As a former AP Physics student, I love a game with a good physics engine powering it. Seeing bullets flawlessly arc based on the amount of force put behind them and mitigated by the coefficient of air friction in front of them is always a little bit thrilling, and digital pool balls, perfectly deflected into pockets, put my soul at ease. Sure, I barely passed the course, but that was because I was too busy having a girlfriend and drawing fairies. Yes, it’s possible to do both at once. Explain THAT, physics!

Recently, the internet has given us a vast variety of simple Flash games, all of which can be quickly played in a browser window, and usually for free. Some of these games have enough graceful genius to warrant a subscription fee, and some even make the bold move onto actual gaming systems. Does ‘bored at work’ easily equate to ‘actively playing during your spare time’? Sometimes, it absolutely does.

Line Rider has been a cult-favorite website, elevated to such a status because of its simple, easily accessible execution. The premise is thus : you have two dimensions, a guy on a sled, and you draw lines that he can ride around on. Gravity and slopes in subtle variations control your rider’s path, and if he doesn’t flip over and crash out because of a funky line here or there, you gots yerself a course - the wilder the better. Especially long or interesting rides are captured and dropped into YouTube. Go on over to the site and play around!

Line Rider 2 : Unbound is a sequel of sorts to the online version of Line Rider, presented on the Nintendo DS. It’s an intuitive move - bringing a drawing game over to a system with a touch-screen and a stylus is just smart gaming. If the online version has any drawbacks, it’s that drawing with a mouse is a frustrating and clumsy experience, so ideally, the ability to actually draw your lines with a stylus would cure this.

The game has three modes : Story, Freestyle and Puzzle. Freestyle Mode most closely represents the free-for-all, make-whatever-you-want spirit of the original line rider, which really needs no additions to keep itself fresh. While the online version depends upon gravity for movement, this DS version incorporates a variety of lines that create different physical or dramatic effects for your little sled guy, making the courses even more interesting to create and watch, but easily omitable if you want to stay true to the mechanics of the original.

The ability to draw your lines definitely adds a dimension of fun to the game, but if you have an unsteady hand, your lines will form like the scrawlings of an armless monkey. Who’s had a bit too much to drink. And is choking on a bar pretzel. It’s bad news, and it means bad things for your delicate little rider, who weighs as much as an anorexic hummingbird, based on how often he’s flung from his sled. Fortunately, the game also has a Bezier Curve drawing mode, where the line artist can draw a perfectly straight line and then drag a few points around to stretch it into a curve, not unlike creating something in Adobe Illustrator.

So, the drawing mode is a smart, exciting addition, once you get used to the technical aspects of drawing the lines. Much of the game turns out to be making tiny, slight adjustments to the line paths, over and over, until everything syncs up just right - and since there’s no quick ‘undo’ button, one needs to click from the pen tool to the eraser tool every time you need to make a change, instead of something intuitive like pressing a button to immediately convert the pen to an eraser or to take your drawing a step back. If you’ve constructed a long course, you’ll need to watch the whole thing over again each time you make a change.

Another addition in Line Rider 2 incorporates the Wi-Fi capabilities of the DS. Now, line artists can go online via their DS interface and share their creations with people around the world, whereas the original website didn’t permit this. Tracks can be quickly downloaded (without a preview, unfortunately) and played with in Freestyle Mode or Puzzle Mode. If they’re not suitably awesome, they can also be quickly deleted. At the time of this writing, the online selection was very sparse, but it’ll certainly pick up once more folks purchase the game. I’m a collector of the DS’ Wi-Fi games, since social-interaction-via-Gameboy is still a novel concept to me, and online, pure, competitive Tetris is pure euphoria.

One innovation that would have completely rocked my world would have been the ability to share your DS creations with a worldwide audience via a YouTube compressor or something. As it stands, your audience remains trapped within the DS - which is still an improvement over ‘yourself and your inattentive cat’.

Story Mode pushes your sled guy through a series of puzzles, all of which can be solved with a few cleverly placed lines. These levels are intermixed with some animated cut scenes of cartoonish sledder kids trying to sabotage one another, since the world of competitive sledding is brutal. 515 deaths last year - and that was just from fighting at the ski lodge. The scenes don’t really add too much, since Line Rider’s total lack of story is what keeps it pure and artful, but I’m also in my mid-20s, so perhaps the appeal is lost on me.

