Video game ANSI part 9: errata

OK, I got one game print ad post out of the way. Y'know what that means? It's time for another session of video game ANSI art appreciation! All right, let's get started:

I hate to mangle that Reset Survivor piece from a Blocktronics pack, but as slight as the eventual video game sprite reference was, I just couldn't pass up its splendidly demented start screen (which the author explains was a take on the Doom II configuration screen.) Now to shake things up, another song! I know that the video game soundtrack remix community is a massive thing which I have just barely scraped the edge of, and I probably won't get into it too extensively here just because blog posts are generally a terrible way to present audio. But this one is special -- another historic exclusive: it was made for Mistigris, my computer art group of the '90s (and just revived for an indefinite time as of this Hallowe'en!), in some vague plan for a game-themed artpack release that never happened. The pack-in-progress had an epic 10-minute-long video game theme megamix that was the subject of tragical data loss, but we still did have Onyx's Castlevania theme from the previous ANSI post and this -- for the first time ever, you can enjoy |<ing /|rthur revisiting the main theme from M.U.L.E. (Unless, as he has recently retroactively been caught doing from time to time, this was him stealing somebody else's sequencing and putting his name on it. But it sounds equally enjoyable and relevant either way!)

We have ... basically, a pile of further posts in this series to get out of the way. The more I delve into the what I thought would be minute pool of video-game themed ANSI artwork, the more I find -- for every post I make, further material is made available to me for two more posts. As the material on my workbench has expanded, I've had the luxury of hashing the pieces out into different themed categories, so you can enjoy comparing and contrasting different approaches to the same subject rather than the jarring and schizoid channel-flipping approach you've seen in previous posts. So this post is a pile of pieces made on rare or singular themes, whereas in the future we will be seeing more sprees on related topics.

Pokémon was a huge video game franchise -- at times singlehandedly floating parent company Nintendo through hard times -- though one under-represented in ANSI art, only emerging as it did in 1996, as this whole culture was in the process of winding down. Here are a few takes on the series' flagship mon(ster), Pikachu the electric squirrel:

Those first two are by Konami, an artist we've already seen in these pages and who will be playing a substantial role in this blog series very soon! And -- not that we'll ever be able to present a complete textmode Poképedia, but here's one more member of the evolving menagerie of hundreds and hundreds of fabulous creatures:

Changing streams, that was a nice Castle Crashers tribute from Blocktronics, and now here's a 67 (blocktronics initials, numeralized) take on another game by The Behemoth, "Alien Hominid".

A couple of stragglers from the Sam & Max love-in we recently shared: a .BIN (typically this just means an extra-wide ANSI), possibly ripped (produced through inauthentic means -- typically miscredited from another artist, or here supposedly machine-converted) -- but we can't argue with the results:

And I don't remember this incident from the Sam & Max game or the comics that inspired it -- could it have originated in their cartoon, perhaps?

Now for a brief change of pace - some "hirez", or high-resolution computer artwork. I found this piece from "Dominion", a logo stumping for Quake II, in my 16-year-old "unreleased computer art" directory and figured -- well, it was relevant to this blog, but some context would need to be provided in order to explain why it was remotely noteworthy at all. In the early days of computer art, people were creative but the tools were lousy -- many works of high-resolution artwork were basically made the same way ANSI is (but with square pixel ratios as in the 80x50 screen mode), with pixel art being plunked down one pixel at a time. (Then once the piece was done came the process of manual anti-aliasing!) When Photoshop came on the scene it was a game-changer, where suddenly your machine could do the heavy lifting and "try out" different variations on themes -- different fonts run through different filters -- as a kind of rapid prototyping. Except previously, where works might be prototyped in notebook sketch pads (as with graffiti artists), here the prototype would also be the finished product... a monkey could churn out dozens of such logos hourly, and the law of averages would ensure that at least a few of them would be worth looking at.

