Contest: DP Writers of 2012 (Due Date: August 10)

[Nz17]

The Pitch: Do you like to write about retro gaming and games in general? Are you a prolific penner of prose? Perhaps you just like to type your thoughts about collecting for your favorite consoles. Whatever the case, we have a competition for you!

Prizes: Three first-place winners will each receive a prize from the Digital Press store in New Jersey with a value of up to $30. Two second-place winners will receive a prize from the Digital Press store with a value of up to $20. Prize will be an item of your choice from available stock. In addition, all winners will be invited to write for the future Articles section of the Digital Press Web site.

Contest: We are looking for well-written articles about gaming. Articles about games and consoles older than five years old are preferred, but columns about modern gaming are also acceptable. Entries can be about almost anything to do with gaming as long as they are interesting, accurate, and informative. Minimum of 200 words, maximum of 1000 words. Three entries allowed per entrant. An entrant can win only one prize. Please number each submitted entry. (e.g., If someone submits articles #4 and #5 and you submit yours next, they would be numbered 6, 7, & 8.)

Examples: Interviews with game makers (designers, programmers, artists, developers, journalists, etc.); columns about certain game series of interest (Sonic, Mario, Tales of ..., Final Fantasy, Beatmania, Alex Kidd, etc.); prose about pinball and arcade game collecting; restoring home consoles, handhelds, or other hardware to working order; supporting, interfacing with, and maintaining classic computer hardware and media in modern times; write-ups about new hardware and techniques for transferring games and saves; classic gaming on modern consoles through emulated compilations or remakes and comparisons with the originals; and stories about working in the game industry. Remember that these are just examples, so please feel free to use your imagination to think up more ideas of your own.

Due Date and Judging: Articles are due by the end of the day on August 10th, 2012, and should be submitted to this competition by posting them in this thread. We will open the articles to public voting within the next few days after the submission period. Voting will last for one week. Voters will be registered members of the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable. Voters will be allowed to vote for multiple entries.

[j_factor]

Where exactly will these be posted?

I remember we used to have bi-monthly columns (are those even on the site anymore?). Are we bringing that back?

[badinsults]

Where exactly will these be posted?

I remember we used to have bi-monthly columns (are those even on the site anymore?). Are we bringing that back?

Have to echo this, where exactly is the articles section?

Wouldn't hurt to update the main website, though. First thing that should go are the frames. It isn't the 90s anymore. We have server side languages to generate pages so that it is easy to link to particular articles without breaking the layout of the site. I think people might be more interested to contribute if the site looked a bit more modern. I mean, I would be willing to write articles, even without a financial incentive, but I think things need to be modernized so that it is easier for everyone. I know exactly how painful it would be to update the main website if you have to manually create the html pages.

Also, the RSS feed on the main page to Nextgen.biz should be removed - the site hasn't existed for some time.

[Nz17]

Some answers:

A) As mentioned, the new articles will be hosted in a new section called "Articles" which will be CMS-powered by software called GeekLog. It is supposed to be the most secure "blogging" software out there today.

B) The Columns section still exists with all of the old articles. It can be found in the Library section of the site.

C) The Columns section stopped being updated a long time ago by the maintainer of that section, and eventually articles stopped being submitted too.

D) If I remember right, the columns were originally stuff for which there wasn't room in the DP newsletter.

E) With this new setup, approved contributors will be allowed to submit their new articles to the site directly instead of the old way of e-mails and having to rely on a middle-man acting as editor and gatekeeper.

E-2) We might add the old columns to the new Articles section if it proves popular.

F) As surmised, most of the DP Web site is basically made up of thousands of individual Web pages hand-crafted by Internet gnomes in the ancient kilns of the past. Many were created using a long-lost and now-forbidden tool called "FrontPage." Thus all these pages collectively make adding a menu in-page and site-wide into a difficult prospect.

G) All of the site's problems from the past two years have kept me from pursuing things other than, "This is broken again, please fix it!"

H) While we won't be adding something as elegant as a modern in-page menu to each Web page, something much nicer than what we currently have has been secretly worked on by myself for the past little while in my spare time. Hopefully it will be finished soon.

I) Looks like Next Gen changed its name to Edge Online. The home page's RSS section has been updated to reflect this. Thanks!

Here's looking forward to your articles, DP community!

[ProgrammingAce]

You might want to consider taking some of that money you're getting from the advertisements and reinvest it back into the site itself by hiring a freelance web developer. Honestly, the main page makes the entire site look pretty dead. It looks like an old geocities site from 1998, and most of the areas of the site haven't been updated in half a decade.

