Well, here’s my list:

Pong, Space Invaders, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, Leisure Suite Larry, Afterburner, Double Dragon, Prince of Persia, Tetris, Secret of Monkey Island, Sonic the Hedgehog, Castle Wolfenstein, Super Mario Kart, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Minesweeper, Myst, Rayman, Command & Conquer, Tekken, Tomb Raider, The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, and Total War.

Darn, I think I have to brush up on my video games history and literature again.

Post from: EveryJoe

The History of Video Games in two minutes

In this first installment of Your Daddy played this game, I present to you Hard Hat Mack, a 1983 Apple II game developed by Michael Abbot and Matthew Alexander.

Here’s an interesting trivia: Hard Hat Mack was the first game published by Electronic Arts. Yes, the same company that’s giving a lot of casual players out there loads of fun with The Sims.

According to wikipedia, Hard Hat Mack is similar to Nintendo’s highly successful Donkey Kong but with more variety in gameplay and faster action.

How is it played? Simple. The player guides construction worker Mack, the main character, through a series of goals, making use of a variety of game tools such as paths, sprinboards, conveyor belts and elevators—and he needs to do all these while avoiding an angry vandal and a representative of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. To top this off, you only have three lives and need to finish the round within a given period.

The game has three levels. The goal of Mack in the first level is to replace four holes in the floor of the building and capture a moving jackhammer to secure the plates. Aside from the roaming baddies and the possibility of falling off the side of the building, Mack also has to contend with falling debris.

In Level 2, the player has to guide Mack through a four-level construction site with the goal of collecting five lunchboxes. The OSHA representative blocks the final hurdle, requiring Mack to make a well-timed jump.

For the last level, Mack has to collect boxes, which he needs to drop into a processor. Like in the second level, a pesky OSHA representative stands between Mack and the final box.

The game doesn’t end with Level 3, though. It cycles back to Level 1 but with faster-moving obstacles (read: vandal and OSHA rep) and shorter time limit.

Do you want to know why your dad went bonkers for this game? There are downloads available on the net that can run on DOS.

Post from: EveryJoe

Your Daddy played this game #1: Hard Hat Mack

But first, here’s something from ‘AngelLover89′ – another instructional video on how the Sims is, and always has been played, this time starring David Boreanaz, who is evidently depressed for some reason.

Now that that’s over with, we continue with the Strange Case Of Mr. F.

Mr F was an unhappy man, as you may recall, his spirit broken on the rack of his daily life in the medical profession – or was it fashion designing? It might have been. But whatever meaningless job he was forced to eke out his pennies performing – gruelling in a terrible limbo as life continued without him in fast-motion, before the bus dumped him, cold and exhausted, upon his own doorstep to shiver his way into a criminally underfurnished swelling and collapse on a pauper’s bed – his dreams of wealth continued to haunt him.

It was then that Mr F made the discovery that would turn him from an ordinary man into one of the most feared and despised criminals of all time.

On coming into the world, Mr F had began with a meagre stipend of $20,000 – most of which went on his home and furnishings. However, he found that others could be brought into the world in similar fashion by his considerate God, and provided with only a telephone by which Mr F could call them – as a result of which they still possessed every penny of their $20,000. In these early days, marrying a girl, or a man, was simply a matter of finding them a comfortable chair, a TV and some food for a few hours before popping the question. Upon marraige, the two fortunes were joined, and Mr F was some $20,000 richer.

At this point you would think that Mr. F’s bold plan of marrying for money would backfire on him – that he would quickly spend the riches thus gained, and his wife would soon become as miserable as he, shuttled remorselessly to her own nebulous employment.

But no. Soon, Mr F married again, for another $20,000. And then again. And again. A constant stream of new people, created to be wife or husband to the beast, passed through his front door – but not out again.

What became of them, I wonder?

Why, they were entombed! Entombed within the walls!

Yes! Possessing no swimming pool, and not wishing to lose his furniture to a random blaze (the firework method was at this point unknown to Mr. F) he simply marched them into the green fields behind his property and boxed them in to slowly starve - even as he romanced their successors! And I say again to you that this was the easiest means of making money in the game!

What sort of hellish lesson did The Sims teach our children? Can we possibly teach them otherwise – before the wallings-in start to happen across the country? Before the fires begin to blaze? David Boreanaz’s life is at stake! We must not waste another precious second!

I beg Maxis to release a game where the best way to success does not lie on a path made from the bones of the endless dead! I beg them! But do they listen?

Let this video tell the grim story.

Thank you Charcoal125 for cheapening life even more.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Strange Case Of Mr. F, Part Two: The Horror At 17 Stabbington Close

Today’s YouTube comes from ‘audreanaisawesome’, who kindly demonstrates how to play the original Sims game, way back at the turn of the Millennium.

Some might turn around and say that this is needlessly cruel – that the object of The Sims was not to fill the virtual world you presided over like unto a God with death, despair, misery and bitter tears of grief. But those people would be quite wrong, as I will now demonstrate by recounting the strange case of Mr. F, which should ideally be read in the voice of Tom Baker.

Mr. F was a fat man with grotesque hair that shone with a greasy lustre, prone to wearing a white jacket, an open shirt and a gleaming medallion that seemed to scream ‘low class’ to all his fellows. The cheap and cheerful bungalow that I built for him was decorated in a style reminiscent of the late seventies, and he seemed happy in his world for a time, cooking, eating, defecating and sleeping to a schedule, in between a reasonably-paid job on the political ladder – or it may have been the acting business, it was all much the same. But something was missing from the life of Mr. F. He was a man of humble means, but in his simulated head there lurked dreams – great dreams of expensive furniture items that seemed forever outside his scope.

Oh, he could slave and slave to raise the little green bar that controlled his happiness before the bus came to drag him to his ill-defined labours, in the hope of a promotion. He could spend all of his free time courting the friends that he needed to make in order to advance, friends carefully created by his benevolent god to appreciate his crass, ugly witticisms and his greasy, sweaty appearance, friends stuffed six at a time into tumbledown shacks barely larger than breadboxes, their only purpose in life being to visit Mr F’s house constantly in order to allow him to claim to his superiors that he did, indeed, have friends.

Mr. F. had barely been born and already his entire life was an endless parade of work, rest and sycophancy. Where was the dream house he craved? The hot tub he lusted after? The expensive sculpture wrapped in boxer shorts that would set his soul at ease? Why did his nebulous job promise so much but grant so little? Would it not be better to quit his job altogether and spend each day that the merciful God sent enjoying his expensive furniture items by himself, only inviting his empty-minded coterie into his dwelling when he felt the green bar of his loneliness creeping down into the red?

But how could Mr. F. afford such a life of ease?

Through murder.

Murder most foul.

None knew it in those first days, but the little bungalow with the seventies-era decor was about to become… a charnel house.

TO BE HULKINUED.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Strange Case Of Mr. F, Part One: I Am My Own Special Creation