Had a day off yesterday. Took the kids on a couple of errands, and went through Fed Square to visit ACMI. I never fail to be impressed with ACMI, especially since I discovered their Games Lab. Last time I was there they had old Commodore 64 games. This time they were highlighting some of the ... [More]
Yesterday afternoon, reminiscing at ACMI’s Hits of the 80s video game exhibit — free at Melbourne’s Federation Square until May. While most of the games were running on Spectrum or C64 emulators, this copy of Way Of The Exploding Fist was running on a genuine machine. And just as it was back then, one of ... [More]
Arthur And George (Julian Barnes) — not quite historical novel, not quite biography, following the true story of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji. Somewhere in between, perhaps. Really well written, I thought (no wonder if was on the 2005 Booker shortlist), getting inside the heads of the main characters using language they’d probably use ... [More]
Bizarre thought #574: In the building where I work, there’s a security guard who is sometimes seen wandering about the place. He looks kind of top-heavy, like he’s got a lot of upper-body muscle. For some reason it reminds me of an old video game I once had back on my Commodore 64: Ultima II, ... [More]
I had it all worked out — 15 more minutes mucking about, then we’d go outside. I’d bring my laundry in off the line — it would be about dry — the kids could jump on the trampoline, or get their bikes out, whatever. 15 minutes later I glanced outside. It was pouring with rain. ... [More]
Playing with your food, nostalgic geek style.
I hadn’t noticed this before: you can now get a deerhunting game for the XBox. Obviously there have been 1st person shooter (FPS to those in the know) games for quite a while now, usually despatching alien monsters or WW2 German guards into the afterlife, but this is the first time I recall seeing a ... [More]
The Crow Road (Iain Banks). I just finished reading this. The ending nicely tied up the story, and it was a great read. I think for me one of the signs of a great writer is that Banks was able to throw up thoughts and concepts along the way that most would consider are thought-provoking ... [More]
Do I walk a bit funny or something? The heels of the two pairs of shoes I most commonly wear (the Monday to Friday work shoes) are wearing away on the outside edges. Further, one pair is re-developing the same hole which I thought was comprehensively eliminated a year ago. And in the same position ... [More]
Plan A for Sunday: Take the kids to the footy, meet up with Tony, Rae and Phoebe and watch the Cats lose. Plan B for Sunday: Walk down to Dick Smith Powerhouse, buy an XBox game, come home, play it. Maybe have a bounce on the trampoline at some stage. When these two plans were ... [More]
Call me an old fuddy duddy if you like, but for the most part I still like the video and computer games of olde a bit better. Though graphics and sound have leapt forward over the past couple of decades, the quality of gameplay is the subject of some debate. How playable is a game ... [More]
Recently I’ve been reading some of Jeff “Yak” Minter’s nostalgic look back at how he got into writing computer games in the 1980s, and it’s got me thinking about those days, and how it’s shaped my life — or at least, my professional working life. It’s something I have written about briefly before, but I ... [More]