Collecting Arcades: My very own NBA Jam machine for $350

I was 12 years old when NBA Jam was released in arcade form. I remember the first time I saw the game at showbiz pizza. It had unbelievable graphics beyond anything else at the time, and amazing forever memorable gameplay. Who can forget the first time they saw someone “On Fire”, or heard the snarky announcer’s “Boom-shaka-laka!”? I played the game rabidly when I could. Even when I lost, I wanted to jump right back in and play again. The game was an arcade sensation that was the first to have more than a billion dollars in quarters pumped into it.


The arcade version in action.

NBA Jam came out during the last few years of arcade bliss. Consoles were quickly catching up to and eclipsing the Arcade experience. NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter 2, these were the closing chapters to a golden era of the arcade version of a game being far superior to the eventual port.

At the age of 12, I wanted that NBA JAM machine at home. I distinctly remember asking a local arcade’s employee how much such a machine costed. The employee looked at me like I was crazy, then dropped the bomb: $3500 on the low end, $5-$6K was the norm. I decided that I could settle for the home version of the game and put the thought of owning such a machine out of my mind for good.

The following year I played my game gear versions of NBA Jam, and NBA Jam TE every day after school for hours at a time. Years later my brothers and I would drain hundreds more hours into 4 player NBA Hangtime (a later sequel in the series) games on the Nintendo 64. To say that NBA Jam has a special place in my heart and memories would be an understatement, but I also never forgot that the machines cost $3K, so I let my 12-year-old dream fade and settled with crappy console ports and revisions that never quite lived up to the real deal.


The game gear version, not quite the same, but the SNES/Genesis versions weren’t much better.

Now, 20 years later, I own a NBA JAM arcade machine, and the machine did not cost $3000+. The machine (actually a NHL Open Ice cabinet) costed $300, and the NBA JAM game was a mere $30.

When you search around on Ebay or Craigslist, you will easily find arcade listings that confirm the $3000 price tag, and you’ll find suckers who pay as much just as easily. The truth of the matter is, as the arcade business winds down, the value of a machine is going down with it.

The trick to finding a reasonably priced cabinet is that you have to know where to look, and what to look for, and be patient.

Know the basics of the arcade business

Back in the day, when 1MB of on-board ROM was $1000, a NBA Jam cabinet with a fancy high quality 25″ monitor, and 300 pounds of 3/4″ plywood did indeed cost $3500 or more.

Arcade owners would buy arcade cabinets, and as games got old, the owner would simply switch an easily-pluggable game board out, put a new sign on the top of the arcade, and call it a new game. For example NBA JAM, NBA JAM T.E., the NFL Blitz series, and NHL Open Ice all use the exact same cabinet design.

It was not uncommon for an arcade owner to buy Mortal Kombat 1, then later paint over the cabinet artwork in black paint, stick the Mortal Kombat 2 marquee in the top of the arcade, put the MK2 board in, and call it a MK2 machine. This doesn’t mean Midway did not sell original Mortal Kombat 2 cabinets, they did, often times it was more cost efficient to simply buy an upgrade kit instead.

Today when you’re buying an arcade, the upgrade kit route benefits you. You can look for a completely original cabinet (called a dedicated cabinet) with the original game. Or you can piece together a gutted cabinet for $100, with a monitor for $150 and joysticks/buttons for another $100, and then just buy the board for the game you want.

In my case, I had no interest in restoring or otherwise fighting against technical issues with a half-working cabinet, so I searched for an NBA Jam compatible machine in good shape, and just stuck my NBA Jam board inside and called it a day.

Know where to look to research

Your research will start, continue, and end, at the Killer List Of Video Games website and forums. KLOV is the #1 arcade collecting community on the web. KLOV has an excellent index of arcade games, a great database of members looking for and selling machines, and a super friendly and intelligent community of people pouring everything you’ll ever need to know into the KLOV Forums.

Start by looking at the index page for your favorite arcade game, such as this one for NBA Jam.

Pay special attention to the parts of the page mentioning how common the game is, and the links to the KLOV member database listing KLOVers who own or want to own or want to sell their arcade. If you see dozens of owners, and the game’s pretty common, you can usually expect to pay less than $1000 for a good quality machine. There are exceptions of course, such as a fully restored top quality game from 1982, but common mid-90s stuff is fairly prolific and easy to come by, and thus: cheaper.

After reading up on your arcade’s index page, join the KLOV forums as a member, so you can search forum topics for your game. There you will find discussions of common issues with the game, and information such as what game cabinets work well for the game if you can’t find a dedicated (original) cabinet.

Know what to look for and what can go wrong

General Important Info:

  • Wikipedia’s great Arcade Cabinet page has some great starter info.
  • An arcade cabinet weighs 300+ pounds. That’s a 80-100LB monitor, and a whole lot of 3/4″ particle board to make sure the machine isn’t going anywhere. If you plan to fetch one, bring 3 strong friends along.
  • The back of the cabinet has a locked door on it, if you purchase an arcade you will need to have the keys to get into this door to get to the monitor’s adjustment controls, the game boards, etc.
  • The front of the cabinet has a coin door. Inside that door, there’s a collection of important diagnostic buttons and buttons to add free credits. The key for a machine (both coin door and back door) may be hanging on a screw peg in that coin door. You need that key or a good screwdriver and some muscle to be able to unlock the coin door.
  • The machines I’ve encountered have this 4-button panel inside the coin door. One of the buttons simulates coins dropping in (for free credits). Another puts the game into a diagnostic/setup mode where you can change game settings, calibrate light guns, adjust sound volume, set games to free play, and more.
  • Cabinet dimension information is available on the web, many are about 6’1″ tall, just tall enough to barely not stand up in a 10′ U-Haul truck.. so go for the 14′ 🙂
  • Generally speaking, a standard arcade cabinet can fit through a doorway, unless of course it has a really wide control panel on the front for 4 players, like NBA Jam, or Ninja Turtles. No worry in this case though, the control panel pops right off, assuming you can get into the back of the machine through the door to release control panel latches and screws.
  • When you go to pick up an arcade, bring along the following items: flashlight, notebook, pen, and a screw driver set with adjustable tips with crazy ends like hex tips (it’s mostly flathead/phillips, but you never know..). Don’t forget the transportation essentials: a pickup truck or u-haul 14′ rental, blankets for padding, ropes and tie downs, and an appliance dolly.
  • Don’t buy an arcade without inspecting it first. Turn the game on, try all the buttons, see how the monitor looks, adjust it a bit if necessary, make sure the game plays for a number of minutes, and so on.

About Game Boards:

  • A *LOT* of arcade games are basically little motherboards with a processor, and various ROM/RAM/sound/etc chips. These are called PCBs. Many arcade collectors own one or two arcade cabinets, and several PCBs. For example I have an NHL Open ICE 2 on 2 cabinet, and PCBs for NBA Jam, NFL Blitz ’99, and Police Trainer. All four games work great in my cabinet.

    NFL Blitz (w/ HD) on left, Police Trainer on right.
  • Later 90s games, such as War Final Assault, Police Trainer 2, and others are more like full on computers, with a full computer mother board, video card, hard drive, and so on. Some, like NFL Blitz and Killer Instinct are simply a PCB + a hard drive.

    WAR has a PCB, a sound PCB, hard drive, and video card.
  • Likewise, early 80s games and earlier may have a interesting assortment of circuit boards and wiring mess that you won’t see in the mid-90s era.
  • There’s a great standard connection called JAMMA that most games connect to. The JAMMA connector is basically a long strip with a standard pin configuration. Plugging the JAMMA connector to a game board is simple, and the simple act of plugging that in gives you the following: power, video, sound, controls. It’s as easy as plugging a nintendo cartridge into a NES… most of the time..
  • Like those old NES games or any computer motherboard, the games typically have a little watch battery on the PCB. This battery keeps saved data alive, and is a simple $5 fix if you find your game settings or high scores are not saving between power cycles.
  • Older games like Pac-Man, Defender, etc, may be pre-JAMMA, and require a great deal more research to understand how the wiring works.
  • Some games have a bit more than the JAMMA standard provides, for example JAMMA provides for 2 players and 3 buttons each. A game like Street Fighter 2 with 6 buttons per player will have another little place on the board to wire in a connector for each player’s extra buttons. My 4 player NBA Jam cabinet has player 3 and player 4 controls on a little wire harness that simply “just works” on all of my midway NBA Jam variant games (NFL Blitz/NHL Open Ice). Hooking that midway player 3 or player 4 harness up to a non midway 4 player game like The Simpsons or X-MEN may not be as easy.
  • Some game boards are notoriously finicky or will give you hell in various ways, especially early 80s and before type games. Tempest is one you’ll hear about often. Mortal Kombat 2’s sound board goes bad pretty quickly and often. Some capcom games had a per-machine encryption key stored in battery-powered memory, 5 years later when the CMOS battery (nicknamed the “suicide battery” on these boards) ran out of juice, the board was useless. Good stuff, and, fortunately, not the norm. In most instances, a PCB will work great for years to come.
  • Sometimes a board’s capacitors or chips go bad. People on KLOV know how to fix these issues. Heard of MAME and arcade ROMS? Those zip files for the roms contain digital images from physical ROM chips or Hard Drives from the actual arcade machine. If such a chip or HD goes bad, KLOVers have equipment to make a new ROM chip to sauder in, and some KLOVers even sell compact flash replacements with IDE adapters for certain games with aging hard drives.
  • Some games have more than one board. When a game has a seperate board, there’s inevitably a custom way to wire between the main board and that board. For example my NBA Jam sound board requires a rediculous harness that goes from one port on the main PCB to parts of 3 ports on the sound board. If you’re the enterprising type, you can make your own wire harnesses within reason. My buddy and I were able to decipher a schematic from the manual and figure it out (shown below). On the other hand, KLOVers, various online collectors (such as Bob Roberts), and retailers sell common replacement wire harnesses for popular games.
  • There are game manuals available, these manuals often sell on ebay for $10-$15 a piece, but KLOV members mention several online websites with scans of manuals. These manuals can be critical for things like understanding how to wire one game’s control wires to another game’s board, or knowing which switch out of a bank of 12 switches makes the game be in Standard video resolution rather than Medium resolution.