This is the first thing vistors see when they come here "Download the Digital Press toolbar and quickly access everything from your browser!".

The "Search the DP" site produces an error message from google's servers: We're sorry... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

The CGE link is 2 years out of date, you might want to take a look at all of those affiliate links. "Web rings" haven't really been popular in 15 years.

[JSoup]

What ProgAce said. I haven't looked at the main page in four some odd years, mostly due to everything being broken and there being pretty much nothing interesting to look at. I'm guessing you're working on a new version of the site currently and the goal of this contest is to have fresh articles and writers ready for when the new layout is finished.

[ubersaurus]

Really, no other submissions? Guess I'll go then; I wrote this retrospective to go on a friend's website, but she hasn't gotten around to posting it. Figure it wouldn't hurt to give DP a preview for whenever she gets around to it.

I'm a bit over the 1000 word limit, to be fair (it's like 1200) but eh, if anyone wanted to use it proper it may be capable of shrinking a bit.

#1
Fear of the Unknown: A Rescue on Fractalus retrospective

The Atari 5200 has always been a black sheep of the classic gaming universe. Its many detractors will talk about the massive footprint of the system – one so large the original Xbox or Neo Geo look positively compact – the poorly designed controllers prone to breaking down even when not in use, and the fact that much of its library consists of basic ports of Atari 800 games (the system itself being little more than an Atari 400 with a funky controller). Enthusiasts will rightly point out, however, how the 5200 pioneered many of the gameplay elements we take for granted now. It has an analog controller with enough buttons (even a pause button!) to run fairly complex games, a slew of fantastic arcade ports, and some amazing home titles that hold up even today.
Possibly one of the best and most unnerving of these is Rescue on Fractalus. One of the very first releases by Lucasfilm Games (eventually renaming itself to LucasArts), it was set to come out for the 5200 in 1984, but didn’t limp out the door until 1986, alongside Gremlins and Ballblazer after Atari was bought out by the Tramiel family. In it, you are the pilot of a modified Valkyrie fighter, flying rescue missions on the inhospitable planet Fractalus. Humanity is at war with a species known as the Jaggis, and they have dug in on this world. While the bulk of the action is in space, you never see it; your duty is to pick up the pieces and rescue downed pilots. In a nutshell, you are supposed to maneuver your ship around the planet, dodge enemy gun emplacements, find downed ships, and pick up the pilots. There is a twist however, and it is terrifying the first time it happens.
For the first several levels, the game is fairly straightforward: you fly through the mathematically-generated landscape of mountains and valleys, pick off gun emplacements and kamikaze saucers before they can damage your shields, and look for a downed ship on your radar. Once you find one, it’s a matter of landing nearby, turning off your shields, waiting for the pilot to run over, and opening the airlock. Your task completed, you take off to find another pilot until you’ve reached a minimum amount and can blast off back to your mothership to head to the next stage. Had this been the entire game, it would get boring incredibly fast, but George Lucas himself suggested a way to give you, the player, a heart attack. To explain how, I’m going to back up and tell the tale of my first Fractalus experience.
The first time I sat down and really played this game was in 2011. I had picked it up during a trip to Chicago, and had finally hooked up the Atari 5200 to try out it and the other games I had picked up on the trip. I was impressed with the game – it had an effective first person perspective, made effective use of the many buttons on the 5200 to control thrust, land, boost into space, and handle the airlock. After several levels, though, I got complacent and settled into a routine: land, shut off shields, open airlock, wait for pilot to hop on board, and repeat. I had been doing this for a while, and had already reached my quote for the stage when I decided to go pick up another couple pilots. I found one, and went about my routine, barely even paying attention at this point. Imagine my shock when the siren started going off.
My ship began to shake as alert sounds screeched out of my TV. A message appeared at the top of the screen, screaming at me that a Jaggi had gotten about the ship and was tearing it apart. My ship has no internal weaponry, and clearly the other pilots were in no position to fight this thing off. Panicked, I took the only course of action I thought I had left: I fired the boosters to bring this fighter back to the mothership. It’s a terrible idea, if movies like Alien are any indication, but in the heat of the moment is was the only one that came to mind to save my life. Thankfully, it worked: the game never stated what happened, if the alien had been spaced or killed in the ship, but I survived to fly again. I was shaken up, however, and didn’t play for much longer before my nerves gave out and I quit flying.
It was strangely one of the most immersive moments I’ve ever had in a video game. I was that cocky pilot, who thought they had things well in hand, and I invited emergency onto myself. I panicked, and to save my own life I risked the entire ship, before losing my nerve entirely and dropping out of rescue missions entirely. The hellish world of Fractalus had won, and those men and women trapped on the rock would slowly perish without my runs to the surface.
As it turns out – and as a savvy reader of the manual can discover – some of the pilots have already been killed, and the Jaggi have donned their suits to try and sneak about the rescue ships. If you don’t open the airlock, they will leap onto the cockpit glass and punch their way in, venting the atmosphere and killing you instantly. The only way to stop them at that point is to activate your shields, which will vaporize them instantly.
Even without these tricky creatures, however, the planet itself is working against you. Starting on level 16, you are subjected to the day/night cycle of Fractalus, which lasts a whopping nine minutes both ways. Putting aside the sheer winds that would cause, as night falls, visibility drops precipitously until nothing but blackness is outside the cockpit. You can either fly using only your instrumentation, or you can land, shut down your systems, and try to wait out the darkness. When the only light source are the beams fired by the gun emplacements at your ship, there’s always a constant fear that you’ll end up flying into a mountain, draining your shields and crashing your fighter.
While the game does not introduce much more in way of new elements, it does build to an incredible level of difficulty. Gun emplacements are a more frequent sight, and tend to group together to hammer your fighter before you can get away, if you are unable to pick them off quick enough. More aliens hide out as pilots on the ground, and since the only way you can get more energy for your ship is by picking up actual pilots, this can drain your fuel reserves and kill you just as well as an alien on board can. Like nearly all classic video games, Fractalus will kill you, and the only way to look at it is whether or not you went out saving lives or cowering on a mothership, being overwhelmed for lack of space pilots.
The game found itself on numerous platforms outside of the 5200: the Atari 800 computer, the Commodore 64, the CoCo, the ZX Spectrum, the Apple II, and a few years ago, even a prototype Atari 7800 version had been discovered. Whatever system the game is played on, though, it remains a powerful and early example of how a basic action game can convey a simple story and play upon one’s own emotions and instincts.

