Bloggity Blog 2: Return of the Blog

September 25th, 2010

Sequels. Trillogies. Franchises. It’s nearly impossible to think of a title that I really really loved that doesn’t have some kind of spin-off or sequel floating around, even in the casual game space. What is it that makes gamers gravitate toward the known quantities so much that game developers these days almost shy away from unique new properties? To understand, I guess we have to look back to the beginning.

The concept of the “sequel” in entertainment is extremely old, and therefor I will skip past literary and stage sequels and move straight to film. It can be argued that one of the first true examples of a sequel in motion entertainment was a 1916 film, “Fall of a Nation” by D.W. Griffith which was a direct follow-up to his original film titled “Birth of a Nation.” It is unfortunate to trace the roots to these films, as they were openly racist works that had significant nods to the Klan, a major issue in those times. Happily, the practice was continued in Hollywood with much more worthy subject matter, mostly because Griffith’s tactic proved to make plenty more money than the original.

The practice was originally a story-telling method, a way of taking popular stories and expanding on them, or a means of splitting a long subject across numerous films. Akira Kurosawa’s famous “Sanjuro” was followed with the even more iconic “Yojimbo.” George Lucas spread the lengthy epic of “Star Wars” across three famous films (I refuse to include the “new” movies. I have decided those were all just very high budget bad dreams), and the infamous “Godfather” movies will never die, the sequel “The Godfather Part 2″ still topping many peoples’ lists of favorite movies.

This did not remain true, however. The goal of the sequel is no longer mainly a means of continuing a story, it seems that it is almost certainly about money. Films are being penned with the word “trilogy” in mind from the very beginning.  Studies showed long ago that a sequel almost always brings back at least %80 of the viewers of the original if the box office takes were decent. On top of that, new watchers flock to theaters to see what the talk is about, and often times buy the DVD to see the first before they do. “X-Men,” “Blade, “The Fast and the Furious.” All of these movies are prime examples of huge money makers that would have only been mediocre in the box office if they hadn’t been trilogies.

Now we see this same scheme in games. In the beginning, Pac Man had Miss Pac Man, Castlevania went on and on into the night with titles, Metroid blasted onto the scene and kept shooting hits, and Mega Man… OOOOOH Mega Man… The sequel was a big thing from the beginning, but now it has become something truly impressive. The production that goes into making popular titles today is so huge, the stories so complex, the characters so intense and often believable that the sequels and third game, fourth game and so-on continue to suck more people in with every release.

Some of the most notorious titles today are “Call of Duty Modern Warfare,” “Devil May Cry,” “Socom” and of course… “Halo.” The numbers generated with these games are amazing, so amazing that they are beginning to challenge the movie industry’s numbers. The sales of Modern Warfare 2 broke movie box office records like a Buick hitting a tea-cup. Their estimated 5-day release sales numbers were estimated at $550 million, bigger than any Harry Potter movie (the box office owner at the time was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) Before 2009′s fiscal report, Activision Blizzard Inc. announced that the game had topped $1 Billion in sales world wide.

This trend follows the same path in casual games (to a much smaller degree) with titles like “Diner Dash,” “Bejeweled” and “Zuma.” Considering the numbers the console games were beginning to generate at the time, and the fact that social games hadn’t become the standard yet, Flo had a second go in “Restaurant Rescue,” Bejeweled got a shiny number “2″ next to it’s already well known title and Zuma got a second chance in “Zuma’s Revenge.” All of these games did extremely well.

It seems that people love to revisit characters they have grown to love and learn more about them, and with the level of immersion games give the player, It is no shock that so many people are buying the sequels. It’s time to hear from the rest of you. What is it about sequels, specifically in games, that makes you keep coming back?

Posted in Experience++, Online Games | No Comments »

More Free is More Fun

September 1st, 2010

Free. The word everybody likes to hear, and the word that few are willing to say without adding a catch or two. Free has been one of the biggest words in the casual games business ever since the consumers moved away from downloadable price-tagged titles. Now that ad revenue and small in-game sales have become all the rage, “free” is the only thing that matters. While many are trying to bring in potential paying customers by offering a large portion of the game for free and then asking players to pay to really jazz up the experience, there are still thousands of good old-fashioned free games out there. Ranging from tiny two minute time wasters to multi-leveled epics these games are still, in this blogger’s opinion, the heart of the online games scene.

