Do video games tease out the latent conservative in all of us? That’s the last line in this Monica Pitts piece about The Sims, Civilization, and more. (warning: Prospect.) It’s a good excuse to share a few thoughts on this front that I’ve had for a while, and get reactions from a few of you who play different genres of games than I do. (warning: long.) Jonathan Last writes, in response:

In theory, I really applaud this Monica Potts pieces in the American Prospect because it’s a serious, but not totally joyless, exploration of an interesting aspect of videogames. But in practice, Potts seems so torn up by the politics of everything around her–Civilization, the Sims, 24, The Blind Side (a “racially problematic movie”)–I found myself wondering how exhausting she must find daily life.

Also, winning diplomatic (vote at the U.N.), technological (space race to Alpha Centauri), and cultural victories in Civ isn’t as hard as she makes it out to be on the game’s lower- to mid-levels.

I’m not a Civ player, but I think all that Pitts is really hitting on is something that’s a much simpler thesis, true of nearly all non-puzzle focused video games:

1. Game designers are overwhelmingly male
2. Most video game players are male (exempting casual/online games, a few MMOs, and The Sims)
3. Most males would, if they admit it, prefer to blow sh*t up as opposed to reason with it

In other words, most of what she’s criticizing is masculinity, not conservatism — though the defense of traditional masculinity is itself an element of modern conservatism. (I shudder to think what this piece would look like had she been reviewing, say, God of War III.) But the point is that most games that go beyond the board/arcade mockup — certainly all FPSs, most RTSs, and nearly all RPGs — offer the player an opportunity for rampant destruction with near-invulnerability. FPSs compress this to a matter of seconds: Start, beat down a guy, beat down another guy, get killed running round a corner in some embarrassing fashion, laugh at your own foolishness/curse at the game, press respawn, repeat. Oh, and here’s a handy on-camera depiction of this dynamic, starring Jimmy Kimmel and Black Mamba:

Note: Of course, the women who deploy the “nuke it from orbit/only way to be sure” approach often become cultural icons because of how much they stand out. The best part of that ad — which is in every way superior to the crap game Black Ops turned out to be — is the shotgun girl, who became rather famous in her own right among the gaming community, and not just for her perfectly executed Mossberg technique.

Female gamers inevitably embrace this winners and losers scenario, even as they still tend toward the casual ongoing game with embedded fashion rewards (see Animal Crossing’s “And your reward is: clothes!”). WOW has a ton of female gamers, and so do other MMOs — and they’ve always been about the fabulous loot, sometimes with hilarious results. Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite New Yorker pieces of all time – Elizabeth Kolbert on Ultima Online:

U.O. took more than two years to design, and, according to Koster, who joined the development team in 1995, a great deal of that time went into trying to perfect what was known as the “resource system.” Under this system, both natural and man-made objects were coded according to the imaginary resources that went into them—a sheep, for example, was a couple of units of meat and a couple of units of wool—and the total pool of each resource was fixed, so that there would always be a certain amount of meat in the world and a certain amount of wool. One of the goals of the system was to produce a naturalistic and therefore dynamic environment: the sheep would get eaten by wolves, and as the wolf population grew the sheep would decline.

The resource system had many features that participants in the early tests of the game found cool. “Players really liked seeing the wolves attack the sheep,” Koster said. “If wolves stayed alive a long time, they got cannier and stronger and smarter and deadlier, so you’d run into these old grizzled wolves that had been around the block. These wolves would eat sheep even if there were no players nearby. They were actually living out their little artificial lives out there.”

Even as experienced gamers, Koster and Vogel were taken aback by what happened next. U.O. went live in late September of 1997, and by early October Britannia was on the brink of environmental collapse. “The creatures had all gone extinct, because people had hunted them out completely,” Koster recalled. “The land was completely deforested, so no more wood was growing anywhere. And all the mines had been mined out.” Players even assembled teams to hunt down some particularly cunning wolves. “These wolves got to be so deadly that a single player had no chance against them, because we didn’t put an upper cap on how smart they could get,” Koster said.

