The last of the video game ANSIs?

I know, everything after my last game ANSI post is anticlimax, but every time I think I can close the book on this particular niche, I find one or two extra items and open another draft blog post to share a few more with you. All of my likely search terms in sixteencolors.net are starting to come up dry, however, so while there is assuredly more video game ANSI art out there... I have picked all of the low-hanging fruit. This one inspired me to re-open my file, another piece released in my own computer artgroup -- as menu artwork for a programmed e-mag (electronic magazine), hence requiring being run and screen-captured in DOSBox in order to get a good look at it. Well, I went to the trouble, so I may as well let you enjoy it. Mage, not challenging my impression that he liked to work in green palettes, from an issue of the Kithe e-mag:

This is a very small fragment of an enormous piece I had the fortune to be a part of, a massive collection of odds and ends by local artist Spirit of Illusion that I spotted in the "ARTSCENE" episode of Jason Scott's BBS documentary series! ... as this is the only part of the work that pertains to games (game-to-toy mascot Earthworm Jim), I've left out 95% of it, including my regrettable rhyming poem for the BBS advertised, "The Twisted Tower".

This one was recently profiled in a Facebook ANSI artists group as a picture of the day from the back archives: the artist is Big Yellow Man, and the scene depicted is of Space Invaders being blasted out of the sky by a naval battleship.

A revisitation to a popular subject, Sonic the Hedgehog returns, in his "Sonic 2" incarnation, in this early work:

Here are a couple of related works by different authors, celebrating the less-common (peculiarly, given the PC warez context of ANSI art production) subject of computer games. To wit -- Doom 1's space marine (here, have an extra shotgun), plus a logo for Doom 2.  If memory serves correct -- probably worth investigating, and possibly providing grist for a final instalment of this interminable series -- some Apogee-ish shareware titles would terminate with ANSI screens promoting their games.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, an artist who adopted the word "arcade" as their nickname might be expected to produce artworks on video game themes. Well, Arcade of Acme doesn't disappoint, with three items here from the Super Mario corner: Starting with a smallscale piece depicting a Mushroom Kingdom hill and mushroom, they get more elaborate.

Next he cooked up Mario in a Frog Suit from Super Mario Bros. 3, swimming around underwater:

... and a final piece by him, here is Super Mario.  I can practically hear him saying "It's-a me, Mario!  Watch-a the next-a episode of-a my Super Mario Super Show!"

This might be enough for a reasonable blog post, but I am not a reasonable blog writer.  I have more pieces and I just want to expedite clearing them out of there so I can return to other subjects.  We open our closing act with two Street Fighter pieces, one of Cammy...

... or her blow-up doll equivalent.  Teenaged boys: when their best reference for female anatomy is the works of Rob Liefeld, these regrettable results are perhaps inevitable.  This one is a step up, Chun-Li and a Street Fighter-style font to boot!:

Now the flip side to Street Fighter is, naturally, Mortal Kombat, and here we have some of its fearsome opponents rendered in a similarly wide array of skill levels.  Round 1: Scorpion!  Get over here!

This Goro is more impressive, though of course it's easier to draw four arms when all of them are out-of-frame:

Now for purposes of comparing and contrasting, two versions of Kano.  A nasty one...

And an awesome one:

Finally, one more version of the MK logo to bring us home:

"The Space Bar", 1997.

Where have I been? Playing the stuffing out of my new NES? Sadly, not yet. (Maybe soon, however!) The good part about reading really good bloggers in your field such as the CRPG Addict or The Digital Antiquarian is that they inspire you to new heights of greatness. The sad part is that unless these new aspirations are matched with an increase in available time in which to step up one's undertakings, activity dwindles away to a mere trickle. Can't it be enough to just post a neat ad for a cool game once in a while without doing research, conducting interviews, making cross-platform comparisons and writing a footnoted essay?

