Crave

Runte's take on real-world Pac-Man. The photographer designed and made the costumes for the series.

(Credit: Patrick Runte)

While we wait for the big-screen adaptation of Halo to hopefully come out in the next couple of years, we must wonder about the real-life looks video games of yore may have taken. Modern games already look like awesome high-definition movies, but what about their heavily pixelated predecessors?

German photographer Patrick Runte has taken on the idea and has come up with some fairly funny recreations of old 4-bit video games as they would have looked in real life. The games adapted include Tetris, Pac-Man, and of course Pong. He even goes off the grid just a tad to bring us a pinball recreation. Rad.

Runte's a good photographer and there are many more (not so geeky) images on his site. In the meantime, check out a couple more of his game shots after the jump.

Runte's friends dress in costume to represent Pong in the real world.

(Credit: Patrick Runte)

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Color-blind players are not the main audience most developers think of when plotting their games.

They're not who Nitzan Wilnai of VGViews originally built for either when the Tetris-like games Tatomic ($4.99) and Tatomic Lite (free) first became available for iPhone and iPod Touch. Yet enough players requested a color-blind mode that Wilnai got to work.

In color-blind mode, green atoms become purple. Too bad the background still looks red, orange, or brown.

(Credit: CNET)

The color-blind mode, found in the Options menu, swaps Tatomic's green-colored atoms with purple ones. In the free version, players must connect chains of same-hued atoms to clear the row, reminiscent of Tetris's iconic puzzle. The full version of Tatomic, however, gives you 30 levels and two additional modes--one in which you must create puzzle shapes, and another that will only clear an atomic chain when you attach a radioactive atom catalyst.

We tested both of Tatomic's color modes on one of CNET's own color-afflicted, who appreciated the difference right away, but still registered the blue atoms as white in both schemes.

It mattered little--he proclaimed the game "All the fun of the Large Hadron Collider, but without the risk."

This week brings us two balance-board-compatible titles along with a duo of Turbografx 16 games.

WiiWare

• Tetris Party (Tetris Online Inc., 1,200 Wii points): Tetris Party puts a new spin on everyone's favorite shape-shifting puzzle game. Not only does the title introduce various new modes of play, but you can now dust off that Wii Fit balance board and use it to control Tetris pieces!
  
• The Incredible Maze (Digital Leisure Inc., 500 Wii points): Use your Wii remote to balance your way through various mazes and puzzles. Or if you prefer, use your balance board to do your tilting for you.
  

Virtual Console

• Digital Champ Battle Boxing (1989, Turbografx 16, 700 Wii points): Digital Champ Battle Boxing is a boxing game that takes place in the future where you apparently can only fight enemies through boxing matches. Fight your way through various opponents and take down Mother Computer.
  
• Gradius II Gofer No Yabou (1988, Turbografx 16, 900 Wii points): This space-themed shooter is the successor to the original Gradius. This time around, you must battle the Gofer empire using multiple modules and shields along the way.
  

What games do you think are missing from the Wii Virtual Console? Sound off here!

(Credit: Tresling.org)

First the movie, now the arena? This one is more real than reel because there's even an official Web site with video to promote the idea of Tresling, a sport combining arm wrestling with a board game setup and Tetris. To play, each hook, top roll, and press equates a turn of a block. Clearly, wimps need not apply, since failure to maintain your position will send your blocks tumbling all over the place. Lockjaw and grunts optional.

(Source: Crave Asia)

If you're looking for a fun and retro way to kill a few minutes this weekend, The Tetris Game offers up a simple freeware version of the classic game. There's no frills here, but anybody who's got a craving for that four-block goodness will probably find this rendition instantly satisfying.

The controls are mapped to your keyboard's arrow keys. Up rotates the piece, left and right shift it in one direction or another, and down accelerates the rate of descent. Pieces come in red, green, gray, yellow, and blue. You can save your high scores or submit them to The Tetris Game Web site, pause the game, and start a new one, and that's about it. The main page of the Web site also features a lengthy history of the video game.

