8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

I have had a simple dream for many years. That dream: to have an arcade in my house. I have many fond memories of pumping quarters into “After Burner” and “Mortal Kombat” at the Tysons Corner Mall while waiting for movies to start when I was in middle school. I remember beating the X-Men arcade with the mammoth screen at the mini golf course in Naples, Maine. In college, I used to swing into the local record store to sneak in some games of “Street Fighter II” after class. More recently, I get my arcade fix from “Barcade” in Brooklyn when I happen to be in town.

However, my personal nirvana involves having some classic cabinets at home. As a starter, I am hoping to put together a unit that runs the MAME arcade emulator software courtesy of a small form-factor PC I have around not being put to use. Dream Arcades sells kits for assembly that get well-reviewed, and I think a cocktail cabinet might be a nice place to start. If I ever need to impress a house guest I can always throw a table cloth over it and pretend it is something a lot less geeky.

I have been a fan of “VG Cats” for some time now. The brilliant mind behind it is Scott Ramsoomair, and he fills his comic with enough video game, 80’s cartoon, and internet meme tom-foolery to make any good geek giggle. His latest creation is a comic dubbed “Super-Effective” that covers the world of Pokemon. For any fellow Pokemon players, past or present (I won’t say which camp I fall into), it is definitely worth reading and is shaping up to be another hysterical romp.

So click here to go back to the first comic and catch up. There have only been three so far, so you’ll be up to speed in no time.

Last year was my first spring in LA, and with it came an amazing indulgent moment of geekery. The “i am 8-bit” exhibit brings together a phenomenal group of artists to create works inspired by this classic era of gaming. It featured a fantastic array of styles ranging from the hyper-real to the absurd. The opening-night party sported a gigantic Atari controller which people had to climb onto in order to play. I picked up this amazing Megaman piece, and my blue bomber bliss cemented my love of this show.

I check in with their website periodically to make sure I keep it on my radar screen. For the past couple of months it has said, “new site coming Monday!”. After enough new weeks came and went, I stopped taking stock in this claim. This past week, I was greeted with another message: “New Show. New venue. New website. August 2008.” So now we know that we will know more in the future. It isn’t much, but I’m still excited…

Last month I wrote about how students at Bowling Green State University were getting in trouble over the game of “Humans vs. Zombies” they were playing on campus. Specifically, they were banned from using Nerf guns and the university thought that the game was causing too much of a commotion and interfering with student life.

The game has continued to cause confusion on campuses, this time at Alfred University in western New York, where a student armed with a nerf gun sent the campus into a “lockdown”. The school and their police personnel found that the game was overly disruptive and were concerned about confusion that could arise over the toy guns. Administrators have decided to temporarily suspend the game while they explore ways to ensure that the game won’t pose a security risk or cause an unncessary amount of commotion. UMass Amerhest dealt with these problems by requiring players to register with the school and having them wear red armbands and headbands.

KTTV, the Los Angeles Fox affiliate, recently had a piece covering how “Humans vs. Zombies” is causing concern on college campuses across the country. In an age of hyper-tension among college administrations over campus security, it is easy to understand how having a bunch of students running around with toy guns shooting each other might cause anxiety.

However, I think it is also critical to allow these students to continue playing. LARPing provides a great way for people to escape daily stresses in a collaborative and constructive way. This game in particular, and the resulting campus dramas, could help normalize some of the apprehension on campuses. A flavor of the game must exist that can be a compromise between players and administrations. If colleges use this game to begin an open dialogue with students over their worries, it could help create an environment which could house the successful balance between campus safety and student fun. Clearly, people are on edge over any form of guns being present on campus, and this is a justified source of apprehension. A school cannot ask its students to constantly live in fear, and part of the recovery process is asking honest questions about what are acceptable boundaries and rules.

This Friday, Party Scammers is throwing “Clash of the Tetris”, a Tetris Tournament and party at Vine Bar in Hollywood. I attended their rock/paper/scissors tournament last spring and it was one of the zaniest times I have had since moving to LA. I’ll definitely be there, and you should drop in (pun intended).

Clash of the Tetris
Friday, April 25th
9pm
Vine Bar: 1235 Vine St.

Flickr recently launched video functionality for the site. To celebrate, they came down to the main Yahoo! campus to host the “Faceball Executive Showdown”. You may be wondering what Faceball is, and so please check out the official site for an explanation.

I volunteered to compete in the tournament, and after beating our CFO in the first round and someone from the widgets team in the second, I was defeated in the finals by Yahoo! cofounder, David Filo. I put up a valiant fight, and rallied back in the second set, but he was a unstoppable machine and won in the end.

