Once again I've grown rather bored, jaded, and altogether uninterested in online affairs. Most of this has to do with the fact that I genuinely like building websites, getting them running, and seeing them work. After that, I tend to lose interest fairly quickly. Running a site just isn't as satisfying to me as building it. I think it's a symptom of playing with Lego's too much as a kid. Build, build, build for days, play for 10 minuntes, and then destroy it, and rebuild something else.

The same thing is going to happen to this site. I'm pushing the reset button...

I'm currently looking for this book, How To Win At Video Games. It was released in the early 80's and is spiral bound. The Consumer Guide put out a lot of different video game books around this time, but this is the one I really have my eye on as it's the one I had when I was a kid. If anyone knows of someone selling one, or has one of their own they'd like to get rid of, please get in touch.

Interesting postscript to this story, while I was looking for a cover image of this book I found another book by Consumer Guide that gave me a chuckle. It's the book How To Win At E.T. The Video Game. What poor defensless sap had to write this? Can you imagine having to play through this game enough to write an entire book on how to beat it?! Ugh, talk about cruel and unusual punishment. If I were him I would have volenteered to be burried in the New Mexico desert with the rest of the E.T. carts. That is, if I still had any mental capacity left to do so after playing that horrid game.

Just added info on my ROM Collection for those of you who like to keep tabs on that sort of thing.

Now I know that Kinja is still in Beta, and has quite a few bugs to iron out. But I found it quite funny to go to my user page today, to see my last post excerpt as the following:

Aparently those controllers really are bad!! Those little things threw out my shoulder! Now, i don't know what happened, but obviously my post got meshed with someone else's post somewhere, as obviously I didn't talk about shoulders in my 7800 post. A quick search of my thoughts archive turns up only one post with the world "shoulder" in it, and it's a rant about web design. Now I must find out whose rogue post snippit this is. Perhaps it's fate. Or perhaps someone just really has a bad shoulder. *shrug*

I think someone should write an app to actually do this, take bits and pieces from random people's web logs to make new entries. I think there's an art project in there somewhere.

I was able to pick myself up an Atari 7800 recently. The good news is I got it on the cheap and the plastic is still on the metal, meaning it's entirely scratch free. The bad news is that it still has by far the worst controllers ever designed. What was Atari thinking?! I remember playing on my cousin's system when it originally came out, and thinking the same thing then (Nintendo's D-Pad was a pretty sweet invention you gotta admit).

Anyway, I've had a few 7800 games for a while, just no system to play them on. Now that problem is solved. 18 systems and counting...

R-Type III came out for GBA recently, and I had the chance to play it. It's basically supposed to be a port of the SNES version which happened to be a really good game. Well, the GBA version wasn't. The scoring was off (the same enemy was worth different points depending on which level you were on), the 'Force' didn't seem to work properly, auto fire was more like somewhat-semi fire, the game intro was missing, and worst of all was that the collision detection was way off.

First, I'm not sure how Nintendo even let this through their rather strict QA (I guess it is R-Type), but this game is just plain bad. It was ported by a developer I'd never heard of from Italy named Raylight. I had just figured they totally botched this port, until I read a thread about it at shmups.com. One of the developers posted some info about the port process...

I read your comments on RtypeIII and would like to explain couple of things on the development of the title.

First we closed an agreement with Phantantagram interactive which went bankrupcy during the development of the game and didnt pay us. then we found DS that paid very low and wanted the game in very few weeks.

Please consider we get no reference art or source code or any kind of support from Irem Software, the only reference was the Snes game. You all can understand we rewrote the code from breginning and ripped the graphic from the snes emulator. also we had not enought time to work around many details as point system, collision, R-90 zooming intro and so on. last...the game was finished months ago, we still owe money from pubisher.

it seems that Irem lost [the source code].

yeah, we started very good and with very good intention...we also made a CG movie for the intro (presented at E3 2002, maybe you can download somewhere on the internet) and other cool staff, but Phantagram bancrupcy and DS low money and very few development time had a very bad influence on our work.

many times behind a bad game there is the hand of marketing, few money and time.

PS we have the zooming intro sequence ready, but not enough time to put in the game, as other things, sorry.

This just shows the sad state of the industry at times. Everyone thinks it's all fun and games (no pun intended) but when it comes down to it, the industry can be downright shady and repulsive. The fact that a company like Raylight got zero support on this title and now has to take the brunt of the criticism for it is a really sad state of affairs. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens more than people realize.

And Irem lost the source code to R-Type III? This concerns me even more, and really helps drive home the point I made recently about preserving game history. As we can see first hand, not only does ignorace to it severely threaten our ability to archive gamings past, but it also undermines a developers ability to port existing games to new platforms!

Annette and I went over to her parents house last night to return the Shop-Vac, but of course we had an ulterior motive...raid thier stash of 2600 games. We already had a few over here, but I wanted to see what else they had, and well, they had quite a few. Among the bounty claimed:

3-D Tic-Tac-Toe
Adventure
Air-Sea Battle
Astroblast
Blackjack [Green Text Label]
Blackjack [Yellow Text Label]
Canyon Bomber
Circus Atari
Combat [x2]
Dark Cavern
Football
Hangman [Text Label]
Hangman [Picture Label]
Human Cannonball
Indy 500
Indy 500 ["11" Text Label]
Laser Blast
Math Grand Prix
Minature Golf
Missle Command
Pele's Soccer
Q-Bert
Sky Diver
Solar Fox
Space Invaders
Space War
Star Raiders
Summer Games
Surround
Surround ["41" Text Label]
Video Checkers
Video Olympics
Warlords [x2]

Best find here is the Summer Games cart, along w/ a few of the rarer numbered text label ones. And no crappy E.T. carts!! Of course this just means now I have even more dupes and more to get rid of come our spring cleaning marathon. That, and less space to store shit.

