For eight years now, Susan has been waiting on (at least) one kid hand and foot — and, since 2005, she’s been waiting on two. (Some would say three.) Whether it’s cooking or doing laundry or cleaning up buckets of puke (last night’s gift from Morgan), Susan spends the vast majority of her free time working for the kids. I thought this was pretty funny, until it started happening to me.

My jobs are admittedly different than Susan’s. While Susan is folding clothes or putting away groceries, I do “dad” duties like wrestle, or find movies for the kids to watch. (Susan gets the short end of the stick, no doubt.) As of Mason’s 8th birthday last December, I have acquired a new role: tech support.

Mason’s had a Nintendo DS for a couple of years and a Game Boy Advance before that, but not much tech support was needed for those. Most of the questions I got were about how to do things in games. “Where do I go now? What do I do? Who’s that guy?” (My answers: I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know … in that order.) He either figures it out, or goes and finds something else to do. Either solution is acceptable.

For his 8th birthday, Mason got an iPod Touch. The interface is simple enough that an 8-year-old can use it, but he can’t do things like install apps, or music, or configure the wireless encryption keys needed to piggyback onto my router, and so those things fall back on me. “Dad, I can’t get on the Internet,” he said the other day. After a bit of troubleshooting I discovered he had deleted the 20-character encryption key needed to connect. After looking up the code and punching it in on the iPod’s small, virtual keyboard, I handed the device back to Mason only to hear, “Oh, so THAT’S how I erased it … Can you type it in again?” seconds later as he handed it back to me.

About two weeks ago, I lost my netbook. I mean, I didn’t lose it, I lost possession of it. Mason’s been guarding it tightly. He knows how to search Google for things and has found several websites with online games hosted on them. I’m sure when I regain possession of it I’ll have to format it to get all the viruses off but, eh.

This morning I woke up around 7:30 only to have the netbook handed to me. “Google Chrome is broken,” he said. What he meant was, the wireless card had quit working. I tried releasing/renewing the IP address a few times and got nothing. When I searched for local wireless access points, I found none. After fifteen or twenty minutes of searching Google (from a different machine) I discovered that the Acer Aspire One has a manual switch that disables the wireless card (for air travel, most likely). After finding the switch and flipping it, everything started working again. Throughout the process, Mason was as helpful as the average tech support caller. “What did you do?” “Nothing, I promise!”

And now, it’s the Nintendo DS again — specifically, the Action Replay cartridge. The Action Replay cartridge isn’t a game — it’s a cartridge that lets you cheat on games. Mason is playing two or three different Pokemon games and has resorted to cheating to collect all the Pokemon, or win the game, or whatever the point is to those Pokemon games. Man I sound old.

The Action Replay uses cheat codes that have to be manually entered into the DS by using a plastic stylus and a virtual touch screen keyboard. Mason asked if I would type one of the codes in for him, and I said sure. He handed me the DS and showed me a code that was 500 characters long. I politely handed the DS back to him and said, “Good luck.”

Now the Action Replay comes with some software for your PC that allows you to sync codes between the two, but it’s lacking the most obvious feature — a way to cut/paste codes found on the Internet into the device. I knew there had to be a way to do it, but so far what I’ve found hasn’t been easy. The codes are stored in XML format and can be imported that way, but I haven’t found a good list that anyone’s put together for Mason’s specific games. I did find a way to cut/paste codes in one at a time, but doing so appears to delete all your other stored codes until you restore, which deletes the code you pasted in. It’s such a clunky system that anyone (including 8-year-olds and 36-year-olds) would look at and instantly say, “this sucks.”

In the meantime I’m having to hear about how much it all sucks from Mason on a daily basis. And by daily I mean several times an hour. “Daaaaaaaaaaaad,” he says, “I can’t get the Juju from the Pling-Plong because I don’t have a code to make Doofasaurus invincible so I can defeat Glorgo and obtain the Sword of Rafadafading Dong.” The names are made up, but barely.

This morning I figured out how to format the XML files and where to store them on the PC. I wrote a quick script to parse codes I found on the net into the right format; with that, I was able to import all the cheat codes Mason could ever want into his Action Replay. He is giddy with delight and I was just informed that Glorgo has been defeated and the Sword of Rafadafading Dong is now in Mason’s possession.