To those not privy to the brave new world -- not running the powerful programs or owning the formidable hardware needed to run them -- it could be difficult to differentiate between work produced through painstaking laborious effort and work produced by a couple of clicks. Then folks who had a hat trick of the skills, the infrastructure, AND sophisticated design sensibilities schooled us in separating the wheat from the chaff, and this sort of thing started to disappear from artpack collections:

We saw him once before -- it looks like here's another ANSI of British bionic secret agent Robocod, aka James Pond:

A surprisingly under-represented game canon here in ANSI-land is the Legend of Zelda. This work starts to address that, with a Link to the Past-era Master Sword by Scarecrow of VOR:

(I didn't notice at the time, but was elite warez group Razor 1911's logo always the Triforce from the Zelda games?)

Once more we have an Air Zonk to share with you, Hudson's futuristic take on caveman Bonk:

And here's something new, also from the ranks of Hudson heroes, a Bomberman:

Here are edited highlights of a much larger (1000-line) work, curated to fit the particular interests of this blog and its readers:

And some Pac-Man for kicks... first a logo:

Then a cartoonish Ms. Pac-Man in watOr's unique style from one of his Echo artpacks:

And before we go, here's one for a BBS named Pool of Darkness -- it's probably not artwork from the SSI AD&D game of the same name, but rather artwork themed after the name of the game, promoting a BBS named after the game. You can't have the art or the BBS (or its name!) without the game, through the game's clammy touch can't necessarily be felt or discerned in the actual content of the art. We saw this kind of thing going on before with Jed's ANSIs for the BBS "Final Fantasy", but I let them in ... because I'm a softie.

"Super Hydlide" / "Air Driver", Genesis, 1990.

How about this: a video game ad from a comic book? I know, didn't think I did those anymore, did you? Truth be known, I wanted to do another video game ANSI post -- looks like I've got 5 or 6 more of them at least! -- but I didn't want this blog to get too consistently off-theme. So off-topic only on alternating posts. Yard sale season is wound down in favour of flood season, so there aren't too many more "here's what I bought" posts in store until summer kicks off again. I do need to make a post about my next retro video game party -- Nov 15th, coming up! -- and about the bonafide '90s-throwback artpack I just released... but this is not going to be either of those.

This ad scan is distinguished by two qualities: a) it's a two-pager spread, and b) the scan skipped the queue because for whatever reason my splicing technique for the two pages resulted in a file of monstrous size, which I horrifiedly uploaded here to clear up the hard drive space. (Strange but true! But, sadly, boring.)

Super
HYDLYDE

Enter the Realm of Myths and Legends.
A wise old oracle has predicted the second coming of evil. One young man has been chosen to save Fairyland from the source of the evil and eliminate it. What fate awaits our hero and Fairyland? Only you can answer this question.

[screenshot]
In the cloud city, many important clues and items can be found, and purchased.
[screenshot]
Deep within the Submerged Palace, you search for a space suit, an ancient computer, and other items, while fighting hoards of killer robots.
[screenshot]
Outside the city in the woods, you begin your quest by fighting minor enemies to power your character up for the long quest ahead.

AIR
DIVER

Top Secret Briefing:
The details of your mission are top secret. You must find and eliminate enemy terrorists and their evil leader, using your skills as a Top Gun pilot to penetrate enemy lines without detection. It is up to you to save the world from this dark force.

[screenshot]
Execute barrel rolls while blasting vulcan guns at the enemy. [screenshot]
After defeating a level, dock inside the Super Transport and be repaired, refueled and restocked with weapons. [screenshot]
Take on the North Pacific region at night; enemies have no chance once they're in your sights! [screenshot]
Specifications on the F-119/Stealth fighter.

Two NEW Exciting Games for Genesis ACTION AND ADVENTURE!

"Wise old oracle". Redundant much? Is it possible there was any better translation than Fairyland? One must assume so. I don't care about whether the clues can be found -- but can they be purchased? Thank goodness! I for one am one game player who needs no search for an ancient computer. There's some obvious hordes/hoards muddling going on here, but if robots can be considered mobile objects -- like cars for instance -- could a group of them someone had stored up not be considered a hoard? Some people hoard gold coins, others hoard Impressionist paintings. Me, I hoard killer robots... I store them in the room in front of the closet where I keep my space suit and ancient computer, and other sundry items.

