Well, borrowing from what he’s written on the About page of his blog, Zack Scott is a prolific videographer. His collection of videos, which is very extensive, focuses mostly on comedy, education, and (gasp!) his cute pets.

So what does his being a, uhmm, cute pet lover have to do with Nintendo and widely or little known facts about the company? Watch this.

You have no way of knowing this just by viewing the video on Re:Retro, but when you hop over to YouTube and check out the Zack Scott’s collection, you’ll discover that his “Amazing Nintendo Facts” video has racked up more than 2.5 million views. Whew!

Kudos to you, Zack! Maybe one day you’ll do a rundown of the Top 100 video games of all time?

Post from: EveryJoe

Amazing Nintendo Facts by Zack Scott

That link will take you directly to a small emulated version which seems to replicate the original classic exactly. Feel free to while away a day or two on it before reading on.

Lemmings changed the landscape of computer games completely and utterly, and in a way that is increasingly impossible to do – it created an entirely new kind of game. Never before had anyone had an idea for a game remotely like this – in fact, the game was born almost by accident, like Penicillin. The prototype, according to the wiki, was a sort of demonstration for technology to be used in a different game. In fact, I get the impression it was 90% pure inspiration and only 10% perspiration, because once you’d created the programming that would allow those tiny creatures to do their things, the actual creation of those tortuous levels sounds like fun – like a contest between friends to see who can stump the others. (Opinion based entirely on supposition, needless to say. I’m sure it was a dreadful grinding nightmare, of sweat, tears and blood and each night Gary Timmons prayed to the loving God to end his life and spare him from the agonising toil.)

Both the games on the list today are games I have very little to actually say about. Zelda, because I’ve never played it, I can’t get a feel for why it should be on the list at all (the horrors of an essentially random list – it’ll happen a couple more times) and I don’t really have any desire to find out more about it. I’ll leave it to other people to explore Link – it’s not my field, or my generation, or my taste. I can’t bring myself to care.

(Ocarina Of Time is not going to be number one of this list.)

Lemmings, on the other hand, I care about too much. It’s too big. Historically, it’s enormous. It’s like Elite – the moment it came out on a coverdisk, computer gaming was reborn. It’s so simple and brilliant that it’s still imitated today, and the basic principles of the gameplay have been imbued into everything from God Games to RTS War Simulators. And yet, it’s so simple, so brilliant, so insidiously user-friendly that I can’t actually remember the moment I first played it. I remember playing it, yes – playing it and playing it, playing it to death on the Atari ST, getting through level after level. But it’s like when you first hear about vampires, or daleks, or Santa – the idea is so… so obvious, that it seems strange that there could have been a time when you didn’t know anything about it.

I’m reminded of a C S Lewis passage, where he talks about the immediate moments after death, when everything becomes clear and all doubts melt away, and the newly-freed soul laughs with joy at how foolish it was when still connected to mortal clay. When Lemmings arrived, it was something like that.

Frankly, Lemmings is beyond words, so I’ll shut up and direct you to the link at the top of this post. That’s where I’ll be spending the rest of my evening.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 70: If The Guy In Front Of You Jumped Off A Cliff, Would You Do It Too?

The Winner’s Book Of Video Games is an odd duck. Published in 1982, it hasn’t aged well – the author, Craig Kubey, has a bizarrely limited video vocabulary even for the times, seemingly unable to gravitate away from the notion of ship vs ship combat, high score as the be-all and end-all of gameplay and a weirdly American history of gaming that centres around the small town of Davis, California, home of the greatest Pac-Man players in the world, a trio of what would now be called nerdish freaks who studied the game so obsessively that they could play for whole days at a stretch.

At that point you have to ask what you’re playing for.