Puzzle Mode allows you to create puzzles for the rest of the world to solve, via Wi-Fi upload. The designs start to become fairly intricate, with the involvement of foreground and background details, camera angles and special effects, another interesting (if mostly ornamental) addition.

The translation from online to Nintendo is pretty successful, but the learning curve might be a little disorienting for the oldschool Line Riders. I’m compelled to create either some kind of elaborate course that prominently features dinosaurs fighting robots, or something vulgar and suggestive to give to the world. Even with the endless possibilities, I’ll restrain myself.

Today, just to get out of the house, we set a budget of $15 and let ourselves go out to the rummage sales. We’ve got a houseful of stuff (it’s about time for a rummage sale of our own), so we’re trying to limit how much we bring in, which means tinier budgets. We can’t risk not going out, lest we miss out on something cool.

Pickings were mostly slim for sales; we drove around a bit looking for signs and ended up at a rather sparse sale. It didn’t have a lot of clothes or kid’s toys, which is usually a good sign, so we stopped. There wasn’t too much, but the guy did have a bunch of old video games for sale. I passed on the Super Nintendo cartridges and dug through his bin of old Atari cartridges. Oh, not all the cartridges were in the bin — he had pulled out the ‘rare’ cartridges, stuff he had looked up and was worth something, and priced those separately. The bin was the bottom of the barrel: stuff that’s not worth much, and not even the gamer wants to keep it. Wifey found a Q*Bert cartridge that she wanted just for the label, but it was rather water-damaged so she passed. Two of the cartridges that I picked up had their labels completely fall off upon being touched. The guy was asking a dollar a cartridge.

I did find two worth buying though:

M*A*S*H — In 1983, Fox Video Games, Inc was one of the early 3rd-party video game programmers. Atari did their best to prevent other companies from producing cartridges for their ubiquitous 2600 console, but in 1983 they relented and, in exchange for royalties, licensed programmers the ability to write new games. The gaming division of 20th Century Fox (making them also one of the first media-offshoot game developers) adapted various Fox properties, such as Flash Gordon, Alien, and — of all things — Porky’s, along with an Atari version of their hit TV show M*A*S*H. The TV series ended in early 1983, which meant the game was released post-finale, but the game relies little on the series itself aside from setting. The videogame, according to atariguide.com, has two parts — the first uses the same sort of gameplay as many generic Atari titles: piloting a helicopter, you pick up injured soldiers or parachuting doctors(!) while avoiding being shot down. Between levels, however, sounds interesting: as a surgeon, you use the joystick to ‘remove’ shrapnel from soldiers, a’la Operation. The “soldier,” understandably looks displeased with the foreign materials inside his body, but the huge passageways through his body make removal relatively easy. The game itself isn’t particularly common, but low demand results in cheap prices. I found a few on eBay for a couple dollars, little more than I paid.

E.T.: The Extraterrestrial — If you know anything about this game, you’d buy every single one you see, too. This is actually the third copy of E.T. I’ve owned: the first copy had its original box and instructions, so it went pretty quickly on eBay for a pretty penny; I’ve still got another cartridge in the basement. Despite already having one, there was no way I was going to leave one in the dollar bin at a water-damaged rummage sale. In 1981, Atari was the king of home videogames, and they had no intention of giving up that spot; arguably, their hubris would catch up with them. They spent a bunch of money advertising two big-name games for 1982: Pac-Man and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. They had millions of each title produced, expecting enormous consumer response. Pac-Man has a reputation of being a very poor version, but today it has a nostalgia quality to it, given the frequency I hear the Atari Pac-Man sound effects used on TV. E.T., however, was an enormous flop. Like I said, the first copy I owned had its instructions included, so in interest of testing the equipment, I popped the cartridge in my 2600 and tried to play it. Oh, my lord, it was unbelievably bad. There was really no indication of where you were going, or even what your character was doing, aside from falling into holes, and there wasn’t really any way to tell whether you were in a hole or not. Gamers all over passed on buying E.T., resulting in millions of unsold cartridges in Atari’s warehouses. Atari couldn’t get rid of them at any price, so every cartridge Atari still held was loaded into a truck and driven to Alamagordo, New Mexico. When the remaindered games arrived at the Alamogordo landfill, they were crushed, buried, and a slab of concrete was poured over them to prevent anything from being stolen or salvaged. Seeing that I’ve owned three in the past decade, the scale of the returns isn’t as excessive as one might expect; there could still be hundreds of thousands of these available, even if 5 million still went unsold. Ebay has nearly a hundred of them listed for sale right now, but even if it’s not as rare as the legend might indicate, I think it’s worth a buck to carry some of Atari’s hubris around in my back pocket once in a while. Maybe I’ll even get to play it again someday.