Bow down — I am POKEDAD!

Imagine for a moment that every time you bought a new computer, none of your old programs would run on it. This is the problem that Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony face each time they release a new generation of video game consoles. It’s hard enough for many people to justify spending anywhere from $300 to $600 on a new game console, but if you tell them that the new machine won’t play any of their old games they’re liable to walk away from the deal. That’s why “backwards compatibility” is such a selling point for consoles.

For the record, backwards compatibility for consoles isn’t a new idea. The Atari 7800, which was released in 1984, was backwards compatible with the Atari 2600 and played “most” of the Atari 2600’s library of games. You’ll see that “most” term a lot when it comes to backward compatibility. Occasionally game programmers use certain tricks that just don’t work on later console revisions, as those chips have been updated over time — but “most” people are happy to play “most” of their older titles. Backwards compatibility has become such a selling feature that gamers almost expect it. The Game Boy Advance played all Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, and the Nintendo DS/DS Lite played all Game Boy Advance games. The PlayStation 2 played all PlayStation 1 games.

Continue reading Console Backwards Compatibility, Haw Haw →

Mason’s officially on Christmas Break, which unfortunately just means he goes to daycare instead of going to school. He doesn’t mind; it’s like a mini-reunion up there with all his old daycare friends.

One of his friends has been bringing their Nintendo Wii to daycare this week, and apparently Mason promised to bring Rock Band for everyone to play. When I was informed of his little plan last night, I said no way. I don’t need two dozen kids beating on our drums, breaking my guitars and dropping my microphone. Of course this caused Mason to completely melt down and cry for two hours solid.

Finally, an agreement was reached — I would take leave from work for a couple of hours this afternoon and bring Rock Band.

I cannot begin to explain how hectic the afternoon was and God bless the teachers over at the daycare who deal with kids every single day. As I told one of them, “This whole experience has reminded me how much I enjoy working with computers.”

The kids, however, had a blast. I ended up organizing the kids into six “bands” of three. Each band got two songs, and on each song I made them switch up the instruments so everybody got a chance to try something different (or, more to the point, nobody got stuck singing twice). Drums were by far the most popular instrument, and I saw many styles throughout the afternoon: some kids actually played them like drums, others played them like bongos (without the sticks) and one kid (I dubbed “Animal,” from the Muppet Show) just beat the crap out of everything within reach every chance he got.

Some of the kids had obviously never played Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Some of those kids “got it” and others didn’t. The ones that didn’t snuck away from the group pretty quickly. I tried to make sure everybody got an equal amount of tries, but I also understand not wanting to learn something new in front of your peers.

If anything, Mason got less play time than everyone else simply because he can play it at time. I did let him show off in front of his friends a few times, of course.

While there certainly were first-person maze games that preceded it, Wolfenstein 3D will always be remembered as the game that introduced the “first person shooter” genre to the masses. Even though the game has been copied hundreds if not thousands of times, Wolfenstein laid the ground rules for the genre. Likewise, while musical rhythm games have existed in one fashion or another for some time (Guitar Freaks predates it), it was Guitar Hero that took plastic bongos and maracas out of players’ hands and handed them their first plastic six-string (albeit, without strings).

While the Guitar Hero franchise turned a generation of videogame players into wannabe guitar gods, Rock Band took things one step further by also including drums and microphones, turning solo guitar players into full fledged virtual band members. Yes, there were karaoke-style games prior to Rock Band (the SingStar games were quite successful) and several arcade-based drumming games (like Drum Mania and Percussion Freaks) along with home versions like Taiko Drum Master, but it was Rock Band that created the “band-in-a-box” package and got kids playing fake instruments together.

