O Kotaku, so short was our affair. But like all things – a summer fling, a migraine, an immigration queue, a pudding cup – this too must end.

As my run as guest editor closes, I thank all the Michaels, all the Brians, all the Lukes, and the few other forenames that grace these mighty, worthy pages. Thanks to your council I have survived my tour. Much I have learned of the Way of Kotaku. I shall take the lessons I learned here and carry them with me in both heart and spleen.

To you readers, I thank you for your eyeballs and your index fingertips, that did pore over and click upon my humble offerings, and your brains that did churn their words, sometimes with flummox, sometimes with snark, and even often with interest.

What you missed today
Mass Effect Mega FAQ, Answered
Singing the Blu-Rays
Ghostbusters Teaser Trailer, Gameplay Footage
Nintendo Churning Out 1.8 Million Wiis Per Month

When I was at Anime Central … I was standing in the lobby of the hotel and talking to someone I had just met. … And some girl ran up behind me and grabbed my braid and just yanked, as hard as she could. My head was jerked back and my neck had this awful pain wrench through it. I whirled around and screamed, “don’t touch me!” And she just goes “I… I just hate Aeris…” and ran off. Like because she hates some fictitious character.. it’s okay to physically assault someone dressed up like that character?

The Aberrant Gamer: Flower Girl [Game Set Watch]

Activision gets the credit for being the first third-party developer, but Apollo followed shortly after, in 1981 (Imagic was also started in that year, by a second round of dissatisfied Atari developers).One of their games was Lost Luggage another Kaboom! clone, this one challenges the player to retrieve luggage from an an airport carousel. Three of the game variations offer the additional challenge of a “terrorist suitcase.” The terrorist suitcase is always black, and looks different from the rest. Normally, you lose a life for every bag you miss. Three misses and the game is over. But if you miss the terrorist suitcase, the game is over immediately.

It’s a simple but reasonably effective way to communicate the urgency of threat. If only the terrorists would all use distinctive, colour-coordinated suitcases…

Lost Luggage [Atari Age]

Al Lowe’s Leisure Suit Larry series of adult adventure games, starting in 1987, is one precedent, but another game five years earlier, on my favourite console, the Atari 2600.

Before we take a peep, a warning. While I wouldn’t characterise this post as NSFW, you might still not want your boss walking by while you’re looking at the turgid member of a naked, 8-bit wide sprite. The main adult game developer for Atari was Mystique, a spinoff of an American film pornographer. Mystique released a number of porn games for the system in 1982. The games were all labelled as “Swedish Erotica” but this was just marketing – they were home grown here in the USA. The games were sold as adult entertainment, not as games, and would only have been available at adult specialty shops, video stores, and the like. Each box sported an all-caps warning: “NOT FOR SALE TO MINORS.”

The best known title is certainly Custer’s Revenge, because it was also the most offensive. In the game, the player pilots a naked “Custer” with cowboy hat and enormous, erect penis across a field of flying arrows in order to rape a Native American woman tied to a post. There’s not much more to say about this one.

Another Mystique game was Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em. It was a clone of Larry Kaplan and David Crane’s popular 1981 game Kaboom!. The player controls a pair of naked women who move along a street. The computer controlled naked man on the top of a building ejaculates copiously from the roof. The player must steer the women to catch the falling ejaculate in their open, upturned mouths. “Should you miss,” explains the game manual, “shame on you. After all, it could have been a famous doctor or lawyer.” I’m not sure how one impregnates a women orally, but I suppose accuracy isn’t much of an issue here. The game also awards an extra life every time your score reaches 69.

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to point out a technical detail in this game. The Atari 2600 is capable of displaying two sprites at a time – that is, its graphics hardware allows the programmer to store two, one-byte sprite values at once. More sprites can appear to be on the screen by reusing these registers at different vertical locations on the screen. In Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em, the women are doubled (or tripled, depending on the game mode) by flipping a bit on another register to stretch or multiply the sprites. But there is no concept of colour bitmapped graphics on the VCS. Instead, colours for each of the two sprites must be set manually. Because of timing constraints, colour changes typically happen on a line-by-line, not a pixel-by-pixel basis (in fact, there is no concept of a pixel on the VCS either).

