I don't play many video games because I spend more than enough time interacting with digital furniture in my life. That said, I occasionally go through phases of obsession with a game, and the current one is Spider Solitaire. If you don't know, Spider Solitaire is a whole different animal (so to speak) than regular Solitaire. In its simplest form (1 suit), it's a pleasant exercise; in its purest form (4 suits) it's a frustrating and potentially maddening experience.

Played with two decks dealt into 10 stacks, the gist is that you are trying to build full sets of a suits (King down to Ace). You can move a card onto its numerical superior (e.g., 6 of Hearts onto 7 of Clubs), but you can only move groups of cards of the same suit. In 1-suit Spider, this is a fairly trivial difficulty since all the cards are the same suit; in 4-suit Spider, with so many different suits falling all over each other, it can make the game frustrating as hell. On top of this, there's a reserve stack of four "deals" that place a new card on top of each row. So just when you have everything lined up kind of nicely, a new card pops up that can effectively block that row and cost you the game.

The one-suit game I win pretty much every time.

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Did you know that if you search for "classic video game screensavers" or "donkey kong screensaver" on Google, you get the "Classic Video Game Screensavers" post on this site where I posted my self-made screensavers for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, and Pac-Man? Well, it's true. Anyway, last night I finally posted the last screensaver I had constructed at the time: Xevious, the original vertical-scrolling shooter! Go visit that post if you want to download it and read instructions on how to install it.

I have a history of creating for myself certain things that I sought online but surprisingly could not find. (In truth, the whole Transformers Box Art Archive is a result of this inclination.) I also appreciate it when others post their similar efforts. Below are a couple audio files (WAV format) that I either created from disparate sources or were surprisingly difficult to locate because of bad tagging. Many of these I have used for when I log in or out of Windows.

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Getting sick on the weekend blows, blows, blows. And it sucks. Such a waste. Here it is, Monday now, and I'm still sick at home with the common cold, but of course it's difficult to enjoy the day off from work because I'm sick. At least I'm prepared:

HOW TO BE SICK AT HOME
by Botch

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I finally did! I had heard about it for years, but was never 100% sure it was true. But this morning, on the subway to work, I reached it myself. The Minus World of Super Mario Brothers! Essentially this is an accident in the game, a technical loophole, wherein through a certain series of events you confound the game and end up in World -1. It's true. Ah, technology and excitement.

Of course, the downside of the underwater Minus World is that it loops forever, endlessly. Once you get there, there's no way out. Reaching the end of the level warps you back to its beginning. But I thoroughly enjoyed those 5 endless minutes. Once again, the child in me triumphs in my later years. Minus Victory!

Well, I already told you about my love of "opposite" villains like Bizarro and the Reverse-Flash. I'm not the only one, you know. The image on the left is the cover from Superman #221, which parodies the classic Superman/Flash races with a Bizarro/Reverse-Flash race. (Actually, it was pretty much a rip-off, because only the last panel of the issue set up the race, which actually happened in Action Comics #831, but I digress.) Of course, the distorted villains ran in a crooked path, and the Reverse-Flash only won by letting Bizarro lose or something like that (it was a rather crappy issue, horribly illustrated by John Byrne, but again I digress).

Well, wouldn't you know there's a couple more opposite villains I'd love to tell you about. You might even have heard of one or both of them.

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So, after my recent tale of Donkey Kong Game & Watch divinity, I got a real hankering for those classic Nintendo characters. I've been playing Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers 3 on my Game Boy Advance. I've been tooling around nostalgic gaming sites and reading the history of the great ape and the plumber. On a whim, I decided that I wanted a classic Donkey Kong screensaver. I cannot tell you how surprised I was that such a thing did not exist.

I mean, seriously: vintage arcade games and computer nerds who make screensavers would seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. I assumed there would be a plethora of screensavers, from Asteroids to Xevious. But no! The only thing I could find was the promotional screensaver for the recent Game Boy game, Mario vs. Donkey Kong (a fun game, I should add). Well, this was just unacceptable. Consequently, I set out to make one myself.

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I think I was in third grade (1984) when I received my Donkey Kong II Multi-Screen Nintendo Game & Watch device. I remember this because I recall that Matt Grey, who was supposed to be my best friend at the time, tried to steal it from me. It actually wasn't the first thing he had stolen from me. My game was found in his desk and returned. Matt was always a fair-weather friend.

Anyway, the game was enthralling, because video games were still a novelty, you see, and a hand-held one was especially awesome. The multi-screen games were more coveted than the single-screen ones, of course. Pre-digital, this was LCD technology at its finest. Run, Junior! Jump over those traps, dodge those birds, avoid the electrical charges, fetch the key to unlock your Papa and free him from Mario's clutches!

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