It’s been about twenty years since my brother Ryan and I got our first video game system: an original Nintendo Entertainment System with the Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros. cartridge and two controllers. I can remember afternoons spent playing cooperative Mario Bros. with my Dad (switching off every level) and crashing my car repeatedly in Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat with Ryan. (Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all of my upgrade money on engine power and boosts.)

That little 8-bit system fostered a love of video games in my siblings and I that continues to this day. My brother is graduating with a BS in Interactive Media and Game Design from WPI. My sister and I talked the other day about Dragon Age characters on her Xbox 360. Katt and I even had a gaming theme at our wedding. With that in mind, I thought I’d run through some of my favorite titles from the past two decades — those that really resonated with me because of their stories, gameplay, or events they ushered in to my life.

The Early Years

After the NES and Super Mario Bros., the first thing that comes to mind is a game that was hosted on Prodigy’s internet service (and later standalone on PC) back in the late 80s/early 90s…

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Carmen Sandiego was the first video game I can remember playing on a computer way back in 1990. I was 4 at the time and terrible with geography, but Carmen’s crazy capers (who steals the Indy 500?) kept me coming back for more.

Eagle Eye Mysteries and its follow-up, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London

Ah, Jennifer and Jake Eagle. My partners in crime-fighting! The characters and attention to detail are what made the Eagle Eye series great. The London-based sequel was particularly good, featuring cases that ramped up in difficulty and eventually all tied together story-wise. Armed with our trusty notebook, the Eagle twins and I solved cases ranging from animal theft to art forgery.

Just about everything in the Super Solvers series

That includes Treasure Mountain, Treasure Mathstorm, Treasure Cove, Spellbound, and (my favorite) Gizmos and Gadgets. They might be a bit old (and firmly in the edutainment category), but they’re a great way to teach math, reading, and physics to a young audience. I certainly played them for hours on end (and was, many years later, somewhat disappointed to discover that you couldn’t technically ‘beat’ any of them — the little prizes you were awarded at the end doubled/tripled/etc. up after awhile). Nothing could beat the feeling I got when I built my go-kart in Gizmos and Gadgets with the fiberglass body and lapped Morty’s (the main antoganist od the series) box-shaped kart in the race.

Tetris

Yep, the line-clearing, block filled puzzle game that’s made an appearance on just about everything with a screen. My first experience was with the one that shipped with the original Game Boy in 1989. I think I got my Game Boy in 1991 (it was awhile ago, my memory’s fuzzy), but I remember how excited I was to find that it came bundled with Tetris! My grandma still carries a Game Boy Pocket and a copy of it wherever she goes. She tells me it helps her pass the time while waiting in movie theaters. Unsurprisingly, her high scores are off the charts!

The Legend of Zelda series, but Link’s Awakening in particular

To this day, Link’s Awakening is my favorite game on the original Game Boy. I first spotted a classmate playing this during recess in 2nd grade and fell in love. I was over at his house for a sleepover and brought my Game Boy with me. I asked him if I could play it “for a bit” and promptly spent the entire night playing! With its  8 dungeons, tons of sidequests and items, and wonderfully varied scenery to boot, it’s a marvel even 17 years later. I mean, look at the size of this world map. This was in 1993 on a cartridge that held half a megabyte! The sheer scope of the game still amazes me — it was the first truly epic adventure I played on a handheld and continues to set the bar for RPG/adventure games to this day.

The Middle Years (and my first MMO)

Sometime in early 1995, we traded in our mostly-broken NES at FuncoLand (now more commonly known as GameStop) for $10. The guy behind the counter frowned as every game he put in to the system seems to be broken. Eventually, he pulled out the trash can, dumped the whole lot in, and said “Okay, you know what, I’ll give you $10 for the lot. It’s a steal.” We walked out with a shiny new Super Nintendo, two controllers, and copies of Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Thus began the SNES era in the Bedell household: a time of role-playing games, my first exposure to cooperative gaming, and lots and lots of Tetris Attack.

Today, my brother Ryan continues to jealously guard our collection of prized RPG cartridges (Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana among them), original controllers, and an SNES Jr (a late-model redesign we bought after our 1991-era model fried itself). I relive our console golden age with a hacked up Wii, an original controller, and one of RetroUSB’s SNES-to-Wii adapters.

