Video games seem more like drugs or watching sports - a pastime which requires something more like passive metal strength from the participant / spectator. I'd say these things leave the participant with the memory of the event, but without much in the way of imaginatory or mental growth (relative to the act of reading smart comics or anything else).


I find it interesting that no one's contested this argument yet. How can playing a video game be construed as passive? Emphasis on the playing. When you have a controller in your hands, you're NOT just sitting there watching a really neat movie. You're controlling it.

If you compared it to reading a comic book or watching a sport, it would be like a book that you have to read to advance (which makes sense) but not only that, you'd have to read it correctly. If you don't, you have to keep reading the same page over and over again. The amount you're able to access depends directly on your personal skill level.

As for mental growth... I suppose it's not every day you're going to have to deal with jumping over giant man eating plants coming out of your sewer pipes, or pushing boxes around in a dungeon. You probably won't learn anything specific from a game unless it's Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, but I think they do help with general problem solving abilities. Has anyone ever done those brain teaser things? It's sorta like that, solving little riddles an

The Official Bira Bira WebpageSomeone on this newsgroup once postulated that perhaps the "I"s in Bira Bira are not "I"s at all but are suggestive of the letter "O", and that the the inscription doesn't bear the name of the deity, "Bira Bira", but is the name of the place of origin "Bora Bora". This could very well be the case. The actual Bira Bira carving is not a very sophisticated religious icon, but is actually a somewhat crude piece of folk art, no doubt reproduced on mass as souvenirs for tourists. It has features common to carving artwork from much of the south pacific but is most suggestive of the artwork of Central Polynesia. Quite possibly the craftsmen who made this based the form of the carving on his native artwork and embellished it with features from other Polynesian islands. The form is a very crude when compaired to most polynesian artwork, but was likely simplified to increase productivity. I'm strongly inclined to believe that what Bira Bira is, is a generic good luck "tiki" made to sell to the tourists visiting Bora Bora. Being somewhat of an amalgamation of polynesian art styles it would not be unlikely that other figures similar to Bira Bira exist with the names of other polynesian islands inscribed on their backs.

There is a less likely possibility that Bira Bira is a Central Polynesian "Canoe God", a figure carved and carried onboard canoes by fishermen both for protection and a bountiful catch. He could also be an ancestral figure used by priests for blessings and healings. And there's an outside (very outside) chance that he might be a representation of the polynesian god Thane.

My research into the origin of Bira Bira has by no means been exhaustive and I concur that it is highly likely that Bira Bira may be something entirely different from what I've suggested. It is entirely likely (unless one of us takes a vacation to Bora Bora) that the mystery of the origin of Bira Bira will never be solved, and perhaps that is for the best. For no matter what Bira Bira may be in actuallity, it is most definetly assured that it is quite different from what he has come to be for those of us with a love for classic video games.

It was Twenty Years ago today . . . 1982 was a fantastic year for new arcade games and not too bad for original games on home systems either. Listed below are 40 of the best video games released that year. I'd like to get your vote for which 10 are your favorites then we'll compile the Retrogaming Times top 10 list. I can't just let Tom and Adam do all the cool surveys around here. Don't worry about ranking them, just cut and paste the text, then delete about 30 of them until you have 10 or fewer left and send it back to me.

They're mostly arcade games, but also some of the more popular home games made on multiple systems. I had to draw the line somewhere, so if you like some other 1982 classic video games, not on my list, feel free to include them as well. I'll collect your email votes through mid December 2002 and post them that month.
Here they are:

Amidar, Bagman, Blue Print, Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom, Bump 'n Jump, Burgertime, Choplifter, Demon Attack, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong Jr., Dragonfire, Frenzy, Gravitar, Joust, Jungle Hunt, Kangaroo, Knock Out!, Millipede, Miner 2049er, Moon Patrol, Mountain King, Mr. Do!, Pengo, Pitfall!, Pole Position, Pooyan, Popeye, Q*bert, River Raid, Robotron
2084, Satan's Hollow, Star Trek Strategic Oper

Action Game – A genre of games that requires a lot of skill and movement of the joystick, buttons or combinations of both to make your character move or perform tasks. This is sort of a catch all Genre that often has elements from several other Genres contained within.

Adventure Game – A Genre of games where exploring and finding things is the key to solving the game. Making or using an on-screen map were important features of these games. Many of the earliest games in this genre were frustrating as there was only one way to win – one sequence of
adding and subtracting, trading or using objects to continue the game or get past obstacles. This also lead to many of the companies selling accompanying solutions and help guides, or even 1-900 phone calls to ask for tips, to the adventurer who got stuck and wanted to complete the adventure.

Bat – Describes or refers to the type of joystick a game uses.

Bios – The Colecovision and other systems had a built in set of start-up routines that must run before any game can be played. Sometimes these can be bypassed, but then the built-in graphics, sound and other features that are stored in the Bios cannot be used by that game.

Bonus Points - Points scored that are in addition to those normally scored. Bonuses vary depending upon many factors such as: specific combinations of enemies or objects eliminated, collected or ignored; getting the complete set, or the

The Official Bira Bira WebpageEver since he was first found by Robert Batina he has inspired a number of testimonial "Brag Posts" from his faithful devotees. And from those very hip to the cult of Bira Bira there have come posts exploring and expanding upon the mythos of Bira Bira. There exists an official Bira Bira webpage, hosted by the person who discovered him. Bira Bira himself gets passed from devotee to devotee having moved from Robert, to myself and then on to Jay Tilton. Some of the faithful own plaster replicas of Bira Bira that they place in special classic videogame shines. Some of the faithful have found their own incarnations of Bira Bira while out thrifting as it is believed that Bira Bira manifests himself in various forms. There is even a game for the 2600 based on Bira Bira (a G-rated graphics mod of an older X-rated game). And like all the best deities, Bira Bira even has an evil arch enemy. He comes in the form of one "Mr. Friendly", the anti-Bira. Mr. Friendly is actually the mascott of an ice-cream franchise in Japan that appears to sell more Mr. Friendly merchandise than ice-cream.