Oh, didn’t I mention that? I sold my Atari a couple years ago — once upon a time, they were a dime a dozen at rummage sales, so I always turned around and sold them once I had my fun. After a point, they ran out, probably because I was buying them all and shipping them off to California eBayers. I guess, if the intent of going rummaging with a budget was to stop us from bringing home useless stuff, the plan failed miserably. Oh, well; I never thought I’d run across a bin of dollar 2600 games, so I may find another 2600 any day now.

While there’s a far greater likelihood that I’ll assume a Jabba-like stature before I’ll ever assume that of a mighty Klingon or a barbarian, I can still live vicariously through the fictional warriors of old. Yes, I’ve watched Hercules and Xena : Warrior Princess, and sometimes, I even stopped looking at the pretty girls and listened to some of the story. I’ve read the books of Gor, and I’ve played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I’m all about the thickly-built warriors, in the most heterosexual way possible.

Which is why I love Robert E. Howard’s Conan. He’s a barbarian, he’s a Cimmerian, he’s a conqueror and a king and an avenger and a… freebooter? Seriously? That sounds more like a jaunty endzone dance than anything a warrior would sensibly do, but whatever Conan does, I’m sure he totally owns it. To the max. And he’s also killing dragons and making out with chicks at the same time.

Conan has been around since the early 1930s, during the revolutionary days of Weird Tales and the emergence of the Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos - a very strange a beautiful time in the evolution of fiction. In fact, the correspondence between Lovecraft and Howard actually precipitated into the intermingling of the Cthulhu mythos and Howard’s world of Cimmeria - essentially making Conan a tangential part of the Lovecraft story cycle, which thrills me to no end. Howard’s character is widely recognized as being ‘the most popular fictional barbarian’, and he’s also spawned a large number of collectibles over the years, outside of the original series of books written about him and Weird Tales magazine - which are collectible themselves in their earlier editions, and fetch hundreds upon hundreds of dollars.

In 1975 (and again in 1979), the Mego company released their action figure version of Conan - the earliest articulated figural depiction of Conan, who would not appear again in a superhero-based line of toys until 2007’s Legendary Comic Book Heroes from Marvel Toys. That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of Conan toys in the interim, but they existed in lines by themselves, including Hasbro’s 1992 efforts, and 2 whole lines of stunning Conan mini-statues released by McFarlane Toys in 2004 and 2005. McFarlane’s line was the very first collection to feature the all-important warrior princesses, monsters, and slave girls that made the Conan series so darned alluring. Dark Horse also released a small Conan statue to coincide with 2007’s Conan video game release, for XBox and PS3.

This Conan video game was the sixth video game to bear the mythos and name of Conan, being preceded by a handful of PC games, and two notoriously awful, but marginally rare, NES games. The popularity of Conan was only aided by the two movies of the same name, starring Arnold Schwartzenegger, both of which were wildly divergent from the original Robert E. Howard tales. A third Conan movie, unrelated to the previous two, is currently being developed, and follows the original storyline more accurately. Sure. the whole Conan franchise also lost a little bit of depth and credibility with the introduction of the questionable Mr. Schwartzenegger to the fray, but the legitimacy of the franchise is being slowly reclaimed.

Conan was also an award-winning Marvel Comics character for a while, beginning in 1970 and illustrated by the legendary Barry Windsor-Smith and John Buscema. The Conan series, as well as its eight spin-off comics, spawned over 600 issues to read and collect. In 2003, Dark Horse comics took over the character, and has been faithfully publishing (and re-publishing) Conan’s continuing comic book tales.

Add busts, high-end statues and trading cards to the array of available Conan items, and you have yourself a generous smattering of bare-chested, heaving paraphernalia. Let’s see Danielle Steel generate THAT.

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This month saw the release of Tetris DS for the Nintendo DS (short for Dual Screen) handheld system, and for anyone who read my previous articles, I LOVES ME SOME TETRIS. Since the Nintendo DS contains a great wireless function and Nintendo themselves provide free online gaming to anyone who can find or provide a Wi-Fi hotspot, I’m finding myself collecting every DS game that I can find which has a wireless gaming function enabled. There’s only about four games so far, but the ability to play video games online against human opponents makes the 35 dollar price of most of these games incredibly worthwhile.