About Monitors (and how they can kill you, no joke):

  • There are a number of differing monitor types, but the two you will hear about most often are standard resolution and medium resolution. Many arcade games from the mid-90s and before are standard res or lower, some around that period are medium res. Often times medium resolution games have jumper switches on the PCB that’ll make them work with standard res if that’s what you have.. you don’t get the same luxury going the other direction, so if you want several games, consider sticking to standard res in the cabinet you find.
  • Some games use a horizontally mounted monitor, and others (especially older games) use a vertical mount. (thanks cdjump!)
  • The monitor is open-backed inside the cabinet and can hold a 25,000 volt charge that can kill you if you touch it wrong, even when powered off. Be aware of this, and be very careful to leave the monitor alone unless you know what you’re doing. The topic to search for is “anode discharge”, and this CRT Safety PDF mentions the problem in passing. Be aware that many KLOVers insist on doing the anode discharge several times in a row before messing with the monitor, and doing the discharge again before plugging the machine back in.
  • Monitors can go bad over time, often times needing either a capacitor replacement (called a ‘cap kit‘), or something called a flyback repair. If you’re looking at a machine with a crappy monitor, a new one can cost $150-$200 without shipping, they’re on KLOV for-sale forums all the time. Alternatively a local TV or arcade repair man may be able to do the cap-kit or flyback fix. I highly recommend having a professional do any monitor work, because, again, there are stored voltages that could kill you when screwing with the monitor.
  • Monitors are not the same as your 25″ $100 sharp CRT from a few years ago, there’s a reason the machines costed $5K when they were new, and a high quality monitor with differing hookups than your antenna TV from back in the day is part of that reason.
  • Most monitors have focus/brightness/contrast adjustment control panels connected to them, you can find this by getting into the arcade through the back door.
  • Arcade Monitor Repair and Arcade Repair Tips are great resources for learning about common problems with monitors.

About Controls:

  • Joysticks and arcade buttons are cheap. Like, $3 for a brand new arcade button cheap. You can find them online with aid from KLOV info. One way to find retailers is to search for “Happ” (a manufacturer of some common arcade control parts). Some popular choices are Groovy Game Gear, or Ultimarc
  • Not all machines are the same, and some quite old or rare machines have parts that are not easy to find. This includes controls parts. If your machine is 8-way joysticks and buttons and that’s it, you’re in pretty good shape. If it’s monkey ball with a custom joystick in the shape of a banana.. finding a replacement joystick may be a bit of an exercise.
  • If you’d like to have one cabinet and many arcade boards, consider getting something that has 2 joysticks and 6 buttons per player, like a street fighter cabinet. Most arcade games are 2 player or less, and use anywhere from 0 (bubbles) to 1 (joust) to 2 (many games) to 3 (nba jam and variants) to 5/6 buttons (mid-90s fighter games).
  • If you’re looking at light gun games, know that in general light guns have 4 wires, and depending on the arcade machine these wires may be configured in different orders than the arcade board expects, a simple trip to radio shack and a quick look at schematics will help resolve this. There’s a “Happ” wiring standard that’s fairly common, for example my Police Trainer uses this.. unfortunately my guns are non-HAPP, so another bit of wiring magic was required there..

Know what works for you

There are options. You can buy one arcade cabinet and switch out the game boards inside. You can purchase a $3500 MAME machine from an online retailer, or you can collect several cabinets for each game you’re interested in. Further, if you’re really handy, you can restore or convert a junked out cabinet into something much better, like this guy, or this guy. Arcade Cab is a great resource for do-it-yourself cabinet building.

Know how to search & what to pay

Finding arcades can be tricky if you don’t know the right tools to use. Here are some suggestions

First, I would recommend subscribing to these two RSS feeds from KLOV in your Google Reader:

Next, I would recommend setting up an Ebay saved search in the arcade/jukeboxes section with keywords for games you’re interested in.

Lastly, Craigslist has a pretty neat feature where you turn a search into a short-lived RSS feed, but their force-you-into-one-city-per-search UI from hell can be cumbersome. For example, I live in Austin and at one time I had to go setup the same 3 RSS feeds for 7 different craiglist subdomains: austin, waco, san antonio, houston, college station, dallas, fort worth.

It’s much easier to just setup some Google Alerts, which email you when new items show up in Google’s search index. Each alert’s settings should look like this:

And a little google kung-fu will go a long way.. instead of “NBA Jam Arcade”, try “NBA Jam Arcade site:craigslist.org” or “NBA Jam Arcade site:ebay.com”. I’d recommend setting up such alerts for both Ebay and Craiglist, as Google’s better than either site at finding content in their listings.

With your searches in place, be prepared to wait. You need to wait so you can see how often your game or games become available. You need to wait so you can see how people price the game and how the price falls very quickly when they’re moving and don’t want to deal with the arcade.

Know that something in really great condition, like a restored Robotron cabinet in great condition from 1982 can be pricey ($2K or so). Similarly something relatively new like Mario Kart GP may still command a $6K price tag b/c it will still make money in an arcade. For common stuff though (NBA Jam, Street Fighter, Contra, etc), if it’s more than $1000 per cabinet, even in great shape, you’re probably getting ripped off. You’ll see numerous humorous threads on KLOV for sale pointing to ebay and craigslist listings with these rip-off prices.

Once you know the price range for your game, try to find it local. It can cost several hundred dollars to ship an arcade freight across the country, or u-haul it back home from somewhere hours away. Consider looking up the game on the KLOV index again and seeing if the DB has any KLOVers in your area looking to sell.

One last tidbit on buying: Auctions and liquidations are fairly common. Do some research on KLOV though about some of these auctions. Some recur fairly often, and some are run by some dicey liquidation companies where KLOVers have noticed the same shill bidders from the company itself artificially driving prices up.

Know when to stop

Arcade collecting isn’t for everyone. The machines are bulky, heavy, and can have technical issues beyond even super geek understanding. They burn a lot of power, put off a lot of heat, and if they’re in the garage and you live in Texas, like me, you basically don’t play them from the months of June through September 🙂

If you’re going to start collecting arcades, I’d suggest being a bachelor or having a really understanding wife as prerequisites to the hobby. I’d also seriously suggest checking out some of the more recent arcade collections available on consoles. Namco, Atari, Midway, Williams, and more publishers are releasing better and better ports of their arcade classics every few years. In particular the Midway Arcade Treasures on Gamecube and PSP are damn near perfect.

