When I went on my hunt for this list, I needed a theme, so I settled on "Easter Eggs I have actually observed." Having missed most of gaming in the 1990s thanks to work, college, and not owning a PC - and because you know about all the cool recent Easter eggs - we'll have to reach way back to antiquity.

Of course, commenters are invited to share with us the oldest Easter egg you can recall finding. Or just any old cool Easter egg you remember, video game or otherwise. In fact, the coolest Easter egg I can recall is the one my brother and I painted to look like Jesse Helms back in 1984. Had glasses and everything. Then Fletch smashed him against a tree.

Where was I? Oh yeah, old Easter eggs.

Smurfette Topless (Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, Colecovision)
Yes, Smurfette porn long, long predates the discovery of Rule 34. This was a redraw glitch available on the final screen of Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle (in which Gargamel makes no appearance.) If you walked off the screen to the preceding one, then back very quickly, the slow redraw would leave Smurfette topless. The topless Smurfette Easter egg - with the false urban myth that she remained topless and would slap the Smurf out of your Smurf - was all the rage in fifth grade. I wouldn't discover it until I bought a ColecoVision off of a seller on Usenet (yes, really) my senior year of college.

RF (Missile Command, Atari 2600) Warren Robinette's secret room in Adventure is probably the most notorious Atari 2600 Easter egg. This one is a close second. I forget where I first heard how to do this, but it increased my neighborhood cred a thousandfold when it went off, as described, the first time. Select difficulty 13, and fire off all of your missiles without scoring any points. At the end of the game, the initials of the programmer, RF, pop up from the ruins of the rightmost city. The coder's name? Rob Fulop, who also wrote "Demon Attack" for Imagic, and was Billboard Magazine's 1983 Programmer of the Year.

"FEEL DESTRUCTIVE "(Pirate Cove, VIC-20) Pirate Cove was a cartridge text adventure for the Commodore VIC-20, and one of the first pieces of software Dad bought me and my brother for our first ever computer. Pirate Cove's command line was brutally unsophisticated. Two words at most, verb and object (sentence diagrammers, the subject was always implied to be "you.") For a nine year old trying to figure out how to get past the goddamn crocodiles, without any visual assistance, it was hard to imagine any solution other than "KILL CROC." But commanding the game to KILL anything brought up this peace-love-dope reply: "I'm sorry, I can't do that. I don't feel destructive." You know where this is headed; I typed FEEL DESTRUCTIVE. Came the reply: "OK, POOF! The game is destroyed!" And Dad nearly herniated himself laughing at me.

HSWWSH (Yars' Revenge, Atari 2600) Another less-publicized set of initials. These are for programmer Howard Scott Warshaw. You had to wait for the Qotile to go into swirl mode, then hit it in mid-flight with the cannon. During the explosion animation, a black line would appear in the midst of the radioactive cloud. Hovering over it brought up the initials and ended the game.

Ghostbusters Scam (Ghostbusters, Commodore 64)In Activision's original Ghostbusters game, you earned money from mundane ghost-busting missions to buy equipment and vehicle upgrades. You started the game with a pitiful sum, barely enough to buy the Ecto-mobile. But in the new game screen, where you create a "bank account" to start the game, punching in "BELLIN ADAM" - for programmer Adam Bellin - and the number 12345 got $954,000 dumped in your account. Then you could go out and buy the Porsche, the mobile ghost detention unit, and every other high dollar gadget you needed.

Indiana Jones and the Extra-Terrestrial (E.T., Atari 2600) Howard Scott Warshaw was so proud of his role in the cartridge that would destroy Atari (the first time) that he upped the self-referential Easter eggs to two: the pieces of the phone were his initials, and there was another way to get the letters up on the screen. You could also summon other Steven Spielberg IP. After collecting all the phone pieces and giving Elliot seven pieces of candy, reviving the flower turned it into a Yar. Doing it a second time changed the flower into Indiana Jones, as represented in the 2600 Raiders of the Lost Ark game. Doing it a third time brought up Warshaw's initials beside the score, so you knew whom to credit blame for this masterpiece.

The company Christmas tree also got 8-bit sprite ornaments based on characters, enemies and powerups from Super Mario Bros 1 through 3 (though I do spy a Mega Man), winning Adam's crew the "most creative" prize by a country mile. Many more images, and a link to the full gallery, below.