Check out these pictures from competition:

Here is a fascinating article about a ban by Bowling Green State University on Nerf guns. Live Action Role-Playing, or LARPing, is a sub-genre of of RPG’s that takes gameplay into the real world. At Bowling Green, students began a game of “Undead”, which is a flavor of the LARP “Humans vs. Zombies”. The game involves two teams, the Zombies and the Humans, and the goal is for the humans to evade being “bitten” by the zombies. The humans can fight of the horde of undead by defending themselves with Nerf guns, among other weapons.

Apparently, the LARPers started causing a commotion and disrupting campus, and so the administration cracked down and forbade the player from using the great foam defense. They were allowed to fight of the zombies with socks and marshmallows, but this limitation still upset the participants. This has caused a bit of controversy on campus, and the LARPers are rallying to get their weapons back. The story continues with more interesting twists, including a relative who worked at Nerf coming to pay a visit to campus.

I am very interested in the phenomena of LARPing and Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG’s), and so, as these forms of entertainment become more pervasive, I am sure there will be more conflicts as we see play continue to spill over into the real world.

- click here to read the piece from the Bowling Green newspaper

(story via slashdot.com)

(image courtesy of Horrordvds.com)

IGN crafted this amazing trailer for April Fools’ Day:

Nintendo just announced plans to bring the Virtual Boy library to the Wii Virtual Console in late Q3. The much maligned (and in my opinion, misunderstood) console is going to be given a second chance. Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, said, “the Virtual Boy was a console that was ahead of its time. The public was not ready to experience that level of gaming. However, as we have clearly shown with the Wii, gamers are now craving a more immersive experience, and we feel that this is the perfect time to give them the opportunity to rediscover the innovation of the Virtual Boy.”

The Virtual Boy was launched by Nintendo in 1995, and provided the user with a 3D gaming experience through the use of a specialized lens system that was housed in headgear. The user would look into the unit and would control the gameplay via a wired controller. Only 14 games were released in the US. Many gamers complained about eyestrain, headaches, and about the generally poor experience it offered due to the fact that all games could only use the red as the color palette. The much-derided system had a relatively short lifespan; being discontinued the following year.

For the resuscitation, Nintendo will be selling a new set of VR goggles that will plug into the Wiimote much in the same way as the classic controller. This add-on will retail for $39.99 when the titles hit the Wii store. As an added bonus, the 5 Virtual Boy games that were only previously sold in Japan will be localized and available for the first time to US gamers as well.

Fils-Aime summarized the decision this way, “we revolutionized gaming with the Wii, and we are looking forward to leveraging that success to get the chance to frustrate a whole new generation of gamers with the Virtual Boy.”

- This article is a complete farse. Happy April Fools’ Day! Enjoy an original commercial for the system:

I am a fairly substantial Nintendo fanboy. I may have strayed from the SNES and N64, but the NES was my formative console, and I’ve had every portable they have produced (unless you count the Virtual Boy). When the Wii came out, one of my major reasons for purchasing it was the potential to play all of those back-catalogue games near and dear to my heart through the Virtual Console. It has been a joy rediscovering old favorites, and being able to play through “Super Mario Brothers 3″ again takes me back to my brother and I sitting in our family room negotiating with our mom over how many levels we could complete before we absolutely had to come in for dinner.

So, as a man who spends his life on the road, I want to be able to take this nostalgia with me. Considering the available horsepower of the DS combined with its WiFi capabilities, I am dismayed to not be able to have my Virtual Console locker be portable. My dream setup would be that I could transfer my VC titles from my Wii to my DS via wireless connectivity or have access to a DS store via WiFi for purchasing on the go. Nintendo already has licensing deals in place to provide catalogue access to systems like the Genesis, TurboGrafx 16, Neo Geo, etc., and could offer handheld consoles from the portable timeline like Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket, Game Gear, and all the rest. Additionally, Nintendo could leverage their kiosks and WiFi download locations as distribution points for VC. They have great infrastructure already in place that they could leverage to help roll out DS Virtual Console access to the masses. Nintendo could offer a unified mobile platform for all classic gaming.

Nintendo complains about the financial damages it suffers due to piracy, specifically from flash cards. For the uninitiated, a flash card is a rewritable memory card for the DS that allows gamers to run downloaded software on the DS. While these products can be used for law-abiding, non-copyright-infringing purposes liking running homebrew, I am sure that a majority of purchasers of these flash cards are using them to pirate games. However, there are people who see these cards as a way to run emulators to achieve the goal of classic gaming on the go. A DS VC would at least provide a solution for this flavor of gamers who want nothing more than to play “Megaman 4″ while stuck in line at the airport (I fall into that camp)

So, Nintendo, I implore you: please let me go retro with my DS. Let me enjoy a round of “Bomberman ‘93″ while stuck on the subway. Save me from wasting nights scouring the depths of the internet to learn about obscure emulator ports to debate whether I want to go through the effort just to play “Ice Hockey” in bed. My DS rarely leaves my side, and I would love it if Nintendo would create a portable Virtual Console so the classics can travel with me as well.

- images courtesy of nintendo.com