Anyone who has been scouring the web for free time-wasting goodness for a while can think fondly on old standards like Newgrounds, MiniClip and Neo Pets, but there are new portals and properties popping up left and right. While many sites including these mentioned have become heavily funded or bought out right by corporations, there are tons of startups floating around that get web searchers in at the ground floor. Sites like Game Trove and Indiegames.com focus on helping new and self funded developers get their titles out to the public, while sites like Arcade Town and Mo Fun Zone simply collect all the games they can find online and put them in front of the user.

While there are many ways to find games online, the real treasures are the portals that are run by these indie developers themselves. If the savvy gamer can find one of these and keep peeking in for updates, they can usually be among the first to see new games as they are developed and released. In certain situations, the lucky surfer can even get in on some beta testing for new games and have a say in how a game gets made!

A great example of one of these upstart developer-run game portals is, if you couldn’t have guessed, EXP Online Games! As a developer working on the portal and many of the games, I can attest that now is an exciting time to be a part of the site. Right now, EXP is looking for as much input and play time as possible, and they are on the edge of a number of fun new releases. EXP and many other developer portals like it take pride in their own work but love the chance to show off other people’s work too. Hosting games like Air Traffic Chief and the incomparable Morningstar is always an honor and a joy, and those games do well to keep people busy while they put the finishing touches on their own titles like the newly released word puzzler Skywords and Kanye West Glory Hog. The best thing about every one of these games, and all the games on EXP is… THEY’RE FREE!!

An added bonus to sites like these is the amount of work they tend to put into keeping their developing users entertained. One of the new things EXP has added to spice up the site is a web comic, “Experience++” written and drawn by game artist, George V. Berger. Having just released the first few strips, now is a great time to start following, as these sorts of things tend to build steam early in their run.

So get out there and find some fun! There are more games floating around on the web than ever before and now is the best time to take advantage of the all consuming motto, “More Free is More Fun.”

Posted in Experience++, Online Games | 1 Comment »

Brains and high scores.

August 26th, 2010

Ah Halloween. I know it’s August, but I just can’t contain myself. Halloween is the greatest holiday of them all, so I think I will make like a Wallgreens and start putting up decorations two months in advance. The long awaited holiday season always starts off with a bang, and as store aisles are slowly filling with candy and plastic witch hats, the virtual game shelves are packed to overflowing with zombie titles.

Meow, a craaaaazy little zombie animation doing quite well on YouTube

That’s right folks, zombies. When all that halloween stood for was held before a panel of judges, the zombies seem to have won. I’ve noticed it more and more as each year passes, and this year I just can’t deny it. Zombies are in. Not only are zombies in this decade, but they are down right CUTE and CUDDLY now! Zombie games have done what zombies do best, and flooded the streets of every platform out there, breaking down the backyard fence at the mobile games ranch, busting in the door at casa DS and amazingly enough, rampaging through the neighborhood of casual games. It is so big now that there are even sites that specialize in the free casual zombie game genre. www.zombiegames.us is a good example of this. Featuring titles like “Zombie Golf Riot,” and “Pimp My Zombie” on their front page, it is impossible to ignore this growing world of the undead.

Now before you start to panic and fear for the fate of your online brains, I have done excessive research into this phenomenon and have come to the conclusion that this particular zombie plague  is rather safe. If zombies were once the purest example of evil, death and pandemonium, that is no longer the case today. High grossing titles like “Plants vs Zombies” and “Zombieville USA” are nothing if not “cute.” As the image of a horde of rotting, unholy living corpses sinks deeper and deeper into the fabric of our country I have chosen not to question exactly what this means about our general mental health, and have instead decided to jump onto the bandwagon and enjoy the ride!

The next big release from Blackburst Media planned for the Halloween season is a little game fresh from the grave called “Night of my Living Friends” I won’t give away too much about this one, but I will say the zombies are, of course, kinda cute, and the game is really addictive. You’ll need to be on facebook to really enjoy it, so if you’re not… where the heck have YOU been, 6 feet under? Ha! See? I made a zombie joke right there! Pretty good, right?