Under the resource system, players could gather raw materials, like ore, and make them into finished goods, like armor, which, once used, would begin to break down and reënter the pool as raw materials. Players, it turned out, liked to make things—they were turning out hundreds, and even thousands, of swords and shields and gauntlets—but instead of using them, or throwing them out, which would have had the same effect, they hoarded them. One player reportedly had a collection of ten thousand identical shirts. The result was that there were hardly any materials available to replenish the pool, which deepened the environmental crisis.

At first, the design team tried to deal with the situation by funnelling in more resources, but these, too, were quickly grabbed and hoarded. No one could figure out how to keep the game going without giving up on the system: in the virtual world, as in the real one, economic growth and ecological stability can be tragically difficult to reconcile.

Now the game is programmed so that the servers continually add more ore and sheep and wolves to the landscape. This largesse has solved the mass-extinction problem, but not the hoarding, which continues, contributing to server lag. Why players hold on to so many essentially useless items remains a mystery. When I asked Koster about it, he said, “Why do you have all the junk you have?”

Back to the moral question: People don’t want real life when they play games, but they increasingly want something that makes sense beyond just the constraints of the gaming universe, where tactics which make sense have results which make sense. Where people get pissed off online is when the results don’t match up with their efforts. This takes me back to Bioshock, the one game that really had that reward matrix right — if you did the “right” thing, you were taking a short term penalty for a long term end-game reward, while if you did the “wrong” thing (and yes, it was too wrong even for me, who admittedly plays all games as an interstellar a-hole), you were rewarded in the short term but had an end-game that was profoundly unsatisfying and bittersweet.

People want tangible rewards and penalties within games which resemble their expectations about real world choices. This is even true of a game like The Sims — functionally, a family sitcom simulator. Gamers want these little avatars and NPCs to react in realistic fashion, even if it’s extra-realistic, and when they don’t, people get frustrated. (If only a morose Danny Tanner had been able to destroy his entire family with a poorly constructed gazebo, life would be very different.)

In recent years, game designers have increasingly deployed a wider range of choices for activity, but it’s essentially all imprisoned by the binary: good/benevolent vs. evil/malicious, and sneaking/hiding vs. stabby/stabby. The former choice is typically so obvious as to be ridiculous, and the latter choice is just about tactical preference. Either you take the circuitous path which typically results in traipsing around in search of MacGuffin number 17 in order to end senseless argument between NPC 1 and NPC 2, or you can take the more direct “I just leveled up my handheld nuke and I am damn well going to use it” method. In other games, you don’t have any choice at all. I think Uncharted 2 is the greatest video game I’ve played in the last decade, and it’s basically an interactive Indiana Jones movie, a rail shooter with no difference in experience for the user.

A friend and I were recently discussing how the addition of party units has made this a more interesting dynamic. Dragon Age, Mass Effect, KOTOR and other similar games offer genuine choices and fundamental ramifications for the paths you take which effect NPCs which (if written well and paired with quality voice acting) may actually motivate you to do something different in the way you play. For RTS games, though, the moral choice dimension typically feels tacked on and unnecessary (you bought this game to conquer, not to cultivate).

Frankly, though, I think again that only the original Bioshock posed choices which made most gamers think for more than ten seconds about what you would do. Shadow of the Colossus actually posed the same choice, but the very act of playing the game decided which path you took, as the Penny Arcade guys noted:

The dread starts at the very beginning, simmering in your gut, and it never gets better ever – hour upon hour. You know immediately that you are engaged in something like evil, if not evil itself, but our appetites as players demand that we seek objectives and conquer them – and the game scourges us for this dereliction of conscience. The technology at work often obscured the game itself, but the emotional wavelength has resounded years after the fact. At this late hour, I can recall no camera foibles or performance valleys. All I can recall now is the black bargain, and concentric waves of anguish.

An aside: Shadow is often cited as a game which explodes Roger Ebert’s thesis — but I tend to think the “Art” debate/construct is a pointless distraction. I think interactive entertainment is a different category because the viewer is a key element in the path taken. Besides, Ebert gave Godfather III more stars than Godfather II, so WTF does he know about anything (are the Resident Evil movies art and the games not? Who cares besides an academic?).

The real step forward for video games will come when people feel like there are true ramifications in-game for the choices you make within this moral/method framework. We’re not quite there yet. You can make decisions for one crewmember over the other in Mass Effect 2 and still beat the game, and what do you care if the psychotic escaped convict dies over the gravelly voiced alien? One of the flaws that’s becoming more apparent is that the writing hasn’t kept pace with the technology — which works out a lot like movies which have a great cinematographer with a sense for drama, but a terrible script which kills the mood (in other words, like 90% of action movies).