Consider this: Robotron on a new 50″ plasma TV with a gamecube controller in the comfort of your living room may go over better with the wife than spending double the money for a unsightly arcade cabinet that’ll take garage space for years..

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About My Collection

Around the time I was considering the NBA Jam machine, my wife and I were considering moving to Seattle, so I canned the arcade machine idea for a year. Instead, I bought an a320 and felt satisfied with many nostalgic moments relived playing my Game Gear NBA Jam port.

We later decided Seattle wasn’t in the cards, so last summer, in 2011, after several failed attempts at NBA Jam or NFL Blitz machine acquisitions, I found someone in San Antonio selling an old NHL Open ICE 2 on 2 cabinet. I knew Midway made the cabinet exactly the same for all three games, so I went for it. $300 later, I had my NHL Open Ice Cabinet. That night Open Ice was ripped out of the cabinet, and a newly purchased $30 NBA Jam PCB from a KLOVer who lives nearby was in the cabinet.

The sound harness was missing, so my buddy and I fixed that, and there were some other little learning experiences as well, but the monitor is in great shape and only a few buttons needed repair. The machine isn’t exactly a looker:

..but, the fact that the cabinet’s beat up made it easy for my next acquisition. My wife’s favorite game is Police Trainer. The PCB typically runs for $100+, and Happ guns typically go for $50 a piece, but watching searches on ebay turned up a real deal where I got the PCB for $20 and a pair of non-happ guns for another $30. A few wiring adventures later, and a slight cabinet mod to stick the guns on the side.. my wife had a pretty good 33rd birthday surprise. To this day Police Trainer is the most popular game with anyone who visits (no love for the original NBA Jam it seems..).

This past spring I picked up a NFL Blitz ’99 PCB for $70 on ebay. Arguably the game is not much different than the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube ports of the series, but there’s something magical about playing 4 player games on the arcade with my brothers.

Another game I lusted after for years was even worse off than NBA Jam. In the late 90s the FPS genre was coming of age and there were only a few attempts at arcade entries to the genre. Atari’s WAR Final Assault being one of them. Like NBA Jam, WAR was fairly lenient on the quarter gobbling. For about $2, two people could deathmatch for 2 or 3 minutes, with loser paying another $1 to continue. WAR was being ported to the nintendo 64, and I was very much looking forward to the port, but the port was canceled before release, so the only way to own WAR is to own the machine.

Worse, the best part of WAR is the multiplayer, which requires more than one machine. I had google alerts running for about a year on the machine, and found a pair in really good shape this summer for $500, again in San Antonio. Now the garage has three cabs.

And the kitchen has a mini-cab. I purchased the iCade and various arcade collections on my iPad and I must say, for the past year the iPad has been a convenient browser for my wife, and a TumbleOn device and not much else for myself… that is, until I bought the iCade. Playing these classic arcade games with real arcade controls almost makes me think I’ll be able to hold off on purchasing a generic mame cabinet for a while..

Games Like Pikmin


Pikmin is the greatest game ever, I think.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s basically a simplified RTS game, with a focus on resource gathering and multi-tasking. That is, the enemies that you encounter are not consistently coming to demolish your home base with constant aggression, instead you take them on at will, taking your time building your army between battles.

The basic premise to the game is that you’re a spaceman, Olimar, who’s crash landed and needs the Pikmin to help him rebuild his spaceship so he can fly home. When Olimar crash lands on the Pikmin planet, 30 pieces of his spaceship are spread across 5 different levels in the Pikmin world. As you play through the game you encounter three different colored Pikmin species: blue, red, and yellow. Red Pikmin can survive flame, while blue can survive water, etc. A given piece of the spaceship may be behind a body of water, across a wall of flames, and to retrieve that piece safely you’ll need to alternate between Pikmin types.

Like all RTS games, the trick to the game is limited resources and micromanagement. Pikmin are weak little creatures by themselves, but you can have an army of 100 at a time. Numbers will not win the game though, a fair bit of strategy and timing matters a great deal in the game. You’ll use your Pikmin to attack enemies, break down walls, build bridges, and bring treasures home. You can break a wall down with 10 Pikmin, but such a task will burn 20 minutes, the same wall will come down much faster with 85 Pikmin. The same rule applies for other tasks such as attacking enemies or bringing treasure home.

The game is beautiful. The Pikmin and Olimar are about 1 inch tall, and the Pikmin world has a striking resemblance to earth. As you play, you’ll guide your Pikmin through lush green gardens, dreary underground caverns full of pools of water, and otherwise, and the eye candy never stops.

A major draw of the game that few knock-offs get right is the ability to multitask. That is, the game is very much non-linear. You can beat the original Pikmin game in some 5 hours or less once you’re familiar with it, because you can set one troop of Pikmin to do one task, while you travel elsewhere with another group working on another task. The challenge becomes attempting to fetch 3, 4, 5 pieces in a single “day” (15 minutes) of game time. Some days are best spent taking your army of 100 Pikmin to vanquish monsters and collect treasures that’ll spawn more Pikmin reserves, while other days could be spent preparing all paths to pieces, allowing a massive 5 piece day a bit later.

The downside to Pikmin? There are only three games in the series.

In the years since Pikmin’s release, there have been a few almost-as-good games released, and there doesn’t seem to be a consistent list of knock-offs anywhere else on the web, so, behold, the list of games like pikmin:

Games Like Pikmin

  • There are three Pikmin games.

