I was eight-years-old in 1981 when Yars’ Revenge was released for the Atari 2600 console. At that time, Yars’ seemed a radical departure from most other available titles. Unlike the other games I owned at that time (Combat, Space Invaders, Basketball), the goal of Yars’ Revenge isn’t immediately discernible by simply looking at the playfield. The left hand side of the screen contains a big white bug (that’s you); on the right sits something or someone else (presumably a foe) behind a big red shield. A strip of rainbow-colored static runs vertically between the two of you. You can shoot (or peck) away at the shield, but not while hiding in the rainbow zone. Sometimes a missile appears behind you. Sometimes your enemy turns into a deadly spiral and shoots you in the face. There’s another wandering wafer that players quickly learn is not friendly.

It isn’t until we read the game’s manual that we learn we are not controlling a fly, but rather a Yar scout. The Qotile (aka “the guy hiding behind the red shield”) can only destroyed by a blast from the Zorlon Cannon, which the Yar must arm by using TRONS (units of energy). TRONS can be obtained by nibbling on cells from the Qotile’s shield, or touching the Qotile when he is not swirling. Yar can hide from the Qotile’s Destroyer Missile in the Neutral Zone (the “colorful and glittering path down the center of the playfield”), but cannot fire from inside it.

In addition to the manual, Atari also included a mini-Yars’ Revenge comic book that further detailed the Yars’ plight. According to the comic book, the titular “revenge” was in response to the destruction of the Yars home planet of Razak IV. We also learn that Yars are alien descendants of common house flies who wear chrome armor into battle. And if you didn’t get enough back story from the comic book, Atari also released two separate vinyl records containing dramatic reenactments of the Yars story. Atari used to put a lot of effort into their releases back then, yo. In this case the efforts paid off, as Yars Revenge became Atari’s best selling original title for the 2600.

Yars’ Revenge has seen multiple ports, mostly to portable consoles. The game was released for the Game Boy Color in 1999, as part of a compilation package for the Game Boy Advance in 2005, and Atari’s Greatest Hits Volume 2 for the Nintendo DS in 2011. Yars’ Revenge was also included on both the Atari Flashback 2 and Jakks Pacific’s Atari Joystick Plug-n-Play/TV Games controllers. Most recently, the original version appeared most recently on the Atari Classics compilation for the PSP and iOS. (Just to clarify, all previous versions of Yars’ Revenge have been ports of the original, 1981 version.)

That brings us to Yar’s Revenge, a brand new Atari game developed by Killspace Entertainment. You can tell it’s an all new game because the old one was Yars’ (with a trailing apostrophe) and the new one is Yar’s (with the apostrophe before the “s”). SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE? This sly bit of coy marketing probably would have worked better if people hadn’t been misspelling the original version as “Yar’s” for the past three decades. Exactly thirty years after the release of the original, Yar’s Revenge hit PCs and XBLA in late April and PSN whenever hackers finally got gone done pissing all over it.

Despite the name of the original, apparently the Yars never got their revenge. In fact, in the sequel we learn that the Yars were all but wiped out by the Qotile, and what few Yars weren’t killed were captured. That’s where you come in, of course. After escaping, you’ll be exacting revenge against your former captors with guns a’blazing, which (technically speaking) means the game’s title should probably have been “Yar’s Yars’ Revenge Revenge”. Fortunately for us all it’s not; apparently, revenge is a dish best served one Yar at a time.

Speaking of names, this all new Yar’s Revenge doesn’t much resemble its namesake. The new Yar’s Revenge is at heart an on-rails shooter. Players are automatically guided through a beautifully pre-rendered world, and are allowed to move (but not steer) using the left analog stick while aiming with the right. In the past thirty years, Yar weaponry has come a long way; along with your traditional pulse laser, you also have a railgun and missiles at your disposal. Like all shooters, there are trade-offs (missiles are limited and the rail gun needs to recharge). Along the way you will also encounter power ups that can do things like recharge your health or make you temporarily invulnerable.

As with nearly all vidoe games, the overall goal here is to rack up a high score. Your score can be boosted by acquiring and maintaining multipliers, which themselves can be increased by shooting accuracy and speed. Yar’s Revenge contains six levels, each of which ends with a boss fight (where those powered-up weapons will come in handy).