Some collectors absolutely hate Bira Bira, some few going so far as to claim he is actually Satanic. Some collectors really don't care much about him at all. And to others he's just plain ol' fun, right up there with Big Foot, Greys, and Chubacabra. So far, to the best of my knowledge nobody has sacrificed a virgin to Bira Bira, though some collectors may be willing to at least sacrifice their virginity in his name (or any name for that matter).

Another new feature that I decided to add is Video Game Lingo. Since we get hundreds of new collectors each month reading Retrogaming Times, I thought that I would explain some of the lingo used by classic gamers. This way you can sound like you are one of veterans of the hobby. Each month, I will put a handful of different terms that are used and tell you what they mean. Feel free to send in any you may have heard that you would like to see in here.
In the Wild-This term is used to describe finding a game cart, system or collectible at a thrift store, garage sale or flea market. The term "In the Wild" pretty much means that you did not buy it online or from a game dealer, but rather you found it in your search and usually means you picked it up at a bargain price. Think of it as getting your Thanksgiving turkey by hunting it as opposed to buying it from a grocery store.

Bira Bira-He is supposedly the god of video game collectors and if you pray to him before searching "in the wild", he will bring you good luck. For more information on this diety, go to the following website: http://birabira.chaosmagic.com/
Actiplaque-This is a term you hear quite a bit, especially when dealing with Activision carts. It is a condition when the label is mottling and begins to have spots. It happens most with Activision games, probably due to the glue they used or the labels, but it has appeared on other carts as well.

Salon.com Technology | A file-trading ship of foolsIt's hard to see how his uncle's house could have been a more professional place than the dorms. The house was the center of operations for John Fanning's Internet firm Chess.net, but rather than see to the business, John Fanning "loved playing games, and he developed a serious habit with a computer video game called StarCraft," Menn writes. John loved to play against Shawn, and "even when Shawn's hacking hobby was starting to look like a serious business, Fanning wanted to play. More than once, when Shawn's friends and collaborators needed him to work, he told them he couldn't: His uncle wanted him to keep playing StarCraft. If he didn't keep playing with him, Shawn told them, Fanning wouldn't give him money for dinner."

Salon.com Technology | A file-trading ship of fools"We didn't have any money, and we didn't have Coke left, and I was literally trying to finish this," Shawn says. "And I looked at the Red Bull, and I'm like, 'It has caffeine in it!' I literally went through most of a case that time, and I was up two or three days ... The strange thing about Red Bull is that it has this really weird ability, and it's not just the caffeine, to keep you really sharp and focused, even though you've been up for two or three days. Usually [on caffeine], you get hazy and you're wired but you're tired, mentally not functioning. But [on Red Bull] you can focus, and you can think logically and clearly. You get tired, but usually it just gets you tired to the point where you're not likely to get distracted. You're just kind of a zombie, but you can focus and think, and it helped to do massive amounts of programming where I had thought of the design before, and I just had to do the programming ... By the end of it, I called the cops because there was a car across the street the second night and I thought it was going to do something bad. I remember calling the cops, and they said something about it not being in their jurisdiction, call somebody else. And then I realized I was kind of going crazy."

An Interview with Richard Kern Are you friends with any of your peers?
Lots of them. As friendly as you can get when you're in your 40s and you're a guy. I was explaining to my girlfriend why I don't have guys who I can just call up and say, "Let's hang out." Guys when they get old don't do that. It's just too weird. You hang out with women or something. It has to be business with guys.
Ha! I'm the same way. I thought it was just me.
No. It's every fucking guy. I'm also in A.A. And that's another way guys get around it. You have an excuse to hang out with other people because you are going to a "meeting." The whole A.A. is a social scene for older people.

Salon.com Technology | The Napster backlash

Salon.com Technology | The Napster backlash

Ain't It Cool News Which one of these unfinished 1950's Science Fiction Films do you most wish had made it to the big screen... but didn't?
Attack from the Future
Blood of the Beast Men
The Bug-Eyed Monster
Cyclops the One-Eyed Monster... by Curt Siodmak
Day the World Trembled... with Victor Mature as a Robot
The Diplomat... by Howard Hawks and William Faulkner
Fifty Years from Now... by Philip Wylie
The Great Green Og aka This Naked Earth
I Buried the Devil
It Stalks by Night
The Killer Brain
Last Day On Earth
Lost In Space
The Man Who Stole the Sun
Nine Billion Names of God... by Arthur C. Clark
The Nomoglod
Road to the Moon... with Crosby & Hope
The Robot Killer
Seven Miles a Second
Shipshape Home... by Richard Matheson, with Peter Lorre
Spear in the Sand
They Came to Destory the Earth
The Uranium Monster
Voyage to Venus... sequel to Flight to Mars
Worlds to Come

TechTV | Shigeru Miyamoto on the Art of Creating Games

Listings: April 14 - April 20, 2003 (Writers Almanac) The roots of the Easter Bunny go way back; the hare was a symbol of fertility in ancient Egypt, the Anglo-Saxons worshipped the goddess Eostre through her earthly symbol, the rabbit. In the middle ages, those that could afford it wrapped Easter eggs in gold leaf. Peasants colored them by boiling them with the leaves or petals of flowers.

Salon.com Sex | When nudists swung

I remember my youth back in the late 1970s. Every blue moon I'd go up to Times Square and check out the porno magazines, but they were so disappointing. They had this Mafia aesthetic -- girls with big hair that you would never date.
That's the difference between the hardcore coming out of Europe in the 1970s, and that coming out of the U.S. It is a mob aesthetic. The mob is Catholic. It's not so much about them being the mob, but it's about them being Italian Catholic. The girls always looked degraded. They looked hard. They looked rough. There was no attempt to make them look pretty. They looked like girls who were going to hell.