    The original Pikmin game was released in 2001 on Nintendo Gamecube (amazon link). Later, a version with motion controls was released on the Nintendo Wii (amazon link). The Wii can also play gamecube discs, with a gamecube controller – and IMO the gamecube controls were a bit more precise when you become an experienced player.

    Pikmin 2 is a much larger game in terms of game time. Like the original game, it was originally released on the Gamecube (amazon link), and later with motion controls for the Wii (amazon link).

    Finally, the latest game in the series, Pikmin 3 (amazon link), released in 2012, brings the Pikmin series into the HD-TV era. It was released on the Nintendo Wii-U system.

  • Little King’s Story (Nintendo Wii version linked, a Playstation Vita port is available as well.)

    Little King’s Story is a great Pikmin clone on the Wii. You play a young king who directs his various subjects to do tasks. Like Pikmin, you can set various subjects to do a bit of work and go on to do something else with another set of subjects. I own a copy of Little King’s Story and have enjoyed it quite a bit, almost as much as I enjoy the Pikmin series. A sequel to the game is coming out on the Playstation Vita in Japan, and hopefully in the United Stats shortly after.

  • Eco-Creatures: Save the Forest (Nintendo DS)

    Eco-Creatures is the first Pikmin knock-off on a portable system. Like Olimar, the main character is fairly weak and cannot accomplish much on his own, but he has armies of squirrels and other creatures he can accomplish much with. Surprisingly, the game allows you to have 100 minions at once, which is an impressive technical feat on the DS. I wrote a in-depth review about the game years ago here: Yes, Eco-Creatures is like Pikmin on the DS. If you are a Pikmin fan, I would *highly* recommend this game. If you enjoy the first title, there’s a sequel that was only released in Japan, it will play on a US DS or 3DS (DS games are not region-locked, though 3DS games are). The sequel is titled Ecolis: Aoi Umi to Ugoku Shima, and appears to have a fair bit of Japanese text in it, understanding what to do in the game may be difficult if you do not know how to read Japanese.

  • Overlord (XBox 360, PC) (Released as Overlord: Raising Hell on Playstation 3)

    Overlord seems to be a direct rip-off of Pikmin, but a bit more linear in gameplay style. Overlord’s visuals are stunning. Overlord has been characterized as a mix between Fable and Pikmin. In the game you are an evil Overlord who reigns destruction via his minions (like Pikmin) and you can choose how much destruction you will cause as you make your way through the game (a bit like Fable). Unlike Pikmin, which seems to be a thinly veiled commentary on human nature wrapped in a cute package, Overlord is overtly, and humorously evil. There is also a sequel, Overlord 2, which many reviews indicate is not as good as the first game in the series. A prequel, Overlord: Dark Legend was released on the Wii. Be careful of the Overlord:Minions game for Nintendo DS, this is a Lost Vikings type game, not a Pikmin knock-off.

  • Army Corps of Hell (Playstation Vita)

    This newcomer from Square Enix was created by some of the same people who worked on the original Pikmin game for Nintendo. Reviews caution to not take the over-the-top style of the game seriously, it’s meant to be humorous. Reviews also caution that the game may not be “as great” as Pikmin, in that it’s a bit repetitive and not free-form / open-world style like Pikmin.

  • Adventures of Darwin (Playstation 2)

    Adventures of Darwin is a budget-level title that was released with a $20 price tag, when Playstation 2 games were normally $40-$50. I bought a second-hand copy of the game years ago and could not figure the game out, which reviews say is about par for the course for the game. Nevertheless, Adventures of Darwin is definitely a Pikmin clone, albeit a low-quality one.

Do you know of another game like Pikmin that should be listed? Please, email me!

Music Roulette – Free for the month of March

Music Roulette is going on sale for the low low price of FREE for the month of march.

Music Roulette helps you pick random music to play from your IOS device’s iTunes Music Library. It makes the process of choosing something random fun and easy, and choosing to play or shuffle an entire artist or album is just as easy as deciding to play the chosen song. When you open the app, album covers flash by like a fast-paced slot machine, and you choose an artist/album/song by tapping the “Stop” button. If you don’t like the selection that you picked, simply select the “Pick Again” button and give it another go.

When you find something you like, simply select the “Play” button, and then choose from a variety of playing options such as playing the song’s album, or shuffling the artist, or just playing the song itself. Music played with Music Roulette is actually played using the standard IOS Music player, so you can jump out of Music Roulette and the music will keep on playing, as shown in the video below.

The Story Behind Music Roulette

I love music, and I have lots of it on my iPod Touch. When I want to listen to something, I’m not very good at finding something new to listen to. I find myself automatically choosing the same old top ten favorite albums, or something I purchased in the past 6 months more often than not. Listening to the same 5 albums for months at a time gets tiring, and the stock IOS Music app makes shuffling to a song and then playing the album for that song a bit tedious. I wanted something different. I wanted an application that made rediscovering old forgotten favorites both fun and easy, so I made Music Roulette. With Music Roulette it’s fun to watch the covers flip by and choose a song, and it’s just as simple to play a given song, album, or an entire artist with just a few taps. I like it quite a bit, and I hope you will too.

Cool Stuff: Remote Desktop (VNC, RDP, etc)

See that? That’s my desktop this afternoon. If you look closely you’ll notice that a few of my desktop applications look a little odd. This is my mac mini’s OSX desktop, with Windows in the left application window, and another OSX in the right window. The trick here is that those two windows are my two other computers. This is what’s called “Remote Desktop”, and it’s awesome.