So strap on your thick leather coats and nail studded baseball bats and get ready for the spooky season. My prediction, it’s going to be one heck of a swarm this year!

Posted in Experience++, Online Games | 1 Comment »

The Drive to Collect Part Two: Closing Shop

August 21st, 2010

It seems that there is no way to fail if you have all the right things in place, right? After all the research and careful planning, your game is destined for success, yes? That isn’t really the case. There are endless games out there, especially when you are looking at Facebook, and an uncanny number of those games are rather large scale collection style games. Farmville started a boom in the production of these games where everyone and their brother saw the raging success of Zynga’s flagship game and figured they could do it just as well. The sad fact is, even with so many gamers out there, there are only so many hours in a day to be devoted to farming, shopping, cooking, animal care and building a better island.

Companies like Playfish, Crowd Star and Hidden Pixel have all climbed aboard and had varying levels of success. Those companies are in the top 25 (based on monthly unique visitors)  and there are literally hundreds of other developers out there working hard to scrape the bottom of the barrel. What is it that keeps some of these games from climbing the ladder? Why can’t they keep their heads above the water?

For one thing, many of these games are just not marketed well enough. Facebook ads are surprisingly lucrative. They have a much higher click rate than many other ad locations simply because the majority of the long term facebook surfers are bored out of their minds and clicking on everything with a splash of color on it. I know I have found myself looking at a targeted ad on the right of my screen and thinking “Why yes, I AM tired of running a farm. I think I WILL take your advice and click on you so I can rev up my life by testing my chops in the island tourism industry!” Simple steps like creating a fan page and telling your buddies about the game are never enough unless the game is truly amazing. The titles that succeed without having a huge studio name backing them are often the ones with developers that take advantage of the ad services like Facebook and Google ads.

Another thing that spells doom for a game, and many times, the whole studio, is the faliure to understand the tangled web that is Facebook’s rule book. Rules like “Thou shalt not advertise for anything that links away from facebook,” and “Whomever does not make it easy to contact the developer will feel our wrath,” cause trouble for developers more often than one might think. Follow the rules and guidelines to the letter and don’t push your luck and you may survive the flaming sword of Social Media long enough to find success!

these rules were roughly translated from two tablets passed down by an ancient Sumerian torture god.

Another pitfall is the “I can just hire a cheap team and bang out a little game a rake in the dough,” mentality. Yes, these types of games are getting lots of buzz and yes, there is grand potential for money making and game popularity out there, but that doesn’t mean that a quickie off the cuff game will succeed. Users are savvy, discerning and highly judgemental of their games these days. The days of riding a popular game mechanic to success with minor effort are gone. If you want to compete with big flashy apps and games, you have to have the pizazz to throw a punch or two of your own. Take the time to find a budget and put some real effort into your game and it may just hit the charts!

A truly crappy low budget game indeed

In this ballooning world of social games and collection driven titles, it is important now more than ever to take stock of everything you have at your disposal to help you compete as a developer. It takes every ounce of ingenuity, creativity and marketing to get a game off the ground. All of this conjecture and concept only addresses the details important to gathering and maintaining an audience, and there are a hundred more problems to solve after that. How do I monetize my game? How can I get players to spend money within my game? Without outside advertising available to me on Facebook, how do I passively earn from my users? … There is so much to think about when creating one of these big collector titles that in the end, only the strongest will survive.

Posted in Game Development, Online Games | 1 Comment »

The Drive to Collect Part One: Running a Successful Shop

August 12th, 2010

The human need to feel ownership and control has driven the direction of a lot of things in this world. The American dream of having a house and a yard, the desire for new cars, fancy electronics and a collectibles industry that continues to make money across the world are but a few examples of how this aspect of human nature has driven industry and product development for countless years. This need has also become applicable to the games industry, and I don’t mean the console games that require hardware and disc purchases, I mean the online casual side of the coin. The trend in online social games to present the player with a personal space, a “shop” or “apartment” or “yard” where the whole point of the game is to endlessly accumulate virtual items and objects to display for all to see has spawned a landslide of game titles on the social scene. Some of the most popular titles include “Pet Society,” “Restaurant City,” and the ever growing “Farmville.” In the face of such a massively popular and potentially lucrative trend, the question must be “What sets the successful games apart from the short lived near misses?” In this article, we will look at features and qualities that have driven players to return and invest time and in some cases, actual money to the game. We will also be looking at certain things that, in my opinion, have lead to lack-luster or poor performance in this extremely important social game space.