Screenshot number 3 describes the basic gameplay mechanic of CRPGs, not having noticed that AN ASSERTION OF THE WAY A GAME IS PLAYED IS NOT CONSIDERED A SELLING POINT IN AND OF ITSELF. All it establishes for sure is that the use of the term "ADVENTURE" at the bottom of the ad is, as usual, incorrect.

On to the Top Secret Briefing. Hey, did we mention that this briefing was top secret? Your mission is so unexpected and beyond the pale, its contents are highly classified. This time, instead of funding freedom fighters, your mission is to eliminate enemy terrorists. Strange how there's never any shortage of this kind of mission, isn't it? "Just what is a Vulcan gun," I pondered to myself, before Wikipedia answered the question definitively. Getting buffed at the end of a level also isn't a selling point, you guys. Won't it stop being fun playing against enemies who "have no chance"? Also, as a kind of DVD bonus feature for those who love starting their games up and not playing them, we have specifications for the F-119. So you can, I don't know, build a replica in your back yard.

Sorry, gang, my heart just wasn't in it, but rest assured the next time you see this page bubbling over with F4 blocks, I'll be gushy and effusive!

Video game ANSI part 8: another Blocktronics pack!

I've already regaled you with choice cuts from the 1980 artpack release of Blocktronics, today's ANSI art supergroup (and let's face it, sole inheritors to a pretty lifeless battlefield). But wouldn't you know it, they've kept on keeping on and, well, there have been subsequent releases -- with new renditions of video game characters and situations in the ANSI medium! It's funny with this weird beat, I can go from showing archival material dug up from 1992 and then zap directly to mid-2014. So has been the power of the enduring cultural relevance of video games, I suppose. A distinguishing feature of this "WTF4" pack (F4 being one of the function keys bound to displaying the ANSI "block" characters in ANSI editors) is that it contained what must be by far the longest piece of ANSI art ever commissioned -- I won't give you specific numbers, but for a ballpark, it measures about 7 stories end to end -- a group collaboration produced to compete at the Evoke 2014 demoparty (whose ANSI art category it won handily). Though it has recurring themes, the diversity of authors and subjects have resulted in recurring flashes of video game iconography surfacing in the greater work which is basically about something else. It opens as demonstrated below, with a classic gaming reference from the 1983 movie War Games. Then a group logo, and then the classic Konami code. Then some dream imagery, and then a classic arcade cabinet! I'm not sure what game is being advertised on the cab's sides -- there are Q*Berts being shot at by what look like Galaga ships -- but if you look at the joysticks and the screen, you can appreciate a classic smallscale representation of Konami's Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. Finally, the screen dissolves into an unrelated transition, with a lone Space Invader lurking in the eaves.

Another Invader or two turn up over the next few thousand lines, but this is the only other major game-related stop in the so-called "megajoint", a point at which a cubic dreamscape resolves into a playground for Q*Bert.

The pack has much more gameinalia in its other works however. Here, for an audience of Metroid and a panel of Space Invaders, the two great red junk food mascots of the early '90s, 7-Up's "Cool Spot" and Domino's Pizza's "Noid" -- both subjects of their own video games -- duke it out. (I don't see why: their products are complementary, not competing.) Cool Spot seems to be dominant in this conflict, aided perhaps by a line of 1-UP mushrooms.

What's the score again?

A fun thing about this piece -- it started as just a weird amoeba-like tree, but R5 felt it would be a suitable backdrop on which to superimpose the hilariously 4th-wall-breaking Mr. Resetti the mole from the Gamecube classic Animal Crossing. I saw an early draft and recommended a balloon-package to kick it off, and there it is! My contribution to art history.

Enzo has been using ANSI art to illustrate articles about tech for his day job; this is one about the whizbang potential of mobile devices, with a little bit of smallscale Pac-Man action going on in the background.

And there we are. But oh, my gosh! It takes me so long for these blog posts to come out these days that another Blocktronics pack has since come out, containing in it still further video game ANSI art. It's really a vicious cycle. My work is cut out for me. You'll be seeing more video game ANSI from this well-heeled crew of textmode art survivors.