If you look closely at the screenshot, you’ll notice that the women have very carefully detailed nipples and pubic hair, as well as blonde locks that wrap around their faces. This is not something the Atari can do without some coaxing. The body is one sprite, running the whole length of the character without colour changes. The hair is the second sprite, horizontally positioned atop the first. To render the nipples, the second sprite is also used, but its colour is changed in the lines after the end of the hair. Then it’s changed back to yellow on the following scanline. You can confirm this if you want by zooming in on the image. Notice that it is exactly 8 “pixels” wide, just enough to fit in the byte-sized register used for sprite graphics. The Mystique games have been accused, usually from the vantage point of history, of being low-quality titles with poor production values. But details like this suggest the opposite; a lot of love went into these titles.

Yet another Mystique game was Bachelor Party. this one was pretty simple and somewhat abstract. It’s a Breakout clone, but buxom women replace the blocks and the player fires a man (the bachelor) instead of a ball to bounce off the walls collecting all the girls.

After the crash of 1983, Mystique went out of business, along with most other independent developers. The rights to their games were transferred to Playaround, which re-released these games and a few more on “double-ender” cartridges (two games attached back-to-back). I’m sure I don’t need to belabor the double entendre.

Playaround added new versions of the Mystique the games that swap the roles. These included Bachelorette Party (self-explanatory, and then a version of Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em called Philly Flasher, in which the roles are reversed (men must catch a woman’s lactation). They also produced new versions of Custer’s Revenge for the European market, again one with each role, called General Retreat and Westward Ho. These were never sold stateside, because of the controversy over Custer’s Revenge.

Playaround also created some new adult games, each offering play as both the male and female role. One was Knight on the Town/Lady in Wading, in which a knight/Amazon must build a bridge across a moat to rescue a princess/prince. Another was Burning Desire/Jungle Fever, in which a naked man/woman flying a helicopter must ejaculate/lactate out a fire that risks devouring a man/woman tied to a stake. And in Cathouse Blues/Gigolo the player help a man/woman score with 7 partners in a neighbourhood while avoiding alarm-rigged houses and police.

The main problem with the Mystique/Playaround games is that they don’t engage adult sexual fantasies very effectively. They sometimes amuse, but they mostly offend. I suppose arousal is relative, to some extent, but the games don’t live up to the truly adult expectations Mystique sets in the manuals. Some of these expectations are clearly written in jest, like this one about how to start the game.

With the power shut off, gently insert your Mystique video game cartridge into your Atari 2600 Video Computer System in the same manner as you would with any compatible game cartridge. Turning the switch “on” will activate the “foreplay” mode. This is very similar to the “attract” mode seen on many arcade games.

But others seem to suggest that Mystique thought they were offering legitimate adult content rather than just teenage titillation. Again from the Mystique manuals:

We at Mystique feel that it’s time for video games and their adult players to come out of the closet, away from the kids, and deal with ADULT fantasies. After all, grown-ups have been known to be imaginative and competitive, as well as have fantasies.

These games may not be particularly noteworthy as culture, as games, or even as porn. But they do have historical interest, and they show us how, well, flexible the commercial game environment of the early 1980s really was. And perhaps most startling, they represent a very large percentage of the commercial marketplace for sex games in all eras.

Atari 2600 Adult Games by Mystique [Atari Age]
Atari 2600 Adult Games by Playaround [Atari Age]

So, what about a new game? There was an NES game based on the series in 1989, and a German-made PS2 game in 2002 (you know how the Germans love their Hasselhoff). Is it time for a proper update? Too early to tell. Until then, you can play this Spy Hunter-style Knight Rider game online on the Universal Television website.

