If you’ve ever wondered what really went on inside the game Super Breakout, then wonder no further. The explanation that Atari contrived is so dramatic and exciting that I’m not even going to make anything up this time. I’ll just read directly from the instruction manual for the Atari 2600 version of the game…

[ Continue reading Retro Scan of the Week: Super Breakout’s Rainbow-Smashing Astronaut » ]

Quit fiddling around with your nancy-boy software, pansy. It’s time to get Hardcore. With Microsoft.

They want you on their team. They’ll give you a door. They’ll give you Windows. And you’ll get a health club membership, access to workout facilities, and an array of benefits like health, dental, vision, and retirement packages. If that doesn’t sound totally hardcore, then I don’t know what is.

But seriously — once you sign up to work at Microsoft, they’re so hardcore that, on your first day on the job, they lock you stark naked in a ten-foot-square, windowless, blank white room with two cans of spray paint. Your next move will determine your position in the company. This Kobayashi Maru-like “no-win scenario” originates from an incident in 1981 when Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was painting their new office space over the weekend and somehow locked himself inside a closet. Thinking quickly, he fashioned a makeshift air horn out of a spray paint can and some cardboard. Of course, no one ever heard him, and that’s probably why we’ve not seen Paul Allen since.

When they ran the same test on Steve Ballmer a year later, he immediately ate both cans of paint and had to be revived with fifteen minutes of intensive CPR. Although he lived, he has still never fully recovered from the incident. Bill Gates took the challenge last, and by day two, he was so bored that he spray painted a window on the wall and tried to climb through. A couple hundred bruises later, Bill Gates emerged from the room bloody, but victorious. Since he is the only man to have ever won the “no-win scenario,” he became president of Microsoft, and the rest is history.

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Way back in the land before time (1995), when a little ole company you might have heard of called “Nintendo” was tinkering with its worst gaming experiment ever (Virtual Boy), another company called Tiger Electronics (famous for its handheld LCD games, if you’ll recall), possibly tried [citation needed] to capitalize on the hoopla surrounding Nintendo’s red-headed stepchild. Tiger introduced the R-Zone, a LCD-based gaming system that used red-tinted game cartridges and projected them onto a HUD mirror strapped over the player’s pimply forehead (see picture). An extremely uncomfortable-to-hold detached controller held the batteries, and the player plugged the cartridge — each containing its own LCD screen — into the headset. It worked very poorly, as you might imagine; but what more could you expect for $30 (US) MSRP?

(The main scan above is of the paper insert from the blister package that my original R-Zone came in back in 1995.)

[ Continue reading Retro Scan of the Week: Tiger’s R-Zone — the Ultimate Eye Strain Device » ]

And you thought video game controllers were over-complicated these days; this one requires five (slightly-pudgy child) hands just to use it properly.

Take a look at this bad boy: four trigger buttons on the pistol-like grip (one per finger), twelve buttons in the overlay-friendly numeric keypad matrix on top, a one-dimensional “speed roller” wheel near the back, and an extremely flaccid red-knobbed joystick crowning it all. Combine this with the futuristic look of a gaudy black space gauntlet that literally engulfs your hand, and you’ve got the ColecoVision Super Action Controller. This marvel of controlling technology came in sets of two with a “Super Action Game” included — in my case, “Super Action Baseball.” I’m lucky enough to have a pair essentially “new in box,” so I grabbed these scans off the box itself.

It’s no secret that the ColecoVision’s original controllers were absolutely horrible. In fact, they could only be surpassed by those of the earlier Intellivision in terms of “least ergonomic controller design ever.” Obviously someone within Coleco noticed this fact and set out to design a super-ergonomic controller with a vengeance. But it seems they went a little overboard in the process: on the box it claims that the Super Action Controller is “the first video game [controller] that [gives] you individual control of 4 or more onscreen players.” Sounds really simple and easy to use, doesn’t it? With this amazing controller, you can control an entire baseball team with only one hand! Coleco was obviously way ahead of its time in this respect, as it seems the rest of the video game industry has still not caught up with their incredible insight into control of on-screen characters. Had Coleco gotten their way, we’d probably be playing five-on-five video basketball against ourselves (using one finger for each player) on a controller with twenty-five buttons. The extra fifteen are for the refs and the cheerleaders, of course.