It was like stepping back in time.

Down the stairs we went, into the darkness. Electronic beeps and bloops could be heard from all directions. Flickering lights.

Most of the classics were there. Centipede. Galaga. Ms Pacman. Asteroids. Space Invaders. Donkey Kong. And more. A handful in cocktail tabletop cabinets, but most the way God intended, in proper stand-up cabinets.

It took me back to the arcade amusements section of Luna Park circa 1985.

Except Luna Park never had MAME hooked up to a big projector screen. Back then if people wanted to observe your prowess, they had to huddle around.

ACMI’s Game On exhibit had all this and lots more. Apart from the section devoted to arcade games, they had areas showing off home computers of the 80s and 90s, consoles from the 80s to present, handheld games (Donkey Kong Game+Watch!) — and almost all of it playable.

I’m not sure the kids fully appreciated the plodding reality of the original IBM PC (sadly it wasn’t wired-up). Also in static displays were a Sinclair ZX-81 and an Apple II.

The kids and I went berzerk playing everything we could lay our hands on. We’d planned our trip to arrive right on opening time, and it paid off, as later things got reasonably busy, but we had a go on most things. I got high score on Pacman clone Puckman, as well as Ms Pacman. Some people had put very high scores on Donkey Kong already, so no go there, but I did get third on Galaga, despite the not-quite-reliable fire button. The Donkey Kong G+W left me trying to remember which of my friends had it. (I remember owning Donkey Kong Jr, and Donkey Kong II in this medium.) The sit-in Star Wars game was terrific, and Asteroids with proper vector graphics was great.

Of the newer games, R-Type on the PS1 (?) was fun, and I couldn’t quite get the controls on Golden Eye, but had a merry old time blasting away. Isaac and I spent some time beating each other to a pulp in Way of the Exploding Fist on a Commodore 64 (yes, I was wearing my Zzap!64 t-shirt). I couldn’t quite figure out Jeff Minter’s Tempest, which was running on an Atari Jaguar. Didn’t get a chance to play Wii, though they had a few PS3 and XBox 360 games on display, some quite spectacular.

Highly recommended, particularly if you grew up pumping 20 cent coins into machines. Oh, and love the giant Mario out the front in Flinders Street — one side a Donkey Kong pixellated original, the other in high-res.

(I’d post a pic of the giant Mario, but alas my five-year-old Canon A70 camera appears to have just died.)

Very clever trailer here.

Had a day off yesterday. Took the kids on a couple of errands, and went through Fed Square to visit ACMI.

I never fail to be impressed with ACMI, especially since I discovered their Games Lab. Last time I was there they had old Commodore 64 games. This time they were highlighting some of the best indie games from the recent Independent Games Festival, a kind of TropFest for games.

In the video game world, many games are churned out by the big Hollywood-style production houses, coded by drones (as so famously documented in EA Spouse: The Human Story). What we saw showed some nice innovations that you might not get out of those big companies, and it was good to see that small-scale game writing didn’t die with the 80s.

We played a few of them, and ended up downloading one, And Yet It Moves when we got home. A quirky rendition of one of my favourite genres, the 2-D platformer.

We’d really gone for the Pixar exhibit mind you. Which was very interesting, with a lot of material from a variety of their films. What really caught the kids’ imagination was the Zoetrope — loads of Toy Story models loaded onto a turntable, which span around and at top speed was accompanied by rapidly flickering lights to animate it. Very very cool. The admission fee wasn’t overly cheap, but seeing that on top of all the other stuff definitely made it worth it.

Yesterday afternoon, reminiscing at ACMI’s Hits of the 80s video game exhibit — free at Melbourne’s Federation Square until May. While most of the games were running on Spectrum or C64 emulators, this copy of Way Of The Exploding Fist was running on a genuine machine. And just as it was back then, one of the joysticks was quite frustrating to use.

We also had a go at The Hobbit. They had a cheat-sheet beside the computer, but it only took you as far as the trolls’ dungeon, and I couldn’t remember how to get out. Move the sand? Smash the trap door? It reminded me of why I sometimes found text adventure games just a tad annoying, unless one had a cheat-sheet.

