There have been lots and lots of bad decisions made by the game industry over the years. FMV in video games, giving 50-cent his own game, the virtual boy, etc. But in the early days of gaming, when the first game characters were becoming famous icons in their own right, companies whored them out George Lucas style and put their likeness on anything and everything they could.
As a kid I had Space Invaders t-shirts, a Pac-man trash can, a Mario Bros. TV tray, and a Sonic the Hedgehog mini-pinball…. you get the idea.
Now, for some reason, as an adult I enjoy re-collecting all this crap. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t give you an answer. Not a satisfactory answer for any rational person anyway.
eBay is a wicked mistress sometimes. I’m killing time, surfing the videogame section and I find this book. On a goof, I bid 50 cents. Lucky me, I win. So I pony up and paypal out the money, hoping to at least get something a little funny or cool in return. This takes the cake as the dumbest thing I’ve bought from eBay.
In all my years of collecting this junk, I’ve never run across anything like this. This book bills itself as the “Official Pac-Man Joke Book”. But I take issue with that. There’s no jokes in this book at all. And I’m not saying there’s jokes but they’re not funny. I’m saying there’s no jokes. It’s just different puns with the word pac crammed in.
Lucky for all of you, I scanned some pages so you can see for yourself
Own anything on this level of craziness video-game memorabilia wise? Let us know, I have to find something worse than this so I can sleep at night.
Yesterday we posted our last podcast of the year, in which each of us presented our top 5 things of 2011. From that we then came up with a group of items and debated which things we should have represent Perpetual Geek Machine for 2011. We decided to eschew a standard top 5 list and instead pick one singular thing, and then have runner-ups in no particular order.
But if you don’t want to listen, or you’d just like to read the results please join us after the break for our individual lists as well as our choice for Perpetual Geek Machine Thing of 2011!
We Tweeted our amazement about this new DLC yesterday. We’ve made our (OK, well maybe MY love) for train games well known so we were absolutely certain that we wanted you to watch us play through some of these new scenarios for Railworks 3: Train Simulator 2012 so hop on board and ride this zombie-infested train with us, won’t you?
I like playing different games as much as possible. I’m about as far from the person that buys 1 or 2 games a year as you can get. I typically play a game for a few weeks then move on to something else. I also pride myself on playing all different kinds of games, and usually try and search out the weird/different titles to try out. Hence the “indie” area on Steam gets a lot of my attention.
SPAZ (Space, Pirates and Zombies), hereafter just called SPAZ, immediately grabbed my attention just cause it looked like games I played on my PC 20 years ago. Great news, it plays out that way, which not only provides a unique experience these days but made me feel like for only a few bucks I was able to jump back in time.
You’ve heard us talk about this game on episodes 25, 31 and 32 of our podcast and we’re all big fans of it. Since it’s a game that’s better seen than talked about we put together this little video to give you an idea of what it’s really all about.
Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below. Would you like to see us do more of this type of video content?
I love the shows where we cover a lot of ground, and we definitely do that this week. Infamous 2 covers the video games, Conquest of Nerath the boardgames. Chew gets us into comics and Super 8 + Xmen First Class handle the movies. If it’s nerdy it’s here people!
We’d also always love to hear from you guys if you want us to cover something specific. Hit us up!
The name Jerry Lawson might now ring any bells to most video game players out there, he’s never been a household name. Even amongst us old schoolers he was never as famous as Ralph Baer or Nolan Bushnell. Heck, I only know his name because I’ve read so many books about the history of video games.
So, who is Jerry Lawson?
Well, he’s the man that for all intents and purposes invented the video game cartridge. Hack in the 70′s he worked on the Fairchild Channel F, which while never super popular was the first game system to include interchangeable ROM game carts (up until then the games available to play on a system were the ones built in). Maybe you’re young enough to remember a game system with carts, even if only in a handheld game system format. But back in the day it changed everything, and paved the way for Atari and Nintendo and all the rest.
It’s a shame that we as gamer community have yet to really embrace the people that built the foundation for the wonderful games we get to enjoy today. Some of us have, Chris Kohler has a wonder write up over at Wired about Jerry. We’re in a unique position because the creators of video games are for the most part still alive, though that’s not going to be true forever. I think we owe it to ourselves and them to learn about their contributions while we still can.
So in that vein I’m including video of a talk Jerry did a few years back about his time working on games, it’s both informative and funny. If you like it there are a few more parts available from the talk.
R.I.P. Jerry, we lost one of the really good ones this week.
There have been lots and lots of bad decisions made by the game industry over the years. FMV in video games, giving 50-cent his own game, the virtual boy, etc. But in the early days of gaming, when the first game characters were becoming famous icons in their own right, companies whored them out George Lucas style and put their likeness on anything and everything they could.
In all my years of collecting this junk, I’ve never run across anything like this. This book bills itself as the “Official Pac-Man Joke Book”. But I take issue with that. There’s no jokes in this book at all. And I’m not saying there’s jokes but they’re not funny. I’m saying there’s no jokes. It’s just different puns with the word pac crammed in.
The name Jerry Lawson might now ring any bells to most video game players out there, he’s never been a household name. Even amongst us old schoolers he was never as famous as Ralph Baer or Nolan Bushnell. Heck, I only know his name because I’ve read so many books about the history of video games.