There is a growing legion of people, most of them musicians themselves, who detest the entire genre of “guitar games.” Earlier this year, John Mayer denounced Guitar Hero because “it doesn’t give you the same thrill that playing a real guitar does,” and Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger said that players “would be better off learning a real instrument.” To be honest, I don’t understand the animosity. I played a lot of games as a kid, and not once did I think I could beat the real Dr. J in a game of basketball after playing One On One: Julius Erving and Larry Bird. I don’t think Activision’s game Space Shuttle would help fly the real thing, I doubt I’m qualified to build my own town after playing SimCity, and I’m pretty sure all of the denizens of Mortal Kombat would surely kick my ass should I encounter one while strolling around Outworld. I’m not sure why any musician would feel threatened by kids playing videogames with plastic instrument-shaped controllers, unless they are worried that their secret will get out: most eight-year-old boys with a week’s worth of training could play the majority of guitar riffs heard on popular radio today.

For his birthday this year, I bought Mason Rock Band for the Nintendo Wii. (I can hear some of you — “He bought a game?” Unfortunately, it is hard to download a drum set.) The box itself is impressive; it’s big but not too big, and heavy but not too heavy.

Up until last night I had neither played nor hooked up Rock Band. Considering we bought the package for the Wii, I was surprised at how many wires there were. The drum’s kick pedal connects to the drums with a wire, the microphone and drums both connect to the Wii via wires to a USB hub that also connects to the system via a wire. It wasn’t that long ago that all systems had wired controllers, but I guess I’ve grown so used to wireless controllers that the spaghetti mess of wires we had going on seemed archaic.

Mason grabbed the guitar and I made a make shift drum riser out of a metal folding chair, and with that our band “Wasp Daddy” was born. (Mason has a thing for drawing wasps, and I’m the Daddy.) Like Guitar Hero, Rock Band has a mixture of both new and old music and there’s something enjoyable about watching a six-year-old play along to bands like Mountain, the Rolling Stones, Rush and KISS.

One of the things I like about Rock Band is that each person can set their difficulty level independently. That allowed me to play the game at Medium while Mason tackled Easy. You are allowed to pick your skill level before starting each song, which was convenient as Mason and I tended to swap instruments every couple of songs.

After Susan and Morgan made it home, Sue picked up the microphone and the three of us plowed our way through a couple of songs before it was bedtime. Say what you will about these make-believe music games, but I can tell you that Susan has never joined Mason and I in a round of gaming, so there’s something to be said about that.

Rock Band crosses generations well. Musically games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero may only be one step above playing air guitar, but I doubt you could talk the average family into hanging out and playing air guitar together for half an hour. The game’s music is diverse enough that both kids and adults can find things they’ll like without being too annoyed. One of the best things about Rock Band is, since it supports four simultaneous “musicians,” everyone gets to play every time. One of the worst things about Guitar Hero is waiting ten to fifteen minutes for your turn.

Mason has already asked Santa for a real guitar for Christmas this year, so I guess we’ll see if his interest in Rock Band and Guitar Hero carries over into the real world.

(This is a long entry that talks about videogames. You have been warned.)

I started collecting Sega Genesis games back in 2003, shortly after stumbling across the Digital Press website and attending the first Oklahoma Videogame Expo. Those two events drug me into the world of what people refer to as “retrogaming.” By definition a retrogamer is a person who plays, enjoys and typically collects “old” games. There are two basic groups of retrogamers — those who discover old games and systems, and those who bought them when they were new and never let go of them. I’m definitely a member of the latter. Some of the Atari 2600 games sitting on my shelf today are the same physical cartridges my parents bought for me back in the late 70s. For years, I didn’t even know I was a retrogamer — I thought I was just a guy who liked to play old games, and didn’t throw things away. Go figure!

Before 2003, most of the old gaming systems I owned and played were ones I had bought new. I hadn’t purchased an old NES deck because of some sudden interest in retrogaming — the NES I owned was the same one I owned as a kid. In fact, somehow, I had ended up with four systems: my old one, Susan’s old one, and a couple I’d picked up as spares from thrift stores along the way. This is course was before eBay came along and disrupted the videogame ecosystem, but I digress.

As I am wont to do, in 2003 I discovered this whole new world of retrogaming and I got excited. I drug things out of closets and the garage, hooked up old systems, drug old out games, and stacked shelves everywhere as a public testament to my gaming loyalty. I displayed my shelves full of games as a badge of honor, a testament to my loyalty to gaming. I like gaming “this” much. Through this new community I found others who liked retrogaming too — and based on the size of their collections, they liked it more than I did.

