Thanks to Kirsten for pointing out that at least one of my blog posts got hit with a spam attack, inserting invisible links into it.
See here and here for other reports.
The quick solution is to upgrade to WordPress 2.5 quick smart. Which I’ll be doing now, so apologies for any interruptions.
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.)
The party made their way slowly down the corridor. Leading was Raftor the Brave, followed closely by Roder the dwarf. Bringing up the rear were the wizard Pyhus and Felonius, the group’s thief. They came to a door, which marked the end of the corridor. Raftor tried the door; it was locked. Felonius got out his tools and went to work on the door, while Roder and Pyhus kept a look out. Signalling that the door was now unlocked, Felonius nodded. Raftor kicked down the door and burst into the room with sword at the ready, the others closely following.
From the light given off by the wizard’s magic lantern, Raftor made out the shapes of five goblins with daggers at the ready, attacking.
Suddenly, a booming voice said “Roll for initiative!” and two giant dice came tumbling down squashing Felonius and two goblins. The party of adventurers had gained initiative, and Raftor attacked first. A huge twenty-sided die came crashing down in the corner flattening the remaining goblins. As the remainder of the party gathered around the crumpled body of the fallen thief, two giant hands descended, and grabbed the huge dice. The booming voice spoke out once more: “That’s enough for this session. See you all on Wednesday.”
– from Toxic Custard 14, October 1990.
The inventor of Dungeons And Dragons, Gary Gygax just died. Not at the hands of a goblin — it was natural causes.
I played D&D a bit in high school. A few of us did the occasional lunchtime and weekend session in years 7/8, and I had a go of Advanced D&D in the following years. At one point I had all the (basic) D&D rule books, a bunch of player character sheets, a stack of graph paper, and a full set of those funny dice. I had a go a designing my own scenarios, but they were never as successful as the professional ones. Child And Adult in Elsternwick sold all the gear.
For a while there in the mid-80s, D&D was quite popular. There was a cartoon adaption on morning TV, and a magazine called Dragon. At one point I encountered a Fundamentalist Christian brochure claiming it was all about devil worship.
It was D&D that got me into computer games like Ultima — which I played a LOT, leading at one stage — with friends Conrad and Konrad — to attempting to write a clone of it on the BBC Micro.
When I first watched Fellowship of the Ring, I was struck by how similar that was to a D&D game. Which I guess just shows how much D&D was influenced by Tolkien.
Unlike some things from my youth (such as classic video games), I’ve got no real urge to revisit D&D, but it does bring back some happy memories. And it leaves me wondering what I did with all that D&D stuff I used to have.
PS. The character names in the piece above were nicked from D&D characters my friends and I had.
OMG.
Why did nobody tell me about this before? The King of Kong.
I know, I know… I didn’t actually list the original Donkey Kong in my top ten games… I don’t know what I was thinking of — it’s definitely one of my favourites. My own high score is around the 31,000 mark.
It’s in the cinemas locally now, but can already be ordered from Amazon.com on DVD. Very tempting, but I think I want to see it on the big screen first.
Yay. My cluster headaches have gone away, for now, even after having gone off the medication. Something to watch out for next spring, as I suspect they’ll re-appear then.
Funny thing is I had suspected the medication would impede my ability to donate blood. I rang the blood bank and they said no, it’s fine, come on in for your appointment. Moments after hanging up, I remembered I wouldn’t be able to go to my appointment anyway because something else important had cropped up at exactly the same time. I pondered ringing back, but decided it would look like I was trying too hard to weasel my way out of it. I’ll just have to give double next time. (Not!)
Boo! My bottle of hair stuff I like from Aveda ran out, and I went to get more. (I wonder if that post from 2004 was really the last time I bought it? Nah, there must have been another one in the meantime.) It’s been discontinued. But curiously, the guy there said it’ll be back “sometime this year”. Odd. He sold me some other stuff, which I bet isn’t as good. Grumble.
Shell emailed pointing out an old entry from 2001, in which I sent an SMS for the first time. Pretty funny stuff, and I wonder what other old posts of mine might highlight the arrival of technologies that we now take for granted.