Salon.com Sex | When nudists swung

How dangerous are dirty magazines?
They can make hair grow on your palms. [Pause.] Are you saying, "Is it a world fraught with crime"?
Yeah. Specifically, the Mafia.
Almost none anymore. My first publisher at Puritan was shot and killed in a parking lot in Florida. It was more dangerous back then. Wilder, woollier.

"Naked as a Jaybird"
By Dian Hanson
Taschen
263 pages
Photography
Buy this book

Once pubic hair was allowed, did the government say, "You can show pubic hair, but you can't show a vaginal opening?"
There was nothing about this. There were no laws whatsoever. The law said, "We recognize that nudist magazines are not sexual." Jaybird was just breaking ground with every issue. They didn't know what was going to happen. They had the very best First Amendment lawyer in America, a man who was horribly crippled. To see him in person -- he had to walk with two arm braces, and swing his limp crippled legs along. And so when he would come in to the courtroom, they didn't want to be hard on him. Yet, he was a master of defense. And he was an enormous fan of pornography himself, so he chose to defend this. And he started pushing Jaybird, saying, "Do this. Go further. Go further." Because he was winning his cases. He wanted challenge. Consider that Penthouse didn't show pubic hair on the newsstand until 1970, and even then it was a long shot -- a tiny smudge of pubic hair --

Salon.com Sex | When nudists swung: an interview with Dian Hanson

Once pubic hair was allowed, did the government say, "You can show pubic hair, but you can't show a vaginal opening?"
There was nothing about this. There were no laws whatsoever. The law said, "We recognize that nudist magazines are not sexual." Jaybird was just breaking ground with every issue. They didn't know what was going to happen. They had the very best First Amendment lawyer in America, a man who was horribly crippled. To see him in person -- he had to walk with two arm braces, and swing his limp crippled legs along. And so when he would come in to the courtroom, they didn't want to be hard on him. Yet, he was a master of defense. And he was an enormous fan of pornography himself, so he chose to defend this. And he started pushing Jaybird, saying, "Do this. Go further. Go further." Because he was winning his cases. He wanted challenge. Consider that Penthouse didn't show pubic hair on the newsstand until 1970, and even then it was a long shot -- a tiny smudge of pubic hair -- at the time when Jaybird was having these wild spread shots.

Salon.com Sex | When nudists swung: an interview with Dian Hanson

What do you think about nude war protesters attempting to form peace signs?
The strange tradition of naked war protest goes back to the Doukhobors in the late 1800s who came over from Russia to America seeking religious freedom like every other bunch of kooks. Whenever they were threatened, the Doukhobors would all take their clothes off. The sight of their nude Russian bodies would pretty much horrify everyone into submission.

Pynchon - Film & TV: Film References A self-described "obsessive but selective" collector, Larroquette often acquires multiples of whatever titles he fancies. In addition to books, he also collects photographs, art, pens, cameras, and computers. By way of explanation he says, "My wife read somewhere that people who collect have had emotional damage as children."

Best little movie house in Laos / English-language films draw crowds to a rare theater

Sai Gnam, 24, invested about $3,000 in the DVD projector and movies, which is a fortune in a country where entire houses cost $200. It's paying off nicely, he said.

"Our most popular movie is 'The Killing Fields' (the epic about genocide in next-door Cambodia)," Sai Gnam said. "And after that I guess it's 'Lord of the Rings.' Violent movies go over pretty well with Americans, so I got ones like 'Desperado' and 'Scarface.'

"They really like 'Scarface,' " he added, face lighting up as he formed a fake gun with his hands. "You know, 'Say Sabaideee ("hello" in Laotian) to my lee-tle friend!' Pow!"

Island paradise may be bulldozed / Delta denizens never got county building permitsOver the past two decades, a group of people passionate about the laid- back lifestyle and beauty of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta built their own paradise on Salisbury Island.

Some in the loose-knit organization that owns the 17-acre island in the southeast corner of Contra Costa County constructed their cabins from the ground up; others brought in attractive manufactured homes or placed simple trailers on the island shore. Because the land is accessible only by water, they put in boat docks, and many added decks and landscaping.
***
Among the problems: There is no sewage system, and raw sewage is spilling from the unapproved leach system built by islanders in violation of the federal Clean Water Act, Baltodano said. The island also has no approved potable water source.

There is not enough electrical power for the number of structures on Salisbury Island. PG&E complained to the county last year that the system was overloaded by the unapproved homes, creating a fire hazard. There is no equipment or water pumps to fight a fire.

The island, like most of the Delta, is in a flood plain, and the structures are not raised above the plain but instead are at the water's edge.
***
Martin Lysons, a lawyer for a Danville firm representing 27 islanders -- who include two photographers for The Chronicle -- said the county is selectively enforcing its codes. He argues that there are numerous other illegal buildings on other Delta islands that have not been red-tagged.

"The county's approach is to completely abate and remove every structure there," Lysons said. "What we would like from the county is the opportunity to make whatever changes we could make at this stage so it's not looked at as (an illegal) subdivision."

Palace of Saddam's son reveals love of fast life


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Palace of Saddam's son reveals love of fast life

NIKO PRICE, Associated Press Writer Monday, April 14, 2003

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(04-14) 11:28 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --

His personal zoo has lions, cheetahs and a bear. His storehouse has $1 million in fine wines, liquor and heroin. His house has Cuban cigars, cases of champagne and downloaded pictures of prostitutes.

While most Iraqis suffered under the U.N. sanctions that drove their country into poverty, Saddam Hussein's eldest son Odai lived a life of fast cars, expensive liquor and easy women, a tour through his bombed house showed Monday.

The walls of a gym were plastered with photographs of women downloaded from the Internet -- "the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen," said Army Capt. Ed Ballanco, of Montville, N.J. "It looked like something at the Playboy Mansion."

Among the photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's 21-year-old daughters, "dressed up very nice in evening clothes," Ballanco said, adding that soldiers took them "to protect the president."

***
The house also indicated Odai's sybaritic side, something Iraqi dissenters have told of for decades: a hunger for alcohol, drugs and lots and lots of women.