And now, on a different note: Hallowe'en is coming up, and I didn't have enough long coffee breaks and no-work-scheduled days to revisit my month of spooky game ads as I did last year (though World 1-1 has been holding that beat down admirably so far in 2014), but here's something new for this blog: music! In preparation for a 20th anniversary reunion artpack of my Mistigris crew from the mid-'90s, I've been shaking down my computer art archives for unreleased materials I've been sitting on for upwards of 16 years. Here's a tune by Onyx, the 604's prolific Impulse Tracker addict of Sonic Equinox and Delphic Oracle -- and yes, sporadically Mistigris -- executing a tribute to the soundtracks of Konami's very Hallowe'eny Castlevania series, entitled NecroNuke. Enjoy!

The Portland Report

I was in Portland a week too soon to partake in its annual Retro Gaming Expo, as I was visiting town for entirely unrelated reasons, but that said -- if your antenna are attuned to the cosmic vibrations of gamery, it will find you. Case in point: this street art showdown on Alberta Street:

I gather that I may have possibly missed for the second year running an opportunity to play Johann Sebastian Joust, a game that basically is pointless to describe if not possible to demonstrate. I did however manage to fortify my gaming book collection at Powell's City of Books, yielding among other finds the "Worlds of Power" novelization of Metal Gear for the NES by "F.X. Nine", described by Fireguard somewhat mordantly:

It's always struck me as bizarre why anyone would write a novelization of Metal Gear but do everything humanly possible to downplay the violence when the people you're hoping will buy the book are kids who like or are at least curious about a game about a commando running around blowing up enemy soldiers and tanks. Then again, the geniuses who dropped Snake behind enemy lines sent him into danger armed with nothing but a pack of cigarettes.

Honestly the book isn't that badly written considering it's adapted from a video game and meant for young readers, but it's nothing to write home about either. It feels more like reading an online walkthrough than an actual story.

Still, my biggest problem is the dissonance between forbidding the writer to have the main character kill his enemies, when it's not only allowed but often encouraged in the game they give tips for at the end of chapters. It's self-defeating, and speaking as a writer that's about the worst thing you can do.

On trips to Powell's, I used to have to scour the sci-fi and children's sections trying to find gamebook and game novelization needles amongst a tremendous haystack. There were always plenty of finds, but I could spend hours combing the stacks. Looks like someone eventually took notice of my very peculiar receipts, as a couple of years back visits to Powell's surprised me with shelves and sections consisting exclusively of this somewhat niche material I'd been prospecting for. I can go right in the front door, walk directly to the shelf, compare what I see with what I have on my "want" list, pay at the front counter and be out within 5 minutes. It's a very different experience, that's for sure!

Portland has plenty to offer game enthusiasts outside the PREX and Powell's -- on previous visits, I have whiled away many a happy hour at the Avalon Nickel arcade. (And, well, some hours there haven't been so happy -- once, I drove over with friends with the express intent of serving skeptics with my formidable Dance Dance Revolution skills, honed in the UBC arcade during picnics with friends on campus, but while exiting the vehicle somehow got my fingertip pinched in a closed (and, eurk, locked) car door. We immediately iced it in a major way, and decided to continue on with our planned activities only to find that the DDR machine had a massive line up. I'd paid my entry to the arcade, but couldn't use my mangled hand (the nail eventually turned black and fell off) to operate any other machines. Sometimes a can-do attitude isn't enough.)

I gather that there are other gaming sites in the good ole PDX -- the name of Ground Kontrol comes up regularly, though somehow I've managed to never go! Also seen in my recent travels was an arcade bar in Eugene, OR, two hours south of Portland -- entitled Level Up. (Google reveals another one in those environs, named Blairally. What I want to know is why Eugene of all places has two arcade bars and there are none here at my home in Vancouver? The answer is, of course, real estate prices. Admittedly the Storm Crow Tavern does come close, but it's conspicuous that the bar owned by the founder of PopCap games -- responsible for Bejewelled and Plants vs. Zombies among others -- takes as its focus the earlier culture of pen and paper tabletop gaming.)

Also down in those parts, we passed a Chuck E. Cheese's. Is that still a going concern? Are they filled with Xbox 360s and iPads now instead of arcade cabinets? Has the pizza gotten any better? Are the robot mascots holograms instead? These and other questions will just have to wait to be answered. Next time, Portland!

"How to Turn On Your Computer", Bantam Software, 1986.

