arne360

First I need to get my frid… I mean Wii back from an old coworker who borrowed it. Then I have to free up some space in internal memory, which is full of Virtual Console games and one WiiWare game–Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, which I haven’t even played yet. I think there will be plenty of easy targets for moving them off to the SD card for storage. For example, after playing it again, I can’t for the life of me remember why I was so fond of the Splatterhouse franchise. Apparently I wasn’t the only one since there is a next-gen (can we kill this term now?) remake in the works.

Anyhow, I now so greatly desire my Wii back (snicker) because Mega Man was released on Virtual Console this week. I actually had to make a quick scan of my NES games to make sure I didn’t already own this, as I do remember playing it many times. But I don’t. I already wanted to revisit it seeing as the super retro Mega Man 9 is on the way and the Virtual Console release just sealed the deal.

I want my… I want my NintyWii. plzkthx.

Normally, reading a list of known bugs for any given game would probably make flip out and complain on message boards and blogs until the developer patched the game for a bug that shouldn’t have been there in the first place with proper QA. At least that is what it seems like these days. Or everybody is exploiting some glitch or bug to gain unfair advantages in the online games. Hardly, if ever, are they actually so amusing to read that you are captivated into reading — and laughing — about nearly every single one, reminiscing about some by-gone yet warm and familiar moments of gaming.

This is what Graeme Cree’s Zork I bugs list turns out to be. Yes, that Zork I… the one about The Great Underground Empire that had you starting off the game standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door, and worrying about grues eating you in the dark.

The bugs detailed in the list nearly all produce hilarious results, such as “the command HIT MIRROR WITH SWORD will generate combat responses, such as ‘The mirror parries’…” If you remember those days of text-based adventures, go lose yourself for half an hour or more reading about the bugs. You won’t regret it.

Via Cathode Tan

These days, using that thing Al Gore invented called the Internets or something like that, you can easily score yourself some video game wearables. Whether it’s an old-school video game t-shirt or an artsy game t-shirt or even a fancy handmade scarf — it’s all out there, somewhere, for you to find. But nothing says you really love video games like wearing a pair of hand crafted knit socks on your feet that you or someone you know made just for you.

If you’re not scared of terms like “purl” or “yarn over” like I tend to be, you might want to head over to online knitting magazine, Knitty. In their newly released Spring 2007 issue, contributor Aija Goto provides patterns and instructions on how to put some Space Invaders nostalgia on your feet. You’re not limited to Aija’s skillful pattern suggestion — you can change the colors, layout and texture in different ways and, as Aija suggests, you can even put your own high score on the socks.

…and they might be well paired with that Space Invaders clock you might have picked up recently.

Full instructions in Knitty’s Patterns section.

Tales of PC gaming from the DOS era

Over on GameSetWatch, John Harris is writing a bi-weekly column, called @Play, which takes a look at various games termed “Roguelike” — a term I’ve never heard of before, but it’s a genre I’m familiar with. Last week, he took a look at one of my favorite games of the DOS era, which was appropriately called Rogue.

I can’t recall how I first come across Rogue, although it most likely got passed on to me by one of my best friends in high school. I do remember how I was instantly hooked by it’s familiarity to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons mythos where monsters were just what they were and potions, spells and armor all had simple intuitive names. I loved the challenge of finding the secret doors and heading deeper into the random dungeons generated by the game, and by never knowing what spell, wand or potion you picked up until you used it. And very often you never know what it did unless you had that “Scroll of Identify,” whose name was garbled in the first place, so you just had to use it by chance to find out what it was. I often named items whose effect I was not sure of really stupid things. One scroll, upon it’s use, says something along the lines of “You feel like you are being watched,” so I just called it “Watch.” And I still do to this day.

In his post for @Play, John Harris takes an indepth look at the gameplay mechanics of Rogue, revealing that it’s simple graphics and interface were extremely deceiving. Sure the monsters were simply chosen to represent the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, sure all you did was explore and fight, but the game is apparently extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to win. And John details this aspect I had never realized. I just thought I was bad at the game. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was playing the game all wrong. This game was about speed, go through the dungeon as fast as possible because everything will likely kill you because your character is so weak. And food! I never really thought about how having to eat food when you are hungry added another challenge to the game. I didn’t even remember you had to eat food. Instead, I tried to spend my time grinding for levels and equipment, exploring every hallway and every room for every bit of gold and equipment I could find. I didn’t know that the game was stacked against you, and it was exactly how Rogue was unfair, but it was exactly what made me keep going back. Just one more time into the fray, “this time I can go farther,” I would think to myself. Only to die even earlier than before, unless I was lucky.

I would have never imagined what the game was really all about if I hadn’t read this column. Nor would I have searched out to see if I could find a download of this freeware game, which turned out to be readily available at the Dos Games Archive. Now when I play it, I barely make it past the second dungeon. Have I not learned or is this game much harder than I remembered?