Americans love a good rags to riches story, especially when the protagonist has to work hard, pull himself up by his bootstraps, and eventually makes it big. Horatio Alger sold dozens of books based on this very formula. There’s also a Geek You Should Know that did this very thing! Ralph Baer is credited with creating the world’s first gaming console, the Brown Box–later called the Odyssey–but he didn’t start as a technological guru.
Tag Archives: gaming
Staff Writer | Why Are YOU Playing A GIRL!?
I’ve been playing female characters in video games for years. I don’t even think about it anymore. This seems to be strange to people who watch me play, and I don’t understand why. I’ve had family comment. I’ve had friends comment. I’ve even had my friends’ kids comment. I have never understood why this is looked at as such a strange thing. Their disbelief is most commonly phrased as an obvious statement of fact, “… But you’re not a girl.” My response is, “Um…so what?”
It seems that some people who have a natural inclination to role-play themselves in games expect that others do the same. I lost this inclination very early on, and not for some adolescent desire to ogle the nicely animated female characters. The real reason I started liking and playing female characters is far more practical: they were always faster, more agile, and made better spell casters. Essentially, they got the first opportunity to act in most role-playing games and were usually faster than their usually heavier male counterparts in fighting games, while throwing cool spell effects at enemies. In racing games, the girls tended to have faster acceleration. Since I had the tendency to smash into things instead of being able to run through the tracks, I really needed that acceleration more than the higher max-speed that the males generally had. Continue reading
Filed under Gaming, Geek Life, Kurt Klein
Review: Atari: Game Over
More often than not urban legends are just that: legends. These fanciful creations may have a glimmer of truth at their heart, but are in general largely exaggerated and embellished to make for a better story. Every so often though, one story proves to be more than just a tall tale. Atari: Game Over tells the story of what is quite possibly the biggest and most mysterious urban legend in gaming.
The legend goes something like this: E.T. the Extraterrestrial was the hottest movie in the world in 1982. Around that same time, Atari was a rapidly expanding video game company that had recently scored a number of hits, including some licensed games based on movies. What more perfect match could there be? However, according to legend, instead of conquering the commercial world, the E.T. game was so awful that it somehow destroyed the video game industry. As a result, thousands of copies of the game were quietly taken out to the New Mexico desert and buried, never to be seen again. When questioned about the legend, Atari corporate leadership would refuse to comment, only adding fuel to the fiery theory that there was, in fact, some kind of cover up in progress ( all good urban legends need a cover up). If the game were really bad enough to destroy the industry, it makes sense on some level that the developer would want to destroy all copies of it, but it also seems almost unfathomable that one game could destroy an industry and be so bad it warranted burial. As Atari: Game Over explains, however, there is much more to this story than meets the eye. Continue reading
Filed under Andrew Hales, Gaming, Movie Reviews
Therefore I Geek 