Orc.One

Remember what I wrote about it remaining to be seen if we dodged the “con-crud”? Well, forget all that. We came down with it as expected after all—which is why this missive from the second day wound up being more delayed than I would like.

Onward.

Here I am in Day Two. I look terrible—there’s reasons for that which involve both a general lack of sleep and a surfeit of confusion.

This job involves doing strange things. My wife and I have a combined total of more than 30 years of print design experience. That means we don't know everything. Someone always knows more, and on certain matters, like, for example, electronic games, our experience is lopsided: she simply has more experience when it comes to electronic games. She's also the better gamer.

Ah, the Vectrex. An utterly unique console.

I’m paying very close attention to this stuff. (Via Boing Boing.)

Previously on Game Restart: [it’s a series]

The thing about arcades is that arcades are expensive. 

Adjusted for inflation, a quarter in early 80s money is approximately 63¢ in today’s money at the time of this writing. Most people probably aren’t used to spending money after the initial investment in the console and then the game for their home, but imagine spending that for every three tries, lives, or continues.

“Failure” is often used as a dirty word by gamers, but this is one of the ways in which gamer culture often gets things wrong. If you fail and try again, that’s essentially practice for success.

Previously on Game Restart: [recapping intensifies]

I’m not going to suggest that video games were better in the olden days. They absolutely were not; anyone who thinks that they were is probably legally blind or has closed their mind to reality not damaged by Space War for the Atari VCS. At a certain point, video games didn’t exist. And then once they existed, they were objectively terrible for the most part. Being novel was their only saving grace.