Kate Kligman

On Saturday, April 26, 2014, I watched folks live-tweet the excavation of Atari 2600 ET cartridges from a New Mexico landfill. A few hours after the dig began workers pulled up several cartridges complete with their packaging.

I’ve had this cartridge since I was five.

I played ET at home during the dig. I have the original cartridge (photo right), but I played using an emulator so I could post screenshots. I don’t remember finishing the game as a kid, but I beat it in an hour with the Stella emulator on the easiest setting.

Despite not finishing the game as a child, I think it says something that I saved the cartridge along with a handful of my other favorites through various moves over the years. It wasn’t until college that I learned the game had been a disaster for Atari and that the gameplay was considered poor and broken.

Overall, I think the game is okay. It’s possible the emulator made it easier to win, so I’ll have to try it again one day on a real Atari 2600. I’m glad I kept my copy, because the newly unearthed cartridges seem crushed and slightly melted.

In May I’m looking forward to reading the following books:

• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• Halting State by Charles Stross
• A Song of Ice and Fire By George R.R. Martin (continued — I’m about 30% in right now)
• The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan (continued — I had started this but never finished)

One of my goals is to read more novels this year. I think a loose commitment to read four books a month is probably a good pace.

Bundle Stars is my new humble bundle.

I used to love buying games from in-store bargain bin sales that supplied me with older and often unusual titles. This weekend I discovered Bundle Stars, a humble bundle-like distributor, only with more games that cost $4.99 or less per bundle.

I bought the Toxic, Extreme Sims 2, and Kalypso bundles which totaled to 30 games. I had originally planned to buy 4-5 of them, but now I have them all along with at least 15 others intriguing enough to try at least once. I was especially impressed with the farming and logistics simulators from the Extreme Sims 2 bundle because they are exactly the type of bargain-bin games I might have grabbed back in the 1990’s.

Bundle Stars games are distributed as Steam licenses, so there’s no physical packaging or manuals, but the documentation and related items are easy to find online. I’m excited to play all of these newly acquired games.

Playing Elite 1 for the first time on my emulated Amiga 1200 was the highlight of this past week in gaming. I had fun reading the Elite 1 manual; it went on at length about pirates and offered tips that seemed funny out of context, ex. “Don’t trade expensive trivia to a hungry world.” I also fixed emulation display issues with the game and hope to post a configuration guide once I’ve put more time into testing it.

I chanced on two recent indie games: Quarries of Scred and the independently produced spin-off Quarries of Scred 1982. The first is a colorful futuristic mining exploration game that killed me quite a lot, the second is a text-based version that seemed to have more rogue-like elements (at least as far as text-based adventures go).

The Quarries of Scred games reminded me to play a variety of games in 2014. I’m going to spend this upcoming week working out a plan and possible schedule to make this happen.

I am astonished that permission has been granted for a documentary crew to dig up potentially millions of unsold Atari 2600 ET game cartridges that were buried in a landfill in the early 1980’s. Despite a postponement last year for chemical testing, on April 26th filmmakers and the creator of the game will search a New Mexico landfill for the vintage cartridges.

I remember playing ET as a kid and getting stuck in pits quite a lot. I didn’t dislike the game, but it was so difficult there wasn’t much fun in finishing it back then. I also remember finding one piece of the telephone, which ET uses to call home, and it felt like a major victory at the time.

I won’t be in New Mexico on the 26th, but I might watch  some of the footage if they stream it. I’m also going to play the game again and see how well I can do as an adult.

The Lurking Horror is an H. P. Lovecraft inspired text adventure game by Dave Lebling, the author of Zork. Published by Infocom in 1987, it’s a spooky text-based look at college life. This is a no-spoiler review of the Amiga version.

The game begins with the player confined to an almost eerily empty campus encased by a brutal snowstorm. After rushing to a computer lab to complete an assignment due the next day, you receive help from a frazzled computer expert who partially guides your actions.

The college campus is a fun space to explore and the puzzles are intuitively easy. The game comes with useful feelies that include a map and student id. Background music uplifts the story during action scenes.

Controls are immersive but frustrating. Early on I had to look through spoilers to determine how to interact with a microwave using terms the game could recognize. Navigation is also problematic. It’s not always obvious where entrances and exits are even after close examination of a room or area.

Despite the controls, I enjoyed the sparse characters that inhabited the creepy and desolate campus. Their movement patterns and behavior reminded me of Oblivion, sans graphics. I was even chased outside by one until I ended up in the snow (the character patiently waited for me to freeze to death at the campus entrance).

The Lurking Horror doesn’t include much lurking or horror, but I enjoyed the Amiga version of the game. The brief reminder of wandering around campus during my own college days more than made up for it.