The qualities of success

When one looks at a game developer like Playfish or Zynga, one must wonder what secret juju they learned to drive their games to be so powerful. It’s not a magical power, nobody paid a warlock a hundred pounds of gold to weave a spell over the audience, it is simple quality control, cleverness and the willingness to take advantage of the tools at hand to engage an audience. The first important thing these companies have done is focus on originality. Now you may be saying to yourself “But my good sir, I must object! These games all have the same concept at play, they are nigh identical!” and to that I say “TRUE!” But there is one thing that sets the successful games apart. In general, with few exceptions, there is only one farm game, one cooking game or one pet shop game on the high end of the charts. I know the practice is the same from game to game, build a space, buy some junk, perform a task that lets you buy more junk, rinse, repeat. These games could have all stopped on the farm front, but the wrapper you put your sweetest candy in is just as important at the ingredients of the sweetness itself. If Zynga made a smash hit with a farming game, then all other games with a rake and a bag of seeds that follows may be seen as clones. Quality, art, ease of play, all these things take a back seat when a player says “Oh, this is just like that other game that everyone plays in stead!”

Another big item that clearly defines the popular games nowadays is visual quality. With so many collection games out there, nothing with sub-par art will pass the test. Gamers are becoming increasingly more discerning when it comes to the quality of their games. Where once the simple act of collecting a few little items was enough, now it’s all about who has the COOLEST items and the PRETTIEST outfits for their characters. When you look at a game like “Restaurant City” and compare it to something like the old “Vampires” games, you can see why the more lush and visually compelling of the two has taken the lead.

When it comes to success in a social games market, taking advantage of the endless ways to pester your friends is unfortunately something one must do. People say “I hate it when I get five million invites and gifts from people on facebook games!” but the fact is, numbers show that these invites, touts, challenges, gifts, notifications, events, page suggestions, likes, comments and everything else in that area work. They work wonders in generating traffic, even if it only drives a one time visit, people will click on these things, visit the page and play for ten minutes JUST to find a way to make it stop! The key here is to find a way to make these things seem fun, different and engaging. Making these gifts boost a new player or give items only available through gifting are a couple of the many creative ways to make these notices a little more interesting. There are nearly endless ways to add a little spice to your game’s invites and notices, and if you do it right those one time frustrated clickers can become long term players.

And alas, for the purposes of this article, we reach our final and possibly most important point. New items, new items, new items. Most of these games have new items for sale and to earn coming out weekly, if not almost daily. The trick here is to make enough of them limited time offers and enough of them permanent additions to the catalog to avoid overcrowding the game with stuff while still growing the overall game. Farmville, bless their little heart, has over crowded their game in my opinion. When you go to that game, especially after a long time of inactivity, you are inundated by so many “new item” touts and “new functionality” blurbs that it makes your eyes bleed.

The next part of this article will address the other side of this topic, and talk about how a collection game can fail, even while taking advantage of the drive to collect. Be sure to come back for “The Drive to Collect Part Two: Closing Shop“

Posted in Game Development, Online Games | 3 Comments »

Why is the iPhone platform attractive?

April 10th, 2010

We were doing some marketing research and uncovered some interesting info related to hand-held gaming. It almost seems to be a hands down choice to focus on iphone at this time. Seems counterintuitive but…

Why is the iPhone platform attractive?

3/17/2009 – 17 million iPhones sold, selling at around 7 million units per month

3/17/2009 – 13 million iPod Touch sold

4/9/2010 – 450,000 iPads sold

This estimates the total market size at around 80+ million users. Furthermore, In-Stat estimates the total US smartphone market to reach 100 million users by 2013 with Apple holding between 33% to 49% of that market. Apple’s app store is the best distribution opportunity for independent developers and generates $500 million is sales per month.

