Oh No! Not More Lemmings!

Nope it's not Lemmings, just an incredible simulation. It's called Caveman and if you ever got sucked into a three-hour game of Lemmings then this app is for you. Released all the way back in 1991 by British developer Psygnosis for the Commodore Amiga, Lemmings was a puzzle game in which you guided a herd of lemmings (although they looked more like Fraggles to me) across a treacherous path littered with traps and pitfalls with the ultimate goal of reaching an exit portal, which would invariably lead to another, more difficult level. The catch was, however, that the lemmings never stopped moving and would simply fall off of a cliff or walk into a spinning fan if someone didn't tell them otherwise, which is where the player comes in, assigning specific tasks to individual lemmings to help them overcome any obstacles or dangers that might otherwise get in their way. You could pause the game and plan your strategy, but assigning tasks was all done on the fly and since there was a time limit of just a few minutes, the game could get pretty intense as your cursor flew all over the screen trying to block one group of lemmings from strolling into a fire-pit while simultaneously keeping a builder-lemming busy constructing bridges over a chasm. The game itself was hugely popular and spawned several sequels and conversions for other systems up until about 2000 when the party stopped. Since then gamers have either had to make do with limited-release ports such as the one made for the PSP in 2006 or indie clones such as the excellent Pingus, which runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.

So in early 2010, when a little-known group called mobile1up took it upon themselves to bring Lemmings to the contemporary world of mobile gaming, I about pissed my pants with excitement. Working from a port of the original game that was made for the PalmOS (remember PalmPilots?) the folks at mobile1up managed to strip away the hacks and additions that had been bolted on to make the game work with Palm's unique idiosyncrasies resulting in a pixel-perfect rendition of the game while retaining most of the original source code. Development of the game was tracked on mobile1up's development blog with regular updates until June of 2010 when Sony, who somehow managed to pick up the property after the dissolution of Psygnosis, sent them a cease and desist effectively throwing all of their hard work into the trash. So in a big FU to the man, mobile1up released it anyway, but with all new graphics, sounds and a caveman theme, and it became an underground hit. Sorry, Sony, you had your chance. Caveman plays and feels almost exactly like Lemmings and features all of the same levels and even the same animations as its counterpart and is available for a multitude of platforms:

• iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad 
• Palm Pre / Pre 2 running WebOS 1.4.5 or later 
• TouchPad running WebOS 3.0.0 or later 
• BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0.1 or later 
• Mac OSX 10.4 or later (PowerPC and Intel)

Windows and Linux versions are currently in the works. I don't think there's an Android version yet, but you Android folks are used to not having any apps anyway, right? (just kidding, gawd!)

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CAVEMAN SITE AND BUY THIS AWESOME GAME!

CLICK HERE TO READ THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF LEMMINGS!

Got Chunk?

I'm lazy today so here's the Truffle Shuffle. Have some chunk.

Beam Me Up, Portland!

Leave it to Portland, Oregon to keep feeding us white, geeky, hipster news. The land espoused by SNL alum, Fred Armisen, to be the place where "the 90s never died" and "the tattoo ink never runs dry," has dipped a little further back into pop-culture's history to bring us a new summer pastime: Trek in the Park. Check out the video below - my apologies for the ad - for a glimpse of the Oregonian brother-sister duo, Adam and Amy Rosko, staging dramatic recreations of some of the original Star Trek's most-loved episodes to an audience of folks who are too hip to have cable.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE AND GALLERY ON CBS NEWS

Blood Covered Wagon

Computers in the 21st century are ubiquitous. They're in absolutely everything. It's not even worth trying to list all the microchips floating around your home, work or vehicle at any given time because they are literally everywhere so let's not even go there, OK? However when that first round of 8-bit personal computers invaded elementary schools in the early 1980s, the vast majority of American households didn't even have a digital watch, let alone a personal computer, so getting to spend even a few minutes of quality time with a Commodore PET or an Apple II at your school was like taking a ride into the future. Hell, for me it was like being frickin' Captain Kirk! Of course, most kids of the time, including myself, were already quite familiar with the 8-bit video games that had long lined the walls of arcades, supermarkets and drug stores, so who could blame us when all we wanted to do with those thousand dollar educational computers is play Pac-Man on them, or maybe blow up some asteroids in outer space or dare to protect the Earth from rapidly advancing waves of bloodthirsty alien invaders?! That's what we hoped for. What we got instead was Oregon Trail (sad trombone). One of the first successful educational games for early personal computers, the Oregon Trail was originally developed in 1974 by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium to run on timeshared mainframes and was used to teach kids about 19th century pioneer life. In the game, the player was given a fixed amount of funds with which to buy food, supplies, bullets, oxen and the like, and was sent on his or her way in a crappety covered wagon to travel the treacherous trail that tied together Missouri and Oregon. Ho hum. Actually I say ho hum because in addition to the fair amount of luck required to traverse the dodgy path to the West, the other key component to ensuring a winning game was good forethought and strategy, which I suck at. Plus my character nearly always died from dysentery. So blessed be I when a local Retrogeeker reader suggested that I use this forum to introduce to you possibly one of the coolest retro 8-bit-style video games ever to grace your iThing or Android device (you can also play it on Facebook, but really, who wants to do that?) The game is called Organ Trail and comes to us from a small indy developer called The Men Who Wear Many Hats. I like that. Descriptive and a mouthful, just how I like my coffee. Organ Trail plays roughly similar to the game that it's based upon, except that instead of trying to lead a happy pioneer family across our great nation to a land of untold bounty, you're trying to get your party of ne'er do wells to the Pacific Northwest in a station wagon while fending off a full-on zombie apocalypse. Funny, great retro graphics and sound, and even a decent plot. Check out the trailer below and then you should totally go and buy it! I did!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE ORGAN TRAIL WEBSITE

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE IPHONE APP

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE ANDROID APP

I Like Ike and Tyler Too!

Before the proliferation of media sound-bites and political viral-videos, our would-be leaders used to lie to us using a much simpler and spunky technology called the "campaign button," first shown off by George Washington at his inauguration in 1789. Oh sure, you still see campaign buttons from time to time, pinned to both militant nationalists and radical revolutionaries, but in this world of internet fireside chats and Twitter-based campaign fund-raising, the quaint art of button-sloganeering has really fallen to the wayside, allowing only the most mundane and politically vague war-cries such as "BELIEVE IN AMERICA" or "HOPE" to occasionally surface. Ugh. Where's the whimsy? The boisterous pride? The lightly-barbed attacks? Whatever happened to slogans like "A used FORD is better than a new CARter" and the anti-McCarthy favorite "Joe Must Go!"  Well we've lost our cojones, I suppose. Mass culture-sanitation, thanks to Facebook. You know everything bad on the internet is Facebook's fault, right? OK, just making sure. So in the spirit of the 2012 election year, I suggest you visit the APIC website, home of the American Political Items Collectors (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) for a peek at the information super-highway's most robust collection of resources and information regarding, um, collectible American political items (cue the crickets for about three seconds). Or if you just want to take a look at some awesome old campaign buttons for sale you can visit the site, Older Campaign Buttons (again, an inspiring name). Vote early! Vote often!

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE AMERICAN POLITICAL ITEMS COLLECTORS SITE

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE OLDER CAMPAIGN BUTTONS SITE