There were bottles of Cuervo 1800 tequila, Danska vodka and Delamain cognac, as well as Chimay, Corona and Miller Genuine Draft beers.

There were bags and boxes of pills and medicines everywhere -- ginseng sexual fortifiers, heartburn medication and Prozac -- and an Accu-Rite HIV Antibodies Screening Test Kit in Odai's office.

***
In the next-door storehouse, were roomfuls of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Ballanco estimated the alcohol's worth at $1 million.

There were "Dom Perignon, French wines -- all appellation controlee, some 30-40 years old -- a lot of very good brandy, a lot of good whiskey," Ballanco said. "There were boxes of Cuban cigars that said `Odai Saddam Hussein' on them, hundreds of them. My guys smoked them."

He said there were also six bags of heroin. He didn't know how much they held.

"There are UNICEF boxes in there with kids' school supplies meant for the children of Iraq, yet these jerks took it," said Maj. Kent Rideout, 39, of San Antonio, Texas.

Odai's obsession with sex was evident everywhere. The house was adorned with paintings of naked women, as well as bundles of Internet printouts of what appeared to be prostitutes, complete with handwritten ratings of each. One black book listed hundreds of women's names and phone numbers.
***



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Palace of Saddam's son reveals love of fast life

NIKO PRICE, Associated Press Writer Monday, April 14, 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



(04-14) 11:28 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --

His personal zoo has lions, cheetahs and a bear. His storehouse has $1 million in fine wines, liquor and heroin. His house has Cuban cigars, cases of champagne and downloaded pictures of prostitutes.

While most Iraqis suffered under the U.N. sanctions that drove their country into poverty, Saddam Hussein's eldest son Odai lived a life of fast cars, expensive liquor and easy women, a tour through his bombed house showed Monday.

The walls of a gym were plastered with photographs of women downloaded from the Internet -- "the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen," said Army Capt. Ed Ballanco, of Montville, N.J. "It looked like something at the Playboy Mansion."

Among the photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's 21-year-old daughters, "dressed up very nice in evening clothes," Ballanco said, adding that soldiers took them "to protect the president."

Odai Hussein's compound is in a back corner of the Presidential Palace compound, a small city that boasts six-lane avenues, traffic lights and a hospital. U.S. soldiers who now occupy the grounds say they believe Odai's portion included a house, a warehouse, a gym, a gaudy house for women and a zoo.

Scattered among the debris from a bomb that tore through Odai's house and exploded in a bunker below lay stationery with Odai's name in gold lettering, photographs of Odai and dozens of copies of Odai's doctoral dissertation, "The World After the Cold War."

The house also indicated Odai's sybaritic side, something Iraqi dissenters have told of for decades: a hunger for alcohol, drugs and lots and lots of women.

There were bottles of Cuervo 1800 tequila, Danska vodka and Delamain cognac, as well as Chimay, Corona and Miller Genuine Draft beers.

There were bags and boxes of pills and medicines everywhere -- ginseng sexual fortifiers, heartburn medication and Prozac -- and an Accu-Rite HIV Antibodies Screening Test Kit in Odai's office.

An e-mail dated Dec. 22, 2000, and signed by a Dr. Jean-Jacques Barrault, instructed "His Excellency" to undergo electrotherapy for a knee injury and to swim and ride horses for no more than 40 minutes a day. It prescribed a regimen of daily exercise.

In 1996, gunmen sprayed bullets at Odai's Porsche, leaving him with a bullet in his spine that forced him to walk with a cane.

The house was filled with boxes from handguns and piles of magazines, including "Guns and Ammo" and "Guns," as well as Spanish car magazines and catalogs of JetSkis.

Soldiers said they found receipts for sports cars signed by Odai. The underground parking garage and indoor swimming pool were destroyed by bombing that gutted the center of the house.

In the next-door storehouse, were roomfuls of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Ballanco estimated the alcohol's worth at $1 million.

There were "Dom Perignon, French wines -- all appellation controlee, some 30-40 years old -- a lot of very good brandy, a lot of good whiskey," Ballanco said. "There were boxes of Cuban cigars that said `Odai Saddam Hussein' on them, hundreds of them. My guys smoked them."

He said there were also six bags of heroin. He didn't know how much they held.

"There are UNICEF boxes in there with kids' school supplies meant for the children of Iraq, yet these jerks took it," said Maj. Kent Rideout, 39, of San Antonio, Texas.

Odai's obsession with sex was evident everywhere. The house was adorned with paintings of naked women, as well as bundles of Internet printouts of what appeared to be prostitutes, complete with handwritten ratings of each. One black book listed hundreds of women's names and phone numbers.

One e-mail printout was a complaint from a woman that she was having a difficult time finding heterosexual men in Europe.

"Darling, babe, it's not good timing to send me sexy attachment. OH BOY where am I going to get one guy?" it read in English.

Odai's bed was painted in gold trim, and his bathroom featured a sink and tub fitted with fixtures in a swan motif.

One house apparently wasn't big enough for Odai's women. To one side, a gaudy house filled with bedrooms that is now a camp for U.S. soldiers appeared to once have housed women.

It had statuettes of couples in foreplay, and couches everywhere with fluffy pillows. And it boasted another swimming pool, with a bar.

"The pink and the cheesiness suggest it was a concubines' house," Ballanco said.

Behind the house was a pen holding two cheetahs, five lion cubs and a young bear.

Three German shepherds who guarded the compound have been adopted by soldiers, who feed them military rations. For the wilder animals, soldiers have been throwing in sheep from a nearby pen, said Spc. Pete Adams, of Lexington, Va.

A feeding on Sunday, he said, "looked like something from the National Geographic Channel."

Fascinating ending to the article, huh?

Safe house or bachelor pad? Troops discover home of one of Saddam's hideawaysThe doors of the town house opened to reveal a playboy's fantasy straight from the 1960s: mirrored bedroom, lamps shaped like women, air-brushed paintings of a topless blonde woman and a mustached hero battling a crocodile.