[JSoup]

Really, no other submissions?

Does it really surprise you? This forums is fairly dead and the site it's based on even more so.

[ProgrammingAce]

My entry is as follows. Any prizes will be sent to Toys for Tots after reciept:

#2

Video games r goud. You should play them when ever you get the chance to play them. They will make you feel like u r fun. My favorite game is sonic. He is fast and he collects rings. If he gets hit by something bad all his rings r gone. if you like to play sonic you should send me a message on my xbox. my name is XXXSn1p3rX420X69XXX i am really good at playing sonic. some times my bruther lets me play call of duty. i am good at call of duty and i always set off a nuke and kill every one and they all die. i like to play call of duty but my mom sais i am not old enough but my friends all play it so it is ok. i tell my mom i am playing sonic because i love sonic but then i really play call of duty. sonic is funner then call of duty but i get to kill people with my nuke. i tried a nother game on my borthers x box and i killed everyone and they all died. every one says i am really good at the x box and some day i will make my own games and every body will play them and i will be rich like my uncle jack

[treismac]

#3

Double Dragon will forever be intertwined in my memory with the Summer of 1988 or ‘87 or maybe it was ‘89. Regardless, it was some murky time before I had my driver’s license and the ability to go too far beyond my childhood geographical confines. Back then I rode bikes, and this summer I made frequent bicycle trips with my older cousin Brandon, who lived next door through the woods, to the Circle K at the end of our Spanish Moss draped road for one purpose: to rescue some pixilated chick in a miniskirt from a bunch of pixilated thugs using as few quarters as possible.

Over the course of this yearless Summer that lies submerged in the back of my mind, Brandon and I got pretty damn good at the whole Spike and Hammer routine. No Abobo could burst out of bricks without being greeted by jump kicks or baseball bats and the majority of gang members were reduced to pitiful ping pong balls battered back and forth between our respective paddles, Billy and Jimmy… no, they were still Spike and Hammer at that point. I suppose, we could compromise ala Double Dragon III on the NES and call them Spike and Spammer. Anyway, we owned that cabinet, and we rode our bikes over to the Circle K every morning to assert that claim.

Yet, there was one thing we could not claim mutual ownership of: Marian. After the final boss fell for the last time, blinked, and faded, a line was drawn in the sand. Only one of us would ride our bike back home knowing that our Spike would get laid while poor Spammer remained a good friend who Marian confided to about her relationship troubles with over sexless coffee. Perhaps I didn’t understand the joys of physical intimacy with ’80s chicks in pleather nor did I have any inkling of the dread of being in the friend zone quite the way I do now, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be Spammer. Having a hot woman, pixilated or otherwise, wrapped within your arms meant you were somebody- somebody who wasn’t blinking, fatally alone on the side of the arcade machine’s monitor while your older cousin basks in his Alpha Male glory with his objectified prize in hand.

