Here is a post to make you think that I occasionally lead a balenced and interesting life. We all know it’s in here solely to provide a counterpoint to my endless book reviews and WoW boss-conquest posts. More about those later.
This weekend we were tempted into the city for a looksee at Game On – a retro computer gaming exhibition at ACMI. My strongest early gaming memories were of playing Pong on a friend’s Atari, of watching “grown up” 16 year olds play Night Driver (I think that’s what it was called) – a black and white driving simulation in my local Milk Bar, playing pinball machines and of course, spending tons of twenty cent pieces on games like Scrambler, Phoenix, Defender, Space Invaders and Battlezone. A bit later on came Frogger, Pacman, Galaxian and Moon Patrol, which were hugely popular. The exhibition was impressive because of the sheer number of machines that were playable in room after room, but the place was full and it was hard to know what to do. I was with company, and gaming is such a solitary pursuit that it felt rude to jump on a machine for more than 2 minutes.
Although I was around for some of the earliest games in the late 70’s, it was surprising how many games were unfamiliar, and of course, the whole playstation / xbox stuff is a whole new world. We finally found what looked to be an MMO section, but it was really just a small theatre which showed snippets of “amazing moments” in MMO history. Many of them translated terribly to the viewer, and unless you knew the context, all drama and significance was lost. They had 30 seconds of the legendary Thresh vs. Billox Quake 2 world championship footage, on a map I’d personally played on, so that was cool. They had the text from a “Best Flamewar” from an EVE forum thread, which was not actually that good, and seemed to take forever. They showed a bit of Machinima, which was good for a laugh. Where was Leroy Jenkins I ask you? For World of Warcraft all we got was the mass attack on an in-game funeral procession for a real-life gamer who had died. There was a space game where they exploded a huge ship and the people started going nuts on the microphone – that sounded cool. Some conceptual art for Tomb Raider, The Sims and a Mafia style game was the highlight for me. I was shocked to see the terrible resolution of the original Tomb Raider game though. How on earth were Lara Croft’s legs so exciting at 640 x 480 I wonder.
We went to the Immigration Museum and saw a Japanese Kimono exhibition which was worthwhile also. I didn’t know that there are normally multiple sashes hidden below the main chest sash, or that the highest nobility wore the most plain ones – in response, wealthy merchants worse increasingly crass, lurid ones to gain cheap attention. Or that Japanese firefighters turned their Kimonos inside out once the the fires had been put out to indicate safety – they fought in plain patterns and showed the ornate flashy patterns in heroic triumph afterwards.