Here I am in Portland, and my standard resident "so, here we are in Portland, and it's October, so which IF comp games do you recommend?" conversor is permanently unavailable. Well, rats. But I do have you, the anonymous Internet, so you may have to do. It's true, the 20th annual Interactive Fiction competition is in full swing -- has been for a week or so now -- presenting a vast slate of amateur text adventures, parser and otherwise, for players to enjoy and rate. I believe that this is the first year that comp games with CYOA interfaces have outnumbered those with text parsers, a trend that will likely continue (and something I would explore in greater depth on my other blog if I had the time.) I was going to dip into the archives and pull out an Infocom ad for the occasion, but wouldn't you know, I used them all up this time last year (I have an exciting lead on some more, but they're not quite ready for prime time yet), so I had to take a tip from The Digital Antiquarian and find an ad from Infocom's contemporary genre boom in "Bookware".

How to turn your computer on. (The following is an actual conversation between Bantam Software and an unusually talkative personal computer). BANTAM SOFTWARE: We always ask what turns people on. Now we want to know what turns you on . PERSONAL COMPUTER: It's about time someone asked the real expert. What turns me off is boring software. Boring, uninvolving, predictable software. And cold rooms. Why is it always so cold in here? B: Games and Ahoy magazines called Sherlock Holmes in "Another Bow" one of the year's best. PC: Let me decide. Okay? (Disk inserted.) Well, this is anything but elementary. You're Holmes. Watson's at your side. And you determine your own fate in case after case. And look, you run into the likes of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Henry Ford, Louis Armstrong. And such graphics! These derive from eariy 20th century photographs. I don't have a clue how you did it, but you have a winner. Next case. B: The Fourth Protocol, from Frederick Forsyth's gigantic best-selling book. Games called it "nerve-tingling." Here you go. (Slides disk in.) PC: You mean circuit-tingling. If 1 knew I had to save the world, I would have gotten more sleep. All kidding aside, this involves nuclear weapons. A British traitor. The KGB. And the subversion of NATO. This is a challenge. Will it help if I read the book? (Loud explosion on screen.) Oh no! Does that mean I lost? B: No, but losing's the whole point of the next one. The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. You know the bestseller. PC: Why, do I look heavy? Never mind, let's have a taste. (Disk is inserted.) This is some menu. It helps you assess your goals. Monitor your progress. Mix 'n match meals from all five Scarsdale diets. Even prepares your shopping list. It'll tell you how much exercise you need to work off certain foods. Let's see about kiwi tart... B: We've got one other program. PC: No more. I'm exhausted. B: No... this is a rebate program. Just fill out the coupon and mail it with proof of purchase and you get $5.00 back. PC: Thank you. That's a nice offer. B: So, did we turn you on? PC: Yup. Now, please turn me off so I can rest. I've got to do some running later on to work off that kiwi tart.

I kind of get the feeling that getting "turned on" in 1986 meant something a few rungs below what it means how. I remember trying to arouse a computer using our smooth talking as pre-teens and all it got us was a Dr. SBAITSO parity error. That photo-graphic of the computer with the bouquet is somewhat tragicomic. Share your favorite "insert floppy in drive" joke here!

This was actually pretty late for the first wave of chatbots -- we had Racter in 1983, and his conversations were much more interesting than this one. (And his volume of poetry, The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, is great -- primarily because it is fudged.) What's the "why is it always so cold?" bit about? I figure it's "server room" humour, though that seems a bit out of place for a personal computer. Is your target market really people who don't know the difference between a mainframe and a microcomputer? Well, I suppose Bantam is a book company, not a tech company, so they may have been so genuinely clueless.

I've never heard of Ahoy magazine, but looks like they were credible enough to invoke as expert testimony here. The blurb describes, well, things you would expect in a (presumably unlicensed, public domain) Sherlock Holmes game: Watson, historical characters, player agency. Graphics? Fine enough, but is establishing their early 20th century provenance really a selling point, or maybe a disclaimer that they may not be as sharp as modern-day photos? They look just like typical Apple II graphics -- no worse than the Oregon Trail standard, nor exceeding it.