I wish this was a story about the time I finally was Spike after landing some Hail Mary jumpkick. It isn’t. The last time we beat the game together that Summer, I recall pleading with Brandon for mercy as the last boss died. “Let me win this time, please!” Swatting me again and again with the bat, he shook with laughter as I jerked the joystick frantically while ineptly barraging the buttons with failed petitions for punches and kicks that would make that bastard Spammer once and for all. The gods of Double Dragon turned deaf ears to me for the last time, and we rode back home wearing the same invisible yet still tangible name tags.

That Double Dragon cabinet taught me a few lessons that still resonate with me to this day. The virtue of mercy is a construct invented by those who struggle with achieving victories in life. Schadenfreude sweetens with the increase of the pain of its object. And the mind chooses the damnedest events to enshrine in its halls of memories. I don’t see my cousin much anymore as we now have a state between us acting as a buffer, but I still see him at family holiday get togethers now and then. I wonder if he still thinks of that Summer. I also wonder if being Spike feels as good as I imagined it would. Maybe next Christmas I’ll surprise attack him with a wiffle bat when I have a bit of eggnog courage flowing through me and find out. I’m fairly certain that memory would make it into both of our memories’ respective halls. I’ll try for the Christmas of 2012 or ‘13, I reckon.

[treismac]

#4

Saving the Summer (part one)

The summer of 1990 saw the death of countless brave Italian plumbers*in the neighborhood of my childhood, Rice Mill. I would like to think, looking back, that they did not die in vain. That their sacrifice amounted to something; something bigger than the sum total of their lives’ calculated worth by a cold utilitarianism mathematics. What that “bigger” was, I cannot say. But… I knew it was true in the part of my heart that words can’t reach. The part of my heart that died the summer of 1990.

Walking through the neighborhood in summertime with Lyle, my friend since pre-school, was a hallowed tradition of sorts. We bounced back and forth between our houses playing video games at one of them until the mom who ruled the respective home unceremonially ended our gaming and told us to “play outdoors” or to “get some exercise”. Once ousted, we walked to the other Nintendo at the opposite end of our small upper middle class neighborhood, to continue playing indoors free of the shackles of either exercise or nature.

One care-free evening after Lyle got Super Mario Bros. 3, we were forced to yet again make the familiar passage from one cool de sac to the other.

“Dude! The new Mario is so awesome that I almost forget about part 2 being the retarded cousin of the series. All the different suits are*so*awesome, John. Makes me wish I had a hammer head suit to wear when we go back to middles school so I could throw a hammer through the gym’s trophy case.” Lyle said in an awesome way as we sauntered down Springhouse Drive.

“Yeah, I totally know. I wish my dad wasn’t so cheap and would buy it for me too. I wasted my allowance I had been saving at the flea market last week on some crappy ninja sword. I broke it on the first stupid tree I hit with it and now…,” I said as I looked off into the never to be grasped future, “it’ll be at*least*another month before I can buy my own Mario 3.”

“John, I could understand your dad not being able to get you the new Mario if you only had a one story house like poor Larry’s, but you’ve got a*2 story, John!” Lyle said while shaking his head ever so lightly back and forth.

“Sometimes… I think… my dad wants me to think I’m poor, Lyle. I really do.”

“Why? That’s stupid! Is your dad a Democrat?!!”

“No no!! God, no! He’s a Republican, Lyle! You know that! It’s just that he thinks I should learn the value of money or something.”

“What the hell does that mean? How can you learn the value of money by not having it to spend? So do the poor understand money better than…”
“No, no its that… I mean… like, I’ll understand its value by knowing that it cost something to get it… I guess.”

Lyle’s feet stop and begin to fill with a rising indignation that escapes from his mouth after the disbelief fades.

“That is more retarded than the second Mario, John. You should make your dad play the second Mario after playing the third one and say, ‘Dad. This is what the crap you say about knowing the value of money is like. Lame and not worth putting into my Nintendo. So shut up, stop being cheap, and buy me the damn game already!’ I just don’t get your dad, John.”

“Yeah… to be honest, I don’t get him either. Maybe because he grew up poor he’s that way. I don’t know, Lyle. It has to do with “character” or something. I dunno…”

“One time my dad started to talk about “character” or some crap like that and my mom started to laugh, but tried to keep a straight face till they both started dying laughing and had to leave the room. Dad said we’d have the talk later after they get back from Europe.”

