Interesting Drug

Adventure Classic Gaming - Adventure game puzzles we have known and hated. “A vivid example of puzzles falling into this trap, to the point of parody, is in Shadowgate. Although the game is largely…

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I recently stumbled upon a Flickr account in which someone has
managed the impressive and noble task of scanning the complete
contents of several Sears and Montgomery Wards Christmas catalogs. The
sight launched me screaming headlong into the dusky realms of
nostalgia; back before the days of free two-day shipping from Amazon,
the Sears Catalog was the definitive masterwork on
consumeristic accessibility — or inaccessibility, if you were a kid
like me and couldn’t afford to buy the merchandise splayed loving
across the catalog’s 500-plus pages.

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That didn’t stop me from looking, though. I can’t even begin to
guess how many hours I squandered at my grandparents’ house, poring
over page after page of enticing game systems and G.I. Joe dioramas,
apparently with the conviction that the intensity with which I
scrutinized those items would somehow determine the likelihood of
them showing up under the Christmas tree.

Sometimes, it even worked! I stared at the G.I. Joe MOBAT so hard
that Santa took pity and dropped one under my tree that year.

Looking back at the catalog now, of course, provides an interesting
perspective on classic gaming that you can’t really glean from any
number of essays or retrospectives. The 1983 catalog, for instance,
was published at the peak of the Atari boom (which came right before
the Atari crash — we didn’t buy enough of the games listed in this
catalog that year, it seems). In those days, gaming was teetering
between becoming an enduring entertainment cornerstone and simply
washing out to be one of the novelty fads that swept America in
those days, a digital Pet Rock. As a result, the ‘83 catalog actually
lists fewer systems and games that remain recognizable in this era
than it does forgotten hangers-on and quasi-videogame cheese. 

The portable games to the right, for instance, are pretty much what
those of us who couldn’t afford a Game & Watch
had to settle for. They weren’t really video games, you see, but
operated with simplistic, motorized, physical mechanisms — not unlike
pre-video arcade games. Even in 1983, they were interesting for about
three minutes, and then you felt sad because you could have spent
those three minutes playing Cement Factory or even
knock-offs like Epoch Man.

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width="253"/>Much more interesting is the Dungeons &
Dragons portable game across the page from the depressing
faux-games. While I have fairly clear memories of just about every
game in the catalog, I don’t recall the D&D handheld at all. From
the gameplay description — move through the maze and shoot a dragon
with an arrow — it sounds pretty much Wumpus. Hell,
I even see a little bat in the upper right hand area. Yeah, it’s Wumpus.

Chances are pretty good I saw this back in the day and promptly wiped
it from my memory after feeling betrayed and angry about the game’s
lack of a hot monk chick in a fur bikini and an adorable baby unicorn
companion. Not that the D&D cartoon was particularly accurate to
the table top game upon which the show was based, but I’m going to
hazard a guess and say it was more authentic than this LCD game.

I guess whatever disappointment I may have experienced wasn’t too
scarring, though, since just about all I play these days are
portable RPGs — some of which are far more faithful to D&D than others.

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People who own a Kindle and an iPhone are in luck: Amazon has published a Kindle application on the iTunes Apps Store, so now you’ll be able to read Kindle books on your iPhone.

The program grabs books you already bought from Amazon and lets you read samples and buy e-books directly from your iPhone. It even supports auto-bookmarking, so you can start reading Gravity’s Rainbow on your Kindle, head out to the mall, then continue reading from the same ePage on your iPhone.

Also: It’s free.

The Kindle is a big improvement over my e-book reader, which consists of a Texas Instruments calculator you duct tape onto whatever book you’re reading. The Stevedle can do math, and if you type "58008" into it, then turn it upside down, it totally looks like "BOOBS."

Source

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In the West, Fallout 3’s advertising campaign tried to keep things classy. So it is in Japan, with the release of these Fallout 3 shirts designed by…Famitsu.

Yes, the magazine/website Famitsu. There are three designs to choose from, each coming in two colourways, and the best part is, some of them keep with the radioactive theme by glowing in the dark.

Before you lunge for your credit card, though, know that thanks to the current economic climate (and its effect on exchange rates), they’re going for around $45 (plus shipping) each.