One thing the sequel shares with the original is in-game poor story telling. In the original, the Yars’ back story had to be conveyed through the help of a comic book (the Atari 2600 wasn’t particularly known for its ability to render cut scenes). In the sequel, the ongoing Yar saga is related to players through voiceless, subtitled cut scenes. I hope you can read fast, because the words tend to zoom by faster than a Qotile Destroyer Missile. Even worse is the written dialogue that appears in-game, usually while a wave of enemies is firing lasers at your insect-shaped head. If you have a tough time texting and driving, you can forget about following the plot.

As far as shooters go, Yar’s Revenge isn’t great and it isn’t terrible; it’s just kind of there. While some of the bosses and waves of opponents can be tough to dispose of (depending on the difficulty settings you’ve chosen), more than anything, the repeated zapping of continual onslaughts of baddies grows monotonous long before players can blast their way through the game’s two-to-three hour playtime. More important to me than the fate of Yar was finding out when this punishment was going to end.

Thirty years ago, Atari programmer Howard Scott Warshaw created the Yars’ Revenge, a 192×160 resolution game that consists of 4k of code and is still being played today on modern systems. Thirty years later we have Yar’s Revenge, an absolutely gorgeous on-rails shooter that is bigger in size than a conventional CD (the PC version is well over 700 meg) and will be forgotten by most gamers in 30 days, much less 30 years. If that doesn’t sum up the current state of the gaming industry, I don’t know what does.

(originally submitted to Caltrops.com)

One man. Three hostages. Ninety-nine bullets. Untold riches. An infinite number of expendable Nazis. Welcome to Into the Eagle’s Nest.

Gauntlet, the classic arcade game released by Atari back in 1985, quickly inspired multiple clones both in arcades and at home on both consoles and home computers. Knock-offs such as Alien Syndrome (Sega, 1986), Druid (Firebird, 1986) and Demon Stalkers (Electronic Arts, 1987) copied the top-down maze format of Gauntlet and competed directly against licensed Gauntlet ports in the home market. While most of these Gauntlet clones took place in fantastic, magical settings, Into the Eagle’s Nest dropped players into World War II.

Presumably inspired by (at least in name) the classic World War II film “Where Eagles Dare” starring Clint Eastwood, Into the Eagle’s Nest places you in the heart of of the Eagle’s Nest, a Nazi fortress full of treasure, danger, and, well, Nazis. Your orders, according to the game’s manual, are to penetrate the Eagle’s Nest, rescue three allied captives before they are killed, destroy the Eagle’s Nest using hidden caches of explosives, and save as many stolen art treasures from destruction as possible.

To those who have played Gauntlet, the game’s layout should seem familiar. An overhead view of the Eagle’s Nest appears on the left, while a running inventory and status of your keys, ammo, health, and score are displayed vertically along the right hand side. A few differences between Gauntlet and Into the Eagle’s Nest are immediately noticeable. One, Into the Eagle’s Nest is a single-player game, so there will be no help for you. And two, the game’s graphics are much larger than Gauntlet’s. This design choice allows for more detailed graphics, but also means players are not able to see much of the game’s map at any given time (your view is limited to approximately 8×8 game tiles).

The game mechanics of Into the Eagle’s Nest should also seem familiar to Gauntlet veterans. Players will need to collect keys to open doors, collect first aid and food for health, and treasure (jewels, paintings, and vases) for score. Each level also contains elevator, wooden doors (which can be shot open), dynamite (boom!), and boxes of ammo. You’ll need the ammo to shoot and kill the hoards of Nazis, who are more than happy to return the favor. They’re not particularly bright, but there are lots and lots of them to deal with. The game is made more difficult by the fact that all bullets are invisible.

The ultimate goal of the game is to find all three allied prisoners and lead them to safety. Once your cohorts have been moved from harm’s way, you can complete the game’s final mission by using explosives and blowing the Eagle’s Nest sky high. If so are somehow able to do this, you’ll just start over in another, more difficult Eagle’s Nest. That doesn’t even make any sense. It would be like Darth Vader telling the Rebellion, “Oh yeah? Too bad for you I had ANOTHER Death Star!” And just how many stolen pieces of artwork were the Germans hiding in World War II? I mean, seriously; the Eagle’s Nest has more art than the Louvre!

As far as Nazi-killing games go, Into the Eagle’s Nest closes the gap between the original Castle Wolfenstein (Muse, 1981) and Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992). Although it’s a difficult game, it’s a fun one to play. Into the Eagle’s Nest was released for most major 8-Bit computers including the Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, as well as a few 16-Bit platforms including the Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS.

Before any of us had heard of Nintendo, we had Atari. If you were a kid in the late 1970s or early 1980s, you either owned an Atari 2600, were friends with someone who did, or were a weird booger-eater that nobody liked anyway.

