Gism Butter

Videogame Collector Magazine has been a great resource for me, what with all my flea marketing and all. I am a rabid game collector, you see, and this quarterly publication helps me to figure out whether or not I should pay the $5 for a NES cart at the Laney College flea market every Sunday morning. This past week, I came up empty, but I did manage to find a copy of Earthworm Jim: Special Edition at the Goodwill on Haight St., always a fertile ground for my hunting.

Some of the highlights of my collection include Chrono Trigger sans box, the actual box for Mario RPG, a couple of beta pressings of Skies of Arcadia for Dreamcast, a prototype Madden cart for N64 (totally worthless, unfrotunately), 1 Nintendo Game & Watch and all of the Tengen carts for NES.

The Laney College flea market, however, has yielded almost none of these for me. I mean, I did get a Tengen game or two over there, but that was back when I thought those carts would actually be worth something.

The real gems I’ve found at the market have always come from the one booth I love more than any other. There is an old Asian couple with a small tent and some glass knick knack cases full of games at the flea market every weekend. I think their son is involved too, somehow. A couple years back, I got a copy of Dragon Warrior III for NES from them. $4. It’s worth something like $50, and has been since the day it was released. I remember thinking about this game even back when FunCoLand was up and running.

The thing about videogame collecting, for me, is that it’s something of the fulfillment of a wish I had when I was a kid. I always dreamed of traveling back in time and being able to buy a copy of The Uncanny X-Men number 1, or that X-Men special issue where Wolverine makes his first appearance. I cursed the fact that, while I was living in the 80’s and 90’s, all the worth while comics (read: valuable) were created back in the 60’s and 70’s. At least, for Marvel, which I was obcessed with.

When the time came for a truly valuable printing of a comic, I, in my youth, did not realize that there was a serious problem with my logic: The timing doesn’t matter, but the observation and intuition do. If I had been born in the 60’s when all those comics were available, I wouldn’t have known to buy them, as back then they weren’t seen to be a valuable commodity.

Thus, my wishes, as seems to happen to all wishes, actually came true in a manner different from my initial wishing. As that popular book, The Secret, says–the universe has a way of giving you what you ask it for. Another of my childhood wishes was to own every NES game. Well, now they all fit onto one CD, and there are games in there that I’d never even heard of as a child. Wish fulfilled.

My wish t have a bad-ass collection of Marvel comics, however, has been morphed. Rather than being born in the silver age of comics, I was born in the golden age of videogames. Of course, Imanaged to lose all the games I had growing up: threw out the boxes, ruined the manual, sold off the NES and games to buy a Genesis…

Not to worry, however, as my place in time affords me the knowledge and awareness to spot important gaming relics as they happen! My association with the ACCRC, too, helps me to find excellent goodies. From the ACCRC, you see, I’ve gotten myself a Japanese Saturn in the original box, a replacement for my dead Dreamcast, and what I consider to be one of the world’s most complete collection of Macintosh games.

Or, what WAS the most complete collection of Macintosh games. You see, I kinda savaged that bit of my collection and pushed the CD’s into binders. I still have one or two choice bits, such as two new, in the box Pathways Into Darkness (Both signed by Seropian) and my in the box copy of Taskmaker. But I decided long ago that the Macintosh game collecting market would not be one of the big winners. The NES market, however, I think will be the most expensive and lucrative games market in 50 years. The NEO GEO, right now, holds that title, easily, but that’s simply because the NEO GEO environment had such insanely high initial costs. If you look at games as either having appreciated, held their initial value, or decreased in value, the NEO GEO market still falls into the depreciated value category.

I’ve obviously got a lot to say about this topic! Perhaps I should work on a follow-up entry too, eh?

Call me a big fart cynic, but I don’t think that anything is going to change about our current wireless situation, here in America. While Google’s, or more specifically, Eric Schmidt’s plan to pay for the whole shee-bang of the 700 MHZ spectrum–provided the spectrum is pushed into some open standards and practices–will come to naught. Let me restate that without digression: Google’s bid of US$4.6 Billion for what used to be television’s spectrum will not be accepted by the FCC.

Here’s why. The United States government is in the habit of doing two things when it comes to an auction or contract: giving it to the highest bidder, or–more commonly–handing the item off to whichever company has the favor of the politicians behind the bill. No bid.

I see the 700 Mhz spectrum auction as ending in one of two ways, with a possible third utopian out come.

The first outcome is one in which the 700 Mhz spectrum is divided up into relatively equal portions that end up in the hands of the major phone carriers. Perhaps, in this scenario, Google dishes out some ungodly sum of money for a small chunk of this, and good things happen in there.

