You told me how to get the Night’s Edge sword in Terraria as we walked to school this morning. I listened as you and your brother went over strategies for the later levels of Epoch 2. I love you both. Have a happy birthday!

I’ve been watching a fair bit of E3 stuff this past week. During Sony’s swing at the stage, the image of a sheepish looking Tim Schafer provided one of the only moments of light, but legitimate comedy. The crowd was filled with game industry veterans and industry press. As is the custom at public events, the joke was explained by a grinning Adam Boyes. If I had to guess, I would say that there was a pretty large group in that crowd, and an even larger group at home that didn’t recognize Tim Schafer’s face and actually did need the joke explained.

Best Games - Artillery Artillery is one of the most basic physics equations given new form as a game. Artillery is one of the oldest computer games and new games based on the model of Artillery are released at a metronomic rate. Scorched Earth, Gunbound, Worms, Angry Birds. They are all descendants of Artillery.

I ask what they want for breakfast. They shuffle, bleary eyed, still asleep from the belly up. Eventually they arrive at the pantry, where they stare, bewildered, at the same row of breakfast cereals they see every day. When they finally do decide, I bustle around the kitchen filling bowls plates and cups, while they are magnetically drawn back to the couches to curl up in blankets and pillows. By this point, the questions have probably already started.

There is no way to keep up with all of the new games coming out. It has become impossible. I have been attempting to follow the games industry for somewhere around twenty years. Okay, first thing. twenty is a thoroughly alarming number of years to do anything. Second, I can flat out guarantee that there will be a massive indie hit sometime next year. Third, I currently have no idea that this massive hit game exists, and I probably won’t until it is available for download. I can’t even fathom how a customer would find this game, or any other game that doesn’t have a massive marketing budget. If it doesn’t appear on the side of a bus, or on the front page of a digital store, the odds of most people, we’ll call them customers, knowing about the game are microscopic.

Finished - mostly. I think that building an arcade cabinet is probably the type of project that you never really finish. There are roughly twenty seven thousand tweaks, additions, and adjustments that I could still make. I suppose I could say that I hit a plateau. Every button is wired up and working. The sticks function beautifully. I still need to rig up a stand for the tv, but any TV or monitor could, as Intended, be used as a display. Smash TV plays great too, the only downside being that you can only play it single player. I can get around the shortage of arcade sticks by plugging in a 360 controller for a second player, but that is really missing the point of having a stand up arcade machine in your home.

Best Games - Shogo Mobile Armour Division Let’s get this out of the way. Shogo is sort of broken. It is empty, ugly, and glitchy. Sure, it is 15 years old, but it looked pretty poor at the time too. The plot is confusing and largely unnecessary. Movement is floaty, and combat is loose and chaotic. Shogo is also incredibly fun.

Video games are weird. They started out weird. Presented as simulations of table tennis, but looking more like a display test pattern, the earliest video games asked a lot of their audience in the suspension of disbelief department. Aside from live college theatre, I don’t know of any expressive medium saddled down with more abstract contrivances than video games. Cronenberg has nothing on Super Mario Bros. 2. Video games are some hip deep weird.

IT LIVES! I have one stick and set of buttons fully wired. Well almost fully wired. The coin drop button isn’t 100% yet, but I think I have that traced back to a poor solder. It shouldn’t be too much trouble to fix. The second stick is sitting on the workbench ready to be hooked up, so that should be ready soon too. The sticks are Ultimarc Ultrasticks. They are analog sticks with a software setting for 4 and 8 way modes. I was a little concerned, since they were analog, that they might not be accurate enough for fighting games. Minutes after hooking up all the buttons and making sure they were all mapped properly, I was able to blast through half the roster in Super Street Fighter 2. When I reached an opponent I wasn’t able to beat, it was due to my own rusty Street Fighter skills and not the controller. The tension on the spring is a little looser than I would like by default, so I might go pick up a stiffer spring, but other than that it performs extremely well. I have it hooked up to the laptop for testing, but eventually a the cabinet will be home to a small pc and modest sized HDTV will act as the display. Is it an arcade accurate gaming experience? No, not really. You also don’t need to get tokens from a greasy haired thug and wonder what that sticky stuff is on the light punch button. Captain Joystick is part of a more civilized home arcade experience.

I attended a meeting? Meetup? What’s the hip term to use? Get together? Hangout? Whatever. We had one of those a couple days ago. Some local game developers gathered together to share projects we are working on, or have worked on. Games that needed feedback to move forward. Games that needed feedback to reinforce that they are moving forward and not backward, or sideways. Games that needed feedback to take the next step.

So Facebook bought Oculus and a wave of disenfranchised nerd anguish washed over the Internet. Oculus had sold out to the man, and the taint of Facebook was on everything and everyone associated. Idealists everywhere cried foul, as if strapping what looks like half a brick to your face made you one of the goddamn sex pistols.

Have you ever watched a wrestling promo? It’s the part during a wrestling show where one of the towering, oiled up dudes wraps a meaty fist around a microphone and shouts angrily at his opponents. He will go on a tirade about how he is going to inflict all sorts of terrible harm. Any nation with laws would charge this man with harassment or assault. Of course, in the contrived, aggression turned up to 11, world of sports entertainment, this is all business as usual. It’s all part of the show.

Best Games - Pengo When I was a kid I would go over to a friends house to play games on his Commodore vic20. I would arrive under the pretext that we were going to play street hockey. Most of the time we actually would play street hockey, because hey, street hockey is fun. The entire time we were playing there was a tune playing in the back of my mind. It was popcorn, and it goes like this.

I searched around to find the original illustrator files I used to cut all the pieces for Captain Joystick, but I seem to have backed them up so well I may need spelunking equipment to retrieve them. You will have to settle for photos of the finished product.

I used to build signs. Lots of them. Aside from a couple of detours into advertising and sculpture, I built signs all through the aughts. I learned to use vinyls, acrylics, plastic, wood and aluminum to construct a pleasing storefront. I stuck stickers for the government.