Those of us with fond memories of the Atari 2600 have multiple ways to relive those blocky classics. A few die hard dorks (myself included) still own real Atari consoles; those less dedicated (or dorky) can still enjoy the games through emulation on virtually any modern computer. Compilations of Atari 2600 games have also been released for essentially every video game console released in the past 15 years. The latest of these retro compilations is “Atari’s Greatest Hits” for the iPad.

Technically “Atari’s Greatest Hits” is available for free via an iTunes download, but the free version only comes with Pong — which, unless you rode/ride the short bus each morning, you’ll tire of in just a few minutes. After downloading the core program, an additional hundred games are available for purchase, divided into groups of four for 99 cents each. For hardcore old school gamers, the entire lot can be purchased for a one time $15 fee. While each game grouping technically has a “theme”, some of the pack groupings make little sense; if you buy the Missile Command Pack (which comes with both the arcade and the Atari 2600 versions of the game), you’ll also be the proud owner of a prime example of false advertising, “Fun With Numbers”.

Of the 100 available games, 18 are arcade games and 82 are ports of Atari 2600 games. Most of the four-title game packs contains a sampling from each group. The Asteroids pack, for example, contains the arcade versions of Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe along with the Atari 2600 versions of Asteroids and Canyon Bomber. The Centipede pack contains both the arcade and Atari 2600 ports of Centipede and Millipede. The only games available to purchase are official Atari titles, so you’ll find no Activision or Imagic games here, boy. A small subset of the games support multiplayer gaming over Bluetooth. While this feature makes sense in head-to-head games like Warlords and Combat, going through the hassle of talking one of your friends into also buying this compilation and configuring Bluetooth just to take turns watching each other play Yars’ Revenge and Tempest seems somewhat pointless.

Each digital game purchased contains scans of the owner’s manual, box cover, and in the case of the arcade games, original artwork. None of them are a replacement for holding or touching the real thing, but when you’re paying for digital content (especially when we’re talking about 30-35 year old games), more content is better. As for the quality of the games themselves, the conversions are passable. The games look and sound relatively authentic, although nitpickers will spot slight differences here and there.

The obvious elephant in the room is, “How well do the controls translate to a touch screen interface?”, with the answer being a resounding “meh”. Listen, moving my finger around on top of a picture of a joystick has never felt realistic and never will. The controls on the iPad are spaced so far apart that it’s almost impossible to hold the iPad up and play the games at the same time. Playing on a smaller screen makes the device easier to hold, but shrinks the virtual controls at the same time. From Crystal Castle’s trackball to Tempest’s spinner (replaced with a “sliding dial”), the lack of tactile feedback is both noticed and missed (don’t get me started on Battlezone or Major Havok). Atari’s Greatest Hits is compatible with the about-to-be-released iCade, a device that turns your iPad into a mini arcade cabinet (complete with a Bluetooth joystick). With an MSRP of $99 there are far cheaper ways to enjoy old Atari games, but if you already planned on picking up the iCade, your Atari’s Greatest Hits experience no doubt would be improved.

For mobile gamers, compilations of Atari games already exist for Sony’s PSP and the Nintendo DS. And, as previously mentioned, both Atari 2600 emulators and MAME have been ported to nearly every platform under the sun by now (there’s even a port of MAME for the iPhone). If you’re an iPad owner and you either enjoy touch-screen controls or enjoy being frustrated by them, you could do worse than picking up “Atari’s Greatest Hits” for the iPad.

(Originally posted on Caltrops.com)

The last time I spent any time with voice-to-text software, it was the 1990s, and the technology was awful. Back then, most programs needed to first learn your voice, a process that involved speaking into your computer’s wired microphone for extended periods of time and hoping that things went well. Between the slow rate of speech required and the high frequency of errors, it never seemed worth the effort to me — especially to a guy who can type nearly 100wpm.

Voice-to-text software has made a comeback, thanks to smartphones. Five years ago voice dialing was all the rage, but today’s users want to be able to tweet, update Facebook, and send e-mail and text messages via voice. Enter Dragon Dictation for the iPhone (and Android).

Upon launching, Dragon Dictation’s interface contains a single button. Press it, and the app will begin recording your voice. When you finish speaking, the app will transfer your captured speech to their servers, convert it to text, and send the text back to you. Assuming the text does not need to be corrected, it can then be copied to your clipboard. For correcting text, users can either re-record words, or choose from a pre-defined list of similar sounding words.