From the Apple marketing event held 4/8/2010 we learned:

Over 85 million iPod Touch/iPhones have been sold (vs. 70 million DS and 35 million PSP). In less than a year (2011) the iPhone/iPod platform will surpass all other hand-held game platforms combined, as it already surpasses the size of any one console.

50,000 games in the App Store (over 180,000 total apps) – contrast this to 4,300 DS games and 2,500 PSP games, the Apple game market is almost 8 times bigger than all other hand-held gaming platforms combined.

Developing for Apple is easier than any other gaming platform – $99 developer program vs. thousands of dollars for licensed dev kits from the other console manufacturers.

Publishing and distribution is much easier with the App Store, vs. no way to do it independently on the other hand-held platforms.

iPhone OS4 Announced

Apple announced a new upgrade to their software platform which will address two key areas based on their discovery that they inadvertently invented a new hand-held gaming platform:

  • iAd – a new mobile ad API, sharing 60% ad revenue with developers
  • Gaming Center – much like XBLA, new API for scores, leader boards, achievements, player matching, friends

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Points vs Endings Part 2: The Beginning and End of “The End.”

April 6th, 2010

This is the second of a three part series in which the writer examines the past, present, and future of the debate. For the first part of the series click here.


Like a good film, the climax of a game is arguably the most important part to the story. The difference is that while you watch a movie the ending is a part of the experience. When you play a game, the ending is what you strive for. You’re the one in control, and you don’t want to fail.

After three years I had finally done it. I had beaten Bloody Malth. I had saved my father. I had taken down Jacquio and the Demon. It was already midnight and playing this game for years on end had finally taken their toll on me. I can finally rest…

Ninja Gaiden’s ending will forever remain one of the best in the history of gaming. It had a truly immersive story with beautifully animated cinematic cut scenes, and the final cut scene lives up to what had been expected of it. The game from top to bottom is superb. It is also one of the most hellishly frustrating games to have ever been created. Most people can get up to Bloody Malth, but the hellish nightmare of failure up to and after him is enough to send even the most hardcore packing. If you persevere, you’re greeted with one of the most epic endings in gaming history.

Once the Nintendo Entertainment System had been released, games could be more than just quarter munching time wasters. They could have a story! Of all of the launch titles for the NES, only two had an actual ending. The most famous ending of those two is the ending to the first Super Mario Bros. After 8 attempts to find the princess you finally find her and she grants you another quest which is slightly harder. It clearly had one foot in the classic arcade mentality of “get the highest score.”  That was just the beginning of a long line of classic game endings.

When the industry realized the potential for a story being the main driving force of a game, it opened the floodgates. Every game had to have an ending. No longer were points the driving force. Arcade games still held high scores as a kind of relic of a bygone era, but ultimately the ending is what gamers wanted to see. The sad thing is it worked.

At the Golden Arrow Hotel, the home of the 1980 winter Olympics where America believed in miracles was a standup of the lackluster Aerosmith shooter Revolution X. One sad summer in the mid 90s, two teenagers with a sack of quarters and way too much time on their hands conquered that machine. A whopping 12 dollars later we had beaten this machine down. It was ours.  Emblazoned in its monitor are the two initials: “JHJ” and “CBB.” In spite of the fact that we had all the high scores, it wasn’t the highlight. We got to go backstage and shoot up an entire concert while Stephen Tyler screeched for me to “Eat the Rich.” Fun ride, but I probably wouldn’t do it again.

Ultimately that’s the downside for games where the goal is to reach “the end.” Once you play through a game with an involved storyline there’s really not much there to push you into achieving it again. The more devilish of developers found a way around this; Multiple Endings. One of the most prominent examples of this is the survival horror classic Silent Hill 2. The endings changed according to how you played the game and how many times you’ve played through it. They range anywhere from the horrific to the most bizarre thing you’ve ever seen in your life. This one is, of course, my favorite of those endings.

