1981: A Gaming Odyssey - II - You're Getting Old
-David, webmaster DVGI

I write for gaming publications, repair neglected video game hardware, restore long forgotten classic games, and travel to exotic locations looking for hidden clusters of video game history.  Join me.

Before we get started, my apologies for the two year hiatus this column has been on.  Believe me that I never intended for such a large passage of time between entries, quite the contrary in fact.  A big change from when the previous entry was written is how I approach my collecting.  I made a large number of cuts in the amount of stuff I have on hand, often removing entire libraries that I really wasn't playing.  The point of all of this was to make the stuff I kept (and there is still a ton of it) more accessible and easier to enjoy.  Thankfully this is exactly what came of the change.  I spent most of 2011 narrowing my focus and by the end of the year I began selling off massive amounts of said items I wasn't playing.  I came up with what I call the "five year rule" to decide the fate of items I wasn't dead set on keeping.  The five year rule works by asking two questions:

Have you played [this game] or used [this hardware] in the past five years?

Do you plan on playing [this game] or using [this hardware] in the next five years?

A "yes" answer to either question and the item can be considered to be retained.  A "no" answer to both questions means the item is okay to part with.  Of course items that don't require thought about (things I would never get rid of, play all the time, have sentimental value, etc.) don't need to be reviewed.  Some stuff like Intellivision games or US Pico stuff that I never touch were no-brainers to get rid of.  Same goes with tons of extra and oddball controllers and other accessories.  On the other hand things like the Vectrex collection took more thought as they were pieces that I really did enjoy but not enough to have them collecting dust in my apartment.  My Sharp Twin Famicom was another piece of hardware that took some thinking about before parting with.  Quite a bit of said items were sold locally and it was nice to be able to point my collecting and gaming in more focused directions.  I began to enjoy my games with a renewed vigor and began to gear up to play more and of course write more.

Unfortunately when November of 2011 rolled around I went through three bouts of heavy illness that brought everything to a halt.  Once December was upon me I began to feel better and get things rolling again until the end of the month when again I was taken ill.  At the start of 2012 I was finally starting to feel better and resumed my duties contributing to Retrogaming Times Monthly as well as adding content to the site.  I began multiple reviews and actually got some features completed and online.  However the next few months would be once again met with rotating illness.  I would feel fine for a while and then be totally knocked out for a week or so.  I had splitting pain on the side of my head and jaw but it would subside over time so I didn't think much of it.  If anything I considered it to be a toothache as local treatment numbed the pain and as I said before, it would subside over time.  By the end of January I was more or less fooling myself that I was feeling better when in reality I was simply learning to live with the pain.  Throughout February I was almost always taking some kind of pain reliever and using a hot or cold pack on my jaw weekly.  Toward the end of the month I began to feel better but as soon as March began things got a lot worse.  Eventually I had to have a hot pack strapped around my face at almost all times.  I constantly had to chew gum to keep my jaw relaxed and oral pain relief swabs became a way of life.  For weeks at a time I would only sleep an hour or so a night due to the pain.  During the second week of March I reached my breaking point and it wasn't until after three weeks of heavy prescription medication did I finally return to normality.  In the end I had an inner ear infection, a middle ear infection, and an infection in my jaw.  More than likely the whole mess was brought on and carried over by the worst flu battle I had ever went through the previous November.  If you want to be technical I was sick, off and on to varying degrees, for four months.  At the beginning of April I was finally getting back to being myself but had a lot of "life" catching up to do after being out of it for so long.  I let a lot of obligations slip during that time and I took awhile for things to balance out once again.  I can't begin to explain how wonderful it is not to feel terrible every night and just go through a day normally.

 The rest of the year, well, it has simply been racing along at a breakneck pace.  Yet during that time I've been playing a ton of games, which is great.  The downsizing and changes in collecting priorities did so much to allow me to better enjoy my games.  Outside of gaming these past few months in particular have been busier than usual.  I began writing a book which has been taking up the majority of my excess time and is also one of the reasons that there haven't been any reviews here recently.  Some big changes happened this month as I quit my job of four years for a variety of reasons that don't need to be documented here.  All the while I am continuing to thin my collection more and more and stick with the stuff I enjoy most.  I'm just about back up to a place where I can work on the site, work on my obligations to other sources, and maintain a healthy balance all around.  Oh, and play video games of course.  Enough catching up, let's get on with this update!