[treismac]

#5

Saving the Summer (part two)


Nearing my end of the neighborhood, we’re hit by a funny smell. Strong and pungent yet unfamiliar, we have no category to place this alien scent. Emerging from the woods, a young man comes into focus. Somewhere in his early twenties and living with his decrepit grandmother, Todd worked at the Circle K which he drove/pushed his beat up car back and forth to. He was unkempt with long straggly hair he pulled back in a pony tail and was seldom seen not smoking a cigarette. In a strange unsettling way he looked like a skinny unhealthy Jesus with an Adam’s apple. I got the gist from my parents that Todd had made some “poor life choices” that I would do well to avoid.

Adjusting to the sunlight as he comes out from the wooded area, he calls out to us.
“Hey… uh… kids!”

Todd’s eyes are on fire as he wears a relaxed yet crooked grin. There was something about him that seemed off but I couldn’t place it. He pulls his blaring headphones behind his ears off, rests them on his shoulders, and then finds a crinkled cigarette from behind his left ear that was hidden beneath his hair. As Todd flicks and raises his green lighter to his mouth, his head jerks back slightly while his eyes lit up opening relatively wide. Regaining himself, he swaps the crinkled cigarette out for another one behind the right ear that he examines for a second, finding it smoother, he lights it up and starts to smoke in a somewhat satisfied manner.

“So ya’ll enjoying your summer?”

“Yeah… I guess so. We’ve only got one month left before we gotta go back to…,” Lyle answers with a matter of factness that kids usually use at an adult’s quizzing.

“Awww… that’s too bad,” Todd said with words not touched by the remotest
sense of sympathy as he exhales.

“I remember summer vacation and school and all that sh*t. You know one day… all that will be over, right? Ya’ll are going to have get jobs you f*cking hate and join the real world where life sucks. So you little f*ckers better enjoy this sh*t and make the most out of it ‘cause its going to be gone, and after that even your f*cking memories of these happy lil’ days will start to fade, and all summer will be to you is just the time of year when everything is just really really f*cking hot.”

Lyle and I stand speechless. I glance over and see that he’s clutching the Super Mario 3 cartridge tightly in his quivering hands. Todd bends over slightly putting his left hand on his knee to make himself eye level with us and grins as he flicks his unfinished cigarette to the side.

“You girls enjoy the rest of your summer, okay?”

He kinda stumbled away while he laughed to himself. For a good 10 minute we stood like corpses as his words sunk deeper and deeper inside of us. Never before had I contemplated the transience of my life nor life in general for that matter. My dad’s allergy to pet dander had shielded me from having to say goodbye to furry friends as they were tossed into a cold merciless ground. None of my grandparents had passed on yet and frequently spoiled me in praise of my good grades. Always and forever, I had seen life as an endless cycle of school and summer with the Christmas holiday joyfully meeting me halfway to raise my spirits for the rest of the trek to Summer’s sweet perpetual embrace. Life was a game with unlimited continues where you got an extra 30 men if you knew the right code to put into the title screen. Now… I caught a glimpse further through the hourglass of time and saw the unforgiving grains of sand that were covering over me slowly but surely, until I am buried and forgotten, and the once sacred mantra “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A” is but the mumblings of a tired and broken old man whose mind and time are now gone. That moment in time of my sixth grade Summer forever broke the way I viewed every moment after that. Childhood had died. Game over.

Later that night, we egged the hell out of that loser Todd’s car. I tried slashing his tires too but the damn blade broke on the butterfly knife that I bought at the Flea Market. I think I finally understood what “character” was that night, too. When the blade snapped on the tire, I still managed to use it to scratch what was left of the faded paint on Todd’s bomb even though it was hard to find amongst the rust in the night’s darkness. I never did buy my own Super Mario 3, but my 401k is pretty damn good and I should be up for partner at the firm soon if I don’t drink myself to death before then.

[ProgrammingAce]

Since only 3 people entered, i assume we all get the top prize?

[Nz17]

Thanks for all the qualifying entries! We will begin voting with the next thread I write. This post will be edited at that time to include a link to the voting thread.

Since only 3 people entered, i assume we all get the top prize?

Ahahahahahahhahaha... No.

Between the entry submission stage and the public voting stage there is a middle stage where the intermediary judges discard disqualifying entries based upon the rules of the contest and whether entries embodied the spirit of the competition. Your submission was ruled to have been neither interesting nor well-written. Thus it will not be included in the public voting period.

In lieu of awarding three top prizes, Digital Press will instead award two $30 prizes and then donate at least $30 (though likely considerably more) to the Toys for Tots charity.

We shall still be running a poll for fun and to determine how popular each qualifying entry is. Everyone, please stand by for your chance to vote!

EDIT: Voting is a-go!