Remote Desktop is essentially a program for your computer that shares your screen and lets you control the computer from another computer. A few other terms for “Remote Desktop” that you may have heard of are VNC, or RDP.

Setting Remote Desktop up on your computer is easy, you’ll need to do two things: allow remote control on the computer you want to control; and install a remote desktop application on the other computer.

A word of caution: Enabling Remote Desktop on your computer means that anyone on your network (behind your router) can connect to, view, and control your computer. Most of the Remote Desktop technologies have password protection to prevent unauthorized access, but some Remote Desktop technologies do not protect (encrypt) the password or screen data as it passes over your network, so be careful not to use Remote Desktop on a network with untrusted users, as you don’t want someone to know your VNC password or snooping on your screen sharing session.

One important caveat about Remote Desktop solutions is that differing technologies dont necessarily mix well. Microsoft’s Remote Desktop service speaks a different language than Apple’s Remote Desktop service, and VNC is a third and different protocol altogether.

If you’re connecting from one OSX to another OSX, consider using Apple’s built-in Remote Desktop service and the built in Screen Sharing app (located on your system’s hard drive here: /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app). Power users may be interested to know that you can enable and disable Apple’s Remote Desktop Service via SSH.

If you’re connecting from OSX or Windows to Windows, consider using Microsoft’s built in Remote Desktop service (Win 7/Vista instructions) (Win XP instructions), and a free Microsoft RDP client.

The built-in Windows Remote Desktop service is only available in Pro editions of Windows and higher, so if you have a home edition (such as Home Premium) of XP/Vista/7, consider the VNC alternative detailed below.

If you’re connecting with any other configuration, such as from Windows to OS X, or perhaps from your iPad or something, use VNC. You can enable the VNC service in OS X easily (it’s already built into the operating system), and on windows you can install something like TightVNC. There are a number of VNC clients for both Windows and OS X, I recommend these:

I’m especially fond of TightVNC. It has a reverse-VNC feature where someone can connect a client to your VNC server and you control their desktop instead of the other way around. Another great feature is the TightVNC web server that lets anyone with a browser run a Java VNC client that automatically connects to your VNC server.

If you’re helping friends and family with their computers, VNC and/or RDP setup can be a bit complicated for your non-I.T.-savvy family, instead consider something as simple as a Skype Screen Sharing session, or a VNC-in-the-browser solution such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, these have much simpler installation instructions than any of the RDP/VNC options presented earlier.

Remote Desktop is an amazing bit of power-user technology that makes managing and using multiple computers very simple. It will save you time, frustration, and help you make better use of your household computers, all without switching your keyboard and monitor or position back and forth between them.

Apps I Liked, 2011

Again in the “better late than never” category, here’s a list of apps I enjoyed in 2011.

Apps I Used The Most

  • Google Docs – I link to this on my home screen from a safari bookmark.
  • Feedler – a great google reader client for both iPhone and iPad.
  • Rhapsody – a music subcription service, the killer feature here is the ability to download tracks for offline play.
  • Wikipanion – the best iPhone/iPad wikipedia app.
  • iLoader – this makes bulk uploading photos to facebook albums easy.
  • Facebook – of course.
  • Camera+ – a great well-rounded photo application for cleaning up or dirtying up your photos on the device.
  • IM+ – a great IM client for multiple services such as Google Talk and AIM.
  • Amazon – of course.
  • Music Roulette – not just a personal advertisement, I truly developed this to do something I wanted: to rediscover my favorite old music that I always forget about.

Apps My Wife Used Quite A Bit

  • Groupon – pay $10 to get $20 worth of food at restaurants, a great way to discover new places to eat.
  • Runner’s Interval Timer – not only was the app developed for my wife, she uses it too.
  • Quarrel DX – the classic Risk game meets a “spell something fast!” word game.
  • TumbleOn – Some of my favorite moments of 2011 involve hearing my wife consistently giggle while she was browsing photo lolz with this app that my friends and I made.

Other Apps Worth Mentioning

  • 8mm Vintage Camera – a really cool old-style video shooting app.
  • PictureShow – another great photo app, this one leans more toward the “dirtying up”/trashing pictures style.
  • iDarkroom – this photo app seems to clean up images rather nicely.
  • Beat wave – a great little procedural music maker.
  • GarageBand – I can’t believe I can record music with my iPod with this.
  • Yelp – we use this all the time to figure out if places are good to eat at, or if a handyman is any good.
  • Cloudcam – a great “web camera” app that made it easy for us to monitor a sick kitten this past year while at work.
  • Flixster – the best app to see what’s in theaters now, in the future, and whats coming to dvd.
  • Netflix – of course.
  • Photosynth – a really cool 21st century “you are living in the future” type app that lets you take a 3d photo of your surroundings and lets you look through it in 3d too.

iPad Games

We bought the iPad this past year and ever since, I’ve been less inclined to play games on the iPod touch at all. I’m tired of playing games where my thumbs cover half of the game I’m trying to see. Many of these apps are “Universal”, which means the app works on both the iPhone and the iPad, but the game experience is better on the iPad.

  • super crate box – this game is an amazing mix of the original mario brothers arcade game with guns. The whole thing works because your score is not based on killing enemies, but instead it’s based on how many boxes you can collect in the level without dying. You can play the PC version for free to try it out.
  • Age Of Zombies – a twin-stick-shooter/robotron clone from the makers of Fruit Ninja, truly one of the best in the genre.
  • Mega worm – a Deathworm clone done in 8-bit retro style.
  • Globetrotters – a great multiplayer game where up to four people control these little spacemen trying to mine treasures out of planets and racing to grab the treasures when they fly into space.
  • Siege hero – angry birds clone with a first person perspective.
  • Eternity warriors – another twin-stick-shooter/robotron clone, this time with a diablo theme.

iPhone Games

  • Pathpix – totally an OCD puzzle game, reminds me of picross.
  • Meteor blitz – Super Stardust HD clone on the iPhone.
  • Jetpack Joyride – a great little timewaster from the people who made Fruit Ninja.

