Looking for a fun and immersive way to teach his 8th grade students about space, science instructor Chad Shumaker brought Activision’s 1984 sim Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space to his classroom…

This article brought a smile to my face for several reasons:

• using video game technology to create an engaging educational experience
• that you don’t need the latest and greatest games or hardware
• the budget was dirt-cheap

and

• the teacher took an awful game and made it fun (or less awful)

I’m curious as to how common it is for teachers to utilize old computer games  in the classroom. My guess is hardly, particularly as classic games such as Oregon Trail are now available on cellphone and Nintendo Wii.

(via GameSetWatch, The Times-Reporter)

Buying here not only gets you a great deal on indie games, the proceeds go directly to the developers. The Indie Bundle sale lasts through Friday (2/19)

http://www.theindiebundle.com/

Students who develop one of these games for Tiltfactor (with ample feedback from us) up to a working, fun, usable prototype will receive a Tiltfactor Fellowship, which comes with an honorarium of $1,000.

Jane McGonigal of Avant Game is seeking game assistants to help run EVOKE, a World Bank Institute funded “10-week crash course in changing the world:”

The goal of the game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most pressing problems: hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, climate change.

Both projects sound challenging and fun. Why not apply and see what happens?

tiltfactor announces game design fellowships

URGENT EVOKE: help us run a 10-week crash course in changing the world

I got a 10 ticket superpack for 1600NT, which comes out to a little less than $5 a show, each ticket redeemable for any show(except invite only…harumph) in the Festival. Apparently it came with 3 little mini-tickets redeemable for other stuff.

One was for a discount on the catalog-sized program guide, making it $6. Full color, good paper, nice stuff, and it came with a complimentary copy of last year’s guide, which was sold out when I tried to buy it. It’s nicer than the freebie small program guide, though that one is amazingly nice for a freebie.

Another ticket was for a free coffee mug with the festival logo or something on it, but it hadn’t arrived yet, so they gave me a piece of paper with secret instructions to go to a website and redeem my mug of the future for whenever it comes out.

The last ticket, which surprised the hell out of me, was for a ginormous Collector’s Edition copy of World of Warcraft which weighs more than two kilograms. It’s big enough to kill babies with a glance, or at least intimidate the really tough ones. Blizzard’s a part of this year’s festival, and one of the shows is a reel of their CG movies from Diablo II and Starcraft up through Starcraft 2. Because of this, it kinda makes sense that they’re trying to whore out WoW to patrons to get them hooked if they weren’t already. That, and they know how to find the right audience for their games.

They also had a giant inflatable orc from WoW at the cineplex, which they seem to give out to some of the net cafes here. Kinda fug fug.

This past weekend, I got to see King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary focused on two men, Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell, and their efforts to get the world record high score for the classic arcade game, Donkey Kong.

Although there was a lot of retro history and footage, especially of the Classic Videogame & Pinball Championships in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, King of Kong was surprisingly accessible to the viewer uneducated in video game lore. Love, envy, disappointment, perseverance, redemption, King of Kong had it all, and by the end of the film, everyone in the theater wanted to see how things turn out for Wiebe and Mitchell. It’s like watching an early Wrestlemania event with a side of Rudy.

Currently, King of Kong is on a limited distribution schedule, so watch this film while you can, or petition your local theater to pick it up.

King of Kong official website
FAQ on King of Kong (NOTE: contains spoilers)
Twin Galaxies – The Official Arcade Scorekeepers

Yeah, the Sukimon crew went underground during that time, to tend to various projects (coaching high school tennis, switching jobs, looking for a new place to live, bought a car, painting a house, etc.). But now I’m back and ready to post… stuff I should have uploaded months ago. Anyways, check out the link below for now:

Atari Flashback: Imagic Documentary

IFAIK, originally posted at the fantastic AtariAge, it’s an early-1980s PBS(?) documentary on Imagic, one of the most successful game developers (the others being Atari and Activision. duh) of its time. In addition to seeing pre-release game footage of Atlantis, it’s also interesting to point out that the video was produced just before the Big Video Game Crash.

All I know is that, based on watching the documentary itself, it was on a show called, “Enterprise.” Please comment if you have any information regarding this documentary.

With a runtime of over 23 minutes, this is one of the more painful video captures I’ve ever seen, a Super Mario Brothers mod, apparently created by some masochistic Taiwanese. Hardest. SMB. Mod. Ever.

One can just watch the first couple of minutes, but for some reason I couldn’t look away, and after a while you’ll catch yourself cheering/yelling at the little mustachioed doode to make it.

• Hardest. Video. Game. Ever. (G4tv.com)
• And for those who can’t download stuff from G4, try this YouTube link.

Thanks to Knick for sending me the links to side scrolling pain.

No serious Apple Computer Inc. collection is complete without a pair of these bad boys/girls. Bid now.

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.

