I’ve been wasting all of my free time lately reviewing CDs. I’m not sure why, because I don’t want to be in the business of having a bunch of crappy death metal bands emailing me their mp3s to review. But I have a lot of loose reviews around, and I wanted to write more long-form reviews and find a place to put them, and I’ve got it about figured out now. When I get more than about 7 reviews done, I’ll post a link. Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been writing here much. It’s far easier to write 1500 words on an old Metallica album than it is to try to come up with 500 words when nothing is going on that I want to write about, except maybe the weather. So, there you go.

But, the other day, I was digging around and found a bunch of ROMS to various stand-up arcade games I had from my old laptop. So I downloaded a MAME emulator program for the Mac, and started digging around all of these old games. I don’t know about you, but I played a lot of arcade games back in the day, and I don’t just mean the really popular Pac-Man/Donkey Kong/Centipede era. I found a lot of these games and played them, and they totally reminded me of my days in a Bally’s, wasting a couple dollars while at the mall. And video game brand loyalty is a huge thing, and it made me think about all of the different brands and games and the whole caste system of consoles, and who played what.

For example, there were certain games that I absolutely loved to play. Like there was the Star Wars vector game, the original Tetris, this Tetris plus enhancements called Bloxxed, and Roadblasters. If an arcade had all of those, it was excellent. If it had one or two of them, it was good. If an arcade (like that shitty one in Pierre Moran Mall, or maybe one in an airport or something) didn’t have any of those games, it sucked, and either I’d play nothing and go off to the Walden Books, or maybe drop a quarter on a sub-par game, just to see if maybe it was really okay. There were a lot of games that either I didn’t like or didn’t see the point of, like most of the three-button-attack quarter-eater types that came out later, or the driving games that didn’t have a good catch to them. I mean, for a buck in gas, I could drive around the parking lot of the mall in my real car and have more fun than half of the sloppy-controller stand-up drivers out there in the early 90s.

But different people liked different games, which always made it weird when you went with other people, because people always had different allegiances to different games. It’s weird, because now, decades later, I can still remember what friends liked what games, way more than I could remember their favorite beer or band or movie. And that would be cool, but sometimes, based on the games there, it would cause problems. Like, sometimes I’d go to the Bally’s in College Mall in Bloomington with Bill, and I’d inevitably buy into some “a shitload of tokens for $20” deal before I’d remember that they had absolutely no machines I liked. I mean, the best game on the list was a Ms. Pac Man, and I could play that for about six months on $20 of change, given that I wouldn’t die of boredom. But there was some game there that he loved, and he’d play it all day, even though I was either no good at it or hated it. So you have that. Another example is that Spaceport had some pretty esoteric game machines, so if you stopped in there with someone who just wanted to play the core Atari games, they’d be screwed.

Oh, at the lowest end of the totem pole were the situations where you only had one or two games, and you had to pick one. A classic example is when you’re with your family at Pizza Hut, and there are two games, and it’s either Bust-a-Move or Robocop, and neither one are very good, but you need something to do until the breadsticks arrive or something. This also applies to dorms with a couple of stray machines, or little arcades in laundromats or whatever.

Another game I didn’t get were the sports games, like the football, hockey, and whatnot. None of my friends played these, because I think you had to like the sport in question, and none of my friends were huge soccer fans. The only sports game that was the exception to the rule was Summer Games. This - I think it came out around the time of the 84 Olympics, but wasn’t a sponsored game or anything - it was all of the track and field events, like throwing discus and running around a track and soforth. But the thing is, to run, you had to slap two buttons really fast to get your dude to run or throw or something. And for some reason, that made it different; it wasn’t about your ability to know about NFL football. It was about how fast you could slap two buttons, and dammit, you knew you could do it faster than the other guy. The sport part was secondary - it could have been monster trucks or shooting dragons or anything else, as long as it was competitive and measured your ability to pretty buttons at light-speed. I knew a lot of people who were really into that, and you could always tell when someone was playing, because it sounded like someone was bitch-slapping a keyboard. And now we wonder why so many people have RSI.

