Lego Plants vs. Zombies…created by my 8 year old son.

I’m not sure what is more impressive: this Lego creation or him reeling of with 95% accuracy the names of each of the plants in the game just by looking at the images.

I am not sure how I failed to play Doom during the last 17 years. While I have long been primarily a console gamer, I dabbled with PC gaming before, during and after Doom’s launch. I had a Commodore 64, a PC that ran games off DOS and, later, Windows 3.11. I had friends who loved playing Marathon, which they described as Doom for their Macs. But somehow I never played Doom. Maybe it was too gritty for me. I was one of those kids who collected Superman comics, not Batman, and never Wolverine.

While Doom’s day in the sun has come and gone with all the advances in the gaming industry, as a game it is the equivalent to Linus’s blanket…comfortable, familiar and its always there when you need to kill a few digital monsters.

Via Slashdot

In 1980, pinball went digital, multi-ball, and multi-media starting with the game Black Knight. Black Knight brought pinball to a new level, literally speaking because it was among the first games with ramps and elevated flippers, but even more importantly because it brought a new challenge that drew in and solidified a pinball crowd. In doing so it also set the pinball market on a path that would eventually lead to its demise.

The article goes on to describe how the algorithms of the machines and the physical limitations of the machines themselves became the barrier to entry for new players, while at the same time video games were on the rise and they gave its users the ability to practice at the lower levels and get better as they advanced.

Every year I go to the Pinball Wizards Convention in Allentown, PA and marvel at the enthusiasm of the people playing the pinball machines, as well as the “chewing gum and paperclip” appearance of how the machines are wired and constructed. The irony is that the advanced (for the time) calculations and logic baked into these machines (not to mention the artwork and design that made up the visual and physical presentation of the machines themselves…there was one guy who said he spent over 500 hours drawing a design for a game!) may have done more damage than good.

Yesterday I drove out to Allentown, PA with my brother-in-law to go to the Pinball Wizards convention. This was heaven for gamers young and old, as for $15, you could walk into the convention hall and play any pinball game, any video game, for as long as you wanted. They had some amazing old pinball games, as well as some modern sleek versions. They also had classic stand up games like Ms. Pac Man, Frogger, and Galaga. Not only was it a place to play games, but people in the pinball trade were actually there selling parts like the lights, the bumpers, old pinball boxes that needed restoration, and everything else related to pinball games. Overall, a cool day and I’m looking forward to going again next year.