They also a display of some of the Horace games (I was never a great fan) and a separate exhibit of more recent Astro Boy games. And just like in a more conventional gallery, an attendant would wander around explaining things to visitors — including how to progress in the level you were playing, if you looked stuck. (How does one get a gig like that?)

Well worth a look.

Arthur And George (Julian Barnes) — not quite historical novel, not quite biography, following the true story of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji. Somewhere in between, perhaps. Really well written, I thought (no wonder if was on the 2005 Booker shortlist), getting inside the heads of the main characters using language they’d probably use themselves. And a very intruiguing story, which although it has a main plot that kind of fizzles out, remains interesting right to the end.

(Having just finished reading the book, I found it interesting to see that Arthur’s house, Undershaw, is the subject of some controversy at the moment.)

Lego Star Wars — The retail life of a video game goes roughly like this: It starts at $80-100, which is a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a game, if you ask me. But if it’s good, the early-adopters grab it. The price gradually falls to a half-decent level, then a very-decent level. And then, particularly if the reviews are pretty good, and I think my kids will like it, I’ll buy it. $20 (at Target), as it turns out, is a very-decent level for Lego Star Wars, which turns out to be a helluva lot of fun. A good variety of (Lego) characters, plus some spaceship flying, plus podracing, plus co-operative two-player mode, plus some terrific visuals adds up to a very enjoyable game. Perhaps not a big challenge for hardcore video gamers, but certainly a lot of fun for everybody else.

And by the way, I reckon those Lego characters are better actors than Hayden Christiansen.

Jyndabine — Comparisons with Ray Lawrence’s earlier Lantana are inevitable. While this one also looks closely at human emotions and death (and bloody noses), this film has less of a claustrophobic, mystery feel to it. People familiar with the Raymond Carver short story or Paul Kelly’s Everything’s Turning To White will know the basic story, but this telling sees the four men slip almost accidentally into the actions they are later condemned for, and the subseqent events are very believable, helped by seemingly flawless acting that left the entire cinema silent and thinking right through the film. Terrific stuff.

Bizarre thought #574: In the building where I work, there’s a security guard who is sometimes seen wandering about the place. He looks kind of top-heavy, like he’s got a lot of upper-body muscle.

For some reason it reminds me of an old video game I once had back on my Commodore 64: Ultima II, which had fighters who looked like that. When I wrote the Ultima clone in high school, I used a similar design.

I had it all worked out — 15 more minutes mucking about, then we’d go outside. I’d bring my laundry in off the line — it would be about dry — the kids could jump on the trampoline, or get their bikes out, whatever.

15 minutes later I glanced outside. It was pouring with rain. It did so for the rest of the day. No trampoline, no bikes, and my laundry was drenched.

Damn.

So instead of enjoying the non-sunshine, we went to Bunnings to get some storage boxes. On the way we stopped at the game/arcade place on Huntingdale Road and fed a couple of dollars into a retro video game for some geek nostalgia. It offers Frogger, Ms Pacman or Galaga.

We each had a go, and by the time it was my turn, I was blasting away aliens in Galaga at a rate of knots, my button finger on rapid-fire. The kids were cheering as I cleared through them, got the double ship on level 2, shot everything on the first challenge stage. The pace picked up and it got pretty tricky, I lost the double ship, but I eventually got as high as level 10 before bowing out. It was high-fives all round — a real WarGames moment.

Playing with your food, nostalgic geek style.

I hadn’t noticed this before: you can now get a deerhunting game for the XBox. Obviously there have been 1st person shooter (FPS to those in the know) games for quite a while now, usually despatching alien monsters or WW2 German guards into the afterlife, but this is the first time I recall seeing a modern-day video game based on blowing away animals.

There have been various cruelty to animals games before, all the way back to Whack-a-mole and those arcade ducks, but video games are more realistic than ever before. Apparently this one actually features you hunting 9 different deer species, including exotic and rare deer. I wonder what PETA think of this? On the one hand maybe it’s better for the hunters to be killing pretend deer, but on the other hand, is it glorifying hunting, and encouraging more people to take it up?

I wonder, is it Game Over or do you at least lose points if you accidentally shoot another hunter? Do you have to avoid others’ bullets without shooting back? Can you opt for your character to wear a bright orange safety vest? What next… a fox hunt game perhaps?

I think I’ll stick to alien monsters.