Top 10 Educational Games of the 1980s

The classic sound of a room full of arcade games all going at once started to vanish before the coin-op arcade started its slide to extinction. Game audio and speech got more sophisticated and music evolved into soundtracks, creating a blend different from the early to middle 1980s. But the Arcade Ambience Project has created more than eight hours of mp3s, sorted by year that depict arcades at their height, buzzing, chirping and whirring like a field of crickets on a summer evening.

Creator Andy Hofle has mixed together the sounds of games popular in the years 1981, 1983, 1986 and 1992, for those who might feel nostalgic for the days of miniature golf, birthday parties or skating rinks. He put a new tool up that ensures the files will play on any sound card, which is why this popped back up recently. The files are about 80 to 90 megs and mirrored at multiple sites. If you want the uncompressed sound you can get that on a CD.

The site says Avril Lavigne used Ambience Project sound in the background of a music video. It was also featured (with permission) in the documentary "Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball."

My audio memory of arcades is dominated by the sounds of Galaga, of Mario clearing barrels and collecting points, and the siren in Pac-Man. If they could release the mp3 in Smell-o-Rama or whatever, recreating that strange aroma of dust cooking on the back of a hot cabinet, sweetened by the scent of waffle cones.

Arcade Ambience Project [arcade.hofle.com]

Watercooler Games saw this earlier in the week and gave a detailed deconstruction of how a Free the Falklands! concept would be graphically impossible on the Atari 2600. I took one look and knew it was satire because one of the writers for this site, Jason Torchinsky, is a comedian and a name I remember as the editorial cartoonist of The Daily Tar Heel back when I was at N.C. State's Technician in the early 1990s.

But play along, because it's funny. Why look, his site, the Van Gogh-Goghs, have unearthed from some New Mexico landfill documented evidence of 11 scrapped projects for the Atari 2600! The casualties included such licensing/adaptations as Bosom Buddies (a cross between Kaboom! and Donkey Kong, and Kramer vs. Kramer (like Pong with children). My favorite, because I like poop jokes, is Gunther Gebel-Williams' Cage Cleaner. The bogus rationale for the bogus game sounds like pure pre-video-game-crash self-b.s.ing: "You can't blow up asteroids in real life, but you sure as [expletive deleted] can clean up [expletive deleted]."

The Best Atari 2600 Games You Never Heard Of [The Van Gogh-Goghs, via Water Cooler Games]

If I had this lunchbox, right after I made my PB&J I would hold it up, edge-on, and blow along it hard before putting it inside. I'd also punch the Konami code into my cheese & crackers to get unlimited Capri Sun.

Here's a mod that guts a perfectly good (or bad) NES and repurposes it for food storage and transport. No putting Chiquita banana stickers all over this one, gang. In 20 years it'll totally pwn Josie and the Pussycats for collectible lunchbox supremacy. Creator fluctifragus shows how he made it, with helpful handmodeling from Sasquatch of Alpha Flight.

Nintendo Lunchbox [Instructables]

Back when I was your age, we played games that sucked and were no fun and we liked it, because it built character, and building character was fun (it was an early form of achievement farming). In fact, we used a slide projector to create finger-shadow combatants for Mortal Kombat, and it was a hoot when granddad had to roll the dice correctly in the correct order to get a fatality.

So that's a big brown blip on the bullshit radar, isn't it. Yeah, thought so. Instead for you, GamesRadar has a comprehensive timeline of all of the video game consoles of the 1970s and I was surprised to learn just how many there were besides the 2600 and the Pong console. Oh, some family friends had the Fairchild (above), that made visiting their home like going to a foreign country where the toilets flushed backward. Except for the Odyssey (actually, we only saw the Odyssey II) I don't think anything other than the Atari retailed in my hometown. Then again, we didn't get a McDonald's until 1980. We had to have our birthday parties at a typewriter repair shop. And we liked it!

Consoles of the 70s [GamesRadar]

Two years ago I toured the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., and if you ever have the opportunity, I very much recommend a visit. It was edifying both in what it taught me that I didn't know, and for the nostalgia that reminded me of what I once did. And on my way out that day, passing an entrance to one of the exhibits, I came around the corner and got a jackhammer right in the kisser.

It was a Commodore 64 — the greatest personal computer of its generation, and one of the greatest ever — hooked up to an 11-inch black-and-white TV with a hoop UHF antenna, a gate-latch 1541 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drive, and a 1526 dot matrix printer. The spitting image of my childhood desktop. It took me straight back to rainy Saturdays I spent with Dad, inputting programs from the back of the old Compute!'s Gazette magazines.

Our disturbed friends at Retro Sabotage are all suspender-popping about their 20th sabotage since the site launched shortly before New Year's Eve. Remember, these are flash games that play normally (or close to it) before something goes horribly, comically wrong and beyond your control.

The latest is the "Missile Command Docudrama" although its message is, surprisingly, kind of serious. Tof from Retro Sabotage explained to me in an e-mail: "We wanted an "anti-sabotage" to celebrate the 20th release, and it's kind of a mirror to Mockumentary (though we got mails of people who somehow believed in that one)."

In the past I know we've linked to some of their other clever redos of classic arcade games. The Xevious Autopsy in particular is worth a look, and I think it's new since RetroSabotage last got a mention here.

Missile Command Docudrama [Retro Sabotage]

OK, OK, kinda misleading headline — his production company is producing "Atari" a biopic about Nolan Bushnell, Pong's developer and Atari's founder. Paramount bought the rights yesterday. Indications are that he will star, but not knowing the story yet, I don't know if that means he would play Bushnell or, perhaps, another character through whom the story of Bushnell and Atari is presented.

The Hollywood Reporter describes "Atari" as drawing on themes of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and "Tucker: The Man and His Dream." I was hoping it'd be a movie adaptation of "Space War" — just two ships drifting to the center of the screen, shooting each other. Maybe a love interest. Somewhere. Maybe not.

Wherever the story ends up, it sounds like it's getting very serious treatment, and the outlook sounds favorable for a well made biography. Plus I love period pieces, even if I've lived in the period described.

Leonardo Di Caprio to Star in 'Atari' [The Hollywood Reporter, via ComingSoon.net, thanks reader D Elfman]

Cracked, when I was a kid, was an extremely poor knock-off of MAD, but I really have to applaud what that brand is doing online. Totally different from the editorial mission of the old magazine, but much better. And not just because it provides me lists for the weekend.

This one documents the 10 Most Terrifying Video Game Enemies of All Time, and while the poison-head crabs from Half Life 2 give me the shivers just reading the words, only Evil Otto from Berzerk has an actual, real life body count (two people died playing the game).

Naturally, they had to have missed someone's all-time pants-wetting foe, so let's hear it in the comments. Mine was the Dark Trooper Mark 1 from Dark Forces. Its electronic shriek, the creepy, clanking walk, those red eyes, and the screen instantly flashing red as it hacked away. I hated it far worse than its upgraded cousin, or the sewer monsters.

The 10 Most Terrifying Video Game Enemies of All Time [Cracked]