(Yes. The answer is yes. On Tumblr, where I see whole flotillas of neat ads drifting by every day with little or no context, there wouldn't even be any question. But here, I see a blank screen full of a text entry field, and feel compelled to, well, fill it. No need!)

You've been ordered to interrogate all suspicious-looking characters.

(Better make it a double.)

A comic sci-fi adventure CD-ROM by Steve Meretzky, where even the drinks look suspicious.

WWW.THESPACEBAR.COM

InfoCom's subversive comic mastermind Steve Meretzky rolled with the punch after Activision's acquisition of the company sucked the life out of it. Actually, he managed to play both ends against each other, simultaneously developing games for the new old Activision/Infocom like LGOP2 as well as for Infocom's successors at Legend (like The Superhero League of Hoboken), somehow wielding an intense outsider charisma perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the renowned reality distorting effects of the other Steve, who returned from exile back to Apple this year. Maybe there is a certain resemblance.

In any case, Steve had seen the effects of what happens when you are beholden to a single master, who is turned out from his castle. Perhaps seeing which direction the wind was blowing for the briefly-renewed Infocom, unwilling to put all his eggs in Legend's basket (a fate well-avoided, lest he end up scripting cutscenes in Unreal 2), he established Boffo Games with some other InfoCom refugees including Michael Dornbrook, whose game industry career began as the self-proclaimed head of the independent Zork User's Group before being brought in-house to develop InvisiClues... and who ultimately caught lightning in a bottle the second time with Harmonix's Guitar Hero series, one of the only (well, very few) common touchstones between the boom times of InfoCom and Harmonix.

Sadly, this attempt to go it on their own was unsuccessful -- The Space Bar was their final game before closing up shop. It doesn't matter if it was any good -- the whole consarned adventure game genre was on its way out, where it would remain for a decade or more, and their attempts to diversify with the puzzle game Hodj 'n Podj were to no avail, as that genre was also about to be handed a cardboard box with all of its possessions and escorted out of the game shop.

I never got a chance to play the game and it falls in that uneasy area of early multimedia works now that are presumed hard to get running outside of the originally-intended environment. I might well be saving myself from disappointment; the CD-ROM adventure produced very few winners outside of the 7th Guest and Myst, and even those I didn't much like. The setting was probably better handled in Legend's own game adaptation of local author Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" books, and it's eminently possible that Steve with The Space Bar and Douglas Adams with Starship Titanic ended up with less working separately 13 years later than they did working together on the HHG game back at InfoCom. All we're left with is a title that's a bit of awkward early-microcomputer wordplay reminiscent of the Zork Chronicles book tie-in, and even that pun has been done better:

Achievement unlocked: the Nintendo Entertainment System

Long-promised at my games parties, but never yet realised: the missing elephant in the room, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Its absence has been conspicuous at my events: I talk about big pixels and classic systems, but then the oldest console available for play is the Sega Genesis -- a game-changer, but still one several generations in to the industry. 16-bit is represented, but where's 8-bit? (No, the Atari Flashback doesn't quite count: that's old software on new hardware.) I once owned a NES, which I painstakingly assembled piecemeal from individual components sourced from local thrift shops. Suspecting that this line of collecting wouldn't serve me well in the end, I traded it in to local multimedia locus Video In in exchange for admission to one of their sporadic "video game orgy" all-night retro video game party fundraisers. (No cash, but here: raw materials for future fundraising!) I never had any cartridges for it, and besides, always figured I could just patchwork myself up another unit if I wanted to later on, an assumption that turned out to be faulty! Once I foolishly got on the retro hardware kick in a serious way, I found that an affordable NES had in the meantime become unobtainable, rating a $50 price tag without cords, games or joysticks while Gamecubes unimaginably more powerful gathered dust, neglected at $10 sitting beside it on the shelf. Thanks to the formidable power of nostalgia, the NES had emerged from the Trough of No Value and had come out as actually quite a rare and desired piece of kit! And consequently I couldn't get my hands on one, a necessary crown jewel of any serious collection, without dropping more cash on it than I was willing to entertain. (But wait! If I can find a TV set old enough to hook up the VHF/UHF screw terminals, we can play the Tooth Invaders cart on my VIC-20! What do you mean, that isn't your nostalgia? What about the game of Hang-On built into my Sega Master System?)