Knight Rider Game [Universal TV]

To drive this point home, I want to share a recent, high profile health game that represents just how these things can go very wrong.The HMO Kaiser Permanente created Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective earlier this fall. Here’s their PR boilerplate on the title:

the Amazing Food Detective takes children through activities that show how to choose healthy foods and get more active. Children playing the game follow the routines of eight culturally diverse children whose activities or conditions would benefit from healthy food and exercise choices. The game, aimed at children ages 9-10 and available to everyone at www.kp.org/amazingfooddetective, complements Kaiser Permanente’s nationally recognised childhood obesity clinical strategy.

There are two parts to gameplay. The first are “investigations.” The player can read the “nutrition files” of each of eight kids who have a particular nutritional problem, such as not getting enough exercise or eating too many sweets. The player moves a magnifying glass around an animated scene trying to find the correct object(s) to “solve” the case. For example, Michael doesn’t exercise enough. The correct solution to his case is to click on the soccer jersey resting on a chair. Miraculously, Michael goes outside and juggles a ball. Case closed!

The second part are minigames. These are unlocked for each case after you complete it. So, you get a simple soccer game after helping Michael, as well as the charming “Zap the TV” game, a kind of Asteroids perversion. There are a bunch more of these too.

The game is competently produced for its style, with good production value in art, animation, and voice over. And I want to be encouraged by large corporate investment in health games. Unfortunately, this game is a conceit that risks sending the whole health games arena back in time. Let’s talk about why.

The game insults the kids it is intended to serve. It does so by preying on the idea that kids enjoy games, and no matter the nature or quality of games, rather than taking advantage of the representational power of games in the service of health topics.

That power is the ability to create models of the way things work in the world and to ask players to make meaningful decisions as actors inside those models. When Kaiser claims their game “takes children through activites that show how to choose healthy foods and get more active,” they make a promise to present actual nutrition and exercise choices within the contexts in which kids might experience them. This is something videogames are certainly capable of doing. But clicking on a soccer jersy instead of a remote control is not a meaningful decision. It is an obvious one. And even if it weren’t obvious, all the kid needs to do is click on all the objects until they get the right one. And even if that experience were meaningful, “rewarding” it with crappy, second rate minigame versions of games that one can find better examples of anywhere online amounts to folly at best, insult at worst.

One of the features the creators and supporters of Amazing Food Detective are most proud of is an “automatic shut off” that engages after 20 minutes, reminding kids to “get active.” I don’t think Kaiser has anything to worry about. I strongly doubt any child is in danger of playing this game for more than 20 minutes.

Serious games don’t need to compete with commercial games or even with web games. They need to present compelling versions of complex topics in convincing ways, ways that can’t be done better with books or cartoons or colouring pages. At Persuasive Games, we’ve been working on a game about the politics of nutrition called Fatworld. It’s something like Animal Crossing meets Super Size Me. It doesn’t have the same goals as Amazing Food Detective, but it does share some overlap in topic. The difference is, we gave nutrition a context. It’s a game about the relationship between nutrition and socioeconomics. There’s a world. It has an economy. There are rich and poor people, not just lighter and darker people for political correctness. Decisions have trade-offs. Some choices are less accessible or less obvious than others. You can do the “wrong” thing on purpose and see what happens. Whether or not our game will succeed is an open question. But we have tried to take advantage of the medium in a way that Kaiser has not.

Worse yet, Kaiser has spent a fortune promoting this travesty. They created a PR staff to bombard the press in and out of the serious games space to cover the game (I get regular telephone calls and emails). They even paid the book publisher Scholastic to produce and distribute textbook materials to 5,000 public schools. Think about that for a minute. Kaiser Permanente, a private company in one of the most eggregiously broken industries around, is buying their way into schools so they can start building a “relationship of trust” with your fourth grader. Of course, if they left the game to sell itself it wouldn’t. The fact that they paid for school placement before they even brought the game out is an admission of how poor they’d expect it to perform on the open market.

Kaiser is a big company with a lot of money, and it’s good that they are seeing value in games and choosing to invest in them. But they are trying to buying legitimacy they have not earned. As Spider-Man would say, with great power comes great responsibility. This game is not education and it’s certainly not health advocacy. It’s unadulterated and nefarious public relations. If you use it for anything, use Amazing Food Detective to teach your kids how corporations vie to buy their attention, not to teach them to eat carrots instead of potato chips.