Along with the lack of complex features that newer versions of Tetris might feature, The Tetris Game has a tiny installer that weighs in at around half a megabyte and it sucks up a wonderfully underwhelming 7MB of RAM while running. The only thing missing is the minimalist electronica of the game's original soundtrack. But for a fast dose of old-school nostalgia, this game doesn't mess around.

At the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference, legendary designer Steve Meretzsky won with his concept for 'Bac Attack,' a 'massively micro-player game.'

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--Get ready for toxic microbes to come packaged in a video game SKU.

Longtime and much-revered designer Steve Meretzsky's Bac Attack, a game that pits man's strategic ingenuity against the march of armies of bacteria, was the winner of Thursday's Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference here.

The challenge, an annual GDC event hosted by GameLab CEO Eric Zimmerman, and a session that always plays to an energized, standing-room-only audience, traditionally pits three well-known designers against each other to come up with a concept for a game that meets some unusual criteria.

In past years, themes have been games about love; games based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson; and games that could win the Nobel Peace Prize. This year's challenge, "The inter-species game," was to create a fleshed-out idea for a game that could be played cooperatively by both humans and members of another species.

"It's a riff on the idea of opening up new markets," joked Zimmerman, well-aware that he was speaking to a room packed with game developers keen on making titles that have commercial appeal. "People are looking for any kind of market for games they can find. So I thought, why stop at homo sapiens?"

The challenge featured the previous year's winner, Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov; Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Leather Goddesses of Phobos designer Meretzky; and Brenda Brathwaite, designer of games like Playboy: The Mansion and the Wizardry series.

And while Brathwaite's concept for an alternate-reality game called OneHundredDogs.com nearly carried the day, it was Meretzky's marching bacteria that was judged the audience's favorite.

Never fear, though. You won't have to worry that going into a GameStop might expose you to life-threatening creatures: the challenge is just to come up with the game's concept, not to build an actual title.

Meretzky began his presentation--each contestant takes 10 minutes or so to showcase his or her design--by discussing other possibilities for a game for both humans and animals. He said he considered something based on a classic English fox hunt--which comes with the possibility for in-game advertising.

He also considered doing something with squirrels, since "they like to collect things, and we like to collect things. So I thought I could train them to be Chinese gold farmers."

But what led him to microbes was the idea that he could reach a potential market of "5 million million trillion bacteria...Now there's a target demographic worth shooting for."

So, he explained, Bac Attack is centered around a new input/output device called the "Tray Station," which projects microwaves onto a Petri dish.

'Bac Attack' tasks players with holding off a marauding army of microbes.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

The Petri dish becomes the field of play, he explained, and the idea is that light projected onto it is intended to stimulate the bacteria.

"The Tray Station reads those moving bacteria colonies as armies on the march," he said. "After an hour, either your defenses have held, or (the bacteria) have emerged victorious and you lose."

He added that there's a secondary game design benefit from working with bacteria.

"Because of the beauty of natural selection," Meretzsky said, "the bacteria that survive next time level up."

The real benefit of the game, though, he added, is that as the bacteria multiply, there's room for monetizing the bacteria beyond just selling the game itself.

And that's because, he joked, you could sell the bacteria to the biotech industry.

"That's one fat pile of loot just waiting for the right publisher to tap into it," he said of Bac Attack. "The game that makes germ warfare available to the whole family. The game that puts the fun back in fungicide. The first massively micro-player game."

For her part, Brathwaite's second-place game design, OneHundredDogs.com, was what she described as "an interspecies Facebook (alternate-reality game)."

The game would feature dog and human challenges in 50 cities around the world. She wasn't entirely clear on what those challenges would be, but the idea is that in each of the 50 cities, contestants would vie to represent that locale as one of the "50 dogs."

So the goal, she said, was to build a player base in each city that would then require cooperation amongst all the players in that town.

The second phase would be "dog fifty-one," she said.

Here, more tasks would be presented, and players would have to work together with those in other cities, all in the hopes of getting invites from a mysterious "Dog 52."

As each new task is completed, players would move up the chain, getting invites from each succeeding numbered dog, all the while building a massive social network amongst the players.

This would continue until players get to dog 92, which would start the third phase of the game, a "massively cooperative" phase.