I’ll start with my absolute favorite SNES game…

Secret of Mana

“Ryan, you can play this one with three people AT THE SAME TIME!” I was stunned to discover with Square’s Secret of Mana that RPG/adventure games weren’t just limited to a single player. Mana‘s cooperative gameplay was, for me, revolutionary. My brother, sister, and I often watched one another play through different titles, but for the very first time in our lives, we could play a console game together. For a trio of RPG lovers, Mana was heaven-in-a-cartridge. Weapons and magic that got better as you used them, an open world you could fly around (in MODE 7 pesudo-3D!), and a decent storyline — we were sold. Many hours of fun (and bickering about who got the fancy new helmet) ensued, and the game remains a family favorite to this day.

Super Mario Kart

Two player racing with characters from Mario? Sign me up. Super Mario Kart was the second racing title we ever owned. Even with just two players, the Grand Prix racing and Battle modes were fantastic (I can see the red balloons popping now). It doesn’t look like much in 2010, but it was the only kart racer around at the time. When you think about it, the mechanics of the series haven’t changed much over the years. Those pesky heat-seeking red shells and banana peels are just as hazardous as ever! In fact, I saw a fellow with this bumper sticker just the other day…

Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds

(wow, it looks a lot better these days than it did 12 years back)

Oh boy. Where to begin with this one. Nexus was the very first massively multiplayer online game that my brother and I ever played — it was also one of the first to be released in the U.S., right around Ultima Online. Ryan and I beta-tested it through 1997, then begged my dad to front the $10/month/account fee so we could keep playing it for the majority of 1998 when it officially launched in the U.S. We even got some of our friends playing!  It is responsible (along with me having no willpower) for:

• Convincing my parents to switch over from 56k dial-up with AOL to a 1 megabit broadband line from MediaOne (“We won’t tie up the phone anymore, mom!”)
• Me nearly flunking 7th grade (academically, it was my worst year of public school hands-down — I went from a solid A student to Cs in the span of 6 months)
• Me realizing that, perhaps, I should play certain games in moderation
• Improving my time-management skills!

Despite all of its negatives (both from a gameplay perspective and the fact that it completely sucked me in), Nexus opened the door to some great social experiences with Ultima Online and its free server community…

Ultima Online

Another doozy that kept Ryan and I busy from 1998 to 2001. After deciding that we didn’t want to pay for another MMO to play, a friend of ours directed us to a player-hosted server called Lair of the Sorceress. It was there we met two individuals who would be a major part of our online lives for years to come: Wolverana from the great state of Texas and Nabisco from Canada. Wolv was a Game Master on the server, a sort of combination administrator/police officer/ who resolved disputes, put on events (more on that in a moment), and generally kept everything running smoothly. Nabisco was a friend-of-a-friend who loved Dungeons and Dragons and writing various modification and extra content for our little server. He started an online D&D group that brought many hours of monster slaying and adventure

A few rounds of drama later, and Wolv had started her own server running off a little 3 megabit cable line in Austin, TX. Ryan and I took advantage of the low population and UO’s awesome open-world “do anything” gameplay to start our first guild: the Obsidian Artificers. Ryan’s incredible powers of wizardry and mining ability combined with my fencing and blacksmithing skills made us a force of benevolence (and sometime mischief) in the world. There are too many tales to tell, but here are some of my favorite stories in one line apiece:

• Founding outposts across the land and stocking them with supplies for players in need (way over the maximum number of buildings two players could put down)
• Holding a complete monopoly on magically-enhanced armor and giving it away for free
• The day we had our first Player vs. Player arena tournament (Ryan cast Flamestrike on every participant and fried them in a single hit, myself included, taking the victory)
• The day we founded Irondale, the first player town on the server (I had a restaurant!)
• The great explosion, when Ryan spent an entire afternoon covering the city in exploding potions and then set one off by accident
• The great pirate invasion (we hired every pirate mercenary in Moonglow, a pirate haven in the middle of the sea, then brought them to town by boat. It crashed the server.)

Needless to say, we had a great time.