Mario Christmas [Photobucket, thanks, and Happy Holidays, Adam]

The in-depth look at a variety of puzzle forms moves from the premise that puzzles are so integral to adventure games, bad ones can easily ruin a game:

Adventure games are different—in that the core features of gameplay cannot be effectively evaluated without actually playing it or giving so many details away as to detract from the experience of playing the game. In many respects, the quality of an adventure game depends upon the quality of its puzzles, whether they are ingenious and rewarding or just frustratingly illogical. Having been told an explanation to how a puzzle works means you will never be able to play it as intended, since a big part of the experience is the enjoyment of figuring it out for yourself. You can evaluate the art, voice acting, and even the story or humor present in an adventure game to a certain extent without diving too deep into it, but an adventure game with terrible puzzles can make all those other elements irrelevant, since you likely will never have the patience to finish the game in the first place.

In this article, I will be taking a closer look at the various types of adventure game puzzles, how they relate to the gameplay, and even how some of these basic forms relate to other game genres.

From two basic classifications ('self-contained' and 'key'), a wide variety of puzzle types appear; the analysis is interesting and the article is worth plowing through if you're interested in the nitty gritty of game design.

Adventure game puzzles: unlocking the secrets of puzzle design [Adventure Classic Gaming via GameSetWatch]

Chapelle takes a look at the legal issues, but the piece is more concerned with the people who love these forgotten games; it's a fun essay on a curious bit of gaming culture. On the issue of legality, Chapelle points out that most of the websites are more than happy to comply with cease and desist orders:

And on the occasions when publishers do ask for material to be taken down, abandonware websites have a steady track record of complying with removal requests. Earlier this summer, when Valve's Steam service began offering the full X-COM series for download, Abandonia pulled all related downloads the day after Steam's went live. Latis recalls that when Sierra produced Sierra Classics offering Police Quest and King's Quest among others, those links were simply removed from XTC.

"Most webmasters I know are serious down-to-retro people, heeding removal requests from their respective companies," Bakkelun says. He adds that in some cases webmasters may contact the intellectual property holders themselves to let them know they are hosting the files, and offer to remove them immediately if the games ever move away from abandonware status.

In many cases, the decision for a company to re-release its older titles is met with praise by the abandonware community rather than annoyance at losing a popular download. Indeed, they take an almost cheerful view of it, finding new games to upload and take their place.

Having spent many an hour gleefully hunting for re-releases of old films, I'd love the same opportunity for more of those classic titles I remember from younger days. Here's hoping more publishers catch on to the desire for relative antiquities.

The Vintage Game Preservation Society [The Escapist]

GG2 is in a complete 1.0 stage and clocks in at 4.8 MB. There's a deep forum discussion on its creation over at TIG Forums, and its periodically updated.

Of course, I feel obligated to tell you to take all sorts of reasonable precautions with what .exe's you download and install. But if you do play it, let everyone know your impressions in the comments. Mine: the sprites, at least in the close-up stills, look nice and familiar. Gameplay seems to follow the same kind of running/jumping physics, if a little skimpy on the animations.

burgerk1ng says it's a fun game. The file can be found here and here. Boilerplate caution about downloading and installing .exes from strangers.

Gang Garrison II [FINISHED] [TIGForums, big thanks reader burgerk1ng]

True, this mod could have been done with pretty much any small plastic box, but choosing a Nintendo Entertainment System to house a retro gaming PC is the kind of crowd pleasing coup-de-modding that is difficult to surpass, save by hollowing out a Vectrex or performing electronic taxidermy on an actual anthropomorphic hedgehog.

The beast contains a Windows XP PC loaded with the GameEx emulator front-end and a metric shedload of NES, SNES and N64 games - all of which, I am certain, are fully licensed and were purchased alongside their original packaging.

NES Console Modded as Retro Gaming PC, With Video [Slashgamer]

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]

He even goes so far as to imply that Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden for NES is a bit too much like its console compatriot Castlevania. C'mon, Chris, I don't know about that one. I'll give you the Balloon Fight slam, maybe, but Ninja Gaiden? Heresy!

Egregious Plagiarism In Classic Gaming [1UP]

Cruising through Osaka's Den-Den Town on a Saturday, I ducked into an otaku second hand shop. Regular folks rent out these glass boxes in a shop and sell their goods. It's like Ebay, but you gotta give a cut to the dude that runs the store.