The competitive games, or more likely the collaborative ones, are the things that have so much memory to me. I’ve already written many times about how me and Ray used to play Smash TV for hours, feeding many quarters into it. I think the first game like this I remember is the original Gauntlet. When I play this now, it reminds me of Adam Pletcher, who I knew from school, and who is now more known for working on the video game Descent and a million others. We played the game a couple times at the Aladdin’s Castle in the Concord Mall, although at that point, the game was so damn popular, all four slots would be full, and the second someone ran out of change, someone else would jump in. Games like this were great, and it’s amazing how shitty some of them are when you look at them now. There’s a Simpsons game that came out in 90 or so that was the same console as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and X-Men game. Then, the graphics were mind-numbing, but now, I cannot stop laughing my ass off the images are so blocky and bad. But being able to get two or three people on a machine to all kick ass hid the poor graphics somewhat.

One of the games that I played but didn’t entirely like at first was Golden Axe. The student union had a room with maybe six or eight game machines, all of them duds, and one of them was Golden Axe. I reluctantly played the side-scroller for a while, and it really grew on me. The animations weren’t bad, but the sound effects were horrible. (When I was playing the other day, Sarah said that the dying people’s screams sounded like some kind of Crunk rap.) It’s also a collective game, although I played by myself a lot. I got the ROM and actually finished the game, which I guess is easier when you’re pressing a button instead of feeding in a coin, but it brought back so many memories of wasting time at the IMU.

Anyway, just some vague thoughts. I think if I had a lot of time and could remember more of this, I could write some kind of book or at least a good essay on greater taxonomy of video games. But, I’ve got these music reviews to write…

I’m in the middle of eating a huge burrito from the tortilla joint on 30th ave and failing miserably. Time to go get a fork…

This was a weekend of media consumption. I did get out on Saturday and do some shopping with some fairly decent weather on hand, about 40 degrees and clear. I made a mega-purchase at Best Buy, since I was still getting over the whole sick thing and wanted some stuff to do while planted on the couch. The big thing that I spent too much time on was Mercenaries for the PS2, which is a very strange little game that’s a mix of Grand Theft Auto with SOCOM, and then some. You play an “independent contractor” who is dropped in North Korea to go through a deck of cards that contains all of the evil generals and lieutenants serving under the big man dictator. Like GTA, if you see it, you can pretty much steal it, as far as all modes of transport are concerned. Pandemic (Star Wars: Battlefront) did the game for LucasArts, and it’s got all the little touches while still being immensely playable. I’ve finished almost the whole lower rung of lieutenants, although I still haven’t figured out how to take people alive, since I usually end up nuking everything from orbit and then identifying the corpses for my reward money. It’s a lot of fun, but I think it’s going to turn into a huge time-suck. And I finally got the first season of the Chapelle Show on DVD, and laughed my ass off at that for a few hours.

I’m waiting on an eBay auction for a new mountain bike frame for another endless project I think I’m starting. I have this idea to strip my old bike of components and build up a new one with a lighter frame that doesn’t have a rear suspension. The rear shock is a nifty looking toy and all, but it actually sucks when you’re really torquing down on an uphill and the whole frame is bouncing up and down on you. Also, the bigger problem is that I have two different racks I’ve tried to put on the back of that bike, and neither one works well because a bike with half of its frame moving doesn’t really have three stable points to mount a rack. I want to get a good, rideable bike by spring and maybe get out of the neighborhood a bit more. I’ve rode from my place to Flushing Meadow a couple of times, and although it’s slightly a pain in the ass to get there, you have miles and miles of strips of asphalt to ride up and down, and also a lot of dirt trails with fun hills and stuff.