Port Games

Last, some games that have been ported from other platforms to the iPhone/iPad in the last year. Great games, now portable, and inexpensive. All of these are not-as-awesome as their big brothers from real consoles, but for on-the-go portable play, they’ll do.

That’s it for the 2011 lists. Next time we’ll talk about something a bit more interesting.

Music To Code By, 2011

A bit late with the ‘best of’ 2011 lists.. but better late than never. This is a list of some great music that I listened to in 2011.

There are different modes of coding, sometimes you need absolute silence, and at other times a loud coffee shop is the way to go. I personally code quite a bit while listening to music and/or watching netflix. I find there are different coding ‘moods’ from time to time, and differing moods require differing types of music.

Standard Nerd Stuff

It’s probably best to start with something that has at least a little nerd cred to it, and work our way down the awesome scale from there.

Just before 2011, the movie Tron Legacy was released by Disney. Daft Punk did the soundtrack to the movie, and it is phenomenal. When you come back up for air after a month of listening to the soundtrack on repeat, try the also-amazing remix album that features remixes from many popular dance/techno artists.

Along the same lines as Daft Punk, my buddy John Quarles and his friend Tim have started a whole new chiptunes genre called “chipsurf”. Chipsurf is chiptunes backed by surf-style guitar, and it is awesome. Listening to these guys is both nostalgic and gripping, the 8bit throwbacks remind you of the best days of NES music, while the guitar lines attach a new sense of melody and movemnt to the genre. Tim and John’s project is called Victim Cache. At the very least, check out the tune Tsunami Gaiden.

Something a bit more laid back

If you liked the Tron Legacy Remix album mentioned earlier, one of the tracks on there is a remix done by M83. M83 is a one-man electronic band with a definite pervasive relaxed theme. This year M83 released a double album entitled Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. The single from the album to check out is Midnight City.

Another easy-going electronic outfit full of awesome is Healamonster and Tarsier. Their album Cupcake Cave is sure to soothe the soul and get you back to where you need to be.

Along the same lines as H&T is Ulrich Schnauss. I spent a fair amount of time this year listening to his Goodbye and A Strange Isolated Place albums. The track that will sell you is In All The Wrong Places.

Post Rock

I’m a big fan of the post-rock genre of music. My favorite tunes as a kid were always the prog-rock/alt-rock songs that started sweet and quiet and ended with a loud cathartic crescendo 7 or 8 minutes later, and post-rock is ALL about that type of song architecture. If you’re not at all familiar with post rock, do check out Sigur Ros’ album Takk, as that album is the pinnacle of the genre.

In 2011, I listened to Jonsi’s (the singer from Sigur Ros) solo album, Go. I also listened to Mono’s Hymn To The Immortal Wind for several days on repeat. And lastly, but certainly not least, I could not get enough of Saxon Shore’s Luck Will Not Save Us From A Jackpot of Nothing EP, and their It Doesn’t Matter album.

Noise

If the chaotic coffee shop while highly caffeinated is the the appropriate mood for focus, the following three albums will fit the bill at home with volume cranked to 11.

First, 65daysofstatic makes this chaotic noise “mathrock” stuff that’s really hard to pull of in a way that’d hook a listener like me who prefers melody. But that’s just it, the band has a magic touch when it comes to weaving absurd electronic drum progressions beautifully in between truly moving melody. Listening to a 65daysofstatic album is like being wound up for a heart attack and then dropped at just the moment before you itch to turn the music off, over and over. It’s amazing. The 65daysofstatic albums that pulled me through 2011 coffee shop type days were their incredible One Time For All Time album, and their 2010 release We Were Exploding Anyway.

If straight-on heart attack of bewilderment is not exactly what you needed, Broken Social Scene may be more fitting. I learned about Broken Social Scene from the great Scott Pilgrim soundtrack. There’s this really weird but oddly catchy tune on there from the band. It turns out Broken Social Scene is a musical collective that has a constantly rotating cast of characters. For example, the lead singer from Metric appears on a track or two on some albums. Broken Social Scene’s music is basically a chaotic jam session put to tape. The opening track to their self titled album sounds like three disjoint jam sessions coming together as one in the span of a few minutes. It’s not heart-attack high-BPM madness like 65 days, but it’s not verse chorus verse either. It’s odd, and usually laid back, but it’s always chaotic, or perhaps, disjoint. The two Broken Social Scene albums that held my attention this past year were the self titled album, and You Forget It In People.

Lastly, an oldy but a goody that seems to just automatically come out on my coffee shop chaos days now: Nine Inch Nails’ instrumental Ghosts album. If you liked the social network score at all, you’ll love Ghosts. Ghosts is 2+ hours of the social network type music, with more bite, and of course, enough random change between beautiful quiet melodies and maddening walls of noise. Chaos as art at its finest. Don’t knock it till you try it, it’s not industrial mope-pop, at all.

Mope Rock

All that being said, I didn’t get into Nine Inch nails at 16 for their instrumentals, and for those baeurocratic work days there’s an appropriate genre, mope-rock. I’m 30 now, and listening to mope-rock at this age can be downright embarrassing from time to time, but we’ll save real embarrasment for later on. This year there were a few albums I listened to that made the the-world’s-not-quite-right genre a still-wearable badge of honor.