Anyway, here’s another salient point from this forgotten tome:

“Space Invaders drove an entire nation mad. You may think the last sentence refers to the United States… But if the United States was an eight on the scale of video craziness, Japan was an eleven. Space Invaders created a national shortage of the hundred-yen coin. Coffee shops replaced all their tables with cocktail table versions of the game. One kind of business after another converted overnight to a Space Invaders arcade: first the arcades, then the Pachinko parlours, then the tearooms, then anything – vegetable stores, garages, you name it. And they didn’t just become pinball and video arcades, or video arcades with a mix of machines. All they had were wall-to-wall Space Invaders, Space Invaders, Space Invaders. Outside they bolted speakers to the roofs and broadcast the seductive, addictive, heartbeat thump-thump-thump of the machines.”

Makes you think, eh?

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 76: Introducing The Winner’s Book Of Video Games

Part 2 after the ‘Read More’…

So what have we learned from that? God knows. Today’s TIP/TRICK is to show humility before the all-powerful constants of being. Thanks to angree of YouTube fame for providing us with a means to explore that message.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 77: Nothing Reviews A Game Like Watching It Completed Without Losing A Life

When you’re blogging, a good TRICK or TIP is to start with a portentious quote, which will lend the following hem-hem ‘article’ some added weight. And now, Sim City.

Here’s a couple of Youtube vids to start us off. Firstly, Sim City on the SNES:

And now an interview with Will Wright about the game:

YOU ARE WIERD AL YANKOVIC AND I CLAIM MY FIVE POUNDS

He does touch on something interesting, though, which is that Sim City is what you make it – what he doesn’t mention is the choice between Eros, the Life Urge, and Thanatos, the Death Urge, that’s at the heart of the game. Yes, it’s another game where you have the option to kill, crush, maim and destroy!

IT IS A PLEASURE TO BURN! As Ray Bradbury howled, face contorted like a devil sick of sin! Press the ‘fire’ button in Sim City again and again and again – watch the thriving metropolis swept up in a wall of flame! The press commentary states that 69% of the citizens have a problem with the constant fire, while 20% aren’t happy with the resultant pollution and another 7% are happy with your reign. The crime rate is down, after all, and there aren’t any traffic jams now the roads have been incinerated. Sim City is a bizarre heaven without death, where the most terrible natural disaster or attack by Godzilla (called up with the ‘monster’ button) is shrugged off as another problem inherent in a poorly-planned city.

So there’s a tendency to either take a pre-built city and ravage it, or turn disasters off entirely in order to build your perfect utopia. Utopian dreams tend to fall apart as soon as the first road is built – even if the entire city is just a grid of roads with one house, there’ll still be a terrifying, snarling deadlock. But laying down rail instead – a train to everyone’s doorstep! We could have had that if not for dirty old Mrs T and her privatising ways – just means that the citizens moan about the lack of roadage. The more you give them, the more they complain. Soon the slums are growing, grey and grim in the middle of your carefully tended green residential zones. The money begins to run out. The new airport causes pollution. The citizens refuse to be happy. They mock you. They are your enemies. THEY MUST PERISH IN FLAME.

And then the fires start again…

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 78: Eros And Thanatos, Sitting In A Tree

Almost as bad as pedophile fantasies if you ask me! But what makes it so bad?

Well, watch this video, dear reader, and then answer a simple question:

How is that supposed to be pinball?

It’s telling that the guy playing the game in the video seems to have no idea how to play pinball – and why should he? He’s never had to deal with the raw physicality of guiding an actual metal ball around a glass-topped arena, feeling the rumble of the ball through the flipper buttons, actually playing a game based on real-world physics rather than an imperfect computer simulation of them. This is a bad joke at pinball’s expense.

I have a similar problem with most sports simulators – I always want something a little extra apart from just being an ordinary footballer or ice hockey specialist or whatever – but at least when I play Fifa Whatever I can take comfort in the fact that I’ll never either play professional football or manage it. Sports games represent something I can never be skilled at in the real world.

But the real world is full of pinball! There’s absolutely no reason not to play real pinball unless you’re so frightened of real human existence that you’d rather never leave your chair at all, never mind go into a (shudder) bar or arcade! Pinball Fantasies is nothing but a pinball nightmare that leads only to true pinball being forgotten and ignored – in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if pinball’s tragic fall from grace as an arcade-style treat was a direct result of the rise of these hideous ‘virtual pinball’ style games!