And so, I started buying, mostly games for systems I already owned. I bought Atari games, and Nintendo games, and a lot of old PC games. I stacked these games on my shelves. When people would come over I would point to the games and say, “I like gaming that much.”

If I could put my finger on when the downward spiral began, it would be when I acquired a Sega Genesis. I didn’t even buy it; my friend FalseGod gave me his old one along with half a dozen games. I never owned a Genesis as a kid and I didn’t have any friends who had one either. If I could pinpoint the specific moment in which I began collecting for the sake of collecting, it would be that moment. I didn’t want a Genesis because I liked playing it; I wanted one because I didn’t have one. Shortly after acquiring the Genesis I began buying games for it. It began, as many collections do, via eBay — a purchase of thirty or so games from a local seller kickstarted my collection. Over the next several years, through a combination of garage sales, thrift store finds and eBay purchases, my collection of Genesis games grew to over 200.

I never played a single one of them. Ever. I may have tested one or two of them just to make sure they worked, but — well, here’s my dirty little secret (actually, if you know me at all, it’s no secret): I was raised on piracy. Essentially all computer users of the 80s were. As young kids we swapped and traded games all day long, building huge empires of copied games on cheap floppy disks. For me — the real me — gaming has always been about the games, not the boxes, or the manuals, or the packaging. That stuff is interesting to me in part because, for the most part, I never had it when it came to PC games.

The Sega Genesis is not a particularly difficult machine to emulate. We’ve had Genesis emulators for the PC now for over ten years (KGen and Genecyst both date back to 1997). Several Genesis emulators were released for home consoles such as the Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox as well as for the PSP, Nintendo DS and GamePark systems. In short, anyone with enough processing power to read this post has the ability to download, run and play any Sega Genesis game ever released, for free.

For those who feel that emulation is not “real” enough let me throw this one at you — I own both a Genesis console copier, and a Tototek Genesis flash card. Both of these devices allow me to transfer and play Sega Genesis ROMs on a real Sega Genesis. That’s about as real as it gets.

Those boxed Sega Genesis games sure did look good on my shelf, but I have come to a couple of realizations. The first is, I have never, nor will I ever, play those games. Period. I just won’t. The second is, the game collecting scene has changed in such a way that it is no longer fun to me. I never enjoyed playing Genesis games; I enjoyed hunting for them. I enjoyed visiting those garage sales and thrift stores in hopes of finding a game I didn’t have. Those days are over. Except in rare occasions, games aren’t making it to the sales floor any longer — they’re being sold online. Or, if they do make it to the floor, they’re being quickly scooped up (sometimes by employees) and resold online. The days of building a sizable collection through physical hunting are dead.

My brain is complicated and twisted. Collecting tortures me. I love the hunt; I hate the spoils. I search for games and kick myself while buying them. My collection has grown to the point where I have erected shelves on every wall of every room that Susan will allow me to touch. Susan once noted, “If you had your way you would put shelves on every wall,” and she is probably right. What good is a collection that no one can see?

When I get overwhelmed by all my stuff, I deal with it in one of two ways: by buying more stuff (which makes no sense to me or anyone else) or by selling stuff. Overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I have piled around me in my game room, I arbitrarily pointed to my Sega Genesis collection and announced, “You have been banished.”

I sold about a hundred games to a couple of fellow collectors. I did that deal in person, so no shipping was involved — awesome. I then sold another thirty or forty via online sales. The final hundred or so went via Craigslist this weekend to a nice couple of recently picked up one of those new clone systems that play both NES and Genesis games. For some reason I thought that was kind of neat — a couple, picking up used games and playing them together. Maybe I should buy a … nah.

The vast majority of my remaining gaming collection can be divided into five main categories: Atari 2600, NES, PC, Commodore 64, and “Virtual.”

The majority of my Atari 2600 and NES games are loose, and I have less than 200 of each. The odds of me playing any of them on vintage hardware are low; still, I find the thought of parting with them difficult. My justification for keeping them is that it would be expensive to replace them, and if I get too tired of them I could always box them up and stick them out in the garage.