Here’s my question about the PS3 and why it suffers so. Before and just after the console was released, Sony defended its absurd price by citing Blu-Ray as a consumer motivator. Even though the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD question has not been resolved, for the better part of this year it was possible to buy a PS3 and an Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive for less than a combo Blu-Ray/HD DVD player. Even now, a cut-rate Blu-Ray player costs around $US400-$500, which is basically the same price as a PS3. And I hear you can also play videogames on the PS3.

So why hasn’t Sony followed through and pimped the machine as a Blu-Ray player?One reason might be that the incremental advantage of a videogame machine would be lost on a whole segment of buyers. After all there are plenty of Blu-Ray movies, and they run across the whole spectrum of film genre: everything from Ratatouille to 300, from Planet Earth to Casino Royale.

In games? For someone who might not otherwise buy a PS3 but who was really into HD movies, maybe they’d enjoy having a go at Madden or even The Simpson’s Game. But Sony hasn’t exactly made it easy to know that would be the case. And there are essentially no PS3 titles for, let’s say, more sensitive souls. FlOw might be the closest thing, and there’s no way you’d know it even existed unless you read the game trades. And even then, it’s too abstract for my mum.

So here’s a speculation. The PS3’s past and future success is tied at least partly to the availability of games for the less experienced, more casual player, who is part of a household in which high-end home theatre is valued. The great irony here is, the kind of games that would work are the ones we’re seeing on the Wii, in terms of gameplay, but with the added benefit of the PS3’s graphics rendering and disk capacity.

In 1982 Data Age created Journey Escape, based on the then hugely popular band Journey’s album Escape. In the game, you have to help the band reach their “scarab escape vehicle” (from the album cover) after a concert, while avoiding “hordes of Love-Crazed Groupies, Sneaky Photographers, and Shifty-Eyed Promoters. For some reason the band manager looks like the Kool-Aid Man. A less successful Journey arcade game followed in 1983, from Bally Midway.

What’s interesting to me about this game is that it is one of very few attempts to licence and adapt bands or music to videogames.Sure, we have Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but those are music performance games. There was Michael Jackson Moonwalker, a 1990 Sega arcade game. And a strange KISS-inspired Dreamcast game. And Peter Gabriel’s EVE, which is more like an interacive CD-ROM than a game. And a Chemical Brothers Flash game for the single Galvanize, which now seems to be offline. And one of my former students, Rob Fitzpatrick, made a game adaptation of a single from the band The Most.

But really, music adaptation is a fairly unexplored avenue in videogames. Interesting, no?

Journey Escape for the Atari 2600 [Journey Tribute]

In 1983 Coca Cola commissioned Atari to create a cartridge for the company’s annual sales convention. The result was Pepsi Invaders, a Space Invaders variant in which the aliens were replaced by letters spelling out PEPSI. The production run was 125, one for each of the attendees of Coke’s sales convention that year. Sales executives also received an Atari 2600 console along with the game. The assumption must have been that shooting down Pepsi at night might inspire more fervent sales efforts during the day.The very small production run for the game probably makes it the rarest title for the Atari VCS. Since Coke sales executives didn’t know the difference, the title is also very hard to find – it would have found its way into attics and closets unnoticed. To make matters worse, the cartridge has no label.

The last time I saw one sell it went for $US1,800, although it looks like we just missed one a week ago on Ebay, which was unable to get its $US975 asking price.

Pepsi Invaders [Atari Age]

The games include Be A Reporter, about the basics of journalistic research, verification, and writing toward deadline; Run Your Newsroom, a game about managing and motivating people as a newsroom chief, and Covering Hospitals, a game about the unique features of reporting in the health arena.

If you play Be A Reporter, maybe sometime you too can grow a fashionable and effective journalistic mane like Crecente’s.

News U [NewsU.org]