Post-recording, Dragon Dictation provides users with five handy icons: SMS, E-Mail, Facebook, Twitter, and Copy. The Facebook and Twitter icons (once configured) will allow you to send your voice message as a status update. The SMS and E-Mail icons will launch the appropriate app with your message copied to the clipboard — it’s up to you to paste the message into the message body.

When Dragon Dictation works, it works well. When speaking in a normal tone in a normal environment (cars included), Dragon Dictation does a good job of recognizing most common phrases. The program also inherently recognizes certain key phrases (“period”, “comma”, and “Caps”) that allow your text to read naturally.

Using the app while speaking in a lower-than-normal tone of voice and/or in a noisy environment quickly reveals the application’s limitations. So does using non-standard phrases, apparently. My attempt to translate “Ding, fries are done” resulted in “Do you guys are doing”. Attempts to convert speech with the car windows down or while whispering gave similar results. According to the manual, repeated use combined with user corrections will train the app to your voice over time.

Security pundits should take note that all converted text is sent to and from Dragon’s servers via your phone’s Internet connection … meaning members of Al-Qaeda and supporters of WikiLeaks should probably look for a different solution. Dragon Dictation also requests to send the names of all your phone’s contacts to its servers, to ease in voice-to-text translations. The app promises that you cannot be identified and the names of your contacts will never be revealed to anyone else, but the idea still made me a little queasy. Opting out is always an option.

The app contains few other bells and whistles. Users can reset the app’s learned behavior and attempt to detect when you are done speaking, but that’s about it.

Users who have yet to upgrade to a multitasking version of iOS (such as myself) may experience some frustration in using Dragon Dictation for sending text messages. It works, but after each message you’ll have to press SMS, select the person you wish to text, press the text area, press it again, press paste, and then press send. For longer messages it will still save you time, and it’s certainly safer while driving, but it’s far from hands-free. For me, the app seemed more useful for updating Twitter and Facebook, and/or drafting e-mails.

Save for the few stares I got from my family as I clearly spoke Twitter updates into my phone, I like this app. I was able to compose multiple Twitter updates and lengthy e-mails with few or no errors (the more common the words and phrases, the better the success rate). It’s not quite hands-free and it’s not perfect, but it’s not bad, especially while driving.

Although I spent several years as a teenager making pizzas, cooking fish, and frying chicken, I never spent any time in a hamburger joint (working, that is — I spent plenty of time in them eating!). Burger Queen puts you in the action behind the counter of a busy burger joint, and it’s your job to keep the hoards of customers happy by delivering burgers, fries, drinks and desserts to them in a timely manner.

In early levels of the game, things move slowly enough that each item — burgers, french fries, and sodas — can be assembled as customers approach the counter. Burgers are assembled by picking the correct ingredients (bottom bun, meat, top bun), Sodas take a few seconds to fill, and fries take the longest to prepare as they must be dropped in grease to fry and then pulled out before they burn. Players have a serving tray that holds up to 10 individual items, which gives you the ability to stockpile a few items to help make it through the afternoon rush.

Later levels add more burger options like lettuce, cheese, tomatoes and chicken patties. Before long, additional drink choices (and ultimately desserts) show up. Your score depends on all sorts of variables, from what order you assemble the burgers to whom is served first and how long each customer has to wait. By the time you reach the higher levels, things get so fast and stressful that it’s like … well, it’s like working in a real fast food restaurant.

Burger Queen has a short ramping up period before it quickly turns into a virtual button mashing frenzy. Both I and my son had a good time playing this game. At $0.99 you can’t go wrong — very fun, and very addictive.

Refill, please!

In 1983, Cinemetronics released Dragon’s Lair, the first (and arguably best) laserdisc-based arcade game. The general consensus from gamers worldwide was that (A) it looked beautiful and (B) the controls stunk. There wasn’t a gamer alive that wasn’t impressed by Dragon’s Lair’s graphics (you got to play a cartoon, man!), but unlike essentially every other arcade game on the market at that time, Dragon’s Lair was more about memorization and timing than it was about lightning reflexes and skill. Whatever frustration gamers had with this new style of gaming didn’t stop Cinemetronics from releasing Dragon’s Lair II, Space Ace, and several other games using the same laserdisc technology. These games were expensive to create, in part due to the hand drawn animation (the animation alone for Dragon’s Lair cost $1 million and took 7 months to create).

