I see now that my previous weeks’ challenges have been too easy! Either that, or you guys are just too good. Time for a real challenge. This week’s theme is “Fantasy Beat ‘Em Ups.” Think Golden Axe, but not. That should help you pin them down. The first block is to the right, the other two are below. As always, post your guesses in the comments section of this entry, and don’t be bashful. Good luck!

    

The answers to the last challenge are after the break.

[ Continue reading Name Those Pixels: Challenge #9 » ]

What’s in a name? Well, if it’s the name of a game for a Nintendo console, there’s a strong chance that part of the system’s name will make an appearance. Popular examples of this practice include the game title Super Metroid for the Super NES and Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64. I call this phenomenon “system-naming,” for lack of a better term.

System-naming is largely isolated to games produced for Nintendo systems due to the company’s penchant for adding “upgrade” prefixes (the “Super” in “Super NES”) or suffixes (the “64” in “Nintendo 64”) to their system titles. We’ll take a look at some instances of non-Nintendo system-naming near the end of the article.

So what does “system-naming” matter? The answer, quite simply, is nothing. Really — nothing at all. This is an exercise in pure console nerdlyness. Information for the sake of information. So if you’re easily scared away by the academic study of trivial minutia, turn away now!

Still there? Ok. Let’s take a look at each Nintendo system, tally up their system-named games, and see which system ultimately wins the battle of the names. All percentages have been rounded up to the next whole number. Sources for the data presented are listed at the end of each section.

[ Continue reading Super Game 64 Advance DS: The Nintendo Game Naming Formula Revealed! » ]

Just a few hours ago, I completed an epic journey that I began over ten years before.

I finally finished the game EarthBound for the Super Nintendo.

I know, I know. Usually, completing a game is no big deal, and most people probably finish EarthBound in the span of a week. But in this particular case, the accomplishment meant something much more to me. I began playing the game in 1996 when I first acquired my copy of EarthBound used from a local Blockbuster store (a video rental chain in the US). I have slowly played through the same saved game a little bit at a time, usually about once every year. There might have been a period or two over the last decade where I didn’t play it for a few years straight, which would partially explain why it has taken so long. Picking up the game again every year was always a challenge because I’d have to spend hours just reacquainting myself with what was going on in the game’s storyline at the point of my last save, and I’d also have to figure out what to do next. Sometimes, I’d get too overwhelmed and just give up figuring it out…and promptly put off the task until the next time I picked up the cart.

Well, just this month, I felt my yearly EarthBound cravings coming on again (they usually hit sometime during the first two months of the year), so I pulled out the ‘ole SNES and fired it up. This time would be different, though: I dedicated myself to finally seeing the game through — all the way to the bitter end! 2007, I figure, is a good enough year to finish a game that came out in 1995. I’m usually a traditionalist about these things, but my original SNES wasn’t feeling quite right on my fancy new TV, so I figured I’d put a little modern technology on my side to aid me in my quest.

I’ve recently been playing a number of SNES games on an old iMac that I have more or less turned into a dedicated SNES emulator machine. I thought it would be nice, for a change of pace, to play EarthBound on there. Using my Super WildCard DX2, I transferred my EarthBound cart’s SRAM data to a file (which contains all the game’s save information) and loaded it up on my emulator. I played through the rest of the same game I started in 1996 on the emulator with an authentic SNES pad (via a Super SmartJoy USB adapter, which I’ve been meaning to review for a year or so now). I’m not going to lie to you; save states are the Emulator God’s gift to gaming, and without them, I probably would have completed a few bosses as usual and put off finishing the game until next year. The save states made playing through the game an absolute joy over the past few days, removing all sorts of time-wasting save-related hassles and just generally smoothing out the experience. Screw the purists — it was incredible fun, not a logistical pain in the neck, like playing a game should be.

Now that the journey is over, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. In one way, I’m ecstatically happy to have finally accomplished something by playing my way through such a masterful game, and in another way, I’m heartbroken that it’s over, as EarthBound is probably one of my favorites of all time. But if it’s one of my favorite games ever, why did it take me ten years to complete?

Maybe I’m just weird like that. Or maybe I didn’t want it to end.

Welcome back! This week’s pixel challenge involves flying bullets. The theme is, appropriately, “Shooter Games.” That means all three of these pixel blocks came from video games considered to fit in the “shooter” genre. That should help you pin them down. The first block is to the right, the other two are below. As always, post your guesses in the comments section of this entry, and don’t be bashful. Good luck!

    

The answers to the last challenge are after the break.

[ Continue reading Name Those Pixels: Challenge #8 » ]

Deep in the heart of Missouri lies a secret underground bunker full of Apple Macintosh computers. Within its stark white walls, you’ll find the computer collection of Jeremy Mehrle, a professional graphic designer with a decided preference for Apple hardware.

Actually, Mehrle’s presentation more closely resembles a swank nightclub than a bunker. The monochromatic color design and minimalistic furniture arrangement compliment the Mac collection perfectly, while adding an incredible touch of class to the makeshift museum. Dozens of compact Macs (mostly Classic IIs), which automatically run screen savers when turned on, engulf a tall bar area in one corner of the basement. In other section, there’s an eye-catching wall full of candy-colored iMacs. And don’t forget to take a stroll down the row of various all-in-one Mac models that includes the rare Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. Eat your heart out, “Mac Shelf.”

Merhle, who also goes by the handle “soyburger,” posted some pictures of his basement Mac collection on Flickr in August of last year, and links to the gallery have been virally spreading around the web ever since. I just recently ran across the photos myself and was so impressed with the aesthetically adept setup that I decided to contact Merhle and conduct a short email interview, which you can read below. There’s a lot more to see of Mehrle’s basement than the pictures here, so don’t forget to check out the full gallery as well, on Flickr.

[ Continue reading The Basement Mac Museum » ]

For those of you who might not know, the GCE Vectrex (1983) was a unique game system that had a built in black and white vector graphics display. Vector graphics are composed of lines drawn point-to-point on a specially-driven CRT rather than through a bit-mapped pixel graphics method on a raster scan display (like an ordinary TV set). That may be a bit too technical for you, but the least you need to know is that vector graphics are different than usual and, in the case of the Vectrex, consisted of white lines on black backgrounds only.

In order to spice up the system’s monochrome gameplay, each Vectrex game came with its own custom translucent colored overlay that snapped in place over the Vectrex’s built-in monitor. The white vector lines on the monitor underneath shone through and gave the illusion of a color display for certain parts of the screen. The one you see above is for Flipper Pinball. Notice the different regions of the play field which have different colors to add more life and variety to the game.

It should be noted that colored overlays were not a new idea to the Vectrex. Their use in video games spans back to the medium’s very genesis, from the days of Ralph Baer experimenting in his lab at Sanders, and later on the first video game system ever, the Magnavox Odyssey. Also, most early arcade games used black and white displays with colored overlays to keep production costs down, as the components needed to generate and the monitors needed to display colored graphics were expensive at the time.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of overlays — I find them a chintzy substitute for a true color display, and instead prefer to play my Vectrex games without them. Monochrome ain’t so bad.

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This week’s pixel challenge is our first to have a theme. This week’s theme is “Sega Systems,” which means that all three of these pixel blocks came from video game systems produced by Sega. That should help you pin them down. The first block is to the right, the other two are below. As always, post your guesses in the comments section of this entry, and don’t be bashful. Good luck!

    

The answers to last week’s challenge are after the break.

[ Continue reading Name Those Pixels: Challenge #7 » ]