Most people know I've been collecting ROMs for quite a while now (7 years or so), and everyone seems to ask where to get them. Of course my answer is, have patience. They mostly come is spurts. You usually find a gold mine for a short period and after a few dozen of those, you can usually build a pretty good collection (they don't last long). Luckly I found another jackpot recently, which pushed my old hard drive to the limit.

Thus I decided to buy a backup Firewire drive for extra space. 250 GB of extra space. Now I can actually sort through my collection since I have the space. Freedom at last! This also allows me to make real backups of my other files. I've also connected it all to our network so Annette can backup her files as well.

One other thing I've wanted to do is consolidate Annette and my MP3 collection. We both have pretty big collections, but not a lot of it overlaps, and we've always been struggling with who's music gets played on the stereo (since iTunes only lets you play one share at a time). Well, now that I have more room, we've put all the music into one central directory. So now both of our MP3 directories in iTunes write to the same spot, and thus we have access to the same music. Eureka! It's not quite perfect (I had originally set it up for us to use the same iTunes library files, but then only one of us could have iTunes open at a time, rather lame), but it works alright for our needs. 14.5 days worth of musical goodness!

So my buddy Mark's new venture, called Kinja launched today. Well, let me go back a bit. It's not his sole venture, obviously there were a lot of other people involved in this process. I'm sure Mark didn't do much more than keep the corporate porn archives up-to-date, and perhaps find new ways to look like he was being productive, but I digress.

Kinja is basically just an online RSS agregator, but it displays each post from the sites you subscribe to in a web log type format, which to me is actually pretty nice. I hate having to have NetNewsWire open here at work all the time to check sites, and then go home and it doesn't know I already read the updates of the day at work. Really, Kinja reminds me of Slashdot minus the commentary. It even has little icons for each site I'm subscribed to next to each post. It's definitely in beta though (even says so on their site). There's a few things they need to fix, but so far it's pretty neat. You can even share out what you're reading to the public if you want. Here's mine.

I had been seeing stuff about Kinja on Mark's site off and on, but had no idea what it was. I guess I was just out of the loop. Of course maybe if I would have went to New York last year I would have heard about it. Then again, I didn't even know everyone went to New York! How out of the smegging loop am I? I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone sometimes, totally missing out on everyone's life. Well, it is April Fool's. It's a surreal day the way it is. Guess I can't expect much.

Insert Credit has posted some of their thoughts on the Game Developers Conference sessions. Of particular interest to me was their commentary on preserving video game history and video game criticism and cultural analysis. Do yourself a favor and read these. It brings up a lot of what I've been thinking lately.

Obviously in working at a museum like the Walker, we're fairly concerned about archiving works, but even to us (and many other institutions), new media archival is a big challenge. Hardware becomes obsolete, as does software, and new standards are made. What concerns me is not how to archive media for the next 10 years, it's the next 100 that's the most troubling.

While there is a definite process for the archiving of media like film, but no such formal process exists for digital media. We may still have arcade machines that play Pac-Man today, but that is not a guarantee in 2104. Some may say that emulation could take care of this, as it does today in MAME, but again, who's to say that MAME will last 100 years? What about systems like the Vectrex, with its vector monitor and limited production run? True archival of that system over the next 100 years is a daunting task. There's a very real problem with software and hardware incompatibilities and degradation, as we move ever forward without a real process of archiving digital work.

This should probably start at the institutions most concerned with archiving, that being museums and hopefully the companies/individuals who created the original content. Unfortunately, even museums are cutting back on digital media initiatives, which doesn't bode well for that side of the equation. Like the former Curator of New Media at the Walker, Steve Dietz, once said, "For society not to be concerned with preserving [digital media] is akin to burning books". Now, perhaps the intentions are different, but the results are the same. Steve has always been one to appreciate the importance of digital media archiving, proven by his support in me and my Arcade Console project that he curated for a Carleton College exhibition. It was great as a platform to actually talk about these issues in a public forum.

On to my other point, that of gaming criticism. Since my short stint as a gaming journalist in the early 90's, gaming journalism has changed little. In some ways it has gotten worse. I think the entire notion of what gaming journalism *is* has become a self fulfilling prophecy. No one has stepped forward to give an alternative viewpoint to the norm, to step outside what has come to pass for journalism over the course of 20 years, and in essence we haven't grown at all from it. Mr. Bittani's comments in the Insert Credit piece just drive this point home.

I've often wondered if we just weren't ready for it. Gaming isn't that old, and perhaps it's just not a mature field of study. But having worked at the Walker and having seen their panel discussions and screenings for films, and the amount of dialogue and ideas presented at them, I truly believe there can be a similar dialogue to be had with games and gaming. Perhaps gaming is just lacking some sort of cultural legitimacy, and perhaps art institutions should be giving video games and interactive entertainment the same attention as film. Perhaps it will only happen from a grassroots movement. Perhaps the gaming industry itself needs to mature, I'm not sure.

But I will say there is way too much to say about gaming that hasn't been said for it to sit quietly. Going back to the issue of archiving our past, as games and developers/designers age, it becomes more and more important to have these conversations and to encourage these dialogues. I really feel we'll be missing out on a huge part of gaming if we don't.