On the wall and in the bedroom were photos of Saddam Hussein and one of his mistresses. Military officials suspect they found one of the paranoid Iraqi leader's many safe houses.

***
As U.S. officials set up command posts there, troops were going home by home, searching for looters and weapons.

Next door, where iron sheets were welded over all the windows, they found more than 6,000 Berretta pistols, 650 Sig Sauer pistols, 248 Colt Revolvers, 160 Belgian 7.65 mm pistols, 12 cases of Sterling submachine guns and four cases of anti-tank missiles all still in the unopened original boxes. There were also tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition mortars and cases of old handguns and heavy machine guns.

Not far off was another presidential palace, this one with a Yugoslav-built, chemical and biological weapons-proof bunker underneath it. A U.S. Army team inspected it and it appeared to be strictly defensive in nature.

But this home was different: beanbag chairs, a garden of plastic plants, a sunken kitchen and a room for a servant, all 1960s-style.

The sunken wet bar was stocked with 20-year old Italian red wines and expensive cognacs, brandies and Scotch whiskeys, the same brands found in several presidential palaces.
***
One of the air-brushed paintings depicted a topless blonde woman, with a green demon behind her, pointing a finger at a mythic hero. From the tip of her finger came a giant serpent, which had wrapped itself around the warrior.

Another showed a buxom woman chained to a barren desert mountain ledge, with a huge dragon diving down to kill her with sharpened talons.

More from the Helen Knode Interview:

Salon.com Books | "Why are movies bad and how do women get dead?" I know the movie took a lot of flack for being anti-feminist and anti-woman, that women with guns are just as bad as men with guns. But the dynamic, the thing that's motivating the violence, is purely female. I was very moved by that movie, and I wanted to go on in that vein. What does it mean for a woman to be free?
Has anybody come close to making a movie that touches on that issue since then?
I don't think people have even tried. What's come out of "Thelma and Louise" is this whole kicking-feet genre, like "Charlie's Angels" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and all the chick-flick stuff. These movies have skipped over the problem of freedom. I have not seen anything like "Thelma and Louise," because it's not explicit. It's talking about its problem in genre language. It's not directly saying what it's saying.

Comments on the Helen Knode Interview in Salon

I want to thank Helen Knode for putting in words what I could never express about "Thelma and Louise." I couldn't see it as a feminist movie, I could see its problems, and yet ... and yet ... and that's where it clicked: When I read Knode's comment that there is no escape to freedom, that "no matter where you go in this world, you are a vagina."

How many times in the literature of the ages have women taken to male disguises in order to be "free"? It's simply a fact of life: Like it or not, women will always, always be under the "male gaze" -- not necessarily a bad thing, but still it deprives women of an anonymous liberty. (For example, you simply can't go into a bar or coffee house alone and expect to remain anonymous, left alone to absorb the atmosphere or observe the goings-on. Inevitably, a man will speak to you, welcome or not. We are never allowed to be truly alone, anonymous, in public.).

Many times I actually look forward to getting old, old enough to be unattractive to men because it will be the ONLY way I'll ever achieve true liberty. I've yet to find a man who understands this sentiment -- and a woman who doesn't.

-- Kim Tilbury

More from the Helen Knode interview:
Tell me about "The Hours."
I think the basic premise of "The Hours" is that modernism is responsible for AIDS. [Laughs] It's a chain of unhappy women leading to a guy who throws himself out the window, all with the link of "Mrs. Dalloway." Virginia Woolf walking into the river leads to him throwing himself out the window. Any movie that opens with a woman walking into a stream with rocks in her pocket is not my kind of movie. And it all seems to be this morass of psychological opacity and sexual ambiguity and unhappiness. It's the most morose movie I've seen in a long time. Nobody knows anything, everything is lost, everything is despair, everything is unhappiness and water's rushing over your head.
Not that there's not tragedy in life. But if I'm going to watch a tragedy I'll watch David Lean, you know. I'll watch "Doctor Zhivago" if I want to cry. At least that's a clean cry.
What about "Adaptation"?
I didn't hate it, but again it's one of those movies that seems to say that there are only two options for human consciousness. Either completely paralyzed self-consciousness, which is not even the same as self-awareness, or your other option is bloody, low-chakra, base, animal unconsciousness, which is adultery, betrayal, drug addiction, death in the swamp, shotguns and crocodiles and car crashes, and all that. There are other forms of consciousness. There's the spiritual dimension that's completely missing.

More from the Helen Knode interview:

Salon.com Books | "Why are movies bad and how do women get dead?" "Thelma and Louise," which I think is a watershed, is the tragic view of the condition of women. You just drive off a cliff and you're dead. Because you've been cornered and there is no hope. You cannot be free. You can drive somewhere and not have a history. You can drive somewhere and start new. Just like the myth of the Wild West. There's a frontier where you can be free. And for women there is no such place. Because wherever you go, you are a vagina. Wherever you go on this planet you are a vagina. And that's what happens, that's the dynamic. That's what starts "Thelma and Louise." Thelma and Louise decide they want to take a vacation from their thankless husbands and boyfriends. So they jump in their car, they're going away for a weekend. The first thing that happens is they go to a bar for some fun and someone gets raped. Or it's attempted. And so someone gets shot. And they're on the run.

More from the Helen Knode interview:

Salon.com Books | "Why are movies bad and how do women get dead?" Where did Greta come from?
She came from my meeting with [film director] Kathryn Bigelow. But she's not Bigelow. I'm a big fan of Bigelow's. I interviewed her for "Blue Steel." That was in '89, years before I started this book. I think that what Bigelow wants, which is to be a female director of action, is strictly speaking impossible, given Hollywood's gender categories. My heroine is driven crazy by this contradiction. She wants to be Steven Spielberg, she wants to make widescreen adventure movies. Her existential position in Hollywood just fascinated me. How could she do the things she wanted to do? I have felt it myself. It's not just Kathryn Bigelow, it's women who just want to do what they want to do. And there's some reason that the world won't let them. At that time, you know, Bigelow had not made "K-19: The Widowmaker."