My PC and C64 collections consist of mostly boxed games, maybe 100 PC games and less Commodore 64 games. While I might someday play some of these games, I will never play the disks that sit inside these boxes. I have copies of all of them. The boxes might as well be empty. I didn’t buy them to play the games, I bought them because I like the way they look on my shelves. That’s exactly why I started buying Genesis games, too. I have the same conflict as I do with the Atari 2600/NES stuff — monetarily it’s worth very little, but without spending a ton of money it would be difficult to replace the games. I like the way they look on the shelf, but I am running low on shelf space. Decisions, decisions.

The rest of my collection (and the vast majority of it at this point) is virtual — that is, ROMs for emulators, burned discs and downloaded games. I’m very happy with the situation at this point. I have virtual copies of every single Sega Genesis game sitting on my Xbox. The physical act of pulling a game off the shelf and inserting it into a console does nothing for me.

There is one other aspect of my collecting that I would like to tame — boxes. I have the original boxes for most of my gaming systems. I’m not just talking about stuff like the Wii or the PS3 — I have boxes for my Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, all my Commodore equipment, and so on. It’s a pointless collection of cardboard that takes up a ton of physical shelf space. I’m not mentally ready to part with those, either. I don’t know, I’m kooky.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the day I started collecting Sega Genesis games symbolized “something.” For a long time I didn’t know what that something was, but in retrospect, I think it was the beginning of collecting not for my own enjoyment, but to impress other people. I suspect that a year from now, I will look back at the sale of my Genesis collection as see the end of one phase and the beginning of another.

This past weekend at Penn Square mall, Nintendo had a display of twenty Nintendo Wii kiosks demonstrating Wii Fit. For my non-gaming readers, Wii Fit is a pressure-sensitive accessory for the Nintendo Wii that looks a lot like a bathroom scale. While standing on it, gamers can shift their weight and control videogames. When I stand on it, it says things like, “get off me fatty.”

Wii Fit comes with a variety of games that fall into four categories; Yoga, exercise, exercise games and balance games. The twenty Wii kiosks were being manned about twenty college cheerleaders, with the biggest portion of the crowd gathered around a few young ladies demonstrating some of the yoga positions. Away from the crowd, we had no trouble finding an available kiosk and trying out Wii Fit for ourselves. Mason got the first round, trying both snow skiing and a Marble Madness-esque game. It takes a little getting used to due to the fact that you are not supposed to move, shuffle or lift your feet. Once Mason got that part down he did pretty well. Next up was Morgan, who tried a virtual hula-hooping game. Susan noted that hula-hoops can be picked up the dollar store (Wii Fit retails for $90, if you can find one that’s not part of a bundle — more on that in a later). The hula-hoop game looked kind of fun but the thought of me jiggling around gyrating my hips in front of a bunch of cheerleaders had bad news written all over it. I passed.

Mason checking out the merchandise …

For someone looking for an exercise mentor, Wii Fit comes with a workout program that, among other things, tracks your workout times and progress. A (skinny) virtual avatar demonstrates exercise techniques and barks out orders. It’s like Sweatin’ the the Oldies, but for Youngies. And it’s a good thing. Mason’s gaming skills are approaching my own and even with time restrictions in place it is becoming obvious that videogames will be Mason’s generation primary source of entertainment. Anything that helps them burn a few calories along the way will be gold.

From the escalator.

As previously mentioned, the Wii Fit retails for $89.99, but I haven’t been able to find one for that. Like the Wii itself, it’s difficult to find the Fit in stores, and the places that do have them in stock have them in “bundles.” Both BestBuy.com and CircuitCity.com list the Wii Fit at $89 (but are out of stock), and Wal-Mart.com has the Fit in stock but for $129; buyers are forced to puchased additional accessories (like the Wii Yoga Mat). Desperate buyers and opportunistic sellers have turned to online sales (Craigslist/eBay) where non-bundled Fits are being sold for more than the bundles cost. A quick search of my local Craigslist showed multiple Fits being offered for $130+.

The only way to get a non-bundled one in stores at this point is to stop by your favorite retail store daily to check stock, an “exercise” in and of itself.