Games! Games! Games!

There will be a bar and a patio, free alcohol, DJ INVIDKLLR and DJ V.I.N.Cent, and we’ve even rented a bunch of stand-up arcade games for your early 80’s amusement. Frogger or Ms. Pac-Man, anyone?

Also: "When Ultimate Play The Game - by that time known as Rare - began advertising for new staff, Ritman approached them and found that they had been playing his games as much as he had been playing theirs. He started work with the company on an independent basis, and began working on their GLAM development tool-kit, along with Guy Stevens... Ritman reveals that there were a number of arcade games that he also worked on with the company, though all remain unreleased. “I think my style of game play is more suited to the long haul rather than the quick fix required in an arcade game,” he muses." Damn, how do we get hold of those games?

If there was ever a thought of how one would look like or live in a Pixelated world, this would be it. Citypixel, goes back to basics and it so old school, it goes back to the very essence of what makes virtual worlds great (without needing the heavy computer resources and network bandwidth). It somehow reminds me of the old Japanese arcade games of the 80s I used to play with.

Gobble your way through Pac-Land and get warped back to the 80s with this awesome Pac-Man 25th Anniversary Arcade Machine ($2,995) being sold at Brookstone. We’re talking about the game that changed the world, kids. To quote Kristian Wilson, CEO of Nintendo in the 80s: “Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive music.” Do I need to say more?

I just published a new build of NetSudoku. This version includes a number of new features:

When it comes to Xbox Live arcade games it ’s inevitable that Mutant Storm Reloaded is going to be compared to the popular and addictive Geometry Wars, and with good reason. Both games share a similar style of play and control system but there are many important differences, some good, others very very bad.

We zijn verder gelopen, binnen 5 minuten hadden we onze eindbestemming berijkt. Het wachten was op Matthijs! Na 2 minuten wachten was mattijs er, en liepen we naar binnen. JammermaarHellaas waren er kinder feestjes aan de gang, dus hadden we gereserveerd voor 17.20. Na een uur wachten en arcade games gespeelt te hebben….

I found it interesting how many similarities exist between the release of early arcade games like Asteroids and Pachinko, in Japan, and the release of the Xbox 360 game system a couple months ago. Pachinko was noted for creating a Yen shortage in Japan, and even many early arcade games placed in bars in the U.S. drew enormous amounts of people to play them, leaving companies like Atari unable to keep up with the demand. When the Xbox 360 was released late last year, there was almost an instant shortage of game systems, leaving people scrambling around and waiting in long lines, only to be turned down and told that the next shipment wasn’t expected until Feb. 2006 (long after the Christmas shopping season was over). This was surprising to many after Microsoft had assured stores and consumers that it would maintain a constant supply of systems on store shelves after witnessing similar issues with the release of the Playstation 2. I find it unfortunate for Microsoft that they were unable to plan ahead better, leaving many wanting to purchase the Xbox 360 system waiting and without systems. This definitely reminds me of the early days of video games and Atari, when the company was struggling to keep up with an overwhelming demand for games, often times pulling programmers and engineers away from their jobs to help manufacture the actual systems.

Peter shows off Xbox Live, a Gamer Tag, the skin he’s chosen (a Dead or Alive one), the small arcade games on Live. You can clearly see the Media Center icon at the bottom. He shows the parental control settings.

To reassure people that I’ve not suddenly moved away from my usual interests, which would be a worrying sign indeed, here’s my solution to the “omg iPod or PSP it’s so confusing” dilemma. Yes, it’s a handheld that runs Linux. No, it’s not just because it runs Linux; it’s arguably more powerful than the PSP for a start, it’s certainly cheaper, and while only a few dodgy penguin types may be writing games for it it can already run all of the open-source emulators out there, allowing one to run original arcade games, (S)NES titles and so on. If you own the original games, of course. It would clearly be illegal and reprehensible to emulate a Double Dragon machine unless you owned a Double Dragon† arcade machine. Which I do. Look, it’s right there. Can’t you see it?

For those of you attending my bachelor party in less than two weeks; we have MAME running on my 50″ TV. So far I’ve tested Discs of Tron, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Super Pac-Man, Xybots, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker and more. They are all working and ready for the party! We’ll also have at least 3 extra T.V.s with consoles attached so that we can run multiple retro arcade games. The Tron cocktail cabinet will be on and we’ll even run the dart board. All music provided that day will come from the coin-op wall CD Jukebox. If you can think of your favorite game that you might like to play, let me know and I’ll try ang get it ahead of time.

This past saturday we went to a party at matt and amandas house. it was a lot of fun even tho i wasnt drinking. even when youre not drinking you can always make fun of the drunk ones. we were there for like 7 hours. they did karaoke and matt gave us performance of Godmack’s VooDoo for us (by request from rene and me). matt has this video arcade stand thingy that he built and it has like a billion old arcade games on it, including dark stalkers!! i used to love that game when i was a kid. i didnt know how to play it tho so i just mashed the buttons a bunch and hoped for the best.

