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Desktop - Three balloons
Saturday, February 8th, 2014 03:25 pm
Tags:
Writer's Block: Beep, Bop, Boop
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 02:06 pm[Error: unknown template qotd]
Datin' myself here...
PONG. The original video game. And interestingly enough, it wasn't in the U.S. There was a Pong machine in a bar in Seville, Spain, in 1975 when I and my family visited there for the summer. At first none of us knew what it was, but when another customer told us, we all sat down and spent a couple of hours switching off and playing it. (The machine was a sit-down one, somewhat lower than a normal fast-food table, with the screen horizontal so the players could all look down on it, and the controls under the screen on two sides of the table so your hand were under the machine.)
It was a BLAST. Hard to believe now that video games have become so complex, but that rectangular paddle and square ball seemed like magic to us. The idea of being able to control what was going on on what was basically a television screen - wow. And the steady unchanging action of the elements was really strange after so many years of pinball machines and their rollicking, gravity-controlled motions. It would be about 25 years before I saw a video game that imitated the world of actual physics.
I sure would like to sit down to a real, original Pong machine again. It would be fun to see how it stacks up now.
Datin' myself here...
PONG. The original video game. And interestingly enough, it wasn't in the U.S. There was a Pong machine in a bar in Seville, Spain, in 1975 when I and my family visited there for the summer. At first none of us knew what it was, but when another customer told us, we all sat down and spent a couple of hours switching off and playing it. (The machine was a sit-down one, somewhat lower than a normal fast-food table, with the screen horizontal so the players could all look down on it, and the controls under the screen on two sides of the table so your hand were under the machine.)
It was a BLAST. Hard to believe now that video games have become so complex, but that rectangular paddle and square ball seemed like magic to us. The idea of being able to control what was going on on what was basically a television screen - wow. And the steady unchanging action of the elements was really strange after so many years of pinball machines and their rollicking, gravity-controlled motions. It would be about 25 years before I saw a video game that imitated the world of actual physics.
I sure would like to sit down to a real, original Pong machine again. It would be fun to see how it stacks up now.
Midnight Media Cafe - Game Over
Friday, April 2nd, 2010 09:46 pm.
For those of you who still remember the old classic arcade games:
Game Over - PES
A kinetic animation by artist PES. You can check out other works over at his YouTube channel.
For those of you who still remember the old classic arcade games:
Game Over - PES
A kinetic animation by artist PES. You can check out other works over at his YouTube channel.
It's the simple things in life you treasure
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 04:07 pm.
Tetris is 25 years old today.
It's true, Tetris has really hung on. Nobody plays Donkey Kong anymore. Minesweeper? Pfft. Only if you're stuck at work on a really shitty computer. Really old games sometimes enjoy a brief nostalgia fling, but Tetris has always been there, never flagging in popularity. I think it's the simplicity of the game that does it. As the article above points out, it has no characters and no shooting. It's the archetype of what I call geometric games, that have to do with moving inanimate bodies through space to fit together or combine. Until the dash games came along, this is the class of game I always favored, because the geometrics tend to free my mind; I don't have to think about them in the same way as other games, so they're more meditative for me.
Anyway, check out the article. It talks about the history of the game and the guy who designed it back in 1984. Did you know the game was created in Russia?
Tetris is 25 years old today.
It's true, Tetris has really hung on. Nobody plays Donkey Kong anymore. Minesweeper? Pfft. Only if you're stuck at work on a really shitty computer. Really old games sometimes enjoy a brief nostalgia fling, but Tetris has always been there, never flagging in popularity. I think it's the simplicity of the game that does it. As the article above points out, it has no characters and no shooting. It's the archetype of what I call geometric games, that have to do with moving inanimate bodies through space to fit together or combine. Until the dash games came along, this is the class of game I always favored, because the geometrics tend to free my mind; I don't have to think about them in the same way as other games, so they're more meditative for me.
Anyway, check out the article. It talks about the history of the game and the guy who designed it back in 1984. Did you know the game was created in Russia?
