And you thought eatin’ shrooms to grow bigger was strange. How about this: flying green crabs dropping red clay bricks on a grinning, toothy duck wearing a cape and glasses with a double-barrel shotgun coming out of his mouth.

At least it’s set in a pond, so the backdrop isn’t too fanciful.

The game is Deadly Duck for the Atari 2600, a 1982 shooter title published by 20th Century Fox. I’ve played it, and it’s not too bad. It’s a vertical shooter, similar to Space Invaders and Demon Attack.

You play as a duck striving to gun down flying crabs that drop bricks on you — actually, around you. When the bricks land, they temporarily impede your movement to the left or right, then disappear in a few seconds.

This is one of the many vintage video game box illustrations that rendered the typically absurd and abstract situations of extremely low resolution games in a very realistic and literal manner. Super Breakout for the 2600 is one of my favorites (it also inspired a 2006 Halloween costume suggestion).

You can find many more examples of this curious art form on the web, including many parody boxes, so watch out for fakes.

Click above for the full advertisement.

Just your typical late-1970s scene — a poofy-haired car salesman at home in a tie with a huge sandwich, a glass of milk, a large set of keys, a generic S-100 bus computer with a TV terminal, and a book called “Trout” behind him.

He likes to fish.

Of course, the whole purpose of this scene is to push the use of “genuine” Shugart mini-floppies in the home. Shugart, if you didn’t know, invented the mini-floppy. And mini-floppies, if you didn’t know, are commonly known as 5 1/4″ diskettes today. They replaced the giant 8″ clown disks people used before that (read your comments about 8″ floppies here). Sadly, these smaller disks held less data at the time, but that was a small price to pay for not knocking over your friends while swapping storage media.

Discussion topic of the week: Do you still use 5 1/4″ floppies to store new or recent data? If so, what are you using them for?

MegaWars: “The Ultimate Computer Conflict”

I betcha Neil Armstrong didn’t do this while he was on the moon.

…or did he?

P.S. You can read more about MegaWars, an early online multiplayer computer game, here.

Discussion topic of the week: If you were a half naked combat-astronaut on an artificial planetoid, what would you do for fun?

[Editor’s Note: This was part of an April Fools gag. Ulaf is still not amused.]

HELLO AGAIN VINTAGE SUPERFANS. RECENTLY, THE BENJ DECIDES TO HAND ULAF THE RAINS OF THESE BLOG POST. SO ULAF CONVERT SITE TO THE FAVORITES OF ALL THE WORLD’S KRELZ, GARDENSING. AND HENCE: VINTAGE COMPUTING AND GARDENSING.

TO STARTS US OFF, MY MIND WILL SHARE WITH YOU EASY THREE TIPS TO THE BETTER GARDENSING.

NUMBERS 1:
DO NOT EAT THE VEGTABLES BEFORE THE GROWING.

NUMBERS 2:
THE DIRT IS NOT FOR THE EATING, BUT FOR THE GROWING.

NUMBERS 3:
THE WORMS ARE FOR THE GROWING, AND THE EATING IF YOUR MIND LACK EXCELLENT NUTRIMENT.

THAT IS ALL FOR NOW. STAY TUNES FOR MORE GARDENSING TIPS AND TRICKSTERS FROM THE WHIRL OF ULAF.

FOR COMPUING AND GAMINGS TIPS, CONSULT HOW TO BEAT THE VIDEO GAMES, THE ULAF CLASSIC. SOON ULAF WRITES “HOW TO BEAT THE VEGETABLES” FOR YOUR MIND TO CONSUME. UNTIL NEXT TIME THIS IS ULAF SAYING BE THE MASTER.

ULAF FANS UNITE! READS ULAF ON THE TWEETER: @ulafsilchov

[ Continue reading ULAF’S GARDENING TIPS » ]

I smell a potential children’s cartoon franchise.

I don’t know what’s more ridiculous: the fact that the Spikemaster surge suppressor has a humanoid superhero mascot with powers of unknown capacity, or the fact that the company producing the suppressor is named “Discwasher.”

Either way, I know what I’m dressing up as this Halloween.

Discussion topic of the week: What do you think Spikemaster’s superhero powers should be?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

Your wish is my command.

If my previous posts on the Game Genie are any indication (wow, they’re from 2005 — that’s vintage), then I’m a huge fan of the game-manipulating device — assuming, of course, that my 2005 self wasn’t lying just to throw off the accuracy of a future Retro Scan post.

But heck; I shouldn’t have to read my old blog posts to know that. In the early 1990s, I spent untold numbers of hours developing my own Game Genie codes for games like Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES, and also for Super Mario Land for the Game Boy (I need to make a homebrew gallery about that). I loved the Game Boy Game Genie so much that I took a hacksaw to its extraneous plastic parts so it would fit on the Super Game Boy. It was a weird kind of love, but it worked.

From there, I moved on to the Super NES Game Genie (I don’t recall developing my own codes for that), and I eventually bought a used Game Genie for the Sega Genesis. The only one I never acquired was the Sega Game Gear version. But I didn’t have a Game Gear back then, so that would have just been silly.

Discussion topic of the week: The Game Genie: reality-bending peripheral or wussy crutch for bad players?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

Resistance is futile. (click for full advertisement)

Long-time readers of VC&G may recall me talking about my adventures on CompuServe from time to time. Needless to say, they never looked like this. But I did have a few nightmares featuring enormous floating hive-mind spaceships hooked up to my computer when I was 12.

On second thought, maybe this thing is the machine God uses to create snow — if snow indeed exists.

Discussion topic of the week: Star Trek or Star Wars? Better yet: Han Solo vs. William T. Riker in a knife fight — who would win?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

So I bought this Atari Touch Tablet last year, right? (always an encouraging way to start a blog entry) It was new in the box, and I documented the process of opening it up via the magic of digital photography. The pictures languished on my computer for some time, anxiously awaiting their day in the sun. Well, their time has come: as of yesterday, they’re part of a slideshow on Harry McCracken’s Technologizer, authored by no one but the one known as myself, me.

If you don’t recall, Harry McCracken has some renown as the excellent former-Editor-in-Chief of PC World, a position he manned for four years. Anyway, this slide show has apparently been a pretty big hit on Slash-something-or-other, especially amongst the personally-grieved-by-everything crowd who are currently neck-deep in complaining that it’s presented on 14 separate pages (instead of all at once, like other slide shows).

Long story short: I thought you might enjoy checking it out.

(click for full advertisement)

Sega created some pretty edgy advertising in the mid-1990s, so it came as no surprise when they used a risqué visual metaphor to introduce their new 32X add-on for the Genesis. Sadly, the only fruit this unholy union bore was Sega’s eventual failure in the hardware market.

Discussion topic of the week: It’s a tough call: are there any decent games for the 32x?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

(click for full advertisement)

Since Friday is Halloween, I’ve pulled out this scary, 25 year-old ad from Interface Age. The Devil doesn’t look too happy with Qantex’s latest offering — the joke being that Qantex’s new model is compatible with Diablo printers. If any of you attend a costume party this Halloween, feel free to dress as the Qantex Devil. Be sure to take pictures.

Discussion topic of the week: Remember dot-matrix, impact, and daisy-wheel printers? How about thermal, bubble-jet, ink-jet, and laser? Tell us about your earliest printer experiences, good and bad.

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.