Back in Nintendo’s early handheld days, we’d be paying a similar price for severely limited black-and-white games, which you’d mostly have to play by your lonesome or against the cold, unyielding hands of a computer opponent, unless you happened to have a link cable and a friend with the exact same game as you. Still, full-color TV gaming was the weapon of choice for multiplayer sleepovers and seemed like a more justified expenditure for the dollar amount. I’m constantly amazed that what once cost forty bucks and was the size of a waffle (and just about as playable) is now the size of a quarter, for the same price, and with several thousand times the capability and graphics. Sure, I miss the clunky, pointy game carts of yesteryear, and I’m never comfortable about spending hundreds of dollars on something that I could potentially lose in a small bowl of cereal, but technology pretty much kicks my butt every day.

Today, we’ve reached an age where we no longer have to leave the house to play video games against people, thus removing the one last social vestige of an already antisocial pursuit. Soon, Nintendo will be providing optional catheters in their Bundle Packs so that we don’t have to move at all. Ever. Ever.

This new Tetris game includes six main modes of play, all with variations, and includes the original Tetris. While the new modes of play are ALL fun, including games played with the touch-screen and the stylus, and a game in which you rotate a collection of blocks on the screen to capture blocks that are falling from above, the original 2-button Tetris has stolen my heart all over again. It wasn’t too long before I actually beat level 20 and unlocked the original Tetris music, as well as new dimensions of time and space that I’m now permitted to walk freely between by God, because he’s down with the Tetris too. He was all like, “Man, I can’t even get past level 15!”, and I was like, “Keep on tryin’, man. You’ll get there. I’ll be in the Precambrian Era throwing sticks at whatever lives there.”

Not only are there subtle new game mechanics to twist your brain even more, but as mentioned, you can bring your Nintendo DS to anywhere with an accessible Wi-Fi connection and play against people all over the world. You can play against Hirokazu in Japan while you’re in the bathroom, and no one will ever see your shameful nudity.

The wireless function of the Nintendo DS, I found out, could be accessed at just about any McDonalds restaurant, which are acting as gaming hubs. You know, luring people in with the promise of a sedentary gaming experience and keeping them there with couldn’t-possibly-be-unhealthy foods. There’s something nefarious in this, but I’m not arguing. I live in the middle of nowhere, but even from my dinky little town, there are 19 McDonalds within 20 miles. I ventured to the nearest one to try my hand at online, anonymous Tetris, DS in hand. The wireless reception didn’t work from within the car and I didn’t really want to go into the restaurant, despite my endless appetite for french fries, so I hovered outside the front door on a handy picnic bench, near the Play Place. Parents looked at me funny, as if I was going to abscond with one of their little brats at any moment, but I generally get that look anywhere I go anyhow. Rest assured, I’ve never absconded with anything without extracting money from my wallet first. My wallet, by the way, is a Super Mario Brothers wallet.

I played Tetris against various opponents for about 30 minutes, getting completely obliterated. I had my excuses lined up, though, because one cannot be a Tetris Master without excuses. My hands were cold, it was my first time, the screen had a glare, the connection cut out, the smell of fries makes me distracted, there were wolves after me, people were staring at me from the inside, I left the oven on. Regardless, the online gaming experience was exciting enough to make me go out and get the computer peripherals to create a wireless network within my own house, which I’ve been meaning to do anyhow.

Honestly, like a good 50% of the rest of my life, the network was for the love of Tetris. I’ve been playing at home for a few days and I’ve racked up over 200 wins against internet challengers. I often ponder the question, ‘How many times can a Tetris Master summarily trounce their opponent before one ends a round and lets them walk free? Is mercy a weakness?’

I’m very excited to play Mario Kart and Metroid Prime : Hunters online with this new wireless function also, but I’ll always come back to Tetris. Go ahead. Take me on. Use my friend code : 421594 926954. I’ll be waiting. Like a ninja, in brightly checkered clothing, high in the cubist trees.

Tetris, for me, is a way of life. It’s one of those yardsticks by which intellect, time and the value of one’s secret worth in the world are measured. Being a Tetris master is like being a ninja, except made of squares. Brightly colored squares. It’s like being one of those freak-brained guys who can solve the Rubik’s Cube in 14 seconds, yet still cannot manage to brush their hair in the morning. It’s a little sexy, it’s completely impractical, but it’s somehow deeply rewarding, even if you can’t quantify it.