I loved this concept, but to be honest, I was a little confused by the end game. And I think others might have been too. That may ultimately have been why Brathwaite's concept wasn't the winner. Or, possibly, I was the only one confused, which wouldn't be entirely surprising since most of the people in the room were game designers.

Unfortunately for last year's winner Pajitnov, his concept for Dolphin Ride, a game that would have people riding dolphins in a complex paintball battle, didn't fare so well with the crowd.

But that's not because the crowd didn't express its affection for the Tetris creator. He may have gotten the warmest welcome from the room. But his game was probably the least well-conceived and there was no favoritism.

All in all, the Game Design Challenge was a huge hit, as always. Afterward, I spoke with someone I know who had attended a session in an adjacent room. He said he was disappointed not to have been able to be in the Game Design Challenge room.

With a somewhat sad face, he said that while listening to his own session, he kept hearing the raucous cheers from the design challenge, and that only made him more frustrated not to have been able to be there.

Tetris for Nintendo's Gameboy may well be the best video game of all time.

(Credit: Nintendo)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--I was waiting to talk to Steve Wozniak last night at the 25th anniversary celebration for the Commodore 64 when I overheard him say his favorite video game of all time was Tetris for the Gameboy.

My eyes practically lit up when I heard that because, in a lot of ways, I have to agree.

In fact, as I told him a couple minutes later when I went up to talk to him, one of the things I made sure to do before I left for my Road Trip around the American Southwest this summer was go on eBay to buy a used Gameboy, just so that I could play that version of Tetris while I was traveling.

Woz seemed a little surprised that I agreed with him, but then he enthusiastically told me that, actually, it wasn't just the normal version of Gameboy Tetris that he loved. Specifically, he said, it was the version for the Gameboy Light, a rare version of the machine distributed only in Japan that has a backlit screen suitable for play on long plane rides.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at the 25th anniversary celebration for the Commodore 64 on Monday night. Woz said his favorite video game of all time was Tetris for the Gameboy Lite.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Not only that, he said, but he'd just been thinking about going on eBay to try to find one of the machines and the Tetris cartridge for it. So this morning, I noticed a Gameboy Lite available for sale on Craigslist, and I sent it to Woz. Apparently, though, it didn't come with Tetris. Bummer.

For me, the Gameboy Tetris was fantastic because the game is so amazingly simple, yet addictive. And that actual version just works so well on that machine. It feels good in your hands; it looks good on the screen; it makes a really satisfying sound when you score a tetris (clearing four lines at once) and the scoring system was just about right.

One of the funny things about Tetris is that there are innumerable versions of it, and they all seem to work a little bit different.

Perhaps my second favorite version was a version for Windows I used to play back in the days when I was a technical support "specialist" for Borland in the early '90s. I realized that Tetris was the kind of game that really requires only your subconscious brain. And I know this because I used to play while I was on support calls. And, believe it or not, the more intense the call and the more involved I was in it, the better my Tetris score. I kid you not.

Anyway, this all got us to thinking: What is your favorite video game of all time, and why? If you have a thought on this, please feel free to post into the comments section.

(Credit: Discovery Communications)

Given that Rubik's and even Tetris cubes are particularly popular among Cravers, we thought this "Color Cube Speaker" might be an especially appropriate gadget to feature. The audio specs are fairly unremarkable, but that's forgivable because a product like this is all about the visuals, as indicated by its description: 48 colors, 16 multi-color cubes, 4 color patterns--you get the idea.

Oh, and if you happen upon a particular combination that strikes your fancy, you can freeze the colors in that pattern forever. But that might disqualify it as a "color-changey" objet d'art, which would undoubtedly upset our colleague Caroline McCarthy to no end.

(Credit: Tetramine Day)

Tetramine Day! All Tetris lovers should get over to Bologna Italy for this giant meetup September 30. The catch? All you have to do is bring a tetramino made out of 60x60x60-centimeter squares, like the one you see here to the left. Designers, i think this means you can get creative on it, and decorate your tetramino as you wish... Still baffled as to how to make a giant tetris piece? Check out the video!

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