Bygone Games and the Big Splash Theory

If you live in South Minneapolis, you heard about 307 police cars screaming last night. This happened at Bryant and the Minnehaha Parkway. Robbery suspect stabbed a police officer and was shot. He is now being nursed back to health, presumably on the public dime.

RIP Deadspin reports that Nintendo Power magazine is shutting down. Never read it, but I do have some scans of early 1990s computer magazines. Shall we return to the glory days of Nintendo gaming?

Man, when are they going to port this to the Xbox??

No wonder Tim Allen doesn't seem to work much anymore! Doesn't need to. Residuals on that one must have been huge.

Can't get more early-90s than "Simpsons" + "Virtual Reality."

I don't ever want to goto Krusty's meat plant.

Your fun will be enhanced by lots of funky pitching:

This one: absolutely fantastic.

I never played the Nintendo version, but something called Spectre VR was released for computers around 1993. Barebones graphics; reminds you of "Battlezone," that 80s arcade game. The action was exhilarating, though - amend that, it is exhilarating. It's available as an iPad app, and while the controls are janky unless you use some sotrt of 3rd party control, it's still fun.

Of course, the game that started modern gaming as we know it today. Mein Leben!

Not maze-like. Actual maze. Wolfenstein, 16 years later:

And it's only getting better.

That's about right. Ratings system on the web are awful. For apps it's particularly treacherous: Who goes online to give an app five stars and say "awesome!! buy it now!" unless that person is 13? Or my favorite: "This app does what says it does. Perfect" or some variant. It's like saying "this car moves forward when the gears are engaged." Not quite specific enough. Then there are the people who give one star because it doesn't work on their computer. Some reviews are obvious sockpuppets, too. If the app's site says "Will be for the main computer are your home" and the review says "works on ever computer are my have!! Recommend!" it's probably a sockpuppet.

More here, concerning movie reviews and what we can do about the problem. I think they advocate something like this:

To which I say: 1/2*

The site grades movies on "quality" and "rewatchability." You can sign in with Facebook or twitter and share what you're watching. Or you can decline to sign in and share because no one cares. Does anyone care that I watched the premier of the third season of "Battlestar Galactica" last night? No one cares. Oh, someone might ask "how did you deal with Adama's moustache," and I'd say "poorly," and then note that he seems to spend 57% of the entire series looking down at something, but really, no one cares. I did tweet while watching the show that Dean Stockwell is the poor man's Harry Dean Stanton, but that's not sharing useless information. That's sharing a useless observation. Totally different.

SCIENCE! Change in the Big Bang Theory, a clarification, or just a case of an inapt metaphor? So it was the Big Splash, then? (Didn't steal that from the comments, because I didn't read them. Even though it's a science site I'm pretty sure it gets political within 15 posts.)