This circumstance tends to result in games that you know will be nowhere near as good as their trailers. The latest example is from, well, this week:

But all of these blockades can be conquered — indeed, are being conquered, step by step, with new and innovative approaches which makes games more and more real, creating dramatic experiences that stick with you long after you set down the controller. With the power of advancements in design and realistic, movie quality acting, the potential is here for a powerful entry. I personally think it will arrive in the form of a Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven game (which is basically what all these groups of allied NPCs games are, repeated over and over again across genres) which goes beyond sheer escapism. In order for a game to be impactful, you need to have a genuine element of “losing while winning” — beating a game but not being able to save/protect your allies. This adds a degree of complexity to the emotional impact of playing a game. Consider: Saving Private Ryan only works if you care about Tom Hanks and Matt Damon — if you don’t, well, they’re just Starcraft sprites. That’s the challenge now for the designers, writers, and minds behind the video game industry now: they should want you to win, but feel genuine loss in doing so. As Brynner muses at the end of his entry in the genre, “Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.”

The first game that puts together all these pieces, fully realizing this new dynamic, will explode beyond silly constructs of politics and artistry debates, and become a true cultural icon as more than just interactive entertainment. We’re not ready to take that next step yet, not technologically, not in the writing quality — but we will be, soon enough.

I‘m sure many of you who love 1) football and 2) video games with the obsessive passion I do are fully familiar with the much-debated EA Sports monopoly – thanks to a ginormously expensive arrangement, they are the sole licensee of the National Football League, and use it to produce a handful of games – NFL Street, Head Coach, and of course Madden, all of which make them a ton of money. Biggest dog on the block. Have been forever. Inspires a huge following. Now if only the games they made were…more fun to play.

My top five favorite sports games regardless of console, in order, are: NCAA Football 06 (see! I don’t hate EA! This is about as close to perfect as a College Football game will ever be), MLB 08 The Show, Tecmo Super Bowl, NBA Jam, and Madden 64. None of these really get it right – Patrick Hruby had an excellent piece on why – but they were realistic enough to be true to experience, to reward the right decisions and punish the wrong ones, and fun to boot. (Remember fun? It’s what we had before setting a simple run-stopping defense required 14 button pushes).

Here’s the problem: last year’s Madden release was the first iteration of the game in history to sell significantly fewer copies than the prior iteration of the game. Like, almost THREE MILLION fewer games sold. EA lost 1/5th of their revenue, just like that. Now THAT’s gotta be fun.

I have more respect for EA – if you can call it that – than a lot of other gamers. Gamers look down on EA for feeding the sheep machine of beer drinking NFL fan frat boys, while gamers wear black drink Bawls and babble about how nobody appreciated Psychonauts. But it really is hard to put out a fully updated game every year on the clock, an ever expanding franchise system (run up to 30 years of simulation, imported draft classes with stats from NCAA games, realistic player performance, etc.) with all the marketing entailed and the vastness of the NFL property encompassed in one label. But when you get a quality experience – ESPN’s College Basketball game is a great example – it really is amazing how realistic these sports sims can be. The baseball games are just phenomenal now – when I have The Show running, the call of the game sounds so pitch-perfect that you’d think you’re listening to a radio broadcast of a real MLB game.

The EA designers really do respect the game, and they try hard. They’ve even gotten online at Operation Sports’ Forums to answer questions and gather glitches. And they’ve already put out an initial patch. But there’s no question that the most recent two games – the games since EA signed the deal to have a monopoly on NFL video games – have had major issues. Major issues as in, such a collection of glitches and problems that the games just don’t work as accurate simulations of the NFL.

