Having said that, it’s also going to matter very gravely how people integrate the games they play into their choice of legitimate social life activities. The closest positive comparison would be karaoke — without parents insisting that games are played with family or friends, there will continue to be decreasing levels of social aptitude, increasing levels of stress, depression and feelings of isolation.

I used to be a relatively solid gamer, but am now quite happily a casual gamer, thrilled to share the triumphs within even a single player game with a friend or sibling using the ‘lives or levels’ rule. It actually helps you identify with the experiences of others, arguably more than a movie (because people close to you are undergoing an artificial setback or pain, rather than an , but less so of course than real life.

So with that in mind, here it is, in all it’s geeky glory: the games that shaped the man – played either alone for hour upon foolish hour, or correctly, with friends and family. Part 1.

Dune 2 & Commander Keen

* Dune 2 (1992) -

With it’s catchy, other-worldly music and effective use of voice files, and being the grand-daddy of all the classic real time strategy (RTS) games – what I call ‘god games’ because of the top-down camera angle and micromanagement of people and resources – it’s small wonder how enamoured I became with this game above all else. It had a simple, yet neat storyline, and you could play as one of three teams, each with special weapons typifying their house character.

I would still play this game today.

On the one hand, even when you play as house Harkonnen, and realise that the Emperor of Dune too, has nukes, the unseasoned player is filled with trepidation. Could his densely built base have its guts torn out by an inter-concrete-slab-or-island-of-dodgy-rock ballistic missile? Oh S:&T! … Wait a minute… If I was smart enough to save every 5 minutes, I can just reload!
And that’s exactly what we all did. Until we won.

Did I mention you could change language just for kicks?
Apologies for the spelling-

“Trois, Deux, Uhhh… [save. Quit. Reload using English sound files]
…Death hand missile launched.”
Other favourite things you might hear on the battlefield:

“Ordos unit approaching. Ordos unit destroyed.”

‘Frigate has arrived’. Frigate docks at spaceport bringing siege tanks or rocket launchers at $60 each. Score. “Atreides unit deployed. Atreides unit deployed. Atreides unit deployed. Atreides unit deployed. Atreides unit deployed. Atreides unit deployed. Atreides unit deployed. Atreides unit deployed. Ordos unit destroyed. Atreides unit deployed.”

As you send your very expensive, one and only brilliant ordos Deviator tank, which shot nerve gas at enemies that made their units attack their own in a frenzied and hilarious bit of mayhem, slowly, slowly towards the enemy base, with you snickering with anticipation- it’s that one moment you take your eyes off it ‘ooh, I should probably check of my silos are full’ that you hear:
“Spice bloom located. Ordos unit destroyed”. Aaaaaaagh!

“Warning! Saboteur approaching! [rocket launcher turrets take him down in 2 seconds] Saboteur destroyed”

“Warning! Sardaukar unit approaching!” Scary sounding name but they soon prove rather ineffective. I love rocket turrets.

“Warning- sandworm approaching.” Ach FFS! I haven’t moved my tanks off the sand yet. And you could never actually kill the suckers – you shot them to half health and they just disappeared. But the sound they made, as they devoured half of your piffly army which was the only thing standing between you and complete annihilation, even in 1992 – was quite horrifying. I used to imagine. Then in early missions, before you could buy 10 carryalls from the spaceport for 299 a pop, your little spice harvester, that did so well venturing out so far to get you the orange good stuff , if it didn’t get inhaled out in the spice field by the worm at 99% capacity-you’d watch helplessly as it trudged along in the sand trying to outrun the worm…

…Which incidentally merely seemed to be playing with it, following innocuously one unit’s-length distance behind … Then, as soon as the harvester artificial intelligence nears land, it says ‘hrm, well let’s see, I am literally filled to bursting with valuable spice, my HQ is struggling to survive, I’ve been outrunning this giant scary worm for the past half hour… The coast is completely clear to cross from sand to rocky safety.. I know what I’ll do! To celebrate my safe passage, at the last minute I’ll show everyone how much of a badass I am by angling away a bit and then hooking back in. Brilliant. Can’t fail. Here we go, here we go… Yeee….h-’
<GULP!>
“Atreides harvester destroyed.”