Anyhow, during my gauging interest and spreading the word for my video game parties (there have been, what, three of them now?), various individuals have chimed in volunteering specific pieces of vintage gear: one friend brought his CoLeCoVision, but the VHF/UHF screw terminal problem arose again (also, incidentally, thwarting use of the VIC-20.) Another friend suggested his NES might be welcome at such a function, and then failed to turn up to any three of the functions despite months of notice. Well, we managed to touch base, and he endowed me with his gear, supposing that in my collection where it would get run through its paces twice a year it would find more and better use than under his custody, where it had languished in disuse since, well, childhood. Circumstances had delivered me a half-dozen NES carts with no machine on which to run them, so I was thrilled at the opportunity to finally walk through that door. We were all very keen to see what was in the bundle he brought in the door:

No mere ad-hoc backpack repurposed for console transportation, this was an official Nintendo carrying case designed and intended for the purpose of packing up your machine and its games at point A and toting them safely to points B, C and beyond. Its existence is a somewhat sad footnote to my friend's home-shuffling childhood among divorced parents, but supposing such an existence is your juvenile fate, better to do it with an NES suitably stowed and on the go than otherwise! It makes for an excellent distraction from the inability of grown-ups to get their acts together. But enough moralizing! Wait, what's that in the front pouch?

We're looking at 1943, Bubble Bobble, Marble Madness, RBI Baseball, and Skate or Die! A nice bump to my existing (and hitherto unplayable) NES cart collection of Captain Skyhawk, Pin-Bot, Rygar, Shinobi and Super Mario Bros. 3. SMB3 is the cat's meow, but Marble Madness is pretty hard to beat and Bubble Bobble is basically the ne plus ultra of cooperative games. Now all I need is a set of power and A/V cords! Every step of the way closes half of the remaining distance between where we are and actually playing these games on their original hardware.

Ironically, since my last game party, I was pledged two more NES-playing machines by like-minded friends who wanted to see their childhood treasures go to better use than the yellowed units were seeing in their closets, forgotten and neglected. Thus, for my next game party around November, I may go from having 0 NESes on tap to 3! It never rains but it pours. It's a good problem to have -- it even raises the option of having multiple NESes set up at the same time!

Now, we all know that this blog's intended purpose is for me to transcribe and analyse advertisements for video games, ideally ones printed in comic books. I was skeptical, but as best as I can tell, in over 2 gigs of ad scans across nearly 2 thousand files still unshared, I don't have any ads for the NES? (By contrast, I have 2 for the Virtual Boy.) Maybe it was so compelling consumers didn't need it to be advertised to them, they just already knew that they needed one -- you just had to look at the competition to make up your mind.

My old friend has also offered me his dust-gathering Xbox 360, which is objectively bigger news (forget this space shuttle in the driveway, look at the pennyfarthing bicycle I've been bequeathed!), but for lack of nostalgia it gets relegated to footnote-like status in this blog and in the popular imagination, which I think is hilarious. Never having owned one, I've avoided collecting games for it, but I suppose I can start keeping my eyes open at garage sales and thrift stores now -- just as well, since the PS2/Xbox era discs are starting to be fewer and farther between.

Game Boy pocket, 1996.

Not much to share here today: I've got some larger and more interesting posts in progress, but they're more like work and take time. This called for a quick turnaround, so here's a quick and dirty ad post for the first time in yonks. Here we are, back at the Game Boy we last saw about a month ago on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. This is the later "Pocket" version of the handheld console. The ad is courtesy of Vintage Computing & Games, which looked at it a bit over a year ago.