The world is always changing and this is especially true in the video game industry.  Nostalgia may be a common reason for remembering the past of gaming but it should also be looked at from an unbiased point of view.  For many years now I've stated that the last massively enjoyable generation of video games was in between when the original PlayStation was fading and when the PlayStation 2 and original XBox were finally hitting their stride.  There was simply so much variety, so much affordability, so much, for the lack of a better word, color.  That doesn't mean that there haven't been great games since, particularly on the Nintendo DS oddly enough, but the industry as a whole has become far more drab and predictable since then.  It also doesn't mean that things were better or worse before then as they were always an ever changing combination of both.  I often feel the same way about the Web, as I really do miss the personally created and hand-crafted content that once made up the majority of the online experience.  Of course this also relates to video game websites back when some of the most useful destinations would be staffed by a single person.  I'm going to save my opinions on the current state of gaming for another time but when it comes to online resources for classic video gaming I've been feeling particularly nostalgic lately.

In previous editorials I've mentioned The NES Enshrined as an important classic gaming website in the days of old.  It hasn't been updated since 2000, the webmaster left long ago to pursue other avenues of interest, but an archive (yet slightly broken) archive has made its rounds over the years.  The site is somewhat sporadic but the reviews and information there give you a good feeling of what the collecting scene, particularly the NES, was like back in the late 1990's and what it meant to someone who had the notion to put some words down about it.  I try to keep myself from talking or writing too much about the authors of long abandoned websites for two reasons.  First, I really don't know them except through what writings of theirs I've had the pleasure to read and personal perception through writing is rarely 20/20.  Second, the authors have a tendency to pop up on other websites or with new projects years later, sometimes remaining quite active with video gaming in different capacities as their desires change.  It's stupid to write a heartfelt eulogy of sorts about a content creator when you really don't know the person involved, especially when they're probably still active at that.  I attempt to match these two points to almost everything I cover, focusing on the content above all else.

Why bring this up?  Well when my birthday rolls around I tend to get kind of strange.  I haven't cared for the day for many years.  There isn't some stigma with the day or a bad occurrence in the past and I don't mope around that I'm going to expire soon or any of that.  In all honestly for the past five years or so it's just been another day, take it or leave it.  Yet when that time comes along every year I start to reminisce about the past, just a little.  Sometimes odd things creep into my mind and for whatever reason the Web of the late 1990's has been occupying that void in my head lately.  Of course video games played a bit part of that time for me so the two mix together and I remember how classic gaming once was online.

I recall how different emulation used to be back then with long lists of single download links.  Free hosting meant that there were always a ton of different mirrors and huge archives of emulated games.  Rather than downloading a giant file with every ROM dump for a particular platform you would instead download a couple games here or a few games there.  Many times the ROM file would be found at the end of a review of the game.  So rather than "here, let's pirate!" it was more of a "now that you've read my review, try the game for yourself."  Back then I think a lot of people played emulated games as more of a "try before you head to your local FuncoLand" type thing.  At least that's how it was for me in high school.  A few long gone websites would act as the public release points for newly dumped ROM images.  Full sets had yet to exist back then so those with the means would buy cartridges that didn't have ROM dumps, archive the data, and then distribute it.  I can recall one game in particular, Treasure Master, having the first ROM dump made publicly available.  The name of the person who dumped it escapes my memory but I remember reading that they found the game at their local FuncoLand, recalled that it hadn't been dumped, and bought it for that reason.  The ROM dump was accompanied with that information as well as a quick review of the game and other interesting details such as unused graphics still contained in the program data.  As more and more games were dumped the accuracy and compatibility of emulators grew along side the increasing number of ROM dumps.  I'm sure not everyone felt the same way but I got a sense that one of the main reasons for the creation of ROM dumps was to have a documented record of the games.  The majority of those dumping games seemed to be people that just really enjoyed playing and collecting classic video games and shared what they had with the community.  I know some really enjoyed exploring the code looking for unused or hidden stuff buried for over a decade.  Yeah there were people that came across as "gimmie, gimmie, gimme" when it came to ROM dumps but I really think those early days expanded the horizons of many early retrogamers.  I can say for a fact that playing ROMs in emulators lead me to search out physical copies of games that I was unfamiliar with beforehand.  Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, Golgo 13 Top Secret Episode, Mission: Impossible, Spelunker, The Guardian Legend, Faxanadu, Uninvited and more were all games that I pursued after playing via emulation.  There are still games that are on my search list that I first experienced via emulation all those years ago.  These days emulation is a much more pushbutton way to play games.  Nearly anything can be found via a web search and entire libraries can be downloaded in minutes.  I'd still rather play the cartridge though.  My primary use for emulators these days is to obtain screen shots for reviews and other columns I write.  Additionally I still use them as a method to try retrogames I am unfamiliar with before I go out searching for them, same if I read a review that piques my interest.  At the end of the day I still want the physical cartridge and emulation provides an avenue to avoid stuff you don't want and go after games you know you'll enjoy.