The game framed the genre, and spawned the command and conquer series, red alert, star craft, black & White (a true god game in every sense), Age of Empires, of course the Warcraft series with its hugely popular World of Warcraft (which, incidentally, I never really got into), Dune 2000, Emperor: Battle for Dune (where your Fremen units could now summon, and ride, a sandworm, and hapless units got sucked up into a freak sandstorm whirlwind never to be heard from again) and more.

Dune series evolving...

...to the visually stunning Emperor: Battle for Dune

Some missions were set at night, or at twilight, or even on other planets...

such as Atreides' home planet Caladan, which was novel

Peer into the gullet of the terror-inducing Sandworm

True, it wasn’t the first in it’s camera angle- you have sim city and the like, but for war and many of the gameplay notions – ain’t nothing comparable to the legendary Dune II: Battle for Arrakis.

* Commander Keen

Highlights:

Taking home one of those cute one-eyed green alien things at the end of the game

No not that one - the cute one-eyed one

Walking, hopping kangaroo aliens… that shot at you

That pogo stick

That helmet

That fish

The dopefish has become an ongoing gaming industry gag, featuring in many other games

Commander Keen had an alien language that if I were THAT geeky, I’d have learnt to read and enjoy the funny messages. At one point in one of the games the player comes across a ‘Rosetta Stone’ of sorts, that shows the whole alphabet. Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Babysitter was a rather enjoyable title, and 4, 5, and 6 were much better than the earlier trilogy.

The games were part of a number of classic Apogee games that often came in trilogies. These included Secret Agent, Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventures, BioMenace, Duke Nukem and more. Duke Nukem later returned as a first person shooter. Either way, the games were a significant part of my young gaming experience.

Next instalment – Part 2 – will feature Star Wars games.

I remember when he’d say “Ooh, a tricky one!” and would absolutely love it, lived the challenge, and produced something such that most kids remarked, “Wow, how the heck did he see that… in there?” Mr. Squiggle – you’re my hero.

Remembering Miss Pat, Gus the Snail, and Bill the Steam Shovel, and of course, the immortal Mr. Squiggle. There’s a link to some clips here, and this is how the site owner describes the star, and full credit to the drawer – well done:

“Mr Squiggle was a show that encouraged children to draw.
I am sure that it must have inspired me to do so.
Perhaps I would not enjoy drawing so much without it.
Mr Squiggle was the kind of entertainment that I don’t think we see often anymore.
Gentle without being boring.
Funny without being smarmy.
Cheeky without being smug.
Simple without being moronic.”

I’d say that this show was one of the many things that made me, as a child, proud to be Australian. We need more of that, and its equivalent in Israel and around the world, too.

I still think these shots are fantastic. For a hopeless Star Wars fan like me. Well, reformed fan.

Enjoy.

When I was younger, I played the grand-daddy of all future ‘god-games’, RTS, or Real Time Strategy games, wherein you control an army from a top-down view. Things have gotten cleaner and crisper and a lot in gameplay has been enhanced, but the style is the same and in most of these games you can still ‘Tank Rush’ – build as many tanks or like units as possible, as quickly as you can, and bulldoze the opposing army.

Dune 2 started it all.

My brother and I and a ragtag group of friends were huge fans of this game, and I would still play it briefly today, just for nostalgia. Plus it had a great musical score that no subsequent incarnations of the game have been able to match.

We were biggest fans of House Harkonnen, made famous in the book by Frank Herbert for being ruthless, bloodthirsty, degenerate, calculating and slightly insane bastards, symbolised by their House colour – a rich, blood red.

In the later missions (there were only 9 for each of 3 Houses – the others being Atreides and Ordos), House Harkonnen received the ability to launch ‘Death Hand’ atomic warheads from their palaces. This would devastate a vast area, but always take out the building it hit directly. Of course, the missile itself had a dreadful aiming mechanism, which meant that you saved before you launched, and launched and reloaded the saved game as many times as necessary until you took that sucker’s Construction Yard out once and for all.

“Death Hand Missile – LAUNCHED!”

Now it seems, the Death Hand is real – in name if not in exactly the same context.

In the 1980s, the Soviets developed the ultimate Doomsday device that would monitor seismic waves and air pressure etc across the motherland, looking for signs of devastation from an American nuclear warhead, at which point it would remove layers of crucial red tape, and allow a 25 year old officer access and ability to launch his local neighbourhood’s nuclear toy.

