Videogame Memories 08 | Nathan LowellGUEST BLOG POST

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Hey everybody, the post for today will be a little different. Nathan Lowell, my favorite podcast novelist, was kind enough to share his video game memories via his daily podcast #TOMMW (Talking On My Morning Walk). Everyday he goes for a 2 mile walk, and records his thoughts for the day on the second half of that walk. Today he talked about his video game memories. Enjoy.

Nathan Lowell is the author and podcaster of several novels. His books can be found on Podiobooks.com and now on Amazon.com as well selling eBooks. He is with Ridan Publishing now and has been able to make a great living selling eBooks. You can learn more about him at http://www.nathanlowell.org/

Videogame Memories 07 | J.R. MurdockGUEST BLOG POST

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I grew up with video games. I think I was 5 when I was first introduced to the PONG console and I could hook up the Atari system to the back of the television by the time I was 7. I watched the games in the bars (yes, I grew up in a town where kids could go the bar) change from Tank and Breakout to Pac Man and Zaxxon. Computers in the schools that started appearing were the Apple II and Apple II+. I discovered Lode Runner quite early.

I was fascinated with video games. It was in the early 80s when I discovered Dungeons and Dragons. It was also in the early 80s when I discovered Dungeons and Daggorath for the TRS-80 that my father had bought for me. I was entranced by the thought of exploring a dungeon, but it was a difficult game that was slow, clunky and you couldn’t save your place unless you had a tape drive (that I would acquire much later).

But then I found Wizardry for the Apple II. This game took much of what my young brain knew about Dungeons and Dragons and put it into a game that I could play. I could roll up characters, put them into the dungeon and explore, map, and discover and best of all save my progress! Before my eyes games grew up from being a static simplistic game to something where you could grow, expand and play longer than the machine you were playing on was turned on.

My characters were saved and I would find any excuse to sneak out of class and into the computer lab. I skipped lunch. I would go to school early. I would stay at school late. Anything to get more time on the computer to play that game just a few minutes longer. It didn’t matter that the game was green lines on a black background. I knew those dungeon levels like I knew the back of my hand. I would send hours trying to map out the mazes before I realized I was in a maze and have to erase much of what I’d mapped out.

Eventually I would have an Apple IIe of my very own. With a color monitor! I would play any game that provided me a story to follow. The Zork series which was entirely text based. The Ultima games. Bard’s Tale. Alternate Reality. I couldn’t get enough and played every chance I could.

Even after the Apple IIe was no longer a viable gaming machine I continued to play RPGs on gaming systems. Moving on to the first Nintendo gaming systems and playing Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda. Games had finally started to mature with similar story lines, but far better graphics.

I knew my addiction and I knew it well and I also knew what it took to feed the beast. I stopped playing games for a long time. I missed out on the first wave of World of Warcraft and after hearing so many people rave about how great the game was, I knew I had to stay away. I would easily be sucked into a game like that, I know.

But even today, I still enjoy going online and downloading an Apple emulator and picking up the games I used to play so much. I still have a copy of the original Wizardry on my computer and every once in a while, I’ll make a bishop, identify 9, and take a couple of characters at super high level around the dungeon and have fun.

J.R. Murdock is an avid reader of almost anything he can get his hands on. That being said, he also writes with near reckless abandon in any and every genre. His style is intended for pure entertainment. Over the years he’s written nine novels and over one hundred short stories. Only a few short stories have seen print (in actual print and on the web) so he’s decided to throw his hat into the podcasting arena with his novel V & A Shipping. Since then he has also podcast his novel Billy Barbarian and released his YA novel Astel: Chosen, not to mention the great short stories he's podcast in his Murdockian Tales series.

When not writing like a mad-man, J.R. Murdock does have a day job as a computer programmer and loves to spend time with his lovely wife and beautiful daughter.

Videogame Memories 06 | John MierauGUEST BLOG POST

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Note: A few choice words lie below but were blipped from the audio.

It's kind of odd that I'm a science fiction and fantasy writer, an IT pro and-yeah, sure, world class geek-but not a gamer.

So why am I blogging about gaming? Well, I WAS a gamer. It showed up in my life at exactly the right time: my most formative years- right at the end of high school and my first year of university -and it has informed my life ever since.

My big games -now, don't laugh!- were Doom, Command & Conquer, and (ah, the memories!) Duke Nuke'em.

When I started university, a friend of mine got me my first gig in networking. It was summer, he was busy as hell with this weird new gig and he asked me to help him out.

