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)

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.

MIT Swapmeet = 3(science fair) + (comic con)/4 + miami swapmeet

The Lore of the MIT Swapfest

I’ve heard stories of the MIT Swapfest from friends and co-workers, of old computer and electronic gear up for grabs. Need an oscilloscope? They’ve got it. Need a replacement power supply for a Commodore Plus4? Check. And did I mention old skool games? Oh the stories people told me, of the boxes of C64 floppies and NES gems.

In spite of these great tales, I rarely go to Boston. This was the excuse I used for several months until around May, when during a volunteer session at WinCycle, MB mentioned that she needed to do some hardware housecleaning and offload some of her old computer gear. For various reasons, MB and I couldn’t go in May or June. July was just as busy for the both of us, but enough was enough; we had to experience the MIT Swapmeet for ourselves. MB got a vendor pass for the July 16 event; vendor setup time was 7am, so we (actually MB) loaded the gear into the truck the night before and took off for Beantown at 4.30am.

Highlights, Low lifes, and Other Oddities

I expected the Swapfest to be an epic experience and it was, but for different reasons. Several things come to mind, not in any particular order:

Mr. Dooshbag

Let’s say that there was a seller that that we’ll call “Mr. Dooshbag.” One of the perks of being a vendor is that you get first dibs on other vendors’ stuff before the gates open for the public at 9am. We were setting up when Mr. Dooshbag stopped by our booth and inquired about our box of Atari and NES games. These were dupes of games MB and I already had, so we were willing to part with them, but Mr. Dooshbag wanted $5 for a box of 25 games. I balked and told MB to not take anything less than $15. Mr. Dooshbag offered $10 and MB took it. Granted, we’ve been in the car for the past two hours and just started taking stuff out of the truck when Mr. Dooshbag stopped by. He could smell our salesman n00bness and we got played.

Unsurprisingly, when we got set up and looked around at other vendors’ stuff, lo and behold, guess who was the one vendor at the whole swapfest selling NES and Atari games? Yup, Mr. Dooshbag. At this point, I was like, whatever, that’s just “good business sense.” When I stop by his booth, he was already set up, but he kindly told me to leave and come back in 10 minutes. Guess what time it was when he told me this? 10 minutes ’til 9am. Even though he was the only vendor to not let other vendors see his stuff, at that time I gave him the benefit of doubt. We’re new here, I said to myself.

Later in the Swapfest, I go to his booth again and check out his stuff. OK collection. Mostly commonly found NES games, with a couple of harder to find stuff. One of the games was Pro Wrestling (common), one I was actually looking for. He was selling it for $3, which was in line with Ebay sales, but here’s the kicker: I offered $1 for it, since we did sell him all those games for cheap. “You sold me those games earlier today, right? So I’ll give you a discount and sell it to you for $2.” Since I was already there, didn’t have to pay s/h, etc., I bought it for $2, but WTF! Granted, it was only a difference of $1, but look at it from the other side: he couldn’t even lower the price to $1.

To add salt to the wound: I asked him about a couple of the games, since he said that he “collects these all of the time and has thousands of these.” He knew NOTHING about the games, except for their rarity. Instead of being knowledgeable of the material, as a comic book store owner would, he’s more like a Border’s manager. For the record, I didn’t protest when MB sold the games and I obviously cared more about that sale than she did. OK, rant over.

The Parrot Guy

Like at any fleamarket or swapmeet, you’re gonna run into your share of characters. One such person was The Parrot Guy. He was this scraggily bearded fellow who wore a red hawaiian shirt and had a live parrot perched on his shoulder. He must be a regular/Swapfest coordinator because it seemed like everyone knew him/about him. In any case, there was all this birdcrap all over his shoulder and he would carry on a conversation as if it wasn’t there. And I mean ALL OVER his shoulder. To increase the gross out factor, he also tended to hang out in front of the hot dog stand, a fact I’m glad I didn’t know until AFTER MB and I had one for lunch. Which brings up another minor rant: boiled hot dogs? Maybe it’s because of a fire code or something, but that’s just ghetto. At least try and cook it over an majorly overclocked PC system or something.

Rap session with the Sinclairs

MB had a couple of Timex Sinclairs for sale and someone would walk by, look at MB’s Sinclair setup, gasp “OMG” and then give a 1-2 minute account of how the Sinclair affected them. “I remember typing this program… how long those programs took… I remember my father showing me a program…” And on and on. This went on for almost an hour, with about 20 stories in all, sometimes interacting with other folks (“Yeah! I remember that!”). My story? I brought a camcorder and didn’t record these sessions. Verdict: I’m a douche.

Other highlights

• Almost everyone we met was really nice, helpful, and fun to talk with.
• Unsurprisingly, a lot of computer stuff, ranging from floppy-based PC games, to brand new über case fans. One vendor had several interesting Mac laptop stuff (can’t remember the model right now), but MB said that she already owned a couple of them. There was also a ton of C64 software for sale that I didn’t have time to sort through.
• The MIT Radio Society and Harvard Wireless Club are co-sponsors of the event, so unsurprisingly all of the walkie talkie channels were used. MB and I had to switch channels several times during the Swapfest.
• Seeing a skinny, crooked teethed kid beaming with pride as he lugged under each arm an oscilloscope and an old SGI server.
• Altough there was a lot of geekiness at the Swapfest, it was still a swapmeet, which meant that there were a lot of 1st/2nd generation immigrants –mostly Haitian and Cuban(?), some Chinese– that hauled away tons of audio gear and scored free hardware at the end of the day, when vendors are offloading unsold items.

And other low points

• We drove there about a week or two after one of the ceiling panels in one of the tunnels struck and killed a driver. With my incredible navigational skills, instead of avoiding the tunnels, we drove through them not once, but four times.

Which brings up another point:

• Driving through Boston sucks. Driving through Cambridge sucks even more.

Overall, it was a great experience: MB offloaded a ton of stuff, we covered our expenses, got to meet a lot of cool people, check out interesting gear, and learned a couple of things for the next time we go back.

The last MIT Swapfest for 2006 is Oct. 15, and then goes underground until next April.

Retro Game Night III was held on March 18, the day after St. Patrick’s Day. In post-celebration, we dubbed Retro III, “St. Sukie Day,” St. Sukie being the patron saint of retro. Just go along with it.

Anyways, for Retro III we set up a video projector and screened films that were also video games: Star Wars (original version), Flash Gordon, Cloak N’ Dagger, and The Last Starfighter. This was a big hit and the films gave everyone a chance to take a break from the 20-minute seshes of Warlords.

Game-wise, we also busted out a couple of the Apple Mac Classics and set up Crystal Quest. One Retro Night participant spent the whole night on it, resulting in a score of over 1.7 million points. Other than the pre-requisite sessions of Warlords, Fast Food, and Dragonfire, Mario Brothers for the 5200 got a ton of play. Low points of the night included Star Wars – Rebel Squadron and the awful Shaq-Fu.

Just as important as the gameplaying itself is the food. Pizza and soda/beer is a must, but this time a couple of folks brought a ton of cookies, a cake, and a much needed and yummy veggie platter.

Another epic night of gameplaying, eating, and movie watching.

The Crystal Quest Queen.

Crystal Quest High Scores. Ridiculous.

Oh, the agony.

Han shot first, but here he can only watch.

Are you feeling this?

3 highschool-aged kids, same score. Must be a generational thing.

via Kotaku