Endings now are based on how epic one can be. The long fought hard battle is finally over. The world is safe again… or is it? There’s no doubt now that if a game is worth its salt and can develop a fan following as well as sales, a sequel is inevitable. More and more games are starting to have far more ambiguous endings. They can gear you up for the next sequel (such as Mass Effect 2) or they can be a severe disappointment and taint the game experience for you (I’m looking at YOU Crackdown). More and more games are starting to short change the ending for multiplayer action. Halo 3 concluded the epic battle with the covenant with Master Chief carrying that front line to an ending to the trilogy, finally finishing the fight… at least for a single player campaign. While single player campaigns and endings still count for something, they aren’t the main goal anymore. They exist to help hone your skills for taking on your friends over the internet.

So where is all this going? What is our goal now that it isn’t the end of the game or to get the highest score? What exactly is the future of gaming? To answer that, we have to go back to the past yet again….

Posted in Online Games | 2 Comments »

Points vs Endings Part :1 – Points to the Past

April 1st, 2010

Since the beginning of gaming scores have been the point of attainment for video games. Sure you could get to wave 5 of Galaga easily, but could you get a high enough score to put yourself on the boards? What about wave 25? What about gaining the oft coveted double ships? Ask a gamer who never set foot in an arcade or held an Atari stick, and they’ll ask “What the hell are points?” High scores are things of the past, yet their influence is still around today.

Take a look at your 360 or PS3 collection. Now, pop in a disc and check and see if you even have a high score screen. Outside of games that have origins in the arcade or online multiplayer games, very few have or care about high scores. Sure, there are ranks, and kill counts, but nothing like seeing how high of a score you can rack up in a single player game. Even if scores do exist in each game, it’s merely a side component of it. Can you remember what the highest score you got in Ninja Gaiden for the NES was? Neither can I, and that’s my favorite game of all time. In order to figure out exactly where they’ve gone, you have to head to the past. You have to see where scoring in games came from.

It’s widely believed that the method of scoring in pinball was highly influential with how game scores were accumulated. Points usually start at 100 with multipliers building up a score that you could brag to your friends about. This remained largely unchanged until you were able to emblazon the screen with your initials (or if you were a complete jerk, write the words “ASS” and “DIK”).  Scores would then be more than just something you could brag to your friends about. It was something you could hold over the entire pizza parlor’s head. You could get on a soapbox and scream “I am the almighty JHJ, and I rule Night Moves!”

The first video game to keep an active high score was Sea Wolf from 1976, a video remake of the electro mechanical game Sea Devil.  The game was fairly simple. Pop a quarter in and you got 60 seconds to bring down as many subs with your torpedoes as possible. The one with the most sunken ships wins the glory of having their score being burned into the screen for years to come … or until someone unplugs the machine. That was the ultimate downfall of the arcade high score, they had a finite lifespan. People would try every method they could to get that score to stay on top, but ultimately it was a losing battle. The video below is probably the most well known dramatization of that battle from the episode of Seinfeld where George learns that all too well.

There were, of course, easier ways. Photos and videos of high scores and attempts were fairly common. I remember submitting my score in Rampage to Nintendo Power when I was 8 years old. Twin Galaxies is a fairly well known authority on high scores as well. Founded in 1981 by Walter Day, the website has now ballooned to include gaming outside of the arcade. Twin Galaxies was also prominently featured in the documentary King of Kong, where Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe duked it out by leaping over pixilated barrels in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong. Their epic records have since been shattered by Hank Chien, a plastic surgeon out of Manhattan.

Another area where scores seem to continue to matter is within the casual games area. High scores and leader boards still exist amongst people who want to play a couple games of Bejeweled while waiting for their TPS cover sheets to print. One of the reasons for this is social websites such as Facebook. The beauty of this system is that you not only see who the worldwide leaders are, but also where you rank with your friends. It’s nice that you can get into the 55th percentile brackets, but dammit you must beat Jimmy in accounting! It gives quick arcade style gaming the thing it’s been missing for years; competition.

While scores may be something that’s on the forefront of classic and social gaming, it has essentially been forgotten by most of those who consider themselves the most hardcore and enthusiastic about video games. In the next article, we explore what put an end to high scores being the goals of video games, and “the end” is only the beginning.

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Round 1… FIGHT! Street Fighter II CE comes to your browser!