Old gaming sites aren't just something that exist in the realm of my rose-colored memories however.  Some are still online and although no longer active, I still find them extremely useful.  One site of special mention is "tsr's NES archive" an excellent resource, last updated in early 2000.  Although inactive it has remained online for the past twelve years in nearly a complete state.  There are a handful of missing images and the expected broken offsite links but everything else is still there.  In my opinion there is still no finer resource concerning "the best, worst, rarest and coolest in the 8-bit world" as tsr puts it on the index page.  There is simply so much content and it is all presented in such a well written and enjoyable way you can easy spend days just browsing all the site has to offer.  I'll honestly say that I was greatly influenced by the writing style over there and tried to a certain degree tried to emulate it over the years.  The writing is detailed yet easy going, informative yet concise and above all extremely enjoyable to read.  However the part of the site I find the most useful is the extensive collection of documentation for NES games.  Sure sites like replacementdocs.com feature complete documentation scans but tsr's NES archive contains plain text transcriptions of hundreds upon hundreds of NES manuals.  Whenever I go to write a review or comparison column featuring an NES game one of the first places I go is to tsr's NES manuals page.  I find plain text more useful for quickly looking up game controls, story, and special mechanics.  Don't get me wrong, I completely understand how important actual scans are and I have a rather large physical NES manual archive myself but plain text transcriptions definitely have their place.  The convenience of being able to quickly search or skim through the contents of a manual in text format provide a nice counterpoint to leisurely flipping through the real thing.  Additionally tsr has label or box scans for almost every NES cartridge as well as an extensive collection of NES cheats and codes.  There are also some very useful FAQ files, walkthroughs and hints, may written by tsr himself.  The whole site carries with it a personal touch that is really sadly missing from many websites today.  Yeah there are some great gaming blogs out there but the time capsule of tsr's NES archive remains my favorite.

As I noted before tsr's NES archive is still active.  Check the site out for yourself at http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/ (offsite link).  Admittedly one of the reasons I thought to write this piece was a concern I had last week.  Nothing lasts forever online, I think all of us have experienced that at one point or another.  To that end I started to get worried about losing the content of tsr's NES archive.  Sure there are archival websites in place and people often host alternate backups of old pages, as is the case with The NES Enshrined.  Yet the free archival sites tend to be very slow due to the massive amounts of data they store, archive.org is plagued with this issue.  As for alternate backups of long dormant pages, they are often reconstructed from displaced archives and tend to be fairly broken.  To this end I decided to make an offline archive of tsr's NES archive just in case it disappears one day.  I usually don't take the time to do things like this but as it is a resource I use so frequently I decided it was well worth the effort.  So I downloaded the entire site locally, patched a couple places were the html lead around incorrectly, and set it aside as an archive just in case.  Call me strange but when I think of all the other sites that faded away long ago I really wish I was more proactive in archiving them.  At least with this one I'll be able to avoid that issue.
 

Written on 10-21-12 by David, insanedavid@classicplastic.net


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