I think I managed to get a slight sunburn today. We (my department) had our quarterly outing; we went to Magic Mountain. I proved my prowess on the miniature golf course (ha) and we then played arcade games for a couple of hours. I where I work, seriously. How often do you get to take field trips at work, much less field trips that include freedom to drink beer on the clock. I’ve heard that for our big company outing, which is approaching, we might be doing paintball. I’ve never played paintball so I’m kind of hoping that is the activity they choose. Other options include going to a baseball game, going to the Ohio State Fair, or to a theme park.

Lately I’ve been messing around with MAME, an emulator for arcade games. Sometimes it’s actually more fun to play a series of games and watch it evolve from beginning to end. Like Space Invaders > Galaxian > Galaga Series. And the best part is that you have an infinite amount of quarters.

MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done for educational purposes and to prevent many historical games from sinking into oblivion once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course to preserve the games, you must also be able to actually play them; you can consider that a nice side effect.

M.U.L.E. is widely considered considered a groundbreaking classic in multiplayer computer gaming today, but it was widely underestimated at its time. Compared to popular arcade games of the eighties like Arkanoid, Frantic Freddie or The Last Ninja, M.U.L.E. had simple graphics and did not depend on joystick skills. Like chess, it required thinking skills and strategy to win, especially when playing against other human players. M.U.L.E. was somewhat complex to learn, at a time when electronic entertainment was new and simple.

We returned from Chicago late last night so I'm just getting around to posting. On Friday we went to see the Game On exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. It was fanfriggintastic!! The exhibit was pretty damned comprehensive. There was most everything from what is believed to be the first "console" that played pong like games (1968) to the Sony PSP (2005) and the greatest part?? It was interactive. There were old arcade games and consoles ripe for the picking. Unfortunately, the handheld games were off limits (so the NEo Geo pocket...

namco are smart and have announced that in addition to a katamari sequel, they are also reworking the original for mobile devices. nokia, despite their expertise in mobile phones, don't get casual / mobile gaming at all. in fact, they might be worse than microsoft. they're equally ignorant of it, but it's more critical to the success of their platform. nokia announced all the new n-gage titles yesterday and there was barely a casual one among the lot. the only casual title is a card full of re-issued classic arcade games. how weak is that? the second...

Nokia today announced Atari Masterpieces Volumes 1 & 2 for the N-Gage platform. Atari Masterpieces Volume 1 brings eight Atari arcade games for the N-Gage including such classics as Asteroids, Battlezone, Black Widow, Millipede, Missile Command, Red Baron, Lunar Lander and Super Breakout. Atari Masterpieces Volume 1 for the N-Gage is expected to be available worldwide in September 2005 and Volume 2 in December 2005.

W00t! These guys used a killer laser galvo system to play MAME arcade games not on your VGA monitor, not on your TV, but on your wall! Apparently there is an add on to the regular MAME32 that will output vector values for use with vector monitors. As I guess vector monitors were in short supply they used lasers. The laser control system was not scratch built (darn!) and they didn’t build the lasers either (crap!) so to do this yourself I’d guess that your going to have to spend some bucks. But hey, the final result is oh soooo sweeet!

Then check out this site, which is just chock full of vintage arcade games. Brings back memories of my days as a vidiot. No Missile Command, though. The bastards.

I have a friend that has been playing som arcade games lately. I was extremely bored one day, and kind of burned out on the usual games I play (SOF2, C&C:ZH, Q3), so I decicded to give the good old arcade games a try.

But second and more important, this insatiable need for human interaction is also influencing the bricks-and-mortar retail establishment. More and more retail stores are becoming like "hangouts." We see this with larger stores as well as shopping malls, with their food courts, playgrounds and arcade games. Again, they're becoming like amusement parks.

Toshiba has announced a display technology that makes 3-D images appear to stand out several centimeters from the surface of a specially designed screen when viewed from an angle.

The new technology, said Toshiba, opens up new areas of application for 3-D displays, including e-learning, simulations of buildings and landscapes, and arcade games.

iPodArcade.com is your one-stop resource for all iPod Games. All of our iPod games are completely free of charge and available to download. We offer different types of iPod Games, including note games and arcade games. To see which games are available to

In addition to telling the world how great XBOX Live is, I found at least one reason to renew our LIVE subscription: "Xbox Live Arcade, a new social experience that brings popular retro classics and broad-appeal games directly to the Xbox console over the Xbox Live service. Members now have a personal arcade connected to Xbox Live, offering quick and easy access to classic arcade games such as Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug as well as exciting new games such as Bejeweled and Alien Sky." That is pretty cool!

I am hopelessly addicted to playing Lumines on Sony's new PSP. There is really nothing else available for the handheld that I am all that interested in. Many of the games released so far are smaller versions of games already available for the PS2, games that would benefit from being played on a much larger screen. However, the types of games that do work exceptionally well on handhelds are puzzle and arcade games, and Lumines is one of the best puzzle games to come along in a very, very long time....

If the graphics in the old arcade games were bad (as I talked about in a past blog), the graphics in text adventure games were, well, horrible. Actually you can't judge them because there were no graphics.