More from the Helen Knode interview:

Salon.com Books | "Why are movies bad and how do women get dead?" Right. And of course most murder victims in crime books seem to be women.
Yes. So what does that mean for the women who are living, who have managed not to be killed? What is it like not to be the object of violence but the subject of violence? And I find that in many mystery novels and crime novels written by women, they act like it's the same thing for a woman to find a woman killed as it is for a man to find a woman killed. But for me, any woman who finds a woman who has been murdered, it's got to throw you back on yourself: Why is she dead while I'm alive? So I went into the novel with these two questions in my mind: Why are movies bad and how do women get dead? And it somehow ends up being the same answer. [Laughs.] I don't know what the answer is but I'm sure it's connected. [Laughs.]

From Chris Hedges' War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, pg. 162:

[War] destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb. The world outside war becomes, as Freud wrote, "uncanny." The familiar becomes strangely unfamiliar--many who have been in war find this when they return home. The world we once understood and longed to return to stands before us as alien, strange and beyond our grasp.

The Onion A.V. Club | Video

The Onion A.V. Club | Video

Nearly as entertaining as the film is the second disc's making-of material, wherein Richert and others provide stories of drunk, stoned, temperamental stars, as well as the troubled production history borne out by Winter Kills' abandoned subplots and narrative shortcuts. Financed by soft-porn distributors with a sideline in the drug trade, the production continually ran out of money, at one point forcing Richert to make another movie, The American Success Company, in order to raise funds for its completion. Though Winter Kills met with glowing reviews, it received a limited release in only a few cities, prompting Condon to write an article blaming the Kennedys and the military-industrial complex.

Freecell FAQ and links

FreeCell FAQ and links

All of the 32,000 Microsoft deals except for number 11982 are solvable.

Jim Horne's version for Windows 3.1 contained 32,000 numbered deals (games), so that selecting a specific number would always produce the same deal. (These are random deals, generated by integer seeds using the random number generator in the Microsoft C compiler). He numbered the deals so that people could exchange the numbers of difficult/interesting games with their friends, and also in the belief that some people would try to play sequentially through the games; many people have in fact done so. Happily, when the game was ported to Windows 95 and later operating systems, the set of 32,000 deals was the same, so any discussion of deal numbers applies to all Microsoft versions. The help file for Microsoft FreeCell contains the claim "It is believed (though not proven) that every game is winnable." When Horne wrote this, he already knew that unsolvable deals could be constructed (see Hans Bodlaender's example): as a joke, the Windows 95 version includes two unsolvable games, numbered -1 and -2. Horne purposely made his claim ambiguous in order to challenge people to find such impossible games, but intending it to mean that all of the 32,000 included deals were winnable. This comes as close as possible to being true...

Freecell game 11982

FreeCell #11982 Contest

In my book, Dan Gookin Teaches Windows 98, I state that all FreeCell games are solvable. And I believe that they are. Along the way, however, various readers have disagreed with me.
First came Game #617, which a reader promised me was unsolvable. And I worked on that game for a week and a half, but eventually I cracked it.
Most recently, a reader has informed me that Game #11982 is unsolvable — and I'm beginning to believe her! So rather than frustrate myself to death over solving this particular FreeCell puzzle, I'm willing to wager $25 of my hard-earned royalty money against solving this puzzle.

Another factor in the popularity of the game, besides Microsoft providing the game free with Windows 95, is Dave Ring's Internet FreeCell Project. Ring solicited volunteers on rec.puzzles and elsewhere (eventually getting more than 100 people involved), and coordinated the volunteers in an effort to solve all 32,000 of the deals in the Microsoft versions. He assigned each volunteer a set of 100 consecutive deals, and the volunteers would report back after they had solved (or tried to solve) all 100, when they would be assigned another set if interested. Ring would reassign any hands reported as unsolved to his best solvers. I got involved in the project fairly late, but still managed to solve 1,970 deals. Eventually the project was completed, and all but one deal was reported solved! This is the famous game number 11982. I wrote the article on FreeCell and Baker's Game for Games while the project was still finishing up. Dave Ring wrote to Games shortly after the article appeared, reporting that the project was finished. Games printed Ring's letter, along with a layout of the unsolved number 11982, in the October 1995 issue (page 4). A report that 11982 had been solved turned out to be incorrect when it was discovered that the solver was playing Baker's Game (by hand) rather than FreeCell. I have since heard from over a dozen players (Doug Schmieskors, Laura Ross, Martin E. Martin, Adrian Ettlinger, Freya Wieneke, John Williams, Dick Belmont2

posted by Jeff Lester | 10:08 AM

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FreeCell FAQ and links

FreeCell FAQ and links

All of the 32,000 Microsoft deals except for number 11982 are solvable.

Jim Horne's version for Windows 3.1 contained 32,000 numbered deals (games), so that selecting a specific number would always produce the same deal. (These are random deals, generated by integer seeds using the random number generator in the Microsoft C compiler). He numbered the deals so that people could exchange the numbers of difficult/interesting games with their friends, and also in the belief that some people would try to play sequentially through the games; many people have in fact done so. Happily, when the game was ported to Windows 95 and later operating systems, the set of 32,000 deals was the same, so any discussion of deal numbers applies to all Microsoft versions. The help file for Microsoft FreeCell contains the claim "It is believed (though not proven) that every game is winnable." When Horne wrote this, he already knew that unsolvable deals could be constructed (see Hans Bodlaender's example): as a joke, the Windows 95 version includes two unsolvable games, numbered -1 and -2. Horne purposely made his claim ambiguous in order to challenge people to find such impossible games, but intending it to mean that all of the 32,000 included deals were winnable. This comes as close as possible to being true...

posted by Jeff Lester | 10:08 AM

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FreeCell #11982 Contest

FreeCell #11982 Contest

Final update, August 2002
According to the on-line FreeCell FAQ, Game #11982 is officially, utterly, proven to be, and undeniably unsolvable. Read more.
Alas.