Game Boy pocket

Now in six tasty colours

It's not unknown for Nintendo to dwell perhaps overly on the aesthetic variations on their basic and simple hardware. Henry Ford boasted of the Model T "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black." but Nintendo has always been happy to reward its loyalists with the ability to coordinate their devices with their overall decor. Admittedly, offerings from rivals Sony, Microsoft and even Sega have often looked like they would only really be fully appropriate as part of the on-board entertainment systems on one of Disaster Area's sundiving stunt ships.

"That," he said, "that ... is really bad for the eyes ..." Ford looked. He too stood astonished. It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. "It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!" Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love. The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it. "Your eyes just slide off it ..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip.

And so forth -- don't get me starting Hitchhiker's Guide quotes: I won't stop. (But in deference to the recently-passed Towel Day, I may as well pass along the link for the new, 30th-anniversary implementation of the HHGTTG text adventure game, now in HTML5!)

But back to the matter at hand, I guess what they're getting at with this ad is that Game Boy pockets are cool and fun in a similar way to the cool fun of drinking Slurpees from the local 7-11, which are likely to stain your tongue some heinous neon tint after freezing your brain. It's a dense little unexplicated reference: anyone who needs to know will appreciate it subconsciously.

The evocation of the 1980 D&D monster the Gibbering Mouther by this "wall of tongues" effect is probably unintentional.

Anyhow, my Game Boy-related excuse for making this post here today is because this morning at shift change a co-worker invited me to tarry a moment; having previously overheard me talking up my fabulous video game party, which wasn't really her cup of tea, she revealed that she still had her childhood Game Boy (because anything not explicitly thrown out is retained) and would be happy to give it a good home under my custody. With the video game party behind me, I'd pretty much forgotten the exchange, but apparently she hadn't -- I was delighted this morning to be endowed with a working GB and its two killer apps, Super Mario Land and Tetris -- arguably the best video game ever made, shortly to be celebrating the 30th anniversary of its creation in the USSR... maybe I will learn the rest of its theme music in honor of the occasion.

I previously owned a defunct Game Boy but got to enjoy a fine selection of its carts harnessing the power of the Super Game Boy adaptor, which duplicates the hardware contents of a Game Boy in cartridge form, parasitically hijacking the Super Nintendo's joystick input and video/sound output. So I'm looking forward to playing Game Boy Tetris with the adaptor, on a big screen, in colour, with block-rocking beats.

Thanks, Anne-Marie! I'll try to take a better selfie next time. She claimed it had just been sitting in a drawer for 20 years, which is sadly very likely, but I was thrilled to flip the switch and observe the power light going on. Typically in such cases the batteries would eventually corrode and explode, leaking battery acid everywhere, rendering the insides of the machine messy if not outright destroyed -- seemingly the fate of my Game Gear (though I have a lead suggesting that cleaning with vinegar can reverse some of the alkaline "battery acid"'s effects. Happily not so in this case!

Video game ANSI art: Reset Survivor's DECAR.ANS

Here it is, the ne plus ultra epic masterwork I reserved from the previous post on Blocktronics' 1980 artpack. After this, all other scriveners of video game ANSI art may as well go home. So just what is it we have got, here, anyway? There's plenty!

"Winners Don't Use Drugs" -- the first time I remember ever seeing this PSA appended to an arcade game's attract mode was, hilariously, Narc (1988, WMS... though oddly the Wikipedia link suggests the campaign began the following year, in '89.) Do you suppose William S. Sessions might have fried my ass with a rocket bomb after I told him "I give up!"?

Next up is obviously Ms. Pac-Man (who else rocks go-go boots quite like that?), though I must confess I can't locate the source of that particular presentation of her. And the "READY!" is also authentic Pac-Man! Then we see some Ms. Pac-Man game sprites, seamlessly segue-ing into Galaga ships -- seemingly a non sequitur, but they're both Namco games, the former from 1982 and the latter from 1981. So our trip through time here isn't necessarily in chronological sequence, but we haven't seen any tremendous leaps yet.