Blizzard’s epics: Diablo and StarCraft

Ryan and I had just received our first personal computers in December 1998: Dell XPS T500s with 500MHz Pentium III processors, 6GB hard disks, and a Voodoo 3 graphics card apiece. Through the magic of telephone-wire networking, Dad managed to get an IPX LAN up and running at home (later, we would actually pipe Ethernet around the house and run a real TCP/IP network). The network multiplayer possibilities were endless! Blizzard’s Diablo and StarCraft had recently been released, and they were the first (and only, for quite some time) games we ever played on our new computers.

Because we shared a desk, we had to stick a large piece of poster-board in-between our monitors whenever we played StarCraft games against each other. I peeked all the time and to this day, I have never won a StarCraft match against my brother. Diablo was cooperative (which was much better), and many rainy afternoons were spent crushing the minions of Hell beneath our bootheels. Ryan’s barbarian and my sorcerer did a fair job of squishing any evil that came our way.

The Last Decade: 2000-2010

These last few titles have a special place in my heart because I spent most of my time playing them with the people I love. Many a Thanksgiving in East Burke, VT was spent playing…

Perfect Dark

The ‘spiritual sequel’ to Goldeneye (at least in terms of multiplayer), Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer shooter on the Nintendo 64…even if it required a special RAM Expansion pack and ran at 15 frames per second on a good day. Even with its engine bringing the N64 to its knees, Perfect Dark was an incredible experience. There was nothing quite like having my brother, sister, and friends all playing at once with four computer-controlled bots making things even more hairy. The stat tracking (I am, according to the game, a grenade magnet) and the ability to tweak gametypes (hate the Laptop Gun? Get rid of it! Love Nanite Bombs? Play an entire round with them as the only weapon!) only made a great game better.

Although it feels a bit dated now, there’s a high definition remake available on Xbox Live Arcade.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy

Another Thanksgiving classic. Joe, my brother, sister, and I once played through the entirety of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in a 17 hour marathon. 100% completion. We never played it again after that, but it was the first ‘marathon’ gaming session I had ever done. I don’t think anything has come close to the 17 hours-in-one-day mark since.

Super Smash Bros. Melee

A college staple, especially freshman year. Super Smash Bros. Melee was the mortar that cemented my friendship with Tim and Scott (second from the left and last in the row, respectively). Every Friday and Saturday night we would head up to Scott’s room on the 4th floor of my dorm at Bentley, break out the sodas, and play Smash until our thumbs were sore. On occasion, we’d head over to Brandeis with other members of the BSGO and play with the CGX members too.

Team Fortress 2

I met the Disgruntled Cookies (although at the time they were the “Uber-noober Battle Group” or UNBU) playing Team Fortress 2. Although we don’t play much of it anymore, the community often plays titles like Heroes of Newerth together. We even exchange Christmas cards during the holidays.

World of WarCraft

Yep, six years later and my shaman is still alive and kicking. WoW and I have something of a history together. I started playing in the beta in September 2004, introduced it to a number of friends (and my wife), and have been playing it off-and-on ever since. We’ve played with folks from all over the world, and even (at one point) went down to visit some guildmates in nearby Connecticut. There were the 9pm to 2am raids on the weekends in college, hours spent fighting off the opposing faction in Battlegrounds, and talks about family over Ventrillo. Server swaps and character transfers, rerolls and respecs. A thousand and one tales of our adventures in Azeroth. In short, WoW’s story is a long one best saved for another day. It’s a tale I plan on telling eventually though!

And there you have it my friends, 20 years of gaming. I may have played a lot of games in my day (our Nintendo DS library is 48 titles strong), but these selections will always hold a place in my heart!

But what if Virtual Console doesn’t have (or, in the case of a few titles, will never have) the classic you want to play? On Saturday, I had a hankering to play some titles that weren’t available on the Virtual Console service, mainly a few of my old RPGs like EarthBound and Lufia II. As it turns out, there’s a group of enthusiast Wii developers who have created a homebrew software installer. You can use said installer to put a number of different system emulation tools on your Wii, including a fantastic port of SNES9x, a Super Nintendo emulator.

The process is fairly simple; head over to BootMii.org and grab the HackMii installer. Drop the included files in to a blank SD card, put it in your Wii, then pull up the SD Card data management screen. You’ll be asked if you want to install the Homebrew Channel (a launcher for any homegrown Wii applications), BootMii (an alternate boot interface), and/or DVDX (which lets your Wii play DVDs). From then on, it’s a piece of cake to fire up the Homebrew Browser (available here if you want to make sure you have the latest version).