posted by Jeff Lester | 10:07 AM

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Gamewatcher Countdown - Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance - allCube.com

Gamewatcher Countdown - Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance - allCube.com

The development of Mortal Kombat was fast and furious, but not without a great deal of thought. The ideas, as well as the blood, began to flow freely - Boon and Tobias incorporated a novel way of ending a fight, with one of the characters brutally inflicting a mortal wound on the other, complete with gushing spurts of blood. Other fighting games had moves which could momentarily stun a character, allowing for a few 'free' shots from their opponent, so Boon and Tobias went not only up a notch, but completely over-the-top, and the infamous Fatalities were born.
Even Boon and Tobias have admitted they didn't think the gory Fatalities would be as big with fans as they were, particularly since they weren't easy to pull off, control-wise, involving complicated joystick / button combos.
Fans loved the hidden, unlisted moves in Street Fighter II that only the more dedicated players would uncover while burning through fistfuls of quarters, so Boon and Tobias ran with the ball by including Reptile, a hidden character whose appearance was extremely rare. The idea was kind of insidious: since the combination of elements needed to 'unlock' Reptile was so difficult to coincide, the vast majority of players would never encounter the character, making them think those who were lucky enough to fight Reptile were total and complete liars.

posted by Jeff Lester | 9:55 AM

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Is there an endscene for the arcade game NARC? I know there's one for the NES version:

http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/nes/a/narc.htm

posted by Jeff Lester | 9:25 AM

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Wednesday, April 02, 2003

I told you I was doing research on video games, right? And that this site was going to do time as an infodump, yeah?

Eugene Jarvis

Eugene Jarvis is one of a handful of names that come up again and again as the inspiration for dozens of other game programmers. He created 1980's landmark "Defender," the first horizontally scrolling game; and the most frantic game of all-time, a classic that works as well in 1997 as it did in 1982: "Robotron: 2084." In the late 80s he spearheaded Williams Electronics return to video games as the designer of "NARC," and a member of the development team for "Smash TV," the official sequel to "Robotron." More recently, he created "Cruis'n USA" and the sequel, "Cruis'n World."

The ten original titles he has worked on have generated over a billion dollars in sales.

...

I got very interested in compiler design as a step toward natural language understanding. My goal was to eventually create a computer program to pass the Turing Test. So when I graduated, I got a job at Hewlett Packard in compiler design. Regrettably, my first job was on a six year project to write a COBOL compiler. I lasted about three days. I didn't want to end up like my colleagues at HP, bored shitless and sitting around talking about their lawn sprinkling systems, as they toughed out another coffee break on the road to oblivion.

What was the atmosphere like at Williams in those days?

Williams was a very small place engineering-wise. The company had nearly gone bankrupt a few years before, so the staff was very lean. There were two or three programmers, two or three hardware guys, and a handful of mechanical designers. The sales and marketing department was an old guy with a phone. It was completely sink or swim, as no one in management really knew the technology. Since there was nobody to tell us what to do, we had complete creative freedom.

There was a huge, grimy old World War II era factory with a thousand employees making everything from transformers to switches to metal stampings to circuit boards to finished games. If the latest game stunk, everyone was laid-off until the next model was ready. Basically the fate of the company rested in the hands of a couple of 19 year olds.

How did "Stargate" come about? Were there parts of "Defender" you thought you could improve?

After "Defender," Williams' first video game, came out and was such a huge hit, management decided that if one team could design a huge hit, 100 teams could design 100 hits. It was basically the monkey and typewriter approach to game design. So a huge new facility was constructed--Kedzie--with a beehive of offices. Since the edict went out to staff up quickly, an army of warm bodies were hired. Whereas I designed "Defender" in an abandoned factory in complete isolation, now I was subjected to twenty stereos playing "Disco Duck," all the while gagging on Cannabis fumes from the turned-on masses.

To escape this insanity, Larry DeMar and myself formed the Vid Kidz design firm. "Stargate" was the brainchild of Larry DeMar. Soon after we left Williams, they became rather desperate for a game. Being a purist, I felt a totally original game should be designed, however Williams needed a game in four months. DeMar proposed an enhanced "Defender" game. It couldn't be just a regular cosmetic con-job, but a really cool enhancement. We got real excited about tweaking the code and programming gobs of new and cool enemies and getting better real-time performance so more stuff could be packed on screen without blowing the silky smooth sixty frames-per-second performance. The "Stargate" warping feature was just icing on the cake.

We programmed the game on a dual 8" floppy drive 1MHZ 6809 Motorola Exorcisor development system. Since PCs were very expensive in those days--about $30,000--we worked on one system in Larry's spare bedroom. I programmed the system in the day, and he worked at night. And in four months it was done.

How did you choose the enemies in "Robotron"? The balance is perfect.

The philosophy of enemy design was to create a handful of AI opponents as unique as possible from one another, with unique properties of creation, motion, projectile firing, and interaction with the player. The enemies would be deployed in a wave related fashion, with distinct themes for each wave. Some of the most interesting and deadly aspects of the enemies were bugs caused by improperly terminated boundary conditions in the algorithms. Often these bugs produced behavior far more interesting and psychotic then anything I conceived of. An interesting bug causes the enforcers to drift in to corners occasionally for a deadly rain of terror.

...

Excitement can be a new character, a new game genre, a new camera angle, a novel playfield, a better display engine: color vs. black & white, texture mapping vs. flat shaded polys, 3-D vs. 2-D, better frame rate, awesome AI, etc. The huge megahits never are strictly a graphics upgrade, but involve fundamental gameplay paradigm shifts: "Mario," "Doom," "Space Invaders," "Tetris," "Pac Man," etc. The latter three involved no real improvement in graphics, they were just awesome games.

What do you think of the modernized versions of your games: "Defender 2000" and "Robotron X"?

It a very natural tendency for gamers to recall the rush they had playing the classics years ago, and then try to think up ways to freshen these concepts to bring their excitement into the current scene. The retrogaming gene is found in all of us. This task often proves difficult if not impossible, because the magic of the games themselves were often due to the limitations they impose upon the player. This is a common mistake all gamers make.