Next up looks like Atari's 1980 Missile Command, though again I've never seen those specific instructions before. Next a return back to Namco and 1982 with Dig-Dug, with a Pooka being blown up (inflated, that is) taking over the foreground. Those don't look like Fygars in the background, but I'm not sure what else they might be, unless there's some game mash-up going on in this particular sequence. (We will be seeing a great deal more of it.)

We're maintaining a 1980 holding pattern with a classic title from still another company, this time Stern and their game Berzerk, complete with quotes from its early and expensive sampled speech synthesis. Then we see another classic from another historical also-ran, the unmistakable Q-Bert from Gottlieb (1982), but instead of the typical enemies Coily and Slick on his Escherian pyramid, here we have a "Sidestepper" crab from Mario Bros. (1983, Nintendo) and what appears to be the titular frog from Frogger (Konami, 1981).

I don't recognize the rainbow that the pyramid dissolves into, but the face behind it is that of Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981) and it is into his scaffolding platform level that the rainbow resolves, with a new champion having reached the top to best Mario -- the ostrich-riding knight from Williams' 1982 game Joust. Something else is fishy two levels below that knight, with what appears to be a happy ambulatory bean jumping around -- a character or power-up I feel I ought to be able to place but can't quite lay my finger on. (Is it one of the early arcades' numerous eggplants?) Below the legume is a chef, apparently the protagonist of Data East's 1982 BurgerTime.

Donkey Kong's scaffolding eventually resolves, dumping a final barrel into the playfield of Atari's Centipede (1981), which is populated not with insects but the Grunt and Hulk robots of Williams' 1982 Robotron: 2084. Rounding the bend, that scene resolves into a background of the keys-on-chains of Nintendo's 1982 Donkey Kong Junior with a skeletal Dirk the Daring from one of Dragon's Lair's (1983) countless death sequences.

That's about it. A price of 67 cents with the message "push to reset" is unclear to me, a final mystery (well no, that would be the filename "DECAR"), reminiscent of a redemption mechanical game, but it may just be a reference to the artist's handle, resetsurvivor. And there we are. With the exception of the anti-drug message, all games depicted in this work date to a period of just a few years -- a "golden age" of the arcades -- from 1980 to 1983.

(Final contextual clarification: large rectangular "glitch"es you may have observed scattered throughout the piece are just ANSI shading blocks writ large 8)

ETA, clarification from the artist:

"thanks for the awesome dissection of the DECAR (decade arcade) piece, Rowan! The Ms Pacman is actually an original. A combination of the Japanese and American versions of MsP. I liked both designs and decided to mash em together.

The 'defend cities' pops up before the wave and volley of missiles in missile command.

The things in the dig dug tunnels are the humans from defender.

The rainbow is indeed from tron. It's the MCP ... I think? I forgot already. That pattern in the 'rainbow' is a simulation of fighting the mcp in tron. when you threw the disc it would take away a little block .

That 'bean' is the hot dog from Burgertime.

Also the 'push to reset' is just a play on my name combined with the 'push to reject' instructions on coin slots." (and 67 cents = 6lock7ronics)

And now you know the rest of the story!

Video game ANSI part 3 - Blocktronics 1980

I enjoyed good success with my previous two posts on this subject -- the obvious good fit between video game characters (and often outright sprite art) and the textmode graphics format of ANSI art. In my adolescence I was plunged into the weird world of textmode computer art, not for any retro reason -- that was just the way dialup BBSes distinguished themselves. The technology has moved on to heights unimagined, but similarly to how I cannot shake memories of the great old games I played back then, neither can I forget the satisfyingly minimalist aesthetic of ANSI art.
The ANSI art scene is long since defunct, but disparate onetime practitioners of the arcane art have found themselves swept together once again for sporadic releases of works made for old time's sake. Specifically, the group "Blocktronics" has just released an artpack of works themed "1980", and when considering the '80s, many of the artists thought about old video games -- and rendered out some textmode visual impressions of them. For your convenience, I have skimmed the pack of its game-related works and present them to you, here. (There are many other impressive works in the artpack, including a conversion of a Patrick Nagel piece, a tribute to the Moore/Gibbons Watchmen and a Max Headroom portrait, so if the look of these appeals to you, please don't hesitate to go check out the rest of it!)