Then The Fourth Protocol: the book was gigantic and best-selling. We establish its themes of nuclear espionage and ... those are considered sufficient to sell the game. (Does it really have sound effects? Mobygames ratings suggest: yes! It seems to have more of a Portal-style interactive novel GUI presentation than the typical bookware IF text parser, but they're just different routes toward a similar end, right?)

And then, because it's impossible to sell on its own, the automated diet book / database. The Scarsdale diet was an early ketosis diet, shades of Atkins, whose doctor author had been dead for six years at this point, murdered by his lover. The blurb doesn't involve any of these compelling details, merely trading on the novelty of a computer diet program. Woefully mundane goods to be depending on novelty! Bantam apparently also sold a conversion of the Choose Your Own Adventure book The Cave Of Time, which would have been a much better fit here, but it looks like they were targeting an older, more world-weary audience.

And the rebate! That's an unfunny turn on ambiguous use of the word "program". All in all, I give the ad the thumbs-down. Bantam probably had no business in the software industry, and from the looks of things, this was both the announcement of its big splash debut and its swan song. Them's the breaks! (Meanwhile, did I mention that the Interactive Fiction competition has been running for 20 years now?)

Video game ANSI art part 7: rounding the bend

OK, I got a couple of actual video game ad posts out, as per the URL of the blog, so now it's time for me to hit up the old well at sixteencolors.net and deliver you another dose of my "ANSI art inspired by video games" series, especially as I've been lately involved in rounding up my old computer art compatriots of 20 years ago from Mistigris and its milieu to produce some sort of commemorative artpack release in October (please drop me a line if you'd like to take part!) These posts have proven surprisingly popular by the past and present artists in the medium, so this and the next few posts in the series (it will wrap eventually, I promise) will include some of their recommendations from their own back catalogues.

BBS door games were one case of "anything goes" in terms of theme -- anything the author could describe and you could navigate through menu hot-keys was fair game. That said, I've got to say that this particular BBS appears to have a somewhat meagre spread. One thing's for sure -- they weren't selling out by laying out all the popular BBS doors all the other boards had. Star Trek Cryptograms? I suppose every niche has sub-niches.

Now for some bona fide blockbusters: first, a run of Earthworm Jim pics. EJ was the brainchild of Doug Ten Napel, a gifted animator who was responsible for making Virgin's Disney adaptations (Aladdin, the Jungle Book) blockbusters. Then he was brought on board by Playmates to devise a new line of action figures tied to some cross-media franchise: historically these things were cartoons first, then toys, but in this case they bucked the trend and debuted the characters in video games. As his follow-up, he used an enormous amount of clay to make The Neverhood -- a lost classic that's recently become supported by SCUMMVM. I was first introduced to him when his surname was used as a sound effect in an issue of Rob Schrab's comic book Scud the Disposable Assassin.

That's a rendition by iCE's eternal luminary Toon Goon, aka Cyberchrist. The former sobriquet suited him better, mastering the cartoonish visual idiom of thick outlines and large fields of flat colour.

That was another iCE pic, this one by Biscuit. iCE remained a home to toony ANSIs after the fad passed from the rest of the scene. This particular rendition of Jim is less exaggerated, with some weird foreshortening in effect as EWJ points a just-out-of-frame ray gun at the viewer. The 80-column limitations of the ANSI medium led to some curious aesthetic constraints, specifically it was odd how there was no upper limit to the length of a piece but its width remained limited to a kind of tall vertical slice. (This was addressed in the .BIN format which could be of arbitrary width -- but it was difficult (read: more or less impossible) to use those in a BBS context. They were just gallery pieces for artpacks. You'll have to take my word for it, since I haven't yet found any video-game themed .BINs to use to illustrate this particular point.

Now two EWJ villains, the former piece by Misfit is of Henchrat (I looked it up on the Earthworm Jim wiki... yes, there is an Earthworm Jim wiki) followed by one of Pete Puppy. Gotta say, I wouldn't have pegged these as video game characters if not for being explicitly called out / being pointed to them.

