It’s true: most controllers can’t stand up to the intense punishment delivered by the average Donkey Kong Country player. That’s why Asciiware created the Super Advantage joystick for the SNES. It’s built “gorilla tough” for “gorilla games.”

Woah there — don’t try using this sophisticated piece of technology on a non-gorilla game, or that tiny gorilla (pictured) will jump out of the controller and smack you. Just a warning: he goes straight for the eyes.

Discussion topic of the week: What if standard joysticks looked like this in the Atari 2600 era? How would games have been different?

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I found this wonderfully stamped card in an old, metal, 20-drawer punch card filing cabinet that I bought from a N.C. State University surplus sale late last year. Actually, it was one of many hundreds of such cards, most of which were rubber-banded together in program stacks for the psychology department.

I’m no expert on punch card-era computers, so I’ll let the more knowledgeable amongst us do the talking. It’s a great piece of history, though. I’m currently using the card cabinet as a tool chest.

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So this is what the famous Super Breakout Astronaut does when he’s not battling gigantic rainbow force fields.

If you haven’t noticed, this painting is a Where’s Waldo sort of exercise. Here are the instructions:

The seaside has been invaded by characters and objects from 23 different Atari games — how many of them can you identify?

Put your Atari knowledge to the test and post your guesses in the comments section below.

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Who needs emulators? Accessory maker NakiTek released an innovative device called the Game Saver+ in the mid-1990s that allowed gamers to store the exact state of their game at any time to memory. As you can see by the picture, the unit worked a bit like a Game Genie, acting as a bridge between a cartridge and the SNES. While playing, you could save your game by pressing something like Select + Right Shoulder button. To restore the game state, you’d press Select + Left Shoulder button (I forgot the combinations exactly). As long the Saver unit received power — either via the SNES’s AC adapter, which passed through the unit, or AA batteries — the Game Saver+ would save your game state. It also offered a few extra features like “slow motion” play.

Unfortunately, the Game Saver+ was released too late in the life of the SNES to make much impact. I picked one up in the late 1990s on clearance at Wal-Mart for a few bucks. By that time, I was already emulating the SNES on my PC.

From what I’ve read, the Game Saver+ didn’t work too well with certain games, causing graphical glitching upon resuming your state. In my experience (I remember mostly playing Super Castlevania IV with it), it seemed to work fine — although I wouldn’t want to depend on it.

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“It’s like your hand is part of the game.”

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A rare scene from the ill-fated film Poltergeist IV: Poltergeist Position.

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“We were quite impressed with the speed of the Tandy 2000’s 80186 processor.”

In honor of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2008), I’ve prepared a special RSoTW that highlights the little-known side career of its keynote speaker, Bill Gates.

Product endorsement ads like this one for the Tandy 2000 computer weren’t unusual for the Gatesmeister back in the early 1980s. Of course, those were the days before Microsoft was insanely huge, rich, and unstoppable. I wonder how much he got paid for the gig?

(P.S. Take a look at the early version of Windows featured in the ad!)

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With floating disc technology, “Pac-Man watches gobble all day long for you.”

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