I came across this case filled with retro Nintendo handhelds. This one has not only a Popeye Game and Watch, but also a Mickey and Donald one. Prices were a tad steep as both handhelds booked at $58 a piece. Not bad when considering they are mint and had their original boxes!

Fossil's ill-fated and poorly thought out PDA wristwatch bit the dust, but that hasn't stopped the company's latest venture: retro video game watches. Partnering with Atari, the watcher maker is rolling out tickers featuring vintage Centipede and Asteroids style graphics. As always, Atari is in it for the money as a company rep. tells Eurogamer that the former game giant is "committed to 'mining the vault' for new revenue streams." That aside, this actually does sound like a cool idea.

See All the Watches [Eurogamer]

Americans tend to imagine Japanese arcades as something out of Blade Runner. The truth is that most of them look like they are circa late-1980's yakuza films, filled with skinny thugs smoking cigs and pounding each other in Street Fighter. Sure, these arcades are not hi-tech or futuristic, but still cool nonetheless.

Stop dreaming Mario fans, Nintendo won't be offering its back catalog for the Revolution without a price. Eurogamer reports that Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said Nintendo had no intention of releasing its back catalog games free of charge. Some of the games could end up as bonus content or promotional material, but Iwata and Nintendo aren't talking about what will be in this catalog or how it will be distributed.

I'm holding my breath for Bionic Commando.

In the past we built monuments to commemorate our favorite pasttimes. Now some of us build... chairs. Craftster.org user boingo82 spent over a year reupholstering this chair, finishing with one of the coolest homages to the NES I've seen. All we need now is a cardboard crown from Burger King and we can coronate the king of Nerd-dom.

NINTENDO chair-UPDATE - DONE! [craftster.org]

SM

Way before R.B.I. Baseball rocked the house that Ruth built, there were low-tech baseball board games like Yakuban Deluxe. Living up to its name, fastballs appear from underneath the pitcher s mound, hitters weld metal bats, gutters gobble up fouls, and fielders can be arranged according to your strategy. Granted, the players can t round bases, track down fly balls, or do much of anything, but they do look like they were designed for Super Nintendo.

Yakyuban Home Page

—B.A.

Retro gaming craze or simply folks unloading used units? Either way, I found a Sega 16 (sans Alterd Beast and controllers). Here's a system that threatened to run Nintendo into the ground at one time, but is now going for a whopping 500 yen. To give you an idea of how much 500 yen is, you can't even buy a McTeriyaki Burger with fries and a melon soda for that chump change. Maybe, you can buy a McTeriyaki Burger and fries, but definately no melon soda.

—B.A.

I friggin love this Flickr group. Someone's compiled a photo collection of old school portable electronic games. The collection includes photos of those mini-arcade machines put out by Coleco and Galaxian 2, a two-player game that I got as a birthday present when I was 12. Man, I loved that game. You could play it solo or have a second player control the bad guys, which was a first for the early 80s.

Portable Electronic Games [Flickr, thanks Nick]

The wireless NES controller I mentioned awhile back got pretty good marks in a recent review. MobileMilitia gave the old-school meets next gen controller a 90 percent and praised its lightweight design and comfortable feel.

Wireless NES Controller [Mobile Militia]

Product Info via Gizmondo

-SM

MTV News recently did a piece about speed trials and the "famous faces" behind them (names changed for the safety of the nerds).

The article does a pretty decent job communicating that beating these games so quickly is no walk in the park, giving these berdorks some sense of dignity. For some reason I don't think pissing in one's pants because you're in your seventh hour of GTA3 exactly grants any.

For Some Gamers, Merely Finishing A Game Isn't Enough

-SM

(Just a quick note: Brian is taking the afternoon off sick, so I'll be filling in for the rest of his posts. Wait, wait! It'll still be worth reading! Waaaiiit!)

The only thing worse than the death of pinball is the fact that very few people seem to care. I could never understand why Pinball machines have slowly died. They don t have fantastic graphics and deep plots, but that s what makes them so much fun. These things are little automatons of fun, handcrafted works of art.

In honor of the lingering death of pinball I m going to try and hunt down a machine to drop a quarter or two in and rack up a high score. If you have the time, try your hand at a little PB and send me a pic of your score. Long live the tilt switch.

The Last Pinball Wizard [Business Week, thanks Belle]