First, the obvious, The Paper Chase’s Someday This Could All Be Yours, Volume 1 is a must listen. My wife and I *loved* their Now You Are One Of Us album and have listened to it for years, but it took a rhapsody subscription for me to do what I knew was right: give this album a spin. Man. It’s as awesome as anything else they’ve ever done, which is saying something. The Paper Chase is like spooky/horror story lyrics over wall-of-noise guitars making sounds guitars don’t make, all carried along by killer drum/bass & piano. The theme of this latest album is natural disasters, one per song. The lyrics are equal parts bleak and beautiful, as are the songs. A straight punk “we don’t give a shit how it sounds” progression leads into a full on orchestra with lump-in-the-throat melodies intertwined, and back again. This is a band that knows how to pull you up and over whatever blah blah you’re getting around to facing, and makes you feel good about the entire process.

Next, something a bit more pedestrian in terms of mope-rock/pop-sadness. Linkin Park’s 2010 album A Thousand Suns is *really good*. Like, you may not be embarrassed for listening to their back history good, it’s that good. I never really enjoyed the band’s early couple or three albums, but their Minutes to Midnight album from a few years back surprised me and showed promise. This one, A Thousand Suns, shows the promise fully realized. The album’s a concept album of some sort about a nuclear holocaust and the aftermath, or something like that. It opens with a chilling sound byte from Oppenheimer talking about the moment trinity succesfully detonated, and then leads into song after song that flows up and down intertwined beautifully. Reviews for the album said it reminded many of how public enemy albums sounded, which makes me want to check out public enemy sometime, it’s that good 🙂

Last, the king of mope rock and sad songs, my friend Greg “The Shark” Shark released a solo album this past year. Greg and I spent many hours in high school listening to The Fragile, everything Deftones, and way too much Radiohead. Radiohead’s influences show the most on Greg’s solo effort, particularly on the Lament For Wolves track. If nothing else, check out The Fall, I lost days of my life in 2011 listening to that track on repeat, vowing for hours to “stop after just one more listen”.

Remasters

You know you’re a full-on adult and “old” when your most cherished albums are being remastered. This can have good, bad, and who-cares effects on your precious memories. It’s kind of a roll of the dice, honestly. In past years U2,The Cure, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Nirvana and even Weezer have released remastered albums. The albums are occasionally “deluxe” sets, so you get some rare/obscure b-sides or demo tracks along with the remastered album, so that can be cool. In the cases listed above, I never listened closely enough to the originals to notice a true difference in sound on the remasters. That’s not to say it isn’t there, it’s just that Pink Floyd has been remastered twice every five years for the past 2 decades, so any variance at all is just too small to notice to me.

Anyway, there are some remasters I’d highly recommend.

Pearl Jams VS/Vitalogy remaster package is fairly amazing, for the VS remaster alone. I remember when VS came out there was quite a bit of news hubbub about it selling pretty well, against predictions. Now that the remaster is out, you can really tell that the record company didnt pour a lot of money into VS the first time around. I never thought of VS as muddy or lacking definition and edge, until I heard the remaster. Some of the better-mixed record-label-money single type songs don’t gain much from the remaster, and WMA in particular seems to suffer a loss of dynamic range to me, but the other tracks being brought up to par makes it all worth it. Pearl Jam’s first album, Ten, was also remastered recently, but I havent checked it out yet (I can’t stop automatically putting VS on :)).

The Smashing Pumpkins also put a couple of amazing deluxe/remaster packages out in 2011 for Siamese Dream and Gish. Both packages include a dvd of a live show from the era, and a second disc including a number of bsides and previously unreleased material. The “Starla” remaster on the Gish package bonus disk pretty much made my year in music, as that’s one of my all time favorite songs ever. Remaster-wise, Siamese Dream shows very minor improvements here and there, much like Nirvana’s recent Nevermind remaster. This is unsurprising as Butch Vig apparently knew what he was doing on the pre-master mix and polish in both cases. Gish shows a lot of improvement though, so much improvement that it’s on my radar for the first time really, the old production was that crappy to me. I’m really looking forward to the Pisces Iscariot, Mellon Collie, Aeroplane, and Adore remasters coming out in 2012.

Pop

Sometimes all you need is a catchy tune, or a nice album full of catchy tunes, and I found more than a few worth at least a listen.

Death Cab For Cuties’ Codes and Keys is a great album to get your day started, and the Naked And Famous’ Passive Me Aggressive You delivers a great pick-me-up when food coma hits around 3pm. Alternatively, the Cults’ self titled effort is a great light-hearted collection of tunes all the way through.

If you liked The Postal Service, definitely check out Owl City. Both of his albums (Ocean Eyes, and All Things Bright And Beautiful) feel like the spirit of The Postal Service with a bit more upbeat optimism flowing throughout.

Finally, if you enjoy the SNL digital shorts from Andy Samburg’s Lonely Island supergroup of comedy, then you really *must* check out 3oh!3’s Streets of Gold album. I can’t tell if these 3oh!3 guys are serious frat-pop or if they’re a satirical comedy troupe, I hope they’re serious, because it makes the album that much more funny. That being said, their tracks are really catchy, fake or real, you’ll feel a bit embarrassed to give it a listen, but you’ll be back listening again and again no matter how silly it seems.

That wraps up the memorable music for my 2011. Next time I’ll cover a list of iPhone and iPad apps that I enjoyed last year. Until then, happy coding, or spreadsheeting, or whatever it is you do.