This excellent blog is about horses in videogames, and only horses in videogames. It’s by a videogame producer and equestrian who is making a videogame about horses. I feel like Frank Cifaldi and Brandon Sheffield did a similar website a million years ago – maybe it was a Tumblr – called “games with bears in them” but this is much deeper and really worth reading.
In its fifth printing since 2011 is this cartoon-filled book on game programming for the fairly obscure (these days) academic programming language lisp. The author, an MD, also made a Jaguar game.
Doug Jones is running for Senate in Alabama and some enterprising folks made a campaign ad using Dig-Dug as the theme. I like it when games make it in the cultural consciousness enough to be used in political campaigns (see: the “Trump Mains Hanzo” billboard elsewhere on this site which I am too lazy to link to), but even more when they are “B Side” games, which in my opinion Dig Dug is. It’s never had a real sequel in the US (we’ll leave Mr. Driller out of it for now), and despite being a classic arcade game, it’s really never penetrated into the zeitgeist like Ms. Pac-Man or Mario or Space Invaders or Minecraft.
Also, I guess this makes the weird dragon enemy Roy Moore. He’s best known in real life for being removed from office twice (for malfeasance) when he was a supreme court judge in Alabama. Roy Moore is endorsed by such luminaries and intellectual heavyweights as Sarah Palin and that alcoholic-looking old man from breitbart.com who wears two button down shirts over each other at the same time which even I know is a really awful fashion faux-pas. (He also favors khaki chinos which, as a west coaster, I really have no ability to explain from a fashion perspective, because I never finished The Preppy Handbook.)
Anyway, no need to get into the politics of things, but after careful consideration by our editorial board, Incredibly Strange Games officially endorses Doug Jones based on his affinity for Dig Dug. Oh, heck, you may also be curious to know that Doug Jones also has a history as a successful prosecutor including convicting some high profile thugs from the KKK who murdered four little girls in Alabama with a bomb they placed at a church, and who had dodged prosecution for decades. In our editorial books, that makes Doug Jones a stand up guy.
(OK, I can’t really leave Mr. Driller out of it.Mr Driller is the protagonist of Dig Dug’s son. The guy in Dig Dug is actually named Taizo Hori and Mr. Driller is actually named Susumu Hori. Susumu’s mother, if you believe the internet, which you’re reading right now so you better, is the protagonist of space shooter Baraduke (AKA Alien Sector), although per the lore lords at the MUGEN wiki, she is no longer married to Taizo.)
I got all worked up last night because I started reading about the gross history of the murderous KKK in Alabama so I forgot to mention that Heather is the one who tipped me off to this piece of importan Dig-Dugania.
Last Saturday night we did our first edition of INCREDIBLY STRANGE GAMES LIVE at the Fuse Box, Seattle’s smallest bar! I think we had more consoles set up then they have bar stools, but we had a great turn out of folks to eat popcorn, drink beer and play Ninja Golf, Um Jammer Lammy (pictured – Katie killed it), some com-Lynx stuff, Sea Man, and the highlight of the evening Gunbare Neo Poke-Kun, a virtual pet/dude/game maker title for Neo Geo Pocket Color that is straight up one of the strangest videogames ever made by humans. Thanks again to the Fuse Box for letting us set up, and thanks to the normal patrons for taking a break from talking weird motorcycles to talk weird games! We’re going to try to get Tree Surgeon running for our next outing after GDC, also Hi-Ten Bomberman! We should also have our mini-zine game in order – with stories on all featured games. If you want to bring a game to present, email me!
I picked up this graphic novel retelling of the story of Tetris at Comics Dungeon and it’s pretty rad. With simple straightforward language and a beautiful, spare, two-color art style, author and illustrator Box Brown takes us from Alexi Pajetnov’s early work at the Moscow Academy of Sciences, to the philosophy of play, and even the physiology of the brain, and why Tetris is so addictive. And of course, the amazing business tale of licensing Tetris from the old Soviet Union, which involved lies, deceptions, and multiple companies believing they had the rights to the game simultaneously.
Overall the book is great. Artistically, Brown uses very stylized graphics, so your focus is on the story and the people, not the details of the hardware or software. It’s also very accurate – I only caught a couple of very minor goofs (GB supports 4 shades of gray, not 8, stuff like that), and they didn’t detract from the story or give me pause.
The book is very much the official, canonical, Henk Rogers story of Tetris, with Atari and Nakajima cast as illegitimate pretenders to the Tetris license. Of course, this is the version that is supported by legal findings, but I would have liked a little more exploration of whether or not Nintendo intended the NES (known as the Family Computer in Japan) to be a full computer, which might have made Atari’s claim to the license to the game valid. (I admit a lot of my interest in this subject is colored by hearing a long description of the Atari side of the story directly from Ed Logg, who created Tengen Tetris for Atari!)
That’s a minor quibble about a settled issue. There’s more than enough drama (and tragedy) in the story of Tetris without re-weighing the merits of the Atari/Nintendo court case, and Brown does a great job of bringing one of the most fascinating videogame stories – both creatively and commercially – to life in this graphic novel. Bottom line: This is well worth picking up! I hope Brown makes The Games People Play into an ongoing series, too – there are so many great behind the scenes stories in games that still need to be told.
I was looking through the archives and I realized I never posted a pic for the release party we didn’t have for ISG 2 back in 2010. I guess now it can be told we only had 45 copies of Ninja Golf on hand…
I’m not really sure what that means, but I saw it on Reddit one time, and it kind of sprang to mind when I saw Space Invaders Bowling peeking out of my stocking on Christmas morning. I like Space Invaders, I like bowling, and I like weird little physical versions of videogames, so I was pretty excited when I got this.
In the box is a neat little full color manual, a spinner, a Space Invaders Bowling Disk (It lights up!) and ten bas-relief Invader panels. I used Photoshop to enhance the contrast in the next pic so you can see the Space Invaders logo on the disk – it’s pretty cool.
There’s also a plastic play mat in there. Now, I don’t care if you’re lying on your grandparents living room floor playing with some plastic ToySmith dinosaurs, or setting up a videogame bowling tie-in stocking stuffer on your workbench downstairs, a plastic play mat is pretty much a guarantee that you’re about to have a good time.
Here’s the play mat in all its glory. Like I said, the manual is really nicely done, and has lots of fun facts about the classic arcade game, as well as the rules for this bowling game. There are single-player and two-player options. Single player is basically bowling – knock down Invaders and score. Two player is much more interesting. One person spins the spinner and can move the Invaders towards the home area. If they get there, it’s game over for Earth. It’s challenging and a little strategic because you can split up the moves, creating difficult split shots for the Defender. It’s also surprising just how menacing bowling can feel when the pins are able to fight back…
Ready for a game. The disk is lit up in this pic but my camera couldn’t really deal with it, sorry.
Overall Space Invaders Bowling is a surprisingly fun game. I think I prefer this kind of bowling twist to a more literal conversion like Tetris Tower 3D. I also wish I was in the meeting when whoever at Running Press was like “We got the Space Invaders license… let’s do a bowling game!”
I got this for Christmas so of course, I have no real idea where Santa got it, but I am pretty sure he picked it up at Barnes and Noble for $12.95.
This is the electronic version of my fanzine about strange videogames and the people who make them and play them. You can contact me at: chris @ thisURL.
I work for Microsoft, but this is all my personal content. Except the comments!
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