In 1990, American Laser Games came up with a twist; by replacing hand-drawn animation with live action footage and using a light gun instead of a joystick, the world’s first live action laserdisc western was born: Mad Dog McCree.

Mad Dog McCree: Gunslinger Pack for the Nintendo Wii contains three live action western shooters by American Laser Games: Mad Dog McCree, Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold, and The Last Bounty Hunter. All three games work essentially the same: using the Wiimote as a pistol, players must shoot their way through B-movie western footage.

As Mad Dog McCree opens, you (referred to as “the stranger”) are informed by a local about the town’s dire condition. Mad Dog McCree is running wild, the Sheriff has been locked up in his own jail, and … about this time, one of Mad Dog’s cohorts walks into view and shoots you dead. After a brief lecture from the town’s undertaker the level will start over, and now you know how these games work. At any given time, bad guys can pop out and shoot you dead, instantly. You start the game with three lives, and believe me, they will pass quickly.

And that was my experience with Mad Dog McCree. After beating one location I would arrive at a new one, only to be killed almost immediately. “Note to self: there’s a guy behind that big rock.” Then I would start over and successfully shoot the guy behind the rock, only to get killed by the guy behind the cactus — and so on and so on. I slowly worked my way through the first game, asking myself all the while why I was doing so.

In the arcade version of Mad Dog McCree, three lives would run you fifty-cents, with continues costing you an additional quarter. Here, you can continue by challenging a quick-draw gunfighter. Let me just say this: it took us forty-five minutes to successfully win a gunfight. With each gunfight sequence lasting around 30 seconds (including the “continue page” and talking to the understaker), that’s about 90 freakin’ attempts. It may be the most ridiculous and needless difficult videogame challenge of all time. I would rather buy a new Wii and another copy of this game and start over each time rather than try to beat those stupid gunslingers.

Save for minor differences, Mad Dog McCree II and The Last Bounty Hunter (the other two games included) play essentially the same as the original. While continues and scoring and handled a little differently, you’ll still find yourself pointing and shooting your Wii Remote at cheesy actors in western garb and getting repeatedly (and cheaply) killed by random varmints.

After playing Mad Dog McCree: Gunslinger Pack for a couple of days, I came up with six target audiences for this game:

01. You are a wicked stepmother. You know, like the one from Cinderella? What better torture for that stepdaughter of yours than to buy her a fancy new Nintendo Wii for Christmas and then only let her play this game on it? TORTURE.

02. You want to ween your kids off of videogames. Are your kids spending too much time on the Wii? Buy this game, and then start hiding their old games one by one until only this one remains. They’ll ween themselves off it within a week.

03. You want to teach your kids about gun safety. If nothing else, Mad Dog McCree teaches kids that if you pick up a gun, you can be shot and killed at any given time by a scoundrel with a handlebar mustache. The earlier in life kids learn this lesson, the better.

04. You are poor. Perhaps you won a Nintendo Wii in a drawing, or someone gave one to you. It sounded good, until you found out new Wii games cost $50. WHAT THE? Fortunately for you, Mad Dog McCree: Gunslinger Pack only costs $20 and contains three games. Sure, it’s like buying your daughter a Barbie that’s missing a leg or your son a three-wheeled fire truck, but hey, sometimes money is tight.

05. You enjoy bad movies, you drink heavily, or you are a sadist. I’ll admit, any of these three groups may enjoy this game.

And finally …

06. People who enjoyed this game in arcades. This is, most likely, the only group that will get any real long-lasting enjoyment out of this package. If you have memories of quick-drawing in arcade and have a soft spot for the cheesy dialog contained within, you will get more entertainment from the Gunslinger Pack than anyone else. And by “more enjoyment” I mean you’ll play it more than once.

Anyone else, even at the budget $20 price, should probably steer clear. Everyone I’ve shown the game to that wasn’t in one of the above six groups lost interest in about fifteen minutes. The game play is repetitive and cheap, and the acting is bad (not in a charming way, but in the bad way). Unless Mad Dog McCree himself is holding you at gunpoint, it won’t take most players long to go find something else to do.

Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t a running bet between gaming industry insiders as to how many times they (the gaming industry) can get us (gamers) to re-buy Dragon’s Lair. Granted, early 8-bit versions of the game were far from arcade-perfect translations, but by the late 80s (partially thanks to the wide acceptance of CD-Roms over floppy disks) fairly decent versions of Dragon’s Lair had made their way to DOS machines.

By the late 90s, thanks to DVD, “arcade-perfect” (for all intents and purposes) versions were available for not only home computers, but stand alone DVD players as well. At the time, this seemed like the definitive version of Dragon’s Lair.