Fallout 3 [ebten]

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While at NVision a few weeks back in San Jose, I got a chance to chat in detail to Jason ‘Textfiles.com’ Scott (pictured, left, in his natural habitat), who was at the event ahead of wandering off to Penny Arcade Expo to shoot MC Frontalot videos.
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hhavensteincw writes “On Monday Google detailed new plans to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. ‘Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written,’ Google said in a blog post. ‘It’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.’ For example, Google noted the availability of an original article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 about the landing on the moon.” When you search the news archive for, e.g., “Chicago fire” or “Rosenberg trial,” a significant fraction of the result pages cost money to view.

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Following his article on Atari’s genesis, game historian Fulton returns with an amazingly detailed piece on Atari’s ‘golden years’, from the rise of the Atari 2600 through Asteroids and Battlezone.
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The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.

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In between watching the glory that has been the Olympics (can’t say I expected so much Sepia-related content, but hey, awesome) and signing up to be one of the very few (10,000+ish) people to receive my very own VP text from Barack Obama, I came across this great piece in the NYT Magazine about Hanif Kureishi, his career, and his latest novel, Something to Tell You. The novel is, in brief, about a member of the rebellious British South Asian generation, Jamal, that came of the age during the 80’s, and how he and his now successful peers have to …

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“This is an actual ad I saved from Shaadi.com, a popular Indian matrimonial website. It’s been on the site for over three days, so I assume it’s not a joke/hoax/hack.”

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Pandora, the internet radio station built around your tastes, will probably be going out of business soon. After getting slapped by the CRB with exorbitantly high royalty rates to continue playing music, founder Tim Westergren says the company is facing a “pull-the-plug” situation. There’s one congressman trying to help Pandora and it’s million plus users, but the service is bleeding money in the meantime and its future looks grim. I’ll be very sad to see it go, since being reintroduced to it recently through their excellent iPhone app. What great idea do you have for us next, CRB?
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Mini Telescope mounts to your iPhone camera and provides 6x Optical Zoom

Pop on this 6X zoom iPhone Telescope and help your phone snap some beautiful close-up photos. The included clear hard shell case fits around your iPhone to protect it. Dock the lens into the mount on the back and start shooting.

Price: $17.99

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Desktop clock accessory, 80’s style!

Bring the iconic 80’s cubic puzzle to your desktop with this colorful cube clock. Twist the top row to switch between the clock, alarm, calendar and temperature! Simple style with 80’s flair.

Price: $19.99

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Patrick Biz of Geeks are Sexy blog has a neat post about the 10 must-read books about technology for geeks. Included are fares like iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith; The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed; Does IT Matter? by Nicholas G. Carr and so on.

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At many 99-cent stores, the signs still advertise rock-bottom prices, but much of the merchandise costs more.

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A celebratory look at Madonna’s career to date

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From fresh eggs to marijuana, it seems there’s nothing you can’t get from an automatic vending machine somewhere in the world. Wired.com’s Gadget Lab brings you five of the oddest.

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The $188 XO laptop created by One Laptop Per Child was devised to stir a revolution in third-world education, but be honest, you don’t care. At least, you don’t come to Gizmodo to debate the state of child welfare in Uruguay or whatever. For you, and for us, OLPC’s story is about hardware.

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Whedon said that if there were ever by some fortuitous miracle, a Serenity sequel, there would never be enough room to explain Book’s back history. So Whedon derived the only way possible to expound on his own universe. The place where he has the control he needs to pour forth his inner imaginations.Comics.

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Humoric has this great collection of thoroughly strange headstones. My favorites are the Scrabble board and the “expired” parking meters (I’m guessing heaven validates), but there are tons of unusual ones here from giant teddy bears to carvings of Yoda to 30% off inscriptions. Be sure to check it out. Link via the consistently great Presurfer.

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The Watts Towers were built by one man, without help and without proper construction tools or blueprints. Continue reading for the story of how Simon Rodia single-handedly built the 17-structure project that still stands today in Los Angeles. He spent 34 years building his masterpiece, and then walked away from it.

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George Orwell began keeping a series of diaries on 9^th August 1938 (love that British date formatting!). These diaries were never published. Seventy years later, the diaries are being released day by day in an annotated blog format. According to The Orwell Prize (who are putting up the entries), Orwell’s diaries reveal several dimensions of the man:

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