Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Windowsill (PC)


Windowsill was a small game that I picked up a while back. The goal is to find the cubed key to the door on the right by interacting with the bizarre and surreal surroundings of each room. It was an interesting, calming room escape game and although it was short I thought it was the right length for what it was. Interacting with these strange objects reminded me of the Japanese flash game "Which." from Nekogames (Yoshio Ishii)

Monday, September 16, 2013

Capsule (PC)


Capsule is something else. From the cryptic official game page, to it's original and minimalist style - throw in the fact that it's from the Adam Saltsman, the guy that made Canabalt and (later) Hundreds : I was hooked. It is quite difficult though, so I have been battling it - it's testing my patience - but I want so badly to know what happens.

Some may scoff at this and say it's another indie developer trying to dodge "real" graphics to be edgy or different, but once you play this game you see how this limited view, the look of the bent screen, coated with grit and the sound effects draw you in. Every race to the next station will leave you frantically trying to manage your two resources, oxygen and power and scanning the space debris for anything helpful - and hopefully nothing else. Soon you'll be role-playing yourself; turning off all the lights in the room, your laptop screen now your only view from your capsule. You're alone. You're afloat in space. When you run out of power you'll gasp trying to fill your lungs with as much air as possible, glad that it's all in your head. But you will have to sit and wait it out, as your ship floats aimlessly without power you'll have to listen as the pilot of the capsule slowly suffocates.

For me, this game is more tense than Dead Space.

Here is a little interview with Adam about Capsule - and drawing inspiration from Lunar Lander.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

My first MAME Cabinet (Part 3)

In this week's blog post I'll take you in to the bowels of El Diablo and show you the actual process involved in transforming an old arcade cabinet in to a MAME cabinet which, hopefully, passes the 'Wife' test (as in will your wife allow you to bring it in to the house when you're done).

So when the cabinet was originally delivered to me, the seller pointed out that a large piece of the arborite (or formica if you're a Yank) had chipped off one of the corners.  After inspecting it further, it would seem that two pieces of arborite had been glued on side-by-side which resulted in a rather obvious seam running from top to bottom.  On top of this, the panelling on this particular side was pretty beaten up.  Also, the arborite on the front panel was cracked and had two button holes drilled into it.  The remaining side had a relatively intact piece of laminate.  Taking all of these factors in to consideration I decided to strip the laminate from all sides in hopes that I could use some of the old laminate to replace the existing laminate on the front panel.  Initially I planned to obtain new laminate sheets to do the sides, but tracking down a distributor who sells to individuals has proven to be very difficult.  In the meantime, I'll use a melamine finish cabinet paint to do the sides, and depending on how that looks, I might be able to just affix side art directly to that.


My first attempt at getting the panelling off in one big piece was a pretty epic fail.  30 year old contact cement is pretty hard, and the panelling itself was pretty brittle.  Trying to use a putty knife to separate the two wasn't working as the putty knife I was using was too narrow.


Using a head gun on the other hand seemed to work pretty well.  It took a long time to heat everything up to the point where the contact cement was soft and pliant, and the fumes were pretty terribad, but the laminate itself was coming away much easier and I was able to use thin sheets of particle board I had lying around to wedge larger portions of the panel away from the cabinet.



Eventually I was able to get the entire sheet away in one piece.  I'll need to clean the old cement off of the back before I can re-apply it, but it should work just fine.  I'll also need to experiment on the best way to cut the panel to size, but I have lots of scrap pieces to work with.  Once I have the front panel cleaned and plugged, I'll use contact cement to glue the laminate on and I'll trim the edges using a router with a trimming bit.  I guess my time co-op'ing at a cabinet making shop might pay off after all.

So now that the sides were taken care of for the time being, I turned my attention to the front panel.  For whatever reason, someone had decided to drill two button holes in to the front, and in doing so chipped the laminate pretty badly.  Also, it seems that the coin door had been installed a few times as there were multiple holes drilled for the studs.  Rather than trying to salvage this, I decided the strip the panel and plug the holes.  Unfortunately, the panel had been screwed & glued to the cabinet itself, so I had to chisel out the supporting blocks in order to get it free.  From what I can tell, three different glues were used to affix the front panel to its various components.


Judging by the expression I don't think the panel was comfortable with what was happening.


With the panel free and stripped I was able to use dowels and wood glue to plug the existing holes.  Once the glue was dry, I cut the plugs flush wit the surface.


At this point I was starting to consider what I would do to prepare the cabinet for paint.  As there was a ton of old contact cement still stuck to the sides, and as particle board would probably suck up any solvent I used, the decision to sand was an easy one.  Next week will cover the prep work I took prior to applying a finish.  If you have any tips on working with arborite/formica/high pressure laminate, please feel free to post!

Monday, September 9, 2013

Incredible Video Game Trailers!

Lately there have been some amazing trailers for upcoming video games that have come across my screen. I wanted to take a moment to share them to hopefully get you as excited about these games as I am. I also don't want to say anything about these games - but just to say, I am already extremely excited about all of them. Enjoy! 