The gig was installing network cards in a bunch of 386's for the federal government.

Back then it was a brand spanking new gig, working in IT admin. And it was a doubly wired gig, seeing as my buddy Jason went to college for Fisheries & Wildlife, before finding out on a summer job with the government that he was an idiot savant with all things computers.

A few times that summer, Jay very patiently led me through how to input scripts and plug in cards and test the network. A windows 3.11 network.

Ground floor, I tell ya!

Well I'm a slow learner, and it was probably more work fixing my mistakes than any help, but we got through it, and I was hooked on computers!

This was not the floppy-disk powered DOS computer my Dad had in his study, these puppies had hard drives and could access 'the internet'!

I was hooked on this new world. I asked for more. No, I begged and pleaded and cajoled until Jason got me a computer to set up in the hall of the place I rented, then busted up old laptops with dead pixels and dead batteries.

Then... He got me a 14.4 modem. I didn't even have my own email address and Netscape was just a painfully slow screensaver (OK with jaw-dropping possibilities) when I discovered my first true joy of the IBM clone: gaming!

That summer my wife-to-be got used to me staying up 'til all hours. I spent hours adding ram and reinstalling windows and then tweaking modem to goose a little faster data transfer.

And why? What was the key that led to what would become one of the biggest careers and passions of my life?

The Duke, baby!

Running, amped on adrenaline, through pixelated halls. Listening on my headset for telltale gunshots or movement through cheesy, looping midi music. Watching the bottom of my screen for taunts and chatter as Jay moved in for the kill--or swore his head off after I got the drop on him first!

Of course, the Duke got all the best lines:

"Damn, those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my ride."
"You're an inspiration for birth control."
"Uh, uh, uh, where is it?"
"Groovy!"

Before my ride on games ended, the love affair carried me through early Star Wars, Myst, and my second favorite video obsession: Unreal Tournament.

Those were heady days, oh, new-gen geeks... heady days.

And I never left the digital theme park, I just got tired of the rides. Networking an support paid all my bills for a decade. My first ongoing blog followed the beginning of the smartphone and mobile tech revolutions and of course I'm as wired as ever today.

Twitter and very real online friendships and one other thing-a dedication to my writing- have replaced the need and buzz I got off of gaming.

Because it wasn't the 'game' aspect, not the puzzler challenge of those first crude titles that hooked me: it was the communication. The head-to-head battles. Joining forces with people far in the distance to beat some ass sniping people.

It was the community.

Like a lot of you reading, I suspect, I have many meaningful interactions online. I learn online. Sometimes I work online. I'm always entertained and in so many ways I play online.

There's a lot in the way of community to fill that need in me nowadays--not the least of which is the 5-person fire-team that Is my nuke-lear family!

It's not to say I don't crave clearing a new level or taking a beautiful headshot... it's just more meaningful to me now to use the precious little time left to a family man, and provider, to write my own stories, create my own danger, my own witty comebacks, and see who gets out of *my* levels in one piece.

Duke taught me a lot. I'm putting the lessons to work somewhere else these days, but when it comes time to kick ass or chew bubblegum?

Those times, I think the Duke... And it's GAME ON!

John Mierau writes science fiction and fantasy. Ebook and podcast Stories available at ServingWorlds.com, along with roundtable and interview podcasts regarding content creation, speculative fiction and anything else I choose to stick under that umbrella!

Videogame Memories 05 | Richard Green aka MainframeGUEST BLOG POST

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I Remember "Pong"

by Richard Green of Geek Out With Mainframe

I'm not talking about having a game console that happened to play "Pong" as well as dozens of other games; not a smartphone app; not a website where you can play it to your hearts delight.

Rather, back in the 70's my Dad came home with a "Pong" home game console that only played "Pong" (o.k. maybe a few other very similar games like handball, but all of them very "Pong"-esqe). It could not play anything other than the games that were loaded in the firmware; no buying more games for it, no upgrades, just "Pong".

I've tried over the years to figure out what model it was, but I haven't been able to find it in various Google Internet searches. The game controllers were wired into the console and only had a slider for the player to use. Most first generation game consoles had a knob, this had a slider. I'm not sure how many buttons and/or switches were on the game console itself, but it had to be minimal.