I passed on last year’s game, along with roughly three million other people who’d bought Madden in 06. But I bought this year’s edition, primarily because I don’t have a single pro football game to run on 1080p (yeah, I know this one’s upscaled from 720 still), and it’s been 2+ years, so I figure this has to contain more than just a roster update. So I played a few games online, messed around with some of the new systems, and start a franchise. And here’s what happens:

Game one, week one. This is the game scheduled for right before McCain’s convention speech, opening night at the Meadowlands. They’ve got some great opening shots. The new voiceovers are decent. A lot more of a cinematic feel to the game, right from kickoff. The playbooks still suck in terms of a general lack of accuracy, but the play stats seem more accurate – nothing’s ridiculously exaggerated. It’s a close game, back and forth. The Giants pass rush is accurately fearsome, but their secondary is weak, and they get burned on the playaction. It’s 16-10 Giants at the beginning of the 3rd, but then a long drive, heavy ground game, for a TD. It’s 17-16 Redskins with minute left.

The CPU Giants get the ball back. They’re driving. The video game crowd is getting louder. Manning gets sacked, twice, but then they’re making long passes to the slot receiver, picking on the SS (starter got injured in simulated preseason). But time is running out, and they don’t have any timeouts left. Tick tick tick. It’s 4th down, they have to go for it. And then with 10 seconds left, they hit Burress along the sideline. Landry knocks him out of bounds at the 32. Only enough time for one 50+ yard attempt in the windy Meadowlands. It all comes down to this. Get read for the wide cinematic shot of a nervous Lawrence Tynes.

And then the CPU sends out the punter.

I started laughing. There is, of course, no earthly reason, no acceptable reason, NO freaking POSSIBLE reason that the AI would ever do this. EVER. It’s not even like it was fourth down and they were giving up – or the CPU couldn’t tell what time was on the game clock – it was just ridiculously bizarre. They have ten seconds and a 1st down on the 32. They can chuck it toward the endzone. They can kick it. I cannot believe what I am seeing. It is a travesty. As the kangaroo said: WTF, Mate.

They punt. Pooch kick through the endzone. Game over. Win.

I love football. So I hope, against all hope, this game bombs.

Video game ads can be, quite frankly, terrible. If you’ve watched any TV appealing to the nerd demographic, you’ve seen them. Horribly forgettable and captive of their genre, they use the same crunching music over and over again, the same jumpy cuts from one FPS kill to the next. Even good games can be made to look uninteresting and cliched – while great games, like the beautiful Shadow of the Colossus, just aren’t the sort of things that play well in the 30-second ad format. It’s similar to movie trailers that way – the more features, the more complexity, the less ability to simplify and sell – so a crappy and formulaic genre film paired with a recognizable drumbeat, an ominous voiceover, and a quick jump cut at the end is transformed into nicely motivational preview, while plot-heavy indie films can be harder to scale down. Sometimes impossible.

That said, after seeing the PS3 ad mashing up Shakespeare’s Henry V St. Crispin’s Day speech tonight, I was reminded that really is some quality ad work out there. So here’s a quick list of my personal Top 10 Video Game Ads.

The only rules: no fan made inclusions – otherwise Half Life Full Life Consequences or Half Life in 60 Seconds would take the cake, and no print media, even though that’s where some of the best work has been done (who can forget the impressive Divine Comedy PSP promotion).

10 – Water Balloons

A devious little ad promoting the online multiplayer capability of XBox Live, set to the creepy strains of “Teddy Bear Picnic.” Frank Budgen has done some great work on this front – he worked on at least three of the ads on this list, besides his work for Nike and other big names.

9 – Gears of War: Mad World

This is on here mostly as a contrast with the kind of FPS game ad I noted before. It’s similar in some respects to this ad for BioShock set to “Beyond the Sea”, but the Gears ad featuring Gary Jules’ Mad World has an enduring following, and hits the right note for Gears’ post-apocalyptic environment.

8. George Plimpton doesn’t know Henry Thomas

This ad just gets more bizarre every time I see it. George Plimpton was the spokesman for Intellivision, and made a host of good ads for them, but the humor here is that Henry Thomas had just finished making E.T. – the idea that Plimpton wouldn’t recognize him was just ridiculous.

7. Pole Position

Turn your speakers down for another throwback. “Hey! You look like a real jerk!” “Well, I am a corporate executive…”

6. Mountain

Another multiplayer ad, with much the same feel as the XBox one, albeit for a different system. But I love this one more, not just for the soundtrack, but the perfect encapsulation of the exhilarating feeling you’ve experienced if you’ve ever broken into a national Top 100 list (I’ve only done this once – Warhawk, right when it came out) on a multiplayer game.