March 25th, 2010

Walking into an arcade in the 90s was indeed a special time. There were no giant DDR machines instead there were rows and rows of stand up units. Shooters, fighters, beat-em-ups, puzzles, sports… the list goes on and on. Every week popping into a local arcade or family fun center was like going on an adventure to see what’s new.  It was a magical time where you stole cigarettes from your uncle’s pack and sold them for quarters to play the latest and greatest at the bowling alley.

Undoubtedly, the king of the arcade was Street Fighter 2. People would line up for hours with rows of quarters for “next.”  People loved Street Fighter 2 to the point of obsession.  We needed more, however.  Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to play as two of the same character? What about the ability to play as the four Shadowloo bosses? Thankfully Capcom released Championship Edition for us, starting a long line of add-ons and expansions to the classic game.

Now you no longer have to duck out of the office to head to a seedy Laundromat to play a couple rounds, you can sit in the comfort of your own cubicle and re-live your days of beating down shoto-scrubs with Blanka. Nothing is abridged; the moves, music, and animation are all here.  Pulling off combos and special moves with your keyboard might take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be throwing fireballs like a pro. The presentation is intuitive as well. Easily click when you want to play and it’s like you slipped a quarter in for a few rounds.  You can also customize your six attack buttons any way you wish with the click of your mouse.

Ultimately, it’s a great quick retro trip. Head back, and fricassee some chumps with your Hadouken by clicking here. Just don’t let the boss find out, he’ll want “next.”

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And So It Begins

March 23rd, 2010

Let me tell you about myself. I’m 27 and like most kids from the 80s, I’ve played video games pretty much all of my life.  As it is now, I’m the proud owner of pretty much every console generation since the pong days. When I went to school, I took my lunch to school in a Super Mario Bros. 2 box. I showered using Mario shampoo. I ate the Nintendo Breakfast System and Pac-Man cereal more often than Christian Bale screams at lighting technicians. I know and love video games more than anyone I’ve ever met.

I forget exactly how old I was. I was visiting my older cousins in Virginia while my parents scoped out places for us to move from New York City to.  The youngest of my cousins got out a small black box and pulls out his antenna from his black and white zenith in his room, and hooks it up to the TV. I knew what video games were; it’s kind of hard not to know when you live in New York City. My dad’s restaurant had Galaga and Centipede machines in it. My uncle would take me to the movies on 42nd street and let me play Star Wars. I believe the Odd-Lot my mom worked at even had a Donkey Kong machine. I’d seen them before, but I had never actually played one intently.

He hands me this bizarre controller with a joystick on one end and a rotating paddle on the other. With the flip of a switch the game started. I had plenty of trouble at first. I was unable to jump over the barrels, and the ones that roll down the ladders constantly kill me. It took a while, but I did finally get past the first level. No easy feat for anyone who’s just picked up a controller.  I played the game that we all know and love as Donkey Kong all afternoon until my cousin pulled out a copy of Pac-Man. I knew who Pac-Man was because of the cartoon I used to watch on channel 11 in New York. I also used to watch my mom and dad play Ms. Pac-Man in the Greek pizzeria below our apartment in Queens. We know this game to be the inferior port it is now, but at the time I didn’t or couldn’t care; it was Pac-Man.

Throughout the afternoon, my cousins swapped their meager collection of carts in and out of the system. They introduced me to the essentials: Galaxian, Warlords, Asteroids, Pitfall. They were all there. My cousins got a kick out of watching me try to figure out what was going on in each game. Trying to see what my barely formed mind was attempting to do for strategy.  For someone as young as I was, I was doing pretty well. My favorite game we were playing was Galaxian. Shooting small blobs that sort of resembled bugs made me smile and laugh. As I fought wave after wave, I began wishing and hoping I could do this all day every day.


Unfortunately, my parents had finished the apartment hunt and had come to take me back on a train to New York. I begged, cried, and pleaded to just stay and play more games. Seeing how much I loved playing with them, the eldest of my cousins gets a shoe box and packed it up with the games and the system. He was the one who started the addiction. On the way back to New York I held the Gemini Universal Command stick in my hand and pretended I was the one controlling everyone on the train.

As soon as we got home, my dad set up the system and I started playing. I not only remember this vividly because it was my first experience with video games, it’s also one of the few memories I have of childhood that I can recall. I have never stopped gaming since, and I doubt I ever will.

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