I went to the Science Museum in London yesterday, to check out the Game On exhibit. I had been to the Science Museum recently but only as an afterthought when it was about to close - I didn't realize it was so big, there's plenty of stuff to see there even without this very special paid for exhibit. I should check it out another day with more time (also, the other museums very close to it are very good; London has amazing museums, really) - quite interesting interactive "Volume" exhibit, with played lights and music in the Albert Hall museum sponsored by Playstation (Nintendo is sponsoring the "Game On", so I
guess Sony had to fight back somehow in the neighbouring museum
...)
In "Game On" itself I saw most if not all of the games, didn't recognize all of them, saw an Atari Lynx for the first time (I only seen pictures before), never realized it was so huge
I also saw a Nintendo
Power Glove and other stuff like that.
There was this weird allegedly Simon says "game" but either it wasn't working or I didn't figure it out - you entered this small area (box) with a grid and could walk to make patterns or something (the original Simon game has you repeat what had been done before)
Other than that I played:
Space Wars in a Vectrex-like thing - the game is allegedly 2 player only, but I don't know what they did you could play 1 player vs AI but the AI was VICIOUS.
Pong in a projection screen: when I played, the other guy playing Pong wasn't too sure what to do and also my button to release the ball was a bit flimsy, so I didn't stay for long (besides there is better stuff to do than play Pong)
Pac-Man in a projection screen: this one was working properly, but after passing one or two levels I left to play other stuff.
Asteroids arcade: Played with buttons! I never thought of it but it makes sense - these older arcades didn't have sticks. It took me a while to get used, but I'm a big fan of this game and subsequent clones. Good fun to play the original one in an old setup.
Donkey Kong arcade: great game as well.
Missile Command: with the trackball and 3 buttons to fire each base. Much nicer than playing on other controls I had played before.
There were more arcades around but many of the games I can play at home if I want without losing on the experience (unlike many of the above); I did want to play a bit of Dig Dug as I like that one, but someone was playing there for a while and I went for other stuff. I saw a couple of Cocktail tables but I never fancied that style much, and the games there were Space Invaders which I'm also not too fond of, so I didn't play this.
Anyway there weren't just arcades there. I checked out the only Amiga (it was an A500) in the exhibit. Personally I think it is a shame they didn't have more, but perhaps that has to do with Nintendo sponsoring it. They had Lemmings on it in one of the original Commodore Amiga mice! Nostalgia...
I passed along a Dreamcast with one of the Tennis games, played it for a short bit but it wasn't that nice to play, or maybe I just didn't get the hang of it quickly enough (this is a recurring problem for a bunch of the games - maybe they should have chosen a bunch more carefully so that more of them were easier to pick up and play)
There was 1 Atari Jaguar running Tempest 2000. I had never seen a Jaguar other than photos, and went to play it (I played other Tempest remakes before). The game is actually quite good IMO, and I'm going to try to get a nice remake with the crazy visuals and music to play on the PC.
Secret of the Monkey Island was running on some PC and I just checked it out for a little bit (I have played it in the Amiga back in the day).
They also had Bubble Bobble running on a Saturn; BB is one of my favorite games so I played a bit in 2p mode, even though I can play it at home.
There was Prince of Persia running on a Megadrive, but I actually don't like it there so much as I used to play with the "white pijama" on different controls.
I wanted to try Rez, but there was usually someone on it when I looked to see if I could get on. It seemed cool but didn't seem ALL THAT, was running on a PS though not a DC; I recall vaguely discussions of it being nicer on the DC so maybe that is it.
In this section about movies they had some cool arcades, like the classic Star Wars cockpit which is great even today (despite the graphics being very dated they are still cool); they also had the game Discs of Tron, which is great to play in the arcade because you have this knob to rotate where you throw the disc on as well as the stick.
I played this on a dreamcast:
http://www.consolevision.com/members/tr ... witch.html
I'm not sure what it was doing there, but honestly it's a decent effort for a one button game, I liked it.
There was also this game I don't know the name now, a PC shooter where you play bigger and bigger ships. It is probably freeware or something. Great gameplay.
Played Dance Dance Revolution (not arcade, they had a mat) for the first time, it is quite fun as well.
I played the New SMB on a DS for a short while.
I tried Saturn Bomberman (they had it with 8 pads there), but couldn't even understand which control was controlling who or whatever was going on. I guess you need to sort that stuff out before the chaos starts; also tried Electroplankton but don't know what to do. Metroid Prime also presented a bit of a challenge as I didn't really grasp the controls so I didn't lose much time when there was so much other nice stuff to do.
And of course, played my 5 minutes of Wii, namely Wii sports. It was my first time playing Wii, and it confirmed 1st hand what I already sort of knew - it is truly great. Won 3-0 against the other guys playing on the Tennis game during that short time.
Don't know if anyone cares about my recounting, but there it is.
Ivo.