There are all sorts of interesting applications available, including webservers and emulation tools. The SNES emulator works perfectly, and even includes some handy features for users of HDTVs (16:9 aspect ratio correction and anti-aliasing/filtering) that the original SNES hardware doesn’t have (unsurprising, considering it came out in 1991!). It’s a great way to check out some old games if they aren’t available on the Virtual Console service.

Oh, and just as an aside, make sure you own a copy of the original cartridge if you’re going out hunting for cartridge images! If you have a Nintendo Game Boy Advance or a Nintendo DS, look through Metacritic and see if your favorite classic has been updated or remade. The DS port of Chrono Trigger, for example, is excellent! Happy retro-gaming!

Commencement’s in two weeks; I can’t wait!

The bandwidth requirements aren’t bad; you need a 1.5 megabit connection for 480i resolution (~640×480), and a 5 megabit connection to do 720p (~1280×720). The company also plans to release a set top box with HDMI, Ethernet, a few USB ports, and optical audio so that you can play titles on your television. The content model looks to be subscription-based (everyone seems to love annually recurring revenue these days), but few details are avaialble other than to expect the service in “Q4 2009.” If this works, the console as we know it is effectively obsolete, as is spending large amounts of money to keep a gaming PC up-to-date. We’ll see how it all plays out!

• The unit is covered in a matte finish, as opposed to being glossy
• It’s a little wider and a little thinner than the DS Lite. The build quality is also better.
• It comes with two cameras, a 0.3MP one on the center of the hinge and a 1.3MP one on the top cover
• It has an SD card slot and upgradable firmware!
• Opera is preinstalled
• The screens are larger (3.25 inches as opposed to 3.0 inches), but they run at the same resolution as the older DS models
• It comes with a “DS Shop” application (much like the Wii’s)

So far, the build quality has been fantastic, and the screens are definitely better in terms of color and contrast. My only complaint is that unlike the other DS models, there’s no way to switch the firmware language to English. I’m hoping the homebrew community finds some way to convert Japanese units to north American ones at some point…

With that, here’s a bunch of pictures!

I’m especially fond of the small extras (the complete soundtrack, the high-res wallpapers, etc.) that come with most of the titles on the service. Plus, the installers are all nicely repackaged and the games have been modified to support XP and Vista (where applicable). I’m extremely satisfied with my purchasing experience! All in all, GOG is a worthy entrant into the field! The site is in beta right now, but you’re likely to get an access key pretty quickly if you sign up on the front page of the site. Enjoy your semi-retro gaming!

That being said, I basically have three options that I’ve narrowed myself down to.

The lightest (and also the most expensive) would be a new Sony Vaio Z-Series. It’s powerful, portable, and has discrete graphics that don’t completely stink. Not so sure about the very MacBook-like keyboard, but the quality certainly seems to be there.

The middle-of-the-road model (and likely the most inexpensive) would be a Lenovo IdeaPad U330. It’s not a slim or light as the Sony, but the keyboard is the rock-solid ThinkPad one (I love ThinkPad keyboards) and it’s pretty powerful. The only issue (apparently) is that the “mirror-like” screen can cause headaches.

And finally, the heaviest option (at 7 pounds) is a Clevo M860tu (aka Sager NP8660). The bang for the buck ratio here is simply incredible (this thing is basically better than my desktop, crammed into a laptop shell). The quality appears to be top-notch as well. Again, the only issue at the end of the day is the weight (really heavy).

In a perfect world, LG would sell their P300 in the United States, but (despite what they’ve said), that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Thoughts?

I present to you a brief overview of capture the flag on Team Fortress 2′s 2Fort map! It was my first time using Adobe Illustrator CS3, and I think it turned out rather well. I really want to keep practicing with the tools, so maybe I’ll end up making more of these for the other maps.

On paper, the X3100 looks great:

There’s still no discreet memory for this thing to use; it hogs some system RAM for itself. I don’t know what kind of latency penalty this causes the X3100 to incur, but I had figured it would be a little slower. In any case, you’d think I’d be able to run Team Fortress 2 on bare minimum settings at 800×600. Sadly, this is not the case. Perhaps they need to improve the hardware T&L engine’s support in their driver?