The second possible outcome is that AT&T gets most of it, and Google gets the rest. Or T-Mobile gets most of it, and AT&T gets the rest. Or, yadda yadda yadda. In this scenario, the whole kit and kaboodle goes at auction for something around US$50 billion. Maybe lots less. Key fact, though, is that the spectrum ends up going for far more than the Google US$4.6 billion.

Of course, there’s always the chance that Google just gets the whole thing and we all dance off into the sun.

I really can’t figure out why, but I see parallels here to when Ted Turner gave US$1 billion to the UN in the 90’s. I know Google’s not yet done the deal, but it seems to me that Ted’s money was largely wasted, as King George the Retard destroyed all credibility and power the U.N. had. But still, ya gotta admire Ted’s pluck. Just like you have to admire Eric’s.

I’m working on a diddled version of Eliza, now that I’ve found a version that’s written in JavaScript. It’s a great way for me to dip my brain into the JS pool, something I’ve never done before. In fact, the code is the easy bit. Thinking of good ways to mess with Eliza’s head is the hard part. Also, I don’t think the image I chose here is particularly appropriate for the topic, but it’s what came up on Google Images for Eliza.

Humans have finally designed a quick and dirty way to generate true random numbers. And it’s a freakin’ API service. How damn rad is the Quantum Random Bit Generator?

Semi Con is going on this week. It’s the annual conference targeted at companies that manufacture products that need vacuum processes and electron-cutting. That means every robot maker worth its salt is on-hand to show off the latest in digitally controlled armitures, sonic-baths, and water filtration systems.

It’s really a hodge podge of companies that are related only by the needs of various processes. Some companies offer precisely controlled robotics that can flick delicate wafers of silicon back and forth like cards in a hyper-space G-Fish game. Other enterprises show off test equipment that can whip sealed safe-like boxes around at extreme speeds inorder to simulate high-gravity conditions.

Imagine, just for a moment, that it is your job to design, fabricate, and mass-produce a computer system that must move the flaps up and down on a deep-sea submersible camera robot. How on Earth do you test your systems before deployment? Shit, how do you even assess what the test requirements are? And what sort of work-arounds do you need, in that case? This is the conference at which the answer can be found.

Need to displace 10,000 RISC chips in 45 days? This is the place. Lots of good schwag on hand. Maybe some sort of pictures or video will appear about that soon…

Unlike the usual nazi practices seen at concerts, the Smashing Pumpkins are encouraging it’s concert-goers to bring video cameras. They’re asking them to upload all the footage they take at this week’s mega-stint at the Fillmore in San Francisco (Me old stomping grounds). Youtube’s idea? Or a collaboration?

The real crux of the issue is to get questions posted online, as they’ll be answering the best ones with their own videos. Go ask them why they broke up, and why Billy has to be so bald.

The Pumpkins themselves have been filming all sorts of stuff lately, and putting it up online.

When was the last time you saw this video? I thought of it because V is watching Tarzan, the Disney animated movie. It’s all full of Phil Collins music. And I remembered back when Phil was still cool.

Gangsters understand branding and marketing better than anyone else on the planet. Or, at least, they seem to in the movies and on TV. I realized this while watching The Wire, HBO’s fantabulous cop drama. Yadda yadda yadda, best show on TV, yadda yadda, best show evar, blah blah blah.

You see, on The Wire, the gangsters are constantly worried about whether or not they will be able to get revenge for perceived mistreatment. If someone attacks Omar, for example, Omar “got to come back on em hard, no doubt.” If Omar doesn’t return an injustice to those that have wronged him, his name will no longer ring out on the street as a message of fear.

Traditional mafia-types also worry about this. Reputation, it would seem, is the single most important asset one can have in the world of crime, we’re taught. Thus, gangsters seem to have an ingrained understanding of just how important branding is in the world of business. Perhaps this comes from the life or death nature of their business: the names that ring out are still around, those that didn’t aren’t.

Of course, across a long enough time line, the survival rate for all gangsters is 0 (ChuckP is a God.) Those names that once rang out loud are eventually meaningless, except as code passed between those that were there. These brands, as they were, become common touchstones for those that have experienced the same situation; the same time and place.

The bigger that name, the more people it will resound with. Marketing 101. Maybe PR reps should start carrying shotguns.

My buddy Simoniker (The fabulous Simon Carless, EIC of Game Developer Magazine and Gamasutra.com) was just off in Jolly old England. He just posted up some photos on Flickr of the games aisles of British stores. Not a ton of pictures, but what he snapped is really interesting. Of course, nothing can top the oddness of Little Britain: The Game.