OK, so I posted Retro IV after posting Retro V highlights. At the time, I had more of the Retro V stuff ready than Retro IV, so I figured I just finish the Retro V post and free up the content blockage.
Anyways, as the title says, Retro Game Night IV was held over this past Memorial Day weekend (May 25th). Unlike Retro V, the weather was perfect for Retro IV: clear and cool with a light breeze. Themes of Retro IV, in no particular order:
- Flash Gordon
- Skate or Die
- Atari 5200 and the Color Organ
- MB’s birthday cake
Flash Gordon
This was either the second or third time that we’ve screened this film. Horrible acting, cheesy special effects, tons of action, and a soundtrack performed by Queen… classic Retro Night film. We also played the Atari 2600 game of the same name, which, unlike other movie-based video games *cough-e.t.-cough*, it was an OK game.
Skate or Die (a lot)
One of the earliest DECENT skateboard titles, Skate or Die had a couple of different “events” you could do, but the only section worth playing was the vert ramp competition, called “freestyle” in the game. This was when vert riding was all the rage and street skating was just starting out. We’re talking old school vert tricks: handplants, fastplants, frontside airs. When you hang up on the coping, your character flaps like a chicken before slamming into the flat bottom so hard that all of the pads fall off. To add insult to injury, the helmet also flies into the air, only to come back and smack your character in the head. Excellent.
We only had the NES version on hand (the one for the Commodore-64 is way better), but it got some heavy playtime, most notably by local skater, videographer, and soon-to-be Canuck convert, Noel. After about 15 minutes of eating shit, he was rocking the vert. If only skating vert was that easy in real life.
The Atari 5200 and the Color Organ
To date, Retro IV had the most people in attendance. Of all of the game consoles available, the Atari 5200 got rocked the most by the new players, particularly Joust. Maybe it was the huge ass, flat screen television. Or maybe it was because of the awesome light show above the TV, compliments of MB’s color organ.
I could just tell you that it’s a box that makes a bunch of light thingies light up to music, but I think MB’s explanation is a tad better and complete:
In a nutshell, it modulates the current delivered to whatever you plug
into its AC outlets (Christmas lights), and it performs that
modulation based on a sound source you connect to it (speaker wires
from the stereo). So, the louder the music being fed into the thing,
the brighter the lights glow. The kit had all the parts and
instructions; I just added the case and the lights and such. Each of
the four AC outlets is associated with a frequency range, and the
sensitivity of each can be adjusted with a knob. There’s also a fifth
knob for overall sensitivity adjustment, i.e., if you blast the music
too loud, they just glow nonstop unless you turn down the music, or
turn down the sensitivity knob(s). It works best with small lights
like Christmas lights, because they are responsive enough to work even
with fast music. Bigger lightbulbs and stuff would have too much
“afterglow”, or something.
According to MB, you can buy color organ kits online, like this one being advertised for $25 USD. Whenever MB can get some free time from her ridiculously hectic schedule, she says that she’d like to make a color organ “with N frequency ranges, where N is rather large and all sensitivities are adjusted along one continuum, such that the “resolution” would be greatly increased. In other words, I want every note of the song to have a corresponding visual element.”
You can check out a short video clip of the color organ here.
The Retrocade Cake
MB’s birthday was two to three weeks before Retro IV, but a friend, Robotson, and I created a surprise birthday cake for her. The idea came to me about over a month before her birthday: build an edible Atari 2600, complete with joysticks and paddles. Because I’d never made a birthday cake for anyone, I asked Robotson, who’s a really good chef (when he’s not doing some far, far, far out cooking experiment; the meat cookies did taste pretty good, but they’re still disturbing, doodemon), to help me out. We looked online to see if other people have done similar projects, in particular, the awesome baked artworks by rakka.
We decided to ditch the cake idea and make the Atari 2600 replica using fudge brownie mix (I know I should have made this from scratch, but I had to simplify steps to compensate for my n00bie cooking skillz) for the body of the “cake,” a plain, strawberry Kellogg Pop-Tart for the game cartridge, Pocky sticks for the switches, a Twix candy bar for the phallic part of the joystick, twizzlers for the joystick’s rubber gasket, and a maraschino cherry as the joystick button.
With the basic plan in place, Robotson and I made a prototype a week before Retro IV, where we learned the following:
- The prototype was smaller than we thought. I wanted to make the replica close to-scale, so we made the base of the atari the size of my casserole dish, 9×13-inches.
- Although covering the pop-tart in chocolate frosting made it look more authentic, we thought it looked cooler if people knew it was a pop-tart and left it unfrosted in the final version.
- I used walnuts in the brownie mix for variety, but the walnuts made cutting the brownie to spec more difficult, so we decided to make the base/bottom part purely a fudge brownie and the top part with walnuts.
- No matter what we tried, the joystick still looked very wrong. You know what I’m talking about.
Game day: I put the cake into a cardboard box, to protect it and to make sure MB didn’t see it until after we had eaten pizza and snacks. Robotson and I also brought the leftover brownie scraps in another casserole dish labeled, “the competition,” so when we got to the Retrocade, we brought out “the competition,” and everyone would wonder what the deal was. This turned out to be the case. Excellent. MB’s mom was present for Retro IV, so I showed her the cake.
“Oh my. She’s gonna freak out when she sees this.”
Most excellent.
Moment of Truth: everyone gathered around the box, which was by “the competition.” I gave MB a pair of scissors to open the box (I taped shut the top, to make sure MB wasn’t peeking 
) and watched her freak out. Unfortunately, I don’t have the footage on hand to upload, but I’ll update this post as soon I get the tape back from MB.
Honestly, the Atari 2600 replica wasn’t as good as the dozens of crazy cake pics I’ve seen on flickr.com, but it was close enough. The funny part was that no one touched the cake. In fact, MB supposedly didn’t eat it until a couple of days later (everyone ate “the competition” and thought that was pretty good, so we assumed that the cake would be too). I think the joystick got tossed though.