Ho ho.

Presumably bored of porting and re-porting the game over and over to the IBM-PC platform (there are roughly 10 different unique PC releases), Digital Leisure has begun porting the game to new platforms, including the Sony PSP, the Nintendo DS, the iPhone, and the iPad.

The latest port and collection is Dragon’s Lair Trilogy, for the Nintendo Wii.

Right up front, let’s get this out of the way — “Dragon’s Lair Trilogy” only contains two Dragon’s Lair games, along with Space Ace. That’s not a trilogy. That’s like buying the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD and receiving Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It would be different if there weren’t a third Dragon’s Lair game, but there was. Actually, there were three! In 1992, “Dragon’s Lair III: The Curse of Mordred” was released for the Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS platforms. In 2002, “Dragon’s Lair 3D: Return to the Lair” was released on the GameCube, Xbox, PS2, and PC. And in 2004, “Dragon’s Lair III” was released for the IBM-PC. But since none of those were released in arcades, and I’m guessing neither “Two Dragon’s Lair Games plus Space Ace” nor “Three Popular Cinemetronics Games!” would pass the marketing board, “Dragon’s Lair Trilogy” it is. Harumph.

I’m also trying to overlook the fact that over the past six months I’ve bought Dragon’s Lair three times: once for the iPhone, once again for the iPad, and once for my son’s Nintendo DS. Even with Dragon Lair Trilogy’s budget title price ($29.99, vs. the standard $49.99 Wii price), buying this game yet again is a tough pill to swallow.

That being said, and I hate to be the one to say it, but this collection is worth owning.

The video in Dragon’s Lair Trilogy has been remastered to 480p (as good as it gets on the Wii), and looks great. Gamers will not be disappointed with the audio or video contained within. Equally good are the controls. Fortunately, no “Wii Waggle” has been added; the games are controlled by holding the Wiimote sideways, like a traditional controller.

That being said, this latest collection doesn’t fix the fundamental problem with Dragon’s Lair, which is that in almost 30 years, the game play is still the same. It still involves pressing your controller in the right direction at the right time. It’s trial and error and memorization, which doesn’t necessarily make for a fun gaming experience — although, as anyone who played any of these games at .50 cents a pop back in the day can tell you, $10/game is a relatively inexpensive laserdisc gaming experience.

The selling point of playing laserdisc games was never the game play — it was the unique experience (especially back in 1983) of “controlling a cartoon”. If playing this style of game were that much fun, they would have kept making them. (Spoiler: they didn’t.)

The pros for buying Dragon’s Lair Trilogy for the Wii are exactly the same as the cons: it’s a near perfect collection of three almost thirty year old arcade games that were nice to look at but not all that much fun to play. If you don’t already own these games and wish to, this is a good package at a good price.

Link: DragonsLairTrilogy.com

Two things came into my life around the same time — a rekindled interest in Text Adventures/Interactive Fiction, and the iPad. Over the past month or two, I’ve been searching for a way to connect the two. While the iPad’s virtual keyboard (similar to the iPhone’s, but obviously bigger) isn’t designed for banging (touching?) out novels on, it’s certainly adequate for typing text into a work of Interactive Fiction. The portability of the iPad is a plus, too.

As I mentioned in my previous post (edit: HERE), iDOS (formerly DosPad) officially hit the App Store this week. iDOS is a port of the popular DOS emulator DosBox for iOS. It runs on the iPhone and iTouch, and contains a few additional features for iPad users. iDOS only lasted for a few hours in Apple’s App Store before it got yanked, but if your iOS device is jailbroken, you can download iDOS via Cydia, directly from the developer’s site.

There are a few works of Interactive Fiction (and Choose Your Own Adventure-style) available for iOS, and thanks to Parchment I have been able to enjoy several IF games on my iPad via the web, but that leaves a whole lot of games unplayable. Like games written in Hugo, which my friend Robb Sherwin primarily uses.

A few minutes of searching turned up a DOS-friendly version of Hugo. It doesn’t display the pictures and music like the Windows-based Hugo interpreter I’ve been using, but it does work. iDOS may have some performance issues when it comes to emulating graphic-intensive DOS programs with the iPad’s processor, but it seems to have no problem running DOS-based game interpreters.

Click to Enlarge

This is a screenshot of Robb Sherwin’s “A Crimson Spring”, written in Hugo, running on the iPad.