We want total freedom in our fantasy game world to do anything, but we forget that the essence of a game is the limitations of its world. The game of chess is a classic example of a severely limited playfield, but with mind-blowing intrigue. We face the freedom of the real world every day, but find it more interesting to play on our computer screens, because it holds the promise of a less infinite world that can be conquered.

It is especially difficult to translate the 2-D classics into 3-D. The 2-D perspective, while not as graphically exciting as 3-D, provides the player with complete information of his position, all current threats to his survival, all escape routes, projectile trajectories, etc. Once you move to a first person 3-D perspective you get the "I am there" adrenalin rush, but there is much less information and more ambiguity. The 3-D game requires the player to memorize the playfield since he can't see it very well. Enemy locations can only be guessed at, and death is often a surprise shot in the back. Because of these problems, most 3-D games in the "Doom"/"Quake" genre involve only a handful of active player threats at any time. It becomes very difficult in 3-D to duplicate the hundred-plus threats of Robotron, and have the player survive for more than a few milliseconds. Also, todays 3-D systems are limited to displaying at most a few dozen rendered objects, so very crowded scenes can bog easily.

"Robotron" has always been frustrating in non-arcade versions because of the lack of the dual joystick control. Because of the intensity of play the game is very athletic, and it is very nice to have a 300 pound arcade cabinet stabilizing your joysticks. Without true dual fixed joysticks, the game can be quite frustrating in console and PC versions.

Do you see retrogaming as just a fad or do you think it will in some way have an effect on the types of games being written?

For me the retrogaming movement is more than just nostalgia of misty eyed Gen X'ers. It's a reaction to the current graphical overkill, the simulation obsessed gaming environment of the late 90s. In our quest for absolute graphical realism, we have forgotten the basics of gaming. Look at "Virtua Fighter 3" vs. "Virtua Fighter 2." Unless you are a proctologist, you can't find a dimes' worth of difference in the gameplay. It is clear that the design team focused on the beautiful water effects, facial expressions, awesome backdrops, and 400 polygon, fully rendered loin-cloth animations. Have we as game designers become mere interior decorators, spending months on the reflection mapping of candlelight, or loin-cloth motion capture? Have we forgotten the essence of gaming which is to present the player with novel and original challenges? Once you've seen the interior decoration, there's no need to come back. You need a game in there.

posted by Jeff Lester | 2:33 PM

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The Dot Eaters - Classic Video Game History During the test-market phase at a Chicago singles bar, Berzerk proves to be a major attraction indeed. Upon release the game goes on to become the biggest arcade hit for Stern, selling upwards of 50,000 units. A new building and three shifts are required to keep up with demand as 300 units are produced a day. This in spite of a dodgy optical joystick with the game that has to eventually be replaced by a Wico stick. Unfortunately, it also goes down in the history books as the first videogame to apparently kill a person. 18 year old Peter Burkowski is in Friar Tuck's Game Room in Calumet City, Ill. for about 15 minutes on Saturday April 3 1982, and puts his initials up twice on the high score list on the Berzerk machine there. He then turns to put a quarter into another machine and falls to the ground. He is dead within half an hour. The cause of death is a heart attack, and while an autopsy finds previously undetected, two-week-old scar tissue on Burkowski's heart, the coroner does not rule out prolonged stress from the videogame as the triggering factor.

posted by Jeff Lester | 2:32 PM

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The Dot Eaters - Player2 Stage1 - Classic Video Game History

In 1972, after dropping out of Reed College in Oregon, Steve Jobs becomes Atari employee #40 as a $5 an hour technician at their Los Gatos facility. As games come down from the company's Grass Valley development labs, it is Jobs' task to refine their design. Facilitated by an Atari sponsored overseas service call, Jobs spends several months in India following his quest to understand Eastern wisdom and philosophy, and after returning to Atari starts sneaking his good friend Steve Wozniak into the factory after hours for long playing marathons on the arcade machines. The first time Wozniak sees a PONG machine he is hooked, and designs a PONG clone himself that would put one of four questionable phrases up on the screen if a ball was missed, such as "DAMN IT" and "OH SHIT". He does provide a switch to turn off the swearing, however. In 1976 Nolan Bushnell promises the young Jobs $5000 to put together the hardware for Breakout, yet another variation on PONG designed by the Atari founder, but instead of knocking the ball back and forth the player uses the paddle to send the ball at a wall of bricks across the top of the screen. The game sports a black and white display, utilizing the old pre-1980 chesnut of coloured overlays on the screen to simulate colour. Even though he is not much of an engineer or ace programmer, Jobs promises to finish the game in four days. It is his ace-in-the-hole Wozniak who actually builds the machine, spending four consecutive nights assembling the hardware and still holding down his daytime job at Hewlett-Packard. The two meet the four day deadline, and Jobs receives his money. Setting the tone for their business relationship, he tells his friend that the payment for the game was only $700 and pays Wozniak his "50-50" share of $350 and furthermore takes all the credit when Breakout becomes a hit 15,000 unit seller for Atari.

posted by Jeff Lester | 2:32 PM

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The Dot Eaters - Player2 Stage2 - Classic Video Game History Over an illustrious 16 year career at Atari, Ed Logg creates some of their more memorable arcade games, including Centipede (with Donna Bailey), Millipede, Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, XYbots, and Steel Talons.

posted by Jeff Lester | 2:31 PM

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The Pitch: It's like Citizen Kane meets Raiders of the Lost Ark!

The Dot Eaters - Player2Stage4 - Classic Video Game History Nintendo's US subsidiary formed in 1980, gives Jumpman his new moniker. The name Mario is taken from the man who rents warehouse space to the Seattle company.

posted by Jeff Lester | 2:29 PM

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It's my Big Fat Greek Wedding meets The Net!

Also known as a big ol' test.

posted by Jeff Lester | 2:19 PM

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