To watch the game, you connected it to the TV. This was decades before HDMI, so even this was primitive by comparison. TVs had two screws to connect the antennae wires. On the other end of the dual wire run was a large metal modern art sculpture held over the roof line by a metal pole. In order to get optimal reception for the 3 TV channels in our area (CBS, NBC, & Public TV ... that was it where I was) there was a motor that could rotate the pole and hence aim the antennae. In later years when the motor no longer functioned; we sons would take turn manual turning the pole, with the door open so we could hear someone inside let us know how close we were to getting the channel clearly (or as clear as it was going to get. Sometimes this was done in the rain. We also walked to school uphill, both ways. hehe

Oops, sorry for getting off track. Well, at the back of the TV where the two screws for the antenna wire; a small box was fit to allow the game signal to be visible ... at least if the slider control on the box was set to "game". After playing, the box was set so that the antenna's signal could once again be received. Yes, you had to walk up to the BACK of the TV before playing this "Pong". It was just as well, since remote controls were rare at the time. WE walked up to the TV to change channels or change the volume. Yes, we walked up and touched the controls actually on the TV ... it was THAT long ago.

Back to the game. Well, just do a quick Internet search and you can find "Pong" for almost any piece of electronic you probably own. I'm guessing that your toaster is "smart" enough to play this game. Think table tennis broken down to the simplest possible form that it would be recognizable as such. This is just a tad less complex than that. I remember that we could play solo "handball" or two could play "Pong". If there were more features than just turning it on and off, I can't recall them.

In retrospect I think my Dad bought it for us boys, so that HE could play it; but it felt like it was just for us. I was never much of a gamer and I'm still not; I had too many books and comics to read. That and I'm a pretty poor game player.

Other video games came and went infrequently over the years ... I think I remember a Commodore 64 and maybe one other cartridge system before I left for college in 1981. But "Pong" was the first ... for us and for the world. :)

 

Richard is a mainframe programmer, comic book fan, podcast fan, and Linux fan (esp. Ubuntu). He is also the host of one of my favorite podcasts, the "Geek Out! with Mainframe" podcast where he talks all things geek with my favorite podcast authors and creative types. His podcast can be found here: http://geekoutwithmainframe.com/ 

Videogame Memories 04 | Scott RocheGUEST BLOG POST

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I am very much what you’d consider a casual gamer. I have a Wii and an X-Box (yes the original). I also have a GBA. Were it not for my kids these things would likely be gathering dust. I enjoy video games though, I really do. I have an iPhone and games like Angry Birds, Battleheart, and Scrabble get more of a workout than just about anything else. I just got a EEE Transformer tablet and I expect that I’ll be looking for games to play on that as well. For me these games are time killers, for use when I just want to veg.

When I was a kid though, things were different. I remember playing E.T. on the Atari 2600. Getting that little alien to navigate the pits ate up HOURS. My first video game console was an Intellivision. It had some truly awesome games including an Asteroids knockoff that owned me for months. Years later I received an Intellivision II from my Dad and this time around it was all about Burger Time. Finally, I went mainstream and managed to snag an NES. Here was were my video game consumption blew up. Blades of Steel is still my favorite hockey sim ever and the time I spent with Mario and the gang explains why my social skills are just now approaching adulthood.

Now that my street cred had either been established or demolished I have to say there’s one thing I sincerely miss, the arcade. For you kids, this was a place that was dedicated to dumping quarters into stand up version of these games. The colorful cabinets, the screaming kids, and the thrill of discovering that a new game had been delivered are all fond memories. The progress in the quality of game play, graphics, and artificial intelligence for the bad guys is certainly a nice trade off, but I miss what are the equivalent of the movie palace of my day. These chapels of geekdom were the places I went to hang out with friends and to engage in the kind of camaraderie and trash talk the jocks out there can appreciate.

I suppose some of that can be found in the dimness of one’s bedroom. Fire up the 360 and log in to Live and you can berate your friends or engage in co-op play with people from around the world. While awesome in its own way, it feels sterile. A purpose built location for hurling bits and blowing large wads of cash while hanging out with your friends should still have a place in the world outside of casinos.

A military brat, fan of horror and occult fiction at an embarrassingly

(for his parents anyway) young age, and a seeker of the true reality

beyond that which we see every day, Scott tries to include as much life

experience in his writing as he can. Every story he writes combines these

elements into something that he hopes you will not only enjoy, but tell

all of your friends about. He is active in the podcast fiction sphere

and is a contributing editor at Flying Island Press (http://flyingislandpress.com/). You can also find Scotts work on his website http://www.scottroche.com/ and many of your favorite online hard copy and eBook retailers.