Always, you must begin at the beginning: the FILE_ID.DIZ would instruct BBS file areas what the contents of the archive were, and here they are represented by a Pac-Man ghost.

At the bottom of the infofile, filled with nonsense typical of the '80s, there is a bright portrait of Capcom's MegaMan reclining by Enzo.

The Konami code will be well-drilled-in to anyone who ever owned one of the company's carts on their Nintendo Entertainment System, and here it is celebrated with one of their hardest games, its logo reproduced with great fidelity (using the advanced XBIN textmode format) by Fever.

Because even new video games owe a big debt to their predecessors, we have a long specimen of what might have once been termed a "scrolly", giving you a peek at the overall tapestry 25 lines at a time, this one themed after That Game Company's Journey, proudly painted by Reset Survivor.

Reset Survivor provided one more video-game-related piece for the artpack, but I have decided to reserve it for a post all its own -- truly it is just that epic. Cheers and fear not -- someday I will get back to video game ads scanned from comic books. Someday.

Yard Sale roundup, April 2014 edition PLUS celebrating 25k views!

Congratulations, readers! (Or, far more likely, Google Image-searchers who never see any of this text content! Google, do your bloggers a favour and endow them with special powers to force their image-scummers to read their posts!) We just surpassed a total of 25 thousand hits to the blog! This has been a good month here, also its most-viewed month ever despite deviating from the script (hello, video game comic book ads? That's what the URL said, at least!) and serving up some atypical content on niche topics (the demo of my vintage computer, the TINK!TONK! book, the two obituaries, that Lotus 1-2-3 VHS tape, and of course "realia" ... and somewhere along the line we actually did accidentally air a couple of video game ads, hitherto unseen here since mid-February. Essentially, this blog has no theme anymore beyond "Stuff I feel like writing about".) Some specific posts saw some mild promo on FaceBook and Google+, which led to big traffic spikes to those specific posts. Will I ever see regular commentors again? Does this blog have subscribers? Maybe it will somehow find its community. (Occasionally I despair of the time and effort needed to enrich these ads with transcriptions, context and analysis and wonder if I might be doing myself a favour if I turned it into a Tumblr imageblog. It hasn't quite happened yet!)

Anyhow, today was Port Coquitlam's city wide garage sale. As you may recall from past posts, my partner comes from a line of inveterate deal-seekers, spending more weekends than not logging visits to garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, flea markets and thrift stores. I didn't even really collect games (at least, not physical media 8) before meeting her and having to come up with some category of goods of interest to me to seek out on these expeditions. It's been chilling to see the onward march of time throttling what I'm likely to find secondhand -- I remember finding NES carts cheap and in great abundance, while now they are the sole province of collectors who hit up ebay to maximise the return on their investment. My family hit these sales during the golden age of PS2 / Xbox / Gamecube game turnover, and now in town when we find games at sales at all, they are more typically of the following generation -- PS3, Xbox 360, Wii -- none of whose machines I own or can easily emulate (and whose games, consequently, I fail to collect, for that way madness lies.) Anyhow, we are now quite distant from the opening sentence of this paragraph, but if you will hold my hand and nostalgically visit back to it, you can note that I invoked it for two reasons: the first advantage of a city-wide garage sale is a sheer density of sites -- you don't have to look for sales, you can just drive down a single street and stop when you find one that you like: they come geographically pre-optimised, and I think we hit up some 15 of them this morning... the second item of note is that Port Coquitlam is of that species of municipality considered a suburb, and hence its propensity for being hoovered clean by hungry urban dealers and hipsters is lesser. Thus, I ended up with a pretty good haul for my kingly $20 budget:

Starting at 1 o' clock, we've got two cheapie Nintendo DS games: Petz Dogz Pack and Monster High - Ghoul Spirit; then there is the PlayStation 1 game of Jurassic Park - the Lost World (which I was delighted to see reviewed at MobyGames under the hilarious headline "The worst game in history!" ... GameSpot's blurb is summarized as "The Lost World video game is an action-packed 3D platform game that has a perfect blend of frustration and frustration.") with its special lenticular case for cover art animation; there it is, the PS2 release of the most reviled game in the Fallout franchise (but how does it measure up to Fountain of Dreams?), Brotherhood of Steel; a big Game Gear haul of Mortal Kombat, Desert Speedtrap, Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and Shinobi (whose GG incarnation is a wholly autonomous game independent of its arcade and Master System predecessor); and a little trove of Game Boy Advance cartridges, including The Incredibles, The Polar Express, underdocumented Polly Pocket and Cabbage Patch Kids games, and the GBA port of Super Mario 3, which is what made my eyes light up at the baggie and pull my wallet out. Also you'll note there is a pink GBA unit itself -- basically thrown in for free under my budgetary terms -- which I can report is working! I don't need it to play the carts, which fit in my DS, so I would likely try to pass it along... but my toddler took an immediate liking to it, so we'll see if she doesn't end up inheriting it. (Over her mother's dead body, I imagine.) Then also a handful of games I already own but was unable to confirm redundant as my phone inconveniently died as soon as we arrived at the sales -- the desirable Metal Gear Solid for PS1 and MGS 3 for the PS2. (Also the Strawberry Shortcake GBA cart, which is embarrassing enough to own once let alone twice.) Alas, fuel for next year's family garage sale. I found other materials I could have bought -- one sale had a dozen PlayStation 2 joysticks but puzzlingly no games, and another one had several desirable games (FF7, Kingdom Hearts) I'm sure I could have picked up for a song and flipped for profit, were I so inclined -- but down that path (join in with me if you've heard this one before) madness lies. I am not a speculator in retro video game futures. (I just feel bad when I imagine the games going unsold at the end of the day and just being thrown out. But as the Ikea ad says, they don't feel bad: they are inanimate objects, they don't have feelings, am I crazy?)

And then there's the Xbox joystick. Why? Setting up my machine after the move, I found I couldn't get a strong enough signal from any of my existing joysticks to set the date and time on the machine after plugging it back in. This raises a worrying question regarding the health of the unit (and if so, the ultimate fate of my hundreds of Xbox games.) I figure either the joysticks are worn out or the joystick port is, and hopefully a "new" used joystick in good shape can help me get to the bottom of the conundrum.

Why do I care if my Xbox is working? Because I'm having another retro video game party! This time we've unhitched it from my birthday and are getting down to business in May. Retro Video Game Party III: The Legend of Joystickia (pretty terrible name, isn't it?) unfolds Saturday May 10th, from 2 to 11 pm. If you can figure out how to reach me and inquire, you are welcome to attend and play some of my hundreds of old games! I'll probably hit this point another couple of times before the date.

Then again, maybe not! Things might be slow around here for the rest of the month... I've entered several of these contests in the past and have never been able to actually deliver a working finished product by deadline, but I have full intentions of submitting a complete and working game to the ShuffleComp IF competition and I need to come up with more time in order to bring my little prototype to fruition, hence something has to go. (Let's not get too drastic, however!) Time spent designing incomplete games for past competitions still takes time and you get nothing out the other end (except, arguably, practice) and I am sufficiently confident in this one's fit of subject and concept that I want to bring it to the finish line. So if it gets quiet here, don't worry too much. Cheers and play on!