Riot 

Super Time Force 

Samurai Gunn 



Enemy Starfighter

Secrets of Raetikon

Would you play these games? Which one really interests you? Leave a comment and let us know.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Steam Greenlight Sale?! Oh Crap....

I tried to be really mature, show restraint and take into account that 80% of the games in my Steam Library (and I can surely call it that now) I haven't really played. But it's official, I am not a game addict - I am already a gaming junkie. It's not my fault...

Incredipede was an easy choice. The visuals are so intriguing I just had to play it. It was 50% off too I think, so it came to about €3,50 so it was a steal.

Papers Please was a little harder to decide on. Of course I want it, but it's pretty new and therefore wasn't reduced much, but after playing The Republika Times last week I have been so excited about this game; I just couldn't turn it down.

And that was it. See? I was being mature. Two games isn't bad. Geez....but then, the minute that the Greenlight sale ends, the deal of the day comes up : Skulls of the Shogun, 50% off.

Skulls of the Shogun is so cool. I played the demo on the Xbox but didn't really want to buy it on there, lest it be tied to my XBL Gold Account - (if I stop playing for Gold of they stop support for Xbox 360, good-bye games) But, now that it's out, safe, on Steam - sure that's a DRM in itself but Steam isn't going anywhere.... I had to get this. Leave me alone!

Here's my maturity, and maybe it's the beginning of some self-control on my part : I didn't buy Shelter. Sure I wanted too - I really want to play this, after watching one trailer I thought it was so excellent I should get it right away. Then I saw that it from Might and Delight, the guys that made Pid. Now I dont want to get into details here - but that was enough for me to be a little more cautious (that and a low metacritic score, and it was only 10% off) - So aren't I being good!?

I'll be playing at least 20 minutes into these games in the next week. So stay tuned! (Well, except for Shelter....)

Sunday, September 1, 2013

My first MAME Cabinet (Step Two - There's so much we can do!)

Nothing says 90's like New Kids on the Block.  Alright, that's not true.  In actuality there are about a million better examples of the 90's, such as Orbitz, The X-Files, Redemption MUD and video game arcades.

In my previous post I covered why I would buy an old beaten up arcade cabinet.  In this post I'll cover some of the things I found upon further inspection.  I'll take off the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and start to look at restoring this cabinet as an actual project.

So, to start out I pulled off all of the panels I could.  Once those were off, I could see that no one had done anything productive inside for a long time.


Well, that explains the smell.

The original Isolation Transformer was still affixed to the cabinet, but that's about it.  Having read up on these to figure out what it did, I realized that they're not really worth much.  Apparently Hydro Ontario had mandated that all arcade cabinets had to be equipped with one of these devices, so it would seem that there is no shortage of them.  With today's copper prices it may have a decent scrap value, but I think I'll hang on to it for now.

Hey, remember when Ontario actually made money in the manufacturing sector?

Apart from the 'Frost' brand boat anchor, there really wasn't much there.  Lots of dust bunnies and accumulated crud, a nickle (1981), a dime (1986), some wire anchors, some sort of plastic doo-dad, and some old paper labels.  Oh, and a Bubblicious gum wrapper!  Now we know we're dealing with the real thing.

Is the plastic doo-dad some sort of arcane tool, or just a piece of random garbage?

This picture is pretty terribad, but does anyone recognize those tags?
There was a fixture for a light bulb and a speaker, but neither looked original in any way so I pulled it all out and scrapped it.  In retrospect I probably should have taken a closer look at the speaker, but in my ignorance I just assumed it was a crappy automotive speaker.

Funny I can say 'it didn't look original' when really I have no idea what original was.  Oh well!


Once all that extra wiring had been removed, as well as the plastic wire anchors, I took out the coin mechanism and the connected counter.


At some point someone drilled two holes in the front panel to allow for two push buttons.  I assume these buttons were meant to be for '1-ups'.  Regardless, the saw dust had settled to the bottom of the cabinet and needed to be cleaned out as well.  Within the pile of sawdust there were a few nuts and washers which I assume fell down there when someone was trying to affix the coin mechanism.



The coin mechanism has obviously seen some use, the look of which I really like.  I would like to fill in the holes, presumably drilled for a lock & hasp, but I think matching the original paint will be a job in itself.  It seems that the paint had a kind of dimpled effect so I'll have to see if there's something out there that will match the texture.

The sticker on the back says, "Date of installation July 8th 83 meter 000000"

Despite the mess I'm still really pleased with my purchase and I'm still super excited to get everything cleaned up and looking pretty.  It's kind of fun to think that something that was once housed elsewhere, making money on its own, is now living in my garage.  I wonder where it lived before?  I wonder who played it?  Heck, at this point I wonder what game it was.  Did someone look forward to going to a specific business in hopes that they could beg some quarters from Mom & Dad to play a few rounds on this machine?  In any case I'm hoping I can live up to my name and preserve a piece of the past which many are nostalgic about.

My next article should really get in to the nitty-gritty of getting the cabinet looking good again.  As always, if you see anything in the pics that you can shed some light on, please leave a comment!