo!" Then I did a little "blog dance". Thanks so much for saying so. I will do my best to not stop. I really like your blog, too, by the way. I hope you continue it and tell us what Teachers do on their summer vacations! (I always imagined they sat on the beach and wrote up lesson plans. Heh.) EDIT: I just noticed that I split my infinitive when I said "to not stop". I know that to be grammatically correct I would have had to say "to boldly not stop". I apologize for the error.

Unless I'm mistaken there are also fireworks at the end of Escape from the Mindmaster.

I had a tooth start to hurt once. It's the "chronic" as in "it just doesn't stop" part of the pain that gets to me. It's the last thing you feel when you go to sleep and the first thing you feel when you wake up. If it is really bad, your dreams evolve plots to account for it as well. It's been a little while since you posted this. Has it been taken care of?

This is probably the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me about anything into which I've put effort, ever. Thank you for your kind words, they mean a lot!

Hmm, there may have been "Simon says" stuff in Die Hard 3, but my flashback seems to extend back further than that to the mid to late 70s. I'm leaning heavily towards Underdog. I'll google around a bit, maybe I'll figure it out. EDIT: Okay, here we go: http://www.toontracker.com/totaltv/underdog.htm I also found a reference to "Simon Says 'Be my Valentine'" which I think is where this flashback is coming from. I didn't know that Underdog ran on TV for NINE freakin' years! I'm happy to find that the flashback fits right into our little chronology here, I remember watching it around the same time of life I was watching Ultraman.

Yes! The lightgun apparently reacts to any bright source of light including lightbulbs, other TVs showing the Odyssey and, especially, The Sun. It doesn't keep score, but when you hit a bright target off-screen the little bright square on screen does disappear. This could probably be considered the first "cheat code"!