No matter as Chris recently posted on Game|Life the results of that challenge and the resulting thread, where I happened to catch it. I think it was an awesome idea and challenge. For the tl;dr crowd, Chris challenged the J-GAF crew to hit up Japan’s amazing used game shops and see how much quality gaming they could get for under 1,000 Yen (just a hair under $11 as of right now).

WhiteAce, cvxfreak and BudokaiMR2 all came back with some pretty interesting results, even using some self-imposed guidelines and ratings analysis!

Over here in the US, Kyle Orland tried out the challenge over in Pittsburgh, with his set of rules and some pretty decent results! Kyle raised the spending cap to $20 to account for the fact that he felt that $10 wouldn’t really net you anything over here in the US. He also didn’t count sales tax (good move).

There’s also a Twitter hash tag (#1kyengamer) if you’re so inclined.

Of course, now I want to try this for myself over here on the West Coast sometime soon. I need to do some research first on where to go, as it would make for a much more interesting adventure to hit up as few corporate owned stores (GameStop and Game Crazy, et al.) as possible. There was a “Game Club” over on Western and 18th Street at some point that sounds like it would have been a prime spot, but it no longer exists.

Anybody from the LA metro area want to provide any good suggestions?

Anywhere LA Metro, but within the SFV/SGV boundaries and north of South Bay and OC — I don’t want to spend more on gas than I do in games right?

I’ll post my guidelines and results sometime later this month.

Anyhow, I now so greatly desire my Wii back (snicker) because Mega Man was released on Virtual Console this week. I actually had to make a quick scan of my NES games to make sure I didn’t already own this, as I do remember playing it many times. But I don’t. I already wanted to revisit it seeing as the super retro Mega Man 9 is on the way and the Virtual Console release just sealed the deal.

I want my… I want my NintyWii. plzkthx.

This is what Graeme Cree’s Zork I bugs list turns out to be. Yes, that Zork I… the one about The Great Underground Empire that had you starting off the game standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door, and worrying about grues eating you in the dark.

The bugs detailed in the list nearly all produce hilarious results, such as “the command HIT MIRROR WITH SWORD will generate combat responses, such as ‘The mirror parries’…” If you remember those days of text-based adventures, go lose yourself for half an hour or more reading about the bugs. You won’t regret it.

Via Cathode Tan

If you’re not scared of terms like “purl” or “yarn over” like I tend to be, you might want to head over to online knitting magazine, Knitty. In their newly released Spring 2007 issue, contributor Aija Goto provides patterns and instructions on how to put some Space Invaders nostalgia on your feet. You’re not limited to Aija’s skillful pattern suggestion — you can change the colors, layout and texture in different ways and, as Aija suggests, you can even put your own high score on the socks.

…and they might be well paired with that Space Invaders clock you might have picked up recently.

Full instructions in Knitty’s Patterns section.

Tales of PC gaming from the DOS era

Over on GameSetWatch, John Harris is writing a bi-weekly column, called @Play, which takes a look at various games termed “Roguelike” — a term I’ve never heard of before, but it’s a genre I’m familiar with. Last week, he took a look at one of my favorite games of the DOS era, which was appropriately called Rogue.

I can’t recall how I first come across Rogue, although it most likely got passed on to me by one of my best friends in high school. I do remember how I was instantly hooked by it’s familiarity to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons mythos where monsters were just what they were and potions, spells and armor all had simple intuitive names. I loved the challenge of finding the secret doors and heading deeper into the random dungeons generated by the game, and by never knowing what spell, wand or potion you picked up until you used it. And very often you never know what it did unless you had that “Scroll of Identify,” whose name was garbled in the first place, so you just had to use it by chance to find out what it was. I often named items whose effect I was not sure of really stupid things. One scroll, upon it’s use, says something along the lines of “You feel like you are being watched,” so I just called it “Watch.” And I still do to this day.

In his post for @Play, John Harris takes an indepth look at the gameplay mechanics of Rogue, revealing that it’s simple graphics and interface were extremely deceiving. Sure the monsters were simply chosen to represent the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, sure all you did was explore and fight, but the game is apparently extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to win. And John details this aspect I had never realized. I just thought I was bad at the game. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was playing the game all wrong. This game was about speed, go through the dungeon as fast as possible because everything will likely kill you because your character is so weak. And food! I never really thought about how having to eat food when you are hungry added another challenge to the game. I didn’t even remember you had to eat food. Instead, I tried to spend my time grinding for levels and equipment, exploring every hallway and every room for every bit of gold and equipment I could find. I didn’t know that the game was stacked against you, and it was exactly how Rogue was unfair, but it was exactly what made me keep going back. Just one more time into the fray, “this time I can go farther,” I would think to myself. Only to die even earlier than before, unless I was lucky.

I would have never imagined what the game was really all about if I hadn’t read this column. Nor would I have searched out to see if I could find a download of this freeware game, which turned out to be readily available at the Dos Games Archive. Now when I play it, I barely make it past the second dungeon. Have I not learned or is this game much harder than I remembered?