RetroGaming
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Super Pong Table serves up four-way retro play, whole lot of awesome (video)
Sure it's just sliding sticks and bouncing balls, but anyone who grew up playing Atari can tell you that Pong rules. Unfortunately, its earliest incarnation only supported enough 2D fun for two, which is why our eyes just about popped out of our heads when we saw this. The folks over at Instructables are showing off another awesome retro gaming project that makes everyone's favorite game a party pleaser -- it's also a pretty good fix for an old coffee table. The Super Pong Table allows for up to four players and fives balls per game, and enlists 900 LEDs and four Atari paddle controllers to make the thing work. Each player controls his or her own stick and gains or loses a point depending on whether they hit or miss a ball -- the first player to reach 20 points gets their very own "YOU WIN" light up display. Looks like we just found something to do with our weekend. You can check out a video of the table in action after the break or follow the source link for instructions on making your own.
Pica-Pic brings retro handheld games back to life, purpose to the internet
Brace yourself. You're about to be guided to the best website in the history of the universe, and if you dare doubt it, your universe may very well be ripped to shreds. Every so often, a new and improved reason for surviving emerges on the world wide web, and it's safe to say that Pica-Pic fits the bill. For all intents and purposes, it's a drop-dead gorgeous portal for accessing retro handheld games -- the very vessels that carried you through your childhood. Simply toggle through the myriad options with your left / right arrow keys, and then mouse over each game to learn of the keyboard controls. Venture on down to the source link if you're looking to occupy yourself for the next week month. Now, if only they'd build an app for porting this to the mobile side...
Wii Warm Up: New release nostalgia
All this talk about Metroid Prime 3 made us want nothing more than to get reacquainted with the original NES Metroid. Nothing against Prime, of course-- it's awesome, and we look forward to getting to play it for real-- but this happens a lot. Hype for a new game always instills in us the desire to play through the whole series, or at least our favorite entry. These feelings are often stronger than our desire to play the actual new game.Are you like us (in this one specific regard)? Do you ever get pulled towards the back catalog when you hear about a new game? Or is this just another case of this blogger's intractable retrogaming tendencies getting in the way of logical behavior?
Quarter gobblers are broken on XBLA [update 2]
Joystiq reader "epobirs" disagreed with our comment earlier today that Xbox Live Arcade title Gauntlet is broken. We'd like to dig into the issue a little more, because we feel that developers are missing a major opportunity to resurrect the true arcade experience. Games like Gauntlet were designed for an era in which expensive game cabinets were purchased by small businessmen who hoped that the large up-front purchase would be paid for (and them some) by teens plunking quarter after quarter into the machines in order to keep playing. Game designers therefore had to make sure (1) that the average player would die frequently; (2) that the game was fun enough to convince the average player to drop another quarter in the slot. Gauntlet, released in 1985 (at the height of the arcade craze) was a masterpiece of the form. It greedily gobbled quarters from addicted gamers who were enthralled by the game's tight design. What made the game so fun was the fact that your money was always at stake. A mistake meant that you had to reach into your pocket and insert more money. There was a constant tension between performance and pocketbook, and this tension made the game. Every non coin-operated release of Gauntlet since then has missed the point. The Xbox Live Arcade version, for instance, allows players to hit a button on the Xbox 360 controller in order to simulate putting a quarter in the machine. Of course, a button press costs nothing, and so the essential tension is lost. The game loses a fundamental game play mechanism by replacing quarter insertion with button pressing. What we'd love to see is a release of Gauntlet for Xbox Live Arcade (or for a competing service) that's free (or very cheap) to "purchase" but that costs $.25 per health increase (equivalent to 20 MS Points). The developer that brings back this core game play mechanism will claim the title of "most authentic arcade experience." We're certain that are some great arcade titles slated for release in 2007. They'd be better if they stayed true to the arcade experience.
Novotable offers ergonomically-questionable retro, PC, and console gaming
We're pretty sure you don't see many tabletop arcade games around anymore for a reason -- mainly, it's not very comfortable to hunch over a screen for more than few minutes. Luckily for us, our poor PacMan and Centipede skills (and perpetual lack of quarters) made this mostly a non-issue in our arcade-trolling days, but now a new product called the "Novo Infotainment Table" (or Novotable for short) is offering to bring spine-curving videogame action for yesterday's hits and today's PC and console titles right to our homes. The Novotable is basically a 32-inch LCD mounted horizontally onto an articulating stand, attached to a pair of arcade joysticks, and stuffed with a subwoofer, Shuttle PC, and your choice of PS2 or Xbox. You also get a a stainless steel keyboard to swap out the controllers in case you want to use your multi-thousand dollar device (actual price: unknown, but presumed high) for something other than playing the biggest pixelated hits of the 80's, plus the usual lineup of PC features that you'd expect to find on a Shuttle, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and FireWire and USB ports. We could see installing a few of these in a bar for some drunken Rampage fun, but the Mansion gameroom only accepts original pinball and arcade cabinets, so no Novotable for us, thanks.[Via Joystiq]
Pack-Man: five joysticks as one
A modified version of Pac-Man that lets five people take control over the pill eating phasmophobic, Pack-Man is another example (for more: 1, 2) of a single-player game modded to let more than one person play. Using five custom-built joysticks, the creators used "MIDI cables to communicate with a microcontroller, which then sends information on to a computer that's running the original Puck Man ROM". What this adaptation means is that Pac-Man will only change direction if the users have democratically chosen to do so. Usually the game runs at 10% of the game's normal speed to compensate for the additional time needed to co-ordinate the group, but every 8 minutes the game reverts to normal speed causing havoc and inevitable death for poor, democratic Mr. Pac-Man. Be sure to check out the MP3 recording of a group of players reacting to this unexpected speed up.[Via we make money not art]Read - Pack-ManHear - A group of playersWatch - An animation of a group's decisions