In the big scheme of things, running old DOS-based interpreters on new hardware via emulation is probably a step in the wrong direction. Ultimately I would like to see web-based interpreters for all the major IF languages. (And no, before you ask; coding such a solution is way beyond my skill set.) I think platform-agnostic interpreters would help widen the acceptance of Interactive Fiction. In a world where essentially everybody and everything connects to the web, it makes sense to put your game there.

Until that happens, we are occasionally left with coming up with alternative solutions, which sometimes means forcefully shoehorning old games onto new devices. iDOS lets me do that.

(Note: I write a lot of these the night before they hit the site. Because of that, there is always a possibility that, due to conky scripts and janky timers, blog posts could appear out of order, causing the appearance of an odd ripple in the space/time continuum when I refer to other posts that (A) haven’t appeared on the site yet, but (B) hopefully fill by the time you read it. While writing them, I am often forced to refer to things in past tense that haven’t appeared on the site yet. When it all works, it’s a beautiful thing; when it doesn’t, I appear kooky. Here’s to everything working!)

It’s hard to believe that Jackass has been part of our lives for ten years now. Part of the show’s and group’s continued success can be directly attributed to the ever charismatic Bam Margera. He’s so charismatic in fact that the last time I was in West Chester, I tracked down his house. Somehow between all the guy’s video production, skateboarding, film making and attempts to break his own (and others’) bones, Bam found the time to put together a book as well.

I love a good tell-all autobiography. Sitting right next to me on my bookshelf are titles like “Clapton,” “Hawk,” and “The Men Behind Def Jam.” Of course, expecting something straight forward from one of the world’s most chaotic individuals was just setting myself up for disappointment. Instead, “Serious As Dog Dirt” is a scrapbook chronicling the past 13 years of Bam’s life. An avid note taker, “Dog Dirt” contains nearly 300 pages from Bam’s personal calendars, with hundreds of handwritten diary entries and photographs included as well.

Acting as a crude “Keep Out” sign is a small drawing at the top of page one with two crossed pistols and a banner that reads “North Philly Faggot”. In other words, “Abandon all modesty, ye who enter.” Bam’s PG-13 gloves got left behind with MTV’s network censors, as the pages of this book are filled with stories of sexual escapades, drug and alcohol abuse, and worse. Next to one photo of Bam and his not-yet-then wife, the author has scribbled, “I knew this bitch was the one.” And directly on top of his wife’s picture, he’s written the three words every woman loves to hear: “I fucked her.”

For Bam’s true fans, there’s gold in these here hills. Some of the notes share stories or give insights that fans will recognize. Many of Bam’s calendar entries relate to specific events. One entry notes, “Saw My Chemical Romance and Avenged Sevenfold.” Another states Bam “went to 50 Cents house in Connecticut”. One amazing thing about the guy that you’ll learn is that there’s not a blank day on his calendar. Ever.

As I mentioned, there are also hundreds of photographs filling every page of the book. Few (if any) are captioned, so you just have to enjoy them for what they are. With so many candid photos, this is probably as close as you’re going to get to flipping through the guy’s personal family albums.

My biggest complaint about the book is that much of it is hard to read — not figuratively, but literally. It seems like many of the calendar pages were shrunk down to fit the book’s pages, leaving much of Bam’s handwriting nearly microscopic in size. Other pages feature notes written in light-colored markers, or text right down the middle of the book’s spine. Sometimes his handwriting is legible, other times, no so much. There’s nothing more frustrating than buying a book and not being able to make out the words!

One of my favorite parts of the book were the “Jackass Sketches”. Bam notes that it was too much work to try to explain many of the Jackass stunts in words, so he just started drawing them. Fans of the show will recognize some of them, while others have yet to be filmed. One of my personal favorites is the appropriately titled “Shit Catapult”, where some poor soul gets catapulted into a pile of … well, you know.

Reviews of the book on Amazon are split down the middle. Bam’s hardcore fans are rating the book five stars, while more casual customers are giving it a one. If your dream is to own a copy of Bam Margera’s personal scrapbook, then “Serious As Dog Dirt” is the book for you. It’ll make a great companion to the “tell-all” biography that’s bound to appear someday.

I was twelve-years-old in 1985 when the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) took America by storm. For years Atari and Intellivision (and, to a lesser extent, ColecoVision) had battled for living room dominance, but the NES blew everything else out of the water. Even as a Commodore 64 owner at that time, it was hard not to be jealous of the Nintendo library.