Rowan's Home for Wayward Games

A remote acquaintance, now spouse to an old elementary school friend, was attending to some late Spring cleaning, posting a curious note on Facebook -- we're getting rid of some horrible old PlayStation 1 games, anybody want them? obviously the answer will be: of course not! Rowan steps in: not so fast, now! Then I mounted my standard defence of the "interesting failure", which in a nutshell is that I'm interested in unknown "failure" games that try to do new things unsuccessfully, because an interesting failure is of greater appeal to me than a boring success. It took a few reschedules, but eventually I made it over to their den to pick up the trove of "PS1 games", including Spyro - Ripto's Rage, Crash Bash, Resident Evil, Defcon 5, Ridge Racer, Andreetti Racing, GTA 2, Command & Conquer, Diablo, Tomb Raider, and Parasite Eve (as last seen by me while celebrating New Year's in NYC at the start of 2003. 11 years later, I've just managed to get my hands on it again for the first time since. Retro gaming: it was a heck of a lot less retro back then. But the long tail delivers all things in time except for the free time needed to play games.) All that PLUS a PS2 demo disc for Dragon Warrior 8 AND some splendid Dreamcast stuff - Chef's Luv Shack, Toy Commander, a disc magazine and the hilariously unusable Dreamcast web browser, all for the low, low price of: free. That's hard to beat!

You see it the longer you collect: things that were plentiful when you began accumulating your materials dry up over the passage of time: if you average one Nintendo 64 cartridge per person distributed throughout the population, in time those who give up the ghost (or were disinterested to begin with) end up with zero. What happens to their games? Maybe half end up in the dump, half get passed along or resold -- hand-waving back-of-napkin calculations here. When all the chips have fallen, maybe 99 % of the people -- those who choose to leave behind the things of childhood -- will have no games, and the remaining person will have accumulated a collection of 51 of them. In time at garage sales I stop seeing one or two games at two out of every three sales, and instead I visit 9 sales with no games, and then one sale with fifty games. This indicates that the period of generally hoovering up loose unwanted games from the general population is over, and what we're left with is, as illustrated above: collectors inheriting liquidated collections from other collectors whose life circumstances have led them to get out of the hobby of accumulating and, perhaps, occasionally playing old video games. It's a little chilling due to the whole "there but for the grace of God go I" factor -- and it also leads one to pontificate what situation might compel us to throw in the towel and willingly give up our treasures. I choose not to speculate: most answers to that question depict dark places I'd rather not visit.

So on that note, here's what will likely be the last big garage sale haul of the season -- all this outtasite entertainment for $70:

Battles of Prince of Persia for the DS, Tekken 2, Battle Arena Toshinden, Robotron X, and Extreme Pinball for the PS1, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Devil Kings, Seven Samurai 20xx, Kessen, Godzilla: Save the Earth, Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick, Sonic Mega Collection Plus, Transformers, Spider-Man 3, Defender, Eternal Ring, KOFXI, and Chessmaster for the PS2, Super Bubble Pop, Amazing Island and Zapper for the Gamecube, and Major Malfunction, Silent Hill 4, Pinball Hall of Fame: Gottlieb, X-Men Next Dimension, Tao Feng, Dead Man's Hand, and OutRun 2 for the Xbox.

Oh yes, and for my patient partner, DogZ for the Game Boy Advance.

My price threshold is $5 typically, which has moved me to pass up many games I would as soon own as not under the premise that I must be able to find a cheaper copy elsewhere. Here most of the games were under half that -- the price is somewhere near $2 per game, which while including many titles which undoubtedly are worth just about exactly that, also includes a number of titles I expect to get a great deal more than $2 of enjoyment out of. This fellow claims to hold two sales a year so I will be keeping my eyes open for that address: I took home maybe a tenth of the games he had for sale (plus piles of systems and peripherals -- I could have bought a couple of SNES mice with Mario Paint, or the Donkey Konga bongo drums), and those are all just the surplus. I considered interviewing him for this blog, but he fumbled on the softball question I lobbed him -- what's the gem of your collection (eventually claiming it was a never-opened Dreamcast sold on launch day). We'll see if he's more on top of his game next time around.

And from the free box, the icing on the cake -- an addition to my wretched film adaptations-of-video games collection! Someday I will mount the world's worst film festival. Do you think that Bob Hoskins' death will be enough to move them to re-issue Super Mario Bros. on DVD? But I digress. See you around next time!