You can read the full Wired article here.

It’s real. And what’s more, it’s still operational. This is a fascinating article that shows that behind how far we’ve come is the story of not only how close we’ve come, but how far, in actuality, we’ve yet to traverse.

First, an explanation of this post’s title: anyone that’s played Lucasarts‘ TIE Fighter (click here for an excellent piece that explains why I still load it up from time to time today) for a decent length of time (read: spent [if not exactly wasted, let's be understated and say spent] life away playing video games with only yourself in the room, something I’m more and more loathe to do), will remember how bizarre it was to see that one of your wingmen (who sometimes happens to be Darth Vader) possessed the callsign “DOOM ON YOU”. It seemed so unnecessarily harsh a message, especially since we were fighting on the same side… but then… he is Darth Vader. Correction: it appears the wing commander had his cargo listed as DOOM ON YOU as an in-game joke because if he got cut down in a fiery ball of ions, he knew you would take his place as wing commander. Cute.

Doom Resurrection

Doom Resurrection is a first person shooter for the iPhone. I quite enjoyed reading this review of the game/interview with its creators. I think it says something about the direction we’re going in as a society with high-end technology in our pockets (something many of us always dreamed about as geek-kids, and secretly still hope for more and better, such as 3D hologram visuals - something I believe the magical “they” people are working on).

Here is how the The Mac Gamer opens:

“Somewhere, somehow, someone decided that the benchmark for any new gaming platform would be a First Person Shooter. Maybe it’s our human compulsion for creating environments regardless of the location’s suitability: ski resorts in Dubai, metropolis’s built on fault lines, beaches in the middle of Mexico City and a First Person Shooter on every platform under the sun, controls be dammed [sic]. We’ve seen FPS shooters on the PSP with its lack of secondary analogue controller, the DS with its touch screen and D-Pad, and now the iPhone with it’s lack of traditional hardware controls.”

You call that a knife? This is a knife!

July 14, 2009 – 9:02AM
A Stanley knife-wielding bandit had the tables turned on him when he attempted to rob a Brisbane convenience store attendant who was cutting vegetables.

The attendant, who had a much larger kitchen knife, chased the man out of the Cut Price Supermarket store on Aminya Road, Mansfield, about 2.50pm yesterday.

He did not make off with any money or goods.
source: SMH.com.au

Some of you will have heard one story or another. Either way, enjoy.

On the way back from a ridiculous Connecticut Shabbaton over X-mas break in my first year in America (the speakers were very good though),  I found myself receiving a very kind lift home from a family that happened to be there. Their older son was at YU at the same time as me. They were a very religious family. One of those shtark bunch that don’t allow their children to have any influence from the outside world. Litvish, enclosed, Bnei Brak ‘Lite’ people. Lovely and all, but more than I was used to. Anyone who knows the drive from Connecticut (I forget where - the Shabbaton was at one of the main cities there at a 5 star hotel, which was one perk), to Yeshiva University… it’s around 1-1½ hours.

Listening to the kind of music they would listen to.

 About half-way through the offensive aural barrage, the CD spun its last spin.

Halleluyah! I thought. It’s finally over! I survived the torture! Well, I maintain that given G-d’s omnipotence, omnipresence and infinite intelligence, G-d also has a corresponding limitless sense of humour:

“OK children, what would you like to listen to next,” started the mother. “Uncle Moishe’s greatest hits 3, Uncle Moishe’s Hanukkah party, Torah Tots Total Torah Tunes, The Little Torah Sings a Song or Two, or Pesach Party 5765?!”

<sigh> Oh G-d, why? I thought. Said I, just loud enough for the parents to hear, but not so the kids – ” … Um… Led Zep?” I was joking of course – I know an impossibility when it smacks me in the face like a wet trout hooked up on artificial growth hormones.

And then somewhat unexpectedly… a chuckle from the understated father driving the van.

He understood.

Needless to say, we continued cruisin’ down I-Ninety-something, rockin’, rollin’ and boppin’ to more hard-core head-banging-worthy haredi children soul music…

…I wonder… does he remember the old Stones songs to this day? When did he throw out his collection? Did his wife make him do it? :-) It doesn’t really matter. That one shared moment. He understood me. That day, he sympathised with the ‘devil’.