Pah! A pox on your pinball fantasies, for I would rather have pinball reality! Yar boo and sucks!

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 79: No. ONE ZILLION More Like

“In your last operation, you tore into the patient’s intestines with your scalpel while laughing maniacally, before injecting him with a deadly cocktail of licodaine, atropine and dopamine that made his heart burst out of his chest and into the corridor. That is not commonly considered proper practice during an appendectomy.”

“NEVER leave equipment inside the patient! Particularly, never open up the patient, drop the hospital’s entire inventory of clamps, forceps and skin clips inside him, and then sew him back up again.”

“The common incision in the skin layer is a straight cut from the patient’s upper right to lower left, and not a satanic pentagram as you have repeatedly attempted.”

“If you accidentally pierce the colon, drain the wound and suture the cut. DO NOT make seventeen more incisions while calling on the power of dread Dormammu.”

“You have scheduled an appendectomy for a patient who is already without an appendix. Furthermore, the appendix and the spine are two different things.”

“In order to diagnose appendicitis, it is necessary to palpitate all four quadrants of the abdomen and check the X-Ray for the presence of kidney stones, whether or not the patient has an ‘appendicitis-y look about him’.”

“No, you can’t have a piece of the transversus muscle layer as a souvenir. Put it back.”

“Turn the anasthetic on BEFORE you slice into the patient. BEFORE. BEFORE. I don’t care what kind of noise they make. BEFORE.”

“Before you move to open up the patient, it’s important to remember that the patient is the one lying down, not the one in the white coat standing next to you.”

And I’ve not even got to the open heart surgery yet! What a great game!

EDIT: Yes, it’s Life And Death. You guys should know that. Keep up.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 80: I Am Appalled At Your Unbelievable Incompetence!

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 81: The Medium Is The Message

Populous seems a little primitive now that the God Game has evolved to new and terrible depths of shadenfreude (SPL CHK PLZ) but it does have everything you need – little men who rely on you to do various simple tasks, and other little men who rely on you to exterminate every last one of them from the face of the earth. In order to build up your powers, you need to generate plenty of belief, which means having lots of followers and doing various nice things for them (mostly flattening the land at first, but also building up military strength and creating temples for your worship). Once you’ve helped your followers in the more mundane ways, you can then generate volcanoes, earthquakes and various other horrific things to completely destroy your enemies – that’s if you don’t want to just raise the water level and wash them away, or sink holes under their feet until they drown. It’s beautifully simple, completely original, and quite brilliant, which are the three things you need if you want to create a whole new genre of computer gaming from scratch.

That said… it’s telling that Populous eventually evolved into Black & White rather than the more user-friendly Sims – there’s something about the setup that seemed a little finickity when I played it, and it quickly fell by the wayside – I think I moved on to the much more fun Mega Lo Mania, among other things. The focus is very much on improving things for your settlers and gaining points rather than wreaking the true vengeance of a god bezerk, and Black & White followed suit, imposing a very tricky and intricate control system on you when all you really wanted to do was make a gigantic monster that ate people. Still, that’s another game that definitely won’t be appearing on the list any time soon.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 82: Smite Makes Right

Here’s the trailer for said game:

Fun stuff with a chugging guitar soundtrack (har har METAL do you see). Apparently this is a first person stealth-em-up set in an olde-timey medievalist city. This mix of genres seems to offer a lot of interesting things to play with, but what struck me the most was the use of…

…TRICK ARROWS!

Spannggg!!

You get a special sponge arrow to put out sources of light, like flaming torches, that might give you away. You get a Moss Arrow to cover clangy metal floors and gratings in patches of spongy, sound-absorbing moss. Presumably, you also get sharp pointy arrows to shoot into the jugulars of guards, although that probably gives away your presence.

This is obviously what a Green Arrow game would be like, only instead of sneaking around stealing a quasi-mystical thingy you’d be making speeches about the plight of the working man and waggling your finger self-righteously at the nearest fat cat. Still, I want a go.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 84: It’s Like Green Arrow The Computer Game