It’s an intimate, fast-paced digital game. As you play, (alone, against a computer or against a human opponent), you lay your intellect bare. You say ‘These are my naked analytical skills - how do they compare to yours? Please ignore my various moles.’ And all for the love of fitting blocks into rows and not leaving any little gaps behind. Tetris brought on a wave of puzzle-solving based videogaming that hasn’t faded away since.

Tetris existed well before it arrived on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, having been created by Russian native Alexey Pazhitnov in 1985. In 1989, after countless legal battles between Nintendo and Atari for the rights to distribute Tetris : The Soviet Mind Game, Nintendo released the game for both the new Game Boy and the NES at around the same time, in a move that can only be described as ‘stealing my soul forever’. Not long after the release of Tetris, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended. There is no coincidence in this. The US lifted its ban on nesting dolls and those tall, furry hats, and all was right with the world.

Perhaps the exotic appearance was some of the allure of Tetris. Nevermind that Nintendo was directly a product of Japan - any of the games that were brought over were highly Americanized. Nintendo never even released the second volume of Super Mario Brothers over here in the states, deeming it ‘too difficult’ for us to handle. Russia, however, was forbidden, and Tetris game didn’t bother hiding its Russian roots, neither in music or the strangely domed buildings in the title scenes. Did turnips give the Russians super powers? Did they really eat a black bear every morning for breakfast? Could you honestly import their wives? And would Tetris hold the answer?

I got my Game Boy in the early 1990s. Being from a single-parent family, getting a video game system was a really big deal, given the expense of it, so I valued these rare and precious things immensely. Part of this process of appreciation was playing Tetris and Super Mario World until my thumbs fell off and to the exclusion of eating and sunlight, all for months on end. I could bring the Game Boy anywhere (despite the early Game Boys being as large as a forearm and running on four quickly-depleted AA batteries), but the NES version of Tetris had more vibrant music and fancy little scenes with folk dancers if you did a really good job. I still oft think that life would be nicer if a small troupe of Russian folk dancers appeared and did a little jig every time I did something positive.

This love of Tetris did not end there, but by 1990, America was so taken by this new experience of Tetris that Nintendo decided to capitalize on the puzzle gaming genre and released Dr. Mario, as ‘the cure for Tetris’, a game in which one must match colored pills with viruses to eliminate them. This caught on with almost as much fever as Tetris, and I quickly borrowed both Game Boy and NES versions from my neighborhood friends. The Game Trade was powerful in those days. A copy of Super Mario Brothers 3 could often be bartered for all three Mega Man games and The Adventures of Bayou Billy. Puzzle games were given to kids by oblivious aunts who followed the recommendations of oblivious toy store employees, but I was still pretty stuck on Tetris, even with the strange appeal of Low G Man and silent, monotonous vistas of Xenophobe.

My attic holds a copy of the original Tetris board game. The mechanics of the game relied upon players blindly reaching into a box of pieces and presumably NOT trying to feel or peek out the right piece to fit into the empty spaces on their board, which is something that you simply can’t trust a little sister to do. The pieces didn’t get played with so much as ‘whipped at high velocity across the room at eye level’. Still, many survive and have made a grudging peace accord with my retinas.

Nintendo followed up Tetris with other variations of Tetris, while other gaming companies created clones of the game with small changes in game mechanics, looking to capitalize on the popularity of puzzling, but things faded. Hatris was confusing and fairly unrewarding, and Tetris 2 tried to improve on an already perfect formula. Bomb blocks were added and game physics were tweaked. The short-lived and migraine-inducing Virtual Boy introduced Tetris 3D. Tetrisphere for Nintendo 64 was a valiant effort, but system after system, original Tetris always won out. Wordtris never seemed to give you enough vowels, and often had creepy Russian circus photographs as backdrops. And Tetris Worlds for the Game Boy Advance? Don’t even waste your time. It feels like playing with your favorite pet, except your favorite pet is suddenly made entirely of hot dogs. You want to love it, but all of your 5 senses are being assaulted with WRONG.

Still, I’ve made it a point to try my hand at as many of these variations as possible; even online, Flash-based versions, such as this one. As of this month, Tetris has found new life in the form of Tetris DS, a cart for the revolutionary Nintendo DS handheld system. Please stay tuned for part two of my Tetris obsession, when it’ll become even more clear why I don’t socialize that often.