What a silly illustration.
Discussion topic of the week: In your opinion, which Super NES game had the best graphics?
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It’s been a while since we’ve had a Fuzzy Memory mysery to solve, but I recently received another request from someone seeking resolution of their distant gaming recollections. I’m not an oracle of infinite knowledge, so like always, I need the adept VC&G readership to help solve the mystery.
Erin wrote me a few days ago regarding a computer game from her past:
I am searching for the title of an old computer game I used to play. I do not remember much, only that it involved walking around, finding “clues” and puzzles and solving them to move forward in the game. There was an alchemists’ lab with the elements and runes and an asylum… I can’t remember much more than that. It was in the mid-late 90’s that I was playing this. Any thought would be greatly appreciated as I am going crazy trying to remember!
Thanks a million,
Erin
Sounds like the description of a Myst-esque point-and-click adventure game to me. I’ve asked Erin to clarify what platform she played this on (given the time frame, likely either a PC or Mac), but I’ve yet to receive a response. If I get any more information from her, I’ll post it.
[ Update – 08/21/2008: Erin says that it was a PC game, not Mac. ]
Come in and “brouse” our wyde variatee of computur goodz.
Apparently, in 1979, the computer buying public could barely stand to wait any longer for Texas Instruments to ship their personal computer masterpiece, the TI-99/4. (I mean, finally. They actually released it.) Lucky for us, we have this handy “The Computer Factory” group ad to serve as a window through time, if you will, to allow us to observe the public’s overwhelming demand for TI’s hot new PC as it was in 1979. Apparently.
The TI-99/4 — which happened to posses the 7th worst PC keyboard of all time — might have been the one of the first home computers to ship with a 16-bit CPU, but it hardly took off in the marketplace (read more about its failings here and here). TI slowly learned from its mistakes and released the TI-99/4A a few years later to a more receptive audience. The Alpiner-playing world rejoiced. But it wasn’t long before the Commodore 64 crushed TI’s struggling machine (and the rest of the home computer market) in a fierce price war.
Discussion topic of the week: Have you ever hotly anticipated the release of a certain computer model? Which one got you excited the most?
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Something is crooked in the state of Denmark.
Leave it to the Japanese to create a fantasy golf game with androids, robotic caddies, and floating islands in the sky. As usual, they were quite forward-looking in 1993: they knew that some day, androids would be better at golf than humans.
I’ve actually tried my hand at this game a few times, and it’s weird. While the 3D engine is cool, it’s painfully slow; you can easily doze off while waiting for the screen to redraw.
[ Correction – 07/21/2008 ] I just played Mecarobot Golf again, and it seems that my memory was flawed. The whacked-out SNES Golf game I recalled above was actually Devil’s Course. Now that is a crazy golf game. Mecarobot Golf still contains robots, but it features a smooth Mode 7 engine.
Discussion topic of the week: What’s your favorite video or computer golf game?
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Click above for full ad.
“No Bad Memories.”
That sounds more like a slogan from a denial-centric pop psychology movement or a dystopian memory-wiping company than from a maker of computer diskettes. It would be easy to dismiss this marketing tagline as absurd, were it not for the enthusiastic bearer of the message: a buoyant, bubbly woman cheerfully peddling OPUS-brand floppy disks. Indeed, she looks like her brain was totally wiped clean by OPUS’s technical staff some time in the early 1980s — a testament that their memory technology really works.
By the way, here’s a high-resolution scan of Floppy Girl in PNG format for those of you out there who might want to turn it into a desktop background. Or print it out and impress your nerd friends with vintage floppy pin-up art.
Discussion topic of the week: Have you ever lost important computer data to a hard drive or disk failure? Share your disaster stories below.
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Of Aliens and Men
This richly illustrated advertisement for Irem’s R-Type and Kung-Fu Master on the Game Boy made me bristle with excitement as a kid. Unfortunately, most Game Boy games (when played on the blurry, slow-response, low-contrast, pale green LCD display of the original GB unit) didn’t live up to the promise of their vivid, colorful ads. Sure, I tried my hand at many action games on Nintendo’s famous handheld, but the lackluster experience made me mostly stick with Tetris until the vastly-improved screens of the Game Boy Pocket and Color came along.
Discussion topic of the week: What was your first portable electronic/video game experience? Describe it for us.
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The transistor — need I say more?
Let’s give a big round of applause to the electronic component that made our current computer revolution possible: the transistor. Here’s an advertisement from RCA touting the benefits of solid state transistor technology from a time when it was still novel. 55 years later, we’d be cramming 300 million of these onto a single piece of silicon smaller than a penny. And Microsoft Word still runs slowly.
Discussion topic of the week: What was your first computer’s CPU clock speed?
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We’re back. Last week’s Fuzzy Memory mysery was such an astounding success that we’ve received another request from someone seeking resolution of their distant childhood gaming memories. I’m not a fount of infinite knowledge, so like always, I need the adept VC&G readership to help solve the mystery.
Julia, from Australia, wrote me a few days ago regarding an electronic handheld game from her past:
G’day red
I’m hoping you can help me locate a game I played when I was a child. I live in South Australia. The game was a handheld game made around 1981 with a lcd screen. The name Tutankhamen comes to mind but it may have been called something else, but I’m pretty sure it had an Egyptian theme. I don’t remember how the game was played, I only remember what it looks like. It may have been red in colour, small between 10-20cm wide an I recall it had a little black stand attached to the bottom of it. I think it was modelled after the 2 player tabletop arcade games except a mini version.
Your help would be much appreciated!
Cheers
-Julia
[ Continue reading [ Fuzzy Memory ] Tutankhamen Rises Again » ]
They put that blue streak there for a reason.
It may seem like online dating is a new thing, but it stretches back farther than you’d think. Case in point: American People/Link, an early dial-up relationship service using Teletext — a much hyped (but little used) online graphical display technology at the time. I’m not sure how successful the service was, but that guy looks pretty happy. If anybody out there ever used People/Link, we’d love to hear from you.
Discussion topic of the week: Have you ever dated someone you met online? Beyond that, how have computer networks changed your social life?
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Often we yearn to reclaim fond memories from childhood, but those memories remain just out of reach. Sometimes the event or object we’re seeking happened so long ago that our recollections have become foggy or even distorted over time.
Well, in a way, that’s why I’m here. As a historian, I like to help people reconnect with and rediscover the past. I regularly receive emails from people looking for information on games, toys, or computers that they haven’t seen in years. Last week, I found another such email waiting in my inbox that left me stumped. That’s why I’m turning to you, my wonderful readers, for help in solving the mystery.
[ Continue reading [ Fuzzy Memory ] Seeking Childhood Computer Toy » ]