I didn’t get my own NES for many years after that, but it didn’t matter as all of my friends had them. In the spring of 1986, the gaming world was all about Super Mario Bros. Only the coolest kids could beat every level, find every last coin, and knew every hidden secret. By the time we had all mastered the first game, the quirky Super Mario Bros. 2 arrived. Back then none of us knew about the game’s Japanese origins … all we knew was that, it was different. While it wasn’t as good as the original, it held us over until the arrival of Super Mario Bros 3 — one of the best and most popular video games of all time.

Super Mario Bros 3 had it all. It took every single good thing from the first game and improved on it. There were more levels, more locations, more items … just more of everything. At a time when gamers were beginning to drown in mediocre platform games, Super Mario Bros. 3 redefined the genre and set the bar so high few games would ever come close in their design.

Nintendo stuck with the same formula with Super Mario World on the SNES, but has been tweaking it ever since. Super Mario RPG dropped Mario in a role-playing adventure, Super Mario Karts found Mario and his friends behind go-kart steering wheels … and then there was Mario Teaches Typing, which nobody found fun. On the Nintendo 64, Mario and his pals entered the third dimension. Super Mario 64 was heralded as a breakthrough in technology and game play. I hated it. Say what you want about the old 2D platform games, but at least I always knew which way to go. I found Super Mario 64’s levels confusing and frustrating; and, I found the graphics nauseating, literally. I couldn’t play that game more than five minutes at a time without getting motion sickness headaches. The series moved on, of course. There were more RPGs, more racing games, and the Smash Bros series of games.

Over the years, mainstream gaming has slowly left me behind. The Game Boy Advance was the last platform to embrace Nintendo’s 2D heritage. Their latest handheld console, the Nintendo DS line, has moved into the third dimension as well. The 2D platform was forgotten in favor of 3D adventures and 1st Person Shooters.

And that brings us to the New Super Mario Bros, which is, as far as I’m concerned, a gift from the gods. It honestly feels like a present for all old school gamers. And more than that, it feels like an apology. “We’re sorry you’ve had to endure stupid Mario games for the past 20 years. Please accept this awesome new title as a token of our appreciation.” Forget about Super Mario Galaxy. Forget about Dr. Mario. Forget about Mario playing tennis, basketball, or competing in the Olympics. New Super Mario Bros (NSMB) for the Wii might as well have been titled Super Mario Bros 4. As SMB3 was to SMB1, NSMB is to SMB3. It’s everything that game was and more.

NSMB begins as many of Mario’s adventures do — Princess Peach has been kidnapped by Bowser (again). The deja vu should hit you right around the time Mario drops into World 1-1 and you find yourself holding your Wiimote sideways like an old school NES controller. (You can also play the game using the two-fisted Wiimote/Nunchuck combination, but … why?) Unlike some of the more recent Mario games, there’s not much of a learning curve here. With only two buttons reachable with your right thumb, Mario is controlled the same way you controlled him twenty-five years ago. Of course it wouldn’t be a Wii game unless Nintendo forced us to wave the wand around for something, and NSMB is no objection. To pick up certain objects or fly as Propeller Mario, you’ll need to shake the Wiimote up and down.

Propeller Mario? Yes, that’s one of the new costumes you’ll soon find Mario wearing. Some old favorites like the mushroom, fireball flower and invincibility star have returned and appear alongside new ones like the propeller suit (an updated version of Mario’s old tanooki suit), an ice flower (an updated fireball shot that encases opponents in blocks of ice) and a penguin suit (an updated version of Mario’s frog suit).

The goal of each level in NSMB is, like always, to get to the end of the level before running out of time, collecting as many coins as possible along the way. In addition to the regular coins there are three semi-elusive gigantic coins that must be collected in order to unlock the ninth world. It seems pretty easy to stockpile extra men in the early levels, but you’ll need them in some of the games more treacherous ones. I am ashamed to admit about another feature I discovered: fail a level enough times and Luigi will appear and offer to walk you through it.

NSMB allows up to four people to play simultaneously, although getting that many people in the game almost guarantees frustration. With only two it’s much easier to stay together. With four, especially on the game’s auto-scrolling levels, it’s almost impossible to keep everyone together and every game quickly turns into a contest to see who can kill whom the quickest.

It’s old and it’s new, a retro throwback with updated graphics and sound, a new romp with old rules through new levels. Gamers who cut their teeth in 3D worlds may not appreciate it, but for those of us who instantly think of “the toaster” when we hear the word “Nintendo”, New Super Mario Brothers is the greatest gift an old fart like me could receive.