There is no way I am going to finish this burrito. I need to put this thing down and get back on the Playstation or something…

I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 too damn much. The problem is I don’t want to write, or can’t write, and that game is the most perfect way to waste time since the invention of SimCity. I don’t even play the missions or attempt to advance through the strategy part of the game; most of my time is spent stealing cop cars and then destroying them in extravagant stunts that usually involve total destruction of the vehicle. I’ve been trying to make some of the crazier jumps with more and more stupid vehicles. There’s a jump over an elevated train platform that’s in all of the commercials, and last night, I made it with a stolen ambulance. I didn’t make it with a flatbed truck - it got stuck on the platform and I had to abandon it. I also got a tank to jump over the water between two piers by rotating the cannon backwards and firing shells to increase my acceleration. It’s a very addicting game, very realistic in some ways, and yet the over-the-top satire in the general theme makes it hilarious to me.

I have way too many things to do, but all of them are drudge-work, fixing stupid design stuff on web pages and finishing this giant trip report from last July in Vegas. I also need to figure out what to do do for this October trip. I wish I knew some people that lived in Vegas that I could hang out with, but I haven’t had much luck googling around on it.

Okay, I should get back to writing this thing…

Last night, I bought a Nintendo-64, a second controller, Diddy Kong Racing, and the South Park game. It’s a present for Marie, sort of like when Homer got Marge a bowling ball. No, really, she used to have one, and I thought it would be fun. I already told her about it, so I’m not outing myself by posting this. Of course, I set all of the stuff up last night, and stayed up way too late playing it.

First impressions: I’ve spent almost zero time with the Playstation or N64, so I was going into this as a complete novice. First, I like the way the console looks - it reminds me of a piece of Sun hardware, or maybe an SGI. It’s also very simple, with few switches, buttons, or jacks. I’m fortunate in that my video/audio setup at home is very generous in facilitating the video/audio setups. People with older TVs would probably have much more trouble dealing with the composite video out and stereo audio out. The controllers are a bit weird, and I still get screwed up on how to hold them and use the 90,000 assorted buttons. They are pretty comfortable after a while, though.

I first started with the South Park game. I expected more realism than other 8 and 16 bit games, but this totally blew me away. It has the whole introduction to the show, and the graphics look almost exactly like the TV show. Although you can tell the shapes are computer generated, it is not blocky or pixelated at all - it is very smooth and shadowed correctly, and looks truly amazing for something on a TV. The sound is even better - it’s stereo, and I ran it through my receiver, which added even more to the effect.

The South Park game is fun - you play one of the four kids, and then you meet up with the other 3 and do various things in the town, trying to finish each level. I haven’t played games that much, and I usually play very specific ones, so I was getting my ass kicked over and over. It is funny to hear Cartman die - all of the characters talk, and even swear (it is beeped out, mostly). But I wanted to see the whole game. So, I got on dejanews, did a search, and found a page of cheat codes. The codenames are funny, and let you enable different characters and other stuff. I think ASSMAN gives you invulterability. If you have the game and are trying to find the codes, email me and I will send them to you. I found a code that turned on everything, and started kicking ass. There’s one weapon which is a terrance and phillip doll, which is like a grenade of flatulence. You can throw a whole bunch of them and leave a path of deadly landmines which produce giant mushroom clouds of green gas. I also had a lot of fun with the cow launcher, and the chicken sniper weapon. At the start of each round, there is a little cartoon that tells you your mission, usually with Chef talking to the kids. It’s very cool - I need to get in there and start going through all of the levels.

I played Diddy Kong Racing a few times, although I spent so much time on South Park that I couldn’t do much more than run a few races. It’s very cool, the graphics look like a Disney cartoon and the sounds are very cute. If I had a kid, I would get them a N-64 just because so many of the games are like this. I couldn’t figure out the controls, but I will mess with it a bit more. Marie likes the game a lot, so we will play it more when she gets here.

Writing, of course, is at a dead stop. Maybe tonight I’ll get a few lines done, but now I need to clean the house and shop for Marie’s visit. I think my sleep schedule is about up to date now, so that’s cool. I also go to the dentist in a couple of hours, and find out how much heavy construction they’ll be doing over the next few months.

I found an odd page on the technology of Star Wars at http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~saxton/starwars/