5. Ratchet and Clank

The Ratchet and Clank ads were ahead of their time in their Youtube-esque feel. I always liked the one with the gravity boots best. Also, Cloverfield is totally a ripoff of these ads.

4. Halo 3

These are all ads from the Halo 3 “Believe” campaign, which are just a phenomenal representation of the war documentary feel. I wish the game was as good as these ads – but I’ve always loved the initial teaser, which ran during the Super Bowl, even better:

3. PS9

Now this is a classic. There is still a minor cult around this ad – and a running joke that whatever console problems there are, they’ll be fixed at the PS9 stage – and the design in it is excellent. The only problem: at the rate we’re going technologically, I doubt we’ll have to wait til 2078.

2. “Banned” XBox Shooting ad

I still kind of doubt that this ad was actually “banned”, as opposed to just released as a bit of internet fodder. But it does take me back to the days of running around the backyard with fingers raised or nerf guns, and the inevitable arguments that would emerge about whether someone got hit or not.

1. Double Life

By far, the best ad ever done for any game system ever. And one of the few bizarre ads created for Sony (and there have been a lot of those, many of which are magnificent triumphs of awful) that actually works. This doesn’t just work: it speaks to anyone who’s ever played a game and loved it so much as to enjoy “a life of dubious virtue.”

This week, there were more than nine thousand Diggs for this Youtube Vid, “Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit.” The vid itself has over 780,000 views at the time of this posting, and no wonder, since it primarily consists of a t-shirt-and-underwear clad girl gyrating in time with the Wii Fit’s hula hoop game.

It’s a simple construction: sex sells. And I’m sure that any boyfriend would be proud to post this. Except that, on further inspection, this looks like it’s just another viral ad – albeit a somewhat edgy one for otherwise child-friendly Nintendo. Shoemoney lays it all out:

The first clue to me was the username on YouTube: tinsleyadvertising

Then a quick search on the Tinsley Advertising site lead me to the employee page where I found 1 guy who looked very similar to the guy in the video. His name is Giovanny Gutierrez.

From Gio’s Bio:

Giovanny Gutierrez
Director of Interactive Media

Gio comes from the future. He is perfectly versed in most programming languages, dreams in code and can’t sleep when his pixels aren’t in order.

As Tinsley’s Director of Interactive Media, he creates web, e-mail and interactive marketing solutions that perfectly integrate with television, radio and print campaigns. Gio is a master of e-commerce, having created web portals for scores of businesses. He was founder and creative director of web-design firm Ionic Studios, teaches digital web programming at Miami-Dade College, is a certified Macromedia Developer, an Apple Certified System Administrator and a Certified Internet Webmaster. He’s also won numerous awards and accolades in the web design circuit.

Gio will be your point man on anything even remotely futuristic. Be nice to him or he will hack into your bank account.

Then doing a quick search on flickr with those tags we come across some interesting photos also tagged as tinsley which also give us clues as to who the girl is in the video. It appears to be another tinsley employee named Lauren Bernat.

If you want to see photos of Lauren and Gio fooling around at what looks like an office outing, head on over there. What is the internet coming to if you can’t even believe that a hugely popular web video with a gyrating female is honest and sincere, instead of some devious capitalist plan?

Christine has the Wii Fit in DC right now, or we could try a more honest substitute.

Update: The Consumerist is all over this.

For a presidential candidate who has based so much of his message on an appeal to a new generation of voters thirsty for hope and change, Barack Obama said something a few weeks back which almost seemed – dare one use such an epithet – uncool.

Speaking to an audience in Indiana, Obama talked about the latest national ill he hopes to cure from the Oval Office: the scourge of video games, embodied by the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV. Admitting that he was only prompted to make the remark based only on a morning news report about how the game will “break all records and make goo-gobs of money for whoever designed it,” Obama spoke in the stilted, uncertain tone politicians tend to use when they’re describing a subject with which they have little familiarity. Here’s a hint to listening: it has the same false certainty of Republican Senator Ted Stevens when he infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes.”

“These video games are raising our kids,” Obama said. “Across the board, middle-class, upper-class, working-class kids, they’re spending a huge amount of their time not on their studies, but on entertainment.”

