Time magazine ran a cover depicting Oculus founder Palmer Luckey leaping into the air in front of what appears to be a high school grad photo backdrop from the late 80s. His invention, the Oculus VR headset, looks like a goofy Johnny Mnemonic throwback at the best of times. Luckey, in the photo, appears to be headed to the socially maladjusted digital rapture. This led a lot of people involved in video games to implicate Time for the attempted murder of VR. The photo is cheesy, ridiculous, and plays into revenge of the nerds style stereotypes. If ever there was a button that could be pressed that would send all of games media into a frothing rant, that’s it. Time Magazine pressed it, and the response was dishearteningly predictable.

Best Games - Miner 2049er I have never finished Miner 2049er. Even now, when emulation, level select codes, and other digital wankery, would make completing the last level of this game trivial, I still haven’t finished it. I don’t think that I want to. 

I don’t buy games on launch day. On the occasion that get a game during a kickstarter, or pre order, or buy a game that’s in early access, I usually won’t play it until weeks or even months after release. Partly that’s because I have other things that need doing and my game playing time is limited. Partly it’s because I’m really cheap and prefer to wait until games are on sale. The real reason though, is that I know a few things about creative work. 

If you have read any of my previous posts, you probably know about my custom arcade cabinet and the neverending saga of it’s construction. I never really mentioned it, but I’m sure at least one or two people have wondered how the games actually run on there. How do you take hundreds of games from the 1980s and 90s that used to inhabit several stacked circuit boards and reels of coiled wire each and make that fit into a smallish pedestal. The answer is emulation, and it’s kind of a big deal. 

Best Games - Twinkle Star Sprites A bullet hell shooter hard as granite and a flop sweat inducing competitive puzzle game. Dress it up in childish, horrifically cute anime. Color schemes that can be best described as garish and audio like an elementary school squealing contest. Absolutely nothing about Twinkle Star Sprites should work. It is a Japanese arcade grab bag of bad ideas. 

This week I have been assembling a 3D printer kit I ordered a little while ago. I may have been under the impression that this was the thing that sucked Jeff Bridges into the computer in Tron. Turns out, it’s the exact opposite. If I build something in the computer I can have melted plastic spit out of a tiny hole until it looks like Jeff Bridges. Or something like that. Whatever. Here are some pictures.

Here is a topic that I have thought of, and then passed on, several times. Buying video games. It’s not the most sensational topic. Some might even call it dull. Pedestrian. This is just the standard day to day of any industry that sell products to people. Maybe, maybe not. Video games have had a unique convergence of circumstances that makes buying them right now really interesting. I’ll try to explain.

We have one of those filter water pitchers. You know the ones. Clear and glossy plastic, you can put it in the fridge to keep your drinking water nice and chilly. We’ve had it for quite a while. It carries the wear of years of daily use. It’s fallen on the floor more than a few times, and has those unique features that only come from significant trauma. The most notable feature is that the top flap of the pitcher that you lever open with your thumb to refill it with water, that thing, it’s thoroughly busted. The two tiny plastic pins that are meant to hold it in place have been long lost to some dark unexplored region. Under the oven most likely. We keep the flap on top of the pitcher to prevent debris or refrigerator flies or whatever imagined evils might enter our drinking water knowing full well that it’s doing little good. The filter in the jug is designed precisely to remove such debris before it ever enters the drinkable water chamber. Still we keep the flap on there. 

I wasn’t going to write anything about the arcade cabinet since I seem to have done that a lot lately, but I recently did a talk for the Calgary Game Developers group about it, so I figured I should post it up here as well.

When I decided to disassemble the arcade stick that had been hastily constructed from happ controls sticks and buttons, some scrap wood with oil stains on it, and several liberally applied layers of paint to hide said oil stains, I thought it would be a couple week project. That was almost 7 years ago. The cabinet I designed and built to replace the arcade stick was originally intended to contain a modified original xbox. It has 3 shelves to hold any old consoles I had kicking around.

A couple of weeks ago I was using a program called Flexisign. Flexisign, as the name would suggest, is a vector graphics program used mainly by the sign industry. Of course Flexisign isn’t the only vector art program available. There are much better known and more widely used, and arguably more capable programs around, but Adobe Illustrator is the top dog. If you want to do design work, page layout, or technical illustration, you probably need to learn Illustrator. Even though there are a couple of vector drawing programs that predate Illustrator and continue to be popular, mainly Autocad, the industry standard is Illustrator. Different programs will have their own tweaks and quirks, but if you know Illustrator, you can probably sit down and start working on a different vector program like Flexisign. Illustrator is the lingua franca of graphic design.

Best Games - Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition When Street Fighter 2 came out I had no knowledge of the original. If I had seen the original Street Fighter at an arcade or a travelling fair or a convenience store, it made no impression on me. I did see it long after it’s release in a restaurant in some small town in Manitoba. I remember it only because it was one of the deluxe cabinets with enormous analog pad contraptions rather than the 6 button layout most people have come to expect from Street Fighter games. The journey that brought that cabinet from Japan to small family restaurant in Canada must have been epic. One of the player 2 pads looked as though someone had been forcefully depressing it with a jackknife. I tried to play it and either I didn’t know what I was doing or the kick pad on player one didn’t work at all. Both cases seem likely. Also the game was terrible. This is the only machine of it’s kind that I have ever come across, and by all accounts mine was not a unique experience.

This week I have been working on finishing up Captain Joystick, my weird hybrid of arcade machine and sculptural home furnishing. I ordered a Raspberry Pi 2 to use as the brains of the machine and as of this writing I still don’t have it working 100%. 

I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about the past and the future. If you know me, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was due to my age. An earned sentimentality. In reality, I’ve always been this way. As interested in history as I am in what comes next. They are joined. There are no events, just a seamless flow from past to future.