Hmmm… the first time I mentioned Google was in 2001. I remember using AltaVista a lot in the 90s, but evidently found no reason to write about it. It wasn’t until 2006 that I finally (permanently) got a camera phone — well behind the pack there, though I had dabbled previously. I first got broadband internet in 2000.
Damn. Superparma.com is no more. And they built the site in such a way that it seems to be impossible to get at anything except the splash page via archive.org, so the ratings they compiled may be lost forever.
Groan. WarGames 2: The Dead Code now in pre-production, and aimed at direct-to-DVD.
OK. I was talking last week about not renewing with the RACV. As it happens my renewal form just arrived, and my membership runs out in a few weeks, so I’ll start shopping. Ultratune is looking pretty good (thanks Peter).
Ah, emails. Do we all know the danger of hitting Reply All instead of Reply? Will Joanna Purdy be the next Claire Swire? Or maybe this one won’t snowball. (I’m too polite to forward it around.)
PS. Sorry, a server glitch (well, actually an upgrade I forgot was happening) has (hopefully temporarily) lost a couple of comments on this post.
1. It was what I needed. I’ve been surviving on a (slightly rickety) old mono laser printer for some time now. I decided to upgrade to a colour copier/scanner/printer, to get back colour printing, to clear out the aging scanner that is only just compatible with Windows XP, and to avoid having to go to the library for the occasional photocopy. I didn’t want fax. Linux support for possible future PCs would be good, too.
2. A brand I like. Canon. I’ve got a 5-year-old Canon camera, and a scanner that’s close to ten years old. Neither have ever skipped a beat. (Apart from a strange camera message that turned out to be particles of grit stuck in the lens gears.) The newish video camera is doing well too.
3. A good model on special at Officeworks for $249. I didn’t want a cheapie, so was looking at the MP610. Nice and quick. Fancy colour screen. Direct link to my camera. Prints on CDs too. Duplex! Drivers for XP, Vista, Mac, Linux. Could pick it up at the local Officeworks so I didn’t have to lug it home by hand.
4. $50 cash-back offer! Woo hoo! A good deal just got better.
5. Easy to set up. The graphical instructions, initially intimidating, turned out to be perfectly logical. Even did its own print head alignment thingy. All running, no problems. (Well, except that it didn’t come with a USB cable, but I had a spare, and a quick trip to Dick Smith the next day procured another for $5.)
6. Cash-back form not overly complex. First job of the printer was to print it out, and photocopy the receipt. No arcane registration codes necessary. (Which once with a Quicken product prevented me putting in the correct application and forgoing my money. Annoying.) Cash-back form into the mail, in time to reach them by the 31/1/2008 deadline (well, unless AusPost do the thing they did with Jeremy’s letter).
It was all looking like the perfect purchase. Happy with the product, good price, and a bonus $50 coming my way.
Then I noticed the small print on the cash-back terms and conditions. It was meant to be purchased by 31/12/2007. Damn! Yet that’s not mentioned anywhere else, and both Officeworks and Dick Smith are still mentioning the rebate in their latest advertising. Hmmm.
Well maybe Canon’s processing people don’t know about the small print either? Yeah, fat chance.
Oh well, I’m still happy with my new printer anyway.
Update: One of my ever-helpful commenters notes the cashback offer got extended. W00t!
Unexpectedly this morning our ADSL at home got shaped — that is, slowed down to more-or-less dialup speed because we’d used all our bandwidth for the month. Fortunately it’s not the calendar month — it’s the month up until the 21st.
I could blame the excessive use of YouTube in the house, but ultimately it’s probably due to torrents of Sports Night, the Aaron Sorkin series from 1998 (pre-West Wing) which appears to be pretty much unattainable otherwise, and is the only TV show I’ve ever encountered with three characters named the same as people in my immediate family: Daniel, Isaac and Jeremy. (We don’t have any people called Casey, Dana or Natalie in our family however.)
It’s been something like 8 years since I’ve had to use dialup from home (apart from a short period after moving in 2003). While I could wail and moan about it. In fact I could easily buy a Data Block to see us back on broadband until the end of the billing period.
But in fact it’s a little like what apparently happened in Seattle recently when they shut down a third of a major freeway for construction works. People used it less, and the traffic just vanished.
I reckon we could do without YouTube for a few days.
