Geek Idol
I’ve had few real idols; people of whom I could genuinely say “I want to be like them.”
In my early-to-mid 20s, Ben Elton was one of them. Amazingly funny, both on stage and in his writing. I wanted to write stuff that was half as good as his books, but never quite managed to write anything that was engaging enough to last over the length of a novel. My best attempt was The Year 2031, and even that wasn’t terribly long.
Ten years earlier, it was Tony Crowther. He was perhaps five years older than me, and a game programmer extraordinaire, writing hit after hit on the Commodore 64. I loved his game Blagger, and the sequel Son of Blagger, then got through Monty Mole (but only with help from a walkthrough). For a while I was hooked on Potty Pigeon, then Loco, which I enjoyed more than its astoundingly similar-looking followups Suicide Express and Black Thunder.
After that I moved off the Commodore 64 onto other things, and lost track of him and his games.
I suppose I dreamt in some ways of writing my own games and making a fortune from it. Back in those days many commercial games were written by solo programmers, or small teams. These days the gaming industry is dominated by borg-like big development studios, and Suits.
The other week I was in MagNation and noticed a copy of Retro Gamer which featured an interview with the man, as well as a big feature on Pacman. Wow. I was in a rush and made a note to go back and buy it the next day.
When I went back in, it was gone. Replaced by the next edition. I asked if maybe it was lurking somewhere in the shop. Nope. Everywhere else I looked was the same. Gone.
I had a look online. There are quite a few articles about Crowther, but most of them are reprinted from the 80s. I was also interested to know what he was up to these days, and what he thinks looking back at those old games — precisely the sort of thing Retro Gamer does well when they find people to interview.
I could order the mag from the publisher, of course. It would cost 5 pounds. Fair enough. But with 6.50 postage (!) it’d be a total of 11.50, or about $25 — double the Australian retail price.
While I was pondering that, Rae (who had been kindly checking newsagents near her work for it) pointed out I could look on Ebay, which was a brilliant idea. I found a copy for UKP 7.70 including postage, about $16. Much more reasonable. I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival from the UK.
In the mean time, I’ve discovered that Crowther has in fact been assimilated into the borg that is Electronic Arts. One of the games he worked on recently-ish was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was one of the last games I bought for the XBox.
And me? Well, I did start writing a few computer games, but never quite finished any of them. But I did end up making a living out of writing software.
Who were your childhood idols? Where did they end up? Did you get to be like them?
EB Games
Reasons to like and dislike EB Games.
Good — price matching. I walked into the Elizabeth Street store with a printout showing that Big W had Mario Kart $30 cheaper and the guy didn’t blink, and happily matched the price.
Good — unlike many of the staff in the department stores (especially the cheap ones), most of their sales people know what they’re talking about and seem genuinely interested. The same guy was frank when pondering the release of Rock Band 2 — probably another year away so EA can maximise their profits.
Mostly good — preowned games. They’re about the only place you can now buy classic out-of-print (old) XBox games, for instance, and generally quite cheaply. Mind you, for anything recent, the pricing makes it hardly worth it.
Good — that Nintendo area in the Swanston Street store where the kids got to play Wii tennis on Christmas Eve (before they got their own Wii), though apparently now it’s closed for renovation, only a few months after it opened.
Good — range, much better than most places.
Bad — what’s with charging $35 for 2000 Wii points? You’ll pay $30 at Dick Smith or using a credit card on the Wii itself. Yes I guess they’ll price match, but why not charge the standard amount in the first place? I guess as per usual, caveat emptor applies.
Bad — in fact, the odd special aside, the pricing is pretty much RRP, so be prepared to look elsewhere to buy cheaper or get them to price match.
How fit are wii?
I’m still really enjoying the Wii. The favourite game with the kids is tennis, playing on one side together, though we’re getting good at it and it’s been giving us some pretty tough opponents.
(I can only imagine that tennis purists are aghast at Wii Sports tennis; from the “best of 1/3/5 games” to the explicit explaining of what Deuce is to the always reading out the player’s team score first. Ditto the golf. Do golfers really say “Nice in!” to each other?!)
Baseball I’m not too bad at. I’ve finally figured out how to have a reasonable chance at hitting a home run. Bowling is improving. Golf is still my handicap; I can’t quite figure out how to put just enough power into my shots. I’ve only tried the boxing once, but will again.
The training gives you a mix of all this. But my real addiction is the fitness test.
I’ve been doing it almost every day since we got the Wii. Sometimes I’m absolutely appalling, and get a fitness age in the 50s and consequently feel like an old man. Last night I was 32. But to my surprise, most days it’s somewhere in the high 20s.
Who knows how accurate it is, but it’s nice to think that at least a machine thinks I’m in my twenties.
Brief things
Haven’t blogged for a bit, so here’s a brief catch-up.
I helped Tony and Rae and family move last week. The inevitable comment that pops up when geeks move house: packing the moving van is like Tetris. Of course, when you get a full row of boxes, they don’t disappear and make more space…
The kids and I watched the early (9:15pm) NYE fireworks a short distance away from the action — Richmond Station platform 4, which unlike the city centre, was not crowded at all, apart from half-a-dozen Connex security guys also watching. They said their shift was from 5pm to 3am. The view was certainly better than from the park near home, where we watched last year, though of course not as good as being in the thick of it.
My Wii fitness level has been up and down, all over the place. The best: 28, the worst: 56. Marita, it turns out, is very good at Wii boxing, knocking-out virtual people with some enthusiasm.
I’ve been playing Scrabble via Facebook with a few friends, mostly local. I was challenged to a game by a friend in Canada, but stupidly, the North American Scrabble is only available in the US and Canada, while the one we have in Australia is only available outside North America… so much for the global village.
Rose would have been 30 on Friday, and the family gathered to pay their respects. It was doubly sobering to see that in the Nagambie cemetery, she now has a neighbour, apparently a local woman in her 40s who also died in a car accident.
On a happier note, the Doctor Who Christmas special will air in Australia on January 25th. You can watch the first couple of minutes here.
A Doctor Who spoiler follows…
Read more
The socks I always wanted
I got the socks I always wanted at K-Mart the other day.
Back to the arcade
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.)
Finding Pixar
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.
Are you keeping up with the Commodore?
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.