Retro Game Night V didn’t have a big turnout as the previous Retro Nights, but Retro V ended up being one of the most hardcore game events thus far, for several reasons:

• It has been just over a year since MB and I hosted the first Retro Game Night.
• I designed crudely animated invites for Retro V that turned out pretty well and got great responses (at least to the invite itself)
• The place where we usually got our pizzas closed down a couple of months ago, so I had to drive almost half an hour in the opposite direction of the Retro Game Night site.
• Knick and Tina arrived dressed as Japanese fox spirits, complete with face paint and hand-crafted/fitted kimonos.
• The Storm. Epic rain and lightning storm. A tiny gas-powered generator. My car unable to start up.
• The Movie. The movie choice for Retro V was E.T. (original version), using a projector I gave to MB, an ancient beast of a machine that I had bought for $25 from a random college yard sale.
• And of course, the Games. We had our epic Warlords battle, proved that ghosting does exist, and busted out a few surprise games that consumed everyone’s attention and patience.

All told, instead of the dozen or so that usually show up, we had at most 8 people. 8 die hard Retro Game Night fans. MB and I salute you. The generator ran out of gas sometime after 2am, but luckily the power came back online around 6 or 7 that morning. And my car started up normally, as if nothing was wrong with it, and hasn’t had any start up problems since then.

The Invite
Crudely animated and packed with several game references. Can you guess all of them? I’ll give you one: the soundtrack is “Rise From Your Grave” by Brazillian heavy metal band and self-proclaimed creators of Game Metal, MegaDriver.

The Storm
There was a huge rain storm that weekend, which, in addition to being cold, wet, windy, and pitch black outside, there was no electricity in the area for most of that weekend. So the Retrocade and Retro Game Night V, for 7-plus hours, ran on a tiny gas generator which MB supplied and refilled once. If you listen closely to the .mp4 videos, you can actually hear the generator’s hum in the background. We turned off everything we could that wasn’t being used: all lights except for a couple (this included the Mac Discoball), and any monitor and game system that wasn’t in use.

To make matters worse, my friend Mike and I packed all of the gear (NES, SNES, games, cables, two monitors, etc.) into my car, I couldn’t get it to start. After several minutes of trying, we moved the gear into Mike’s Green Machine: an old, barebones, but dependable Tercel. Oh yeah, and Mike has had his driver’s license for less than a year. Small car, shitty weather, n00b driver. Pucker factor was a little high, but Mike’s a good driver, which we needed to navigate in the near zero visibility weather and avoid almost knee high water levels we drove past. Good job Mike, but don’t get cocky kid.

The Movie: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
MB chose to screen E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I hadn’t watched E.T. in years, and to see it on a big screen again was just as enjoyable as the first time I saw it. I was laughing more this time around though, especially when E.T. gets totally drunk. And I can’t get over the fact that E.T.’s wearing a flannel shirt in that scene too. (NOTE: Yeah, I gave a minor spoiler away. It’s not a spoiler if you’ve already seen it, which you should have.)

Unlike previous Retro Nights, where we showed movies and played games concurrently, everyone watched the movie first. Once the movie finished, we launched into some serious gaming.

The Games: Lolo2, the Sinistar Warlord of Us All
First game up: Warlords. A tradition at any respectable Retro Game Night, we had another epic Warlords session that went down to the wire. This time though, I have VIDEO PROOF that “ghosting” exists. As described in the Wikipedia,

…When when a player is defeated (computer or human), a “ghost” of his platform still exists on the field and will alter the trajectory of a direct shot off another player’s platform.

This has been debated a bit over the past couple of Retro Nights, and now I have proven that Warlords “ghosting” is not snopes-fodder. Because of our power predicament, the Atari 5200 wasn’t used, so no Joust or Mario Brothers. Actually, except for Warlords and Duck Hunt, we focused playing a couple of “new” selections. For Retro Night V, MB set up a Sega Master System and played Space Harrier, complete with 3D glasses. After wearing the glasses for a couple of minutes, the game really looked like it was in 3D. Too bad my video screen captures are so dark.

Another game we set up was Sinistar on the SNES, via a “Video Game Classics” compilation cartridge. Sinistar was a classic arcade game, known best for its fanstatic digitized audio, with such trash talking gems as “run coward” and “beware i live.” Sinistar got massive playing time by everyone present, and in return Sinistar administered the beatdowns.

The highlight of the night, however, was when everyone huddled around the NES to play Lolo2. Cute characters, perky game music, and complicated (at least for me) puzzles that kept us playing it for hours. Lolo2 straddled the line between obsessively fun and excrutiatingly frustrating. Damn you, Lolo.

Click on one of the video highlights below:

• Retro 5 Invite.
• Warlords Sesh.
• Sinistar, eating n00bs for breakfast.
• Embarassing footage of me playing Sinistar.
• A sample of the magic that is Lolo2
• VIDEO PROOF of ghosting in Warlords.