Obama’s remarks don’t come from out of the blue – they’re just the latest in a series of steps that set up video games as an opportunity for him to bolster his “values” street cred for a general election. In February he urged University of Texas students to “turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy,” in another dated reference. And in 2006 Obama rather rudely returned a donation from Doug Lowenstein, then-president of the game industry’s Entertainment Software Association.

Obama isn’t alone in his dislike for gamers – during her time in the Senate, Hillary Clinton introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, which would’ve expanded the regulation of game sales and imposed heavy penalties on stores who accidentally sold the game to underage customers. And more than a few politicians in both parties took to the airwaves in anger in response to the release of one of Rockstar’s previous iterations of the GTA series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the “Hot Coffee” mini-game that could be unlocked within modified versions. But it’s clear that when it comes to video games, there are far fewer Republicans who have a problem – this is a Democratic issue.

What is it about video games that infuriate so many Democrats? What is it about these games that make them emulate ambulance chaser Jack Thompson, the ever-present clownish Florida attorney who would probably find a way to blame video games for acne and crabgrass? And why is it that these political leaders refuse to acknowledge the plain truth: that the video game industry as a whole has undergone a massive change for the better in the years since Tipper Gore’s crusade against the evils of Ice Cube?

Over the past eight years, the Federal Trade Commission has significantly stepped up their monitoring of the video game industry. The unspoken message: shape up, or we’ll start cracking down. And to their credit, the industry responded as we would hope responsible members of the marketplace would: they stepped up their support for self-regulation, they made the rules clear for gamesellers, and they made a sustained effort to educate parents on the ESRB game ratings that are now the industry-wide standard.

According to the FTC’s 2007 report on their “mystery shopper” monitoring program, the area of greatest improvement over the past eight years has by far been the video game sector. In 2000, 85% of underage customers teens were able to purchase Mature-rated games – today, that number has been more than cut in half, down to 42%. By comparison, 39% of underage customers were able to buy an R-rated movie ticket – and that’s comparing a purchasing system with a stagnant model that has been in place for more than thirty years to one that has expanded drastically, rocketing to $18.8 billion in sales in 2007.

It’s not just the industry that’s matured, either. Gamers themselves are growing up – according to research by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, over 35% of parents American play video games, and 93% of their children, numbers that will only increase in the future. Engaging systems like the Nintendo Wii and the vast arena of online play have taken video games from a pursuit for teens alone to a cross-generational platform for group entertainment. And as Harvard psychiatrists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson find in their new book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games, the overwhelming majority of young players use games not to play out violent fantasies, but to relieve stress and relax.

Obama’s tired anti-gamer rhetoric about slacking and laziness starts to sound particularly silly when you consider the creativity, ingenuity, and strong social conscience at the heart of the grown-up gamer community. For an example, one need look no further than Child’s Play, a charity founded in 2003 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of the webcomic Penny Arcade, which has given over two million dollars in donations from video gamers of toys, games, books and money delivered to more than 40 children’s hospitals worldwide. Not bad work for a bunch of underachievers.

If Barack Obama wants to take on video games as his latest straw man for America’s manifold problems, that’s his business. But he should be smart enough to recognize that gamers can’t be caricatured anymore: too many people have played these games without being inspired to do violence and mayhem. Gamers look increasingly like America as a whole, and they want to take responsibility for the upbringing of their own children. The same Hart study found that 85 percent of voting parents say that they – not government, retailers or game creators – are responsible for monitoring their children’s exposure to games. Sorry, Clinton and Obama – that’s one less area where voters want the government to play daddy.

Let’s give the Illinois Senator a pass on this one, though. It could be he’s just stressed out from the campaign trail. If he wants a break, he might consider a trip to Liberty City to blow off some steam. At least it’ll take his mind off of whatever Rev. Wright is up to today.

originally published at Right Side Politics

>> Last year was the first year since I could afford a console that I didn’t buy a single version of Madden Football – I settled for NCAA Football on the PS3, and I remain quite happy with it.  Turns out that last year was also the first year in a long time that sales of EA’s cash cow declined.  But next year?  Yeah, I’m gonna have to put up the coin for this. A jam-packed 20th Anniversary version with #4 on the cover?  Nice.  I just hope the Madden Curse of old doesn’t mean that Favre falls off his riding mower and breaks his leg the week it comes out.

>> Salvador Dali’s Pinball and other beauty from the Atari Age.