A Doctor Who video game always struck 8-year-old me as a no-brainer. Now that I’ve added 30 years to that number, I know now that it’s an incredibly difficult proposition. Let’s take this quote from the article linked above:

The game will be closely monitored by the BBC, which does not want anything too violent. Former Doctor David Tennant said the game had struggled to get off the ground as some developers had wanted the Time Lord to beat up his enemies and blow things up. David said: “The video game was quite actively developed, but it’s difficult to nail as the Doctor doesn’t blow things up. He’s not Batman, who goes around smacking people in the head.”

Now, allowing for a moment that David has apparently witnessed some BatHeadSmackage that I’ve somehow missed, this raises a very good point. Anytime the Doctor has been seen to use a weapon in Doctor Who, it’s been a last-resort, life-or-death thing. More often than not, he’s faced down those with weapons, armed with little more than words, and he’s lamented others taking up arms countless times. How do you make a game out of that?

It hasn’t been easy going. I’ve chronicled several attempts at Doctor Who games before, from the very first one (released on cassette in 1983 for the BBC Micro) to the most recent PC game, which was a Doom clone, and everything in between.

Let’s take the 1997 PC game Destiny Of The Doctors as an example. It’s a first-person shooter – eek! That violates the whole canon of the show right there. But in this game you’re not the Doctor, but rather some strangely amorphous “champion” fighting for the Doctor. Therefore you can get away with the shooting and so on. But any fan of the show will tell you that this is a gigantic cop-out: what any player invested in the show really wants to be is the Doctor himself. The “champion” character – never mentioned in the TV show before or after the game – is a proxy, and a cheap one at that.

But this is where I get excited that this thing’ll be on the Wii. Hello? Wiimote = sonic screwdriver. It can even make the noise any everything. How freakin’ cool is that? What’s scary is that, according to the article, it’s taken years for anyone on the game-development end of things to make that connection:

Firms had been coming up with ideas for the last three years in a bid to tap into the show’s success. The insider added: “BBC Worldwide, which licenses BBC shows, has been trying to find some way of doing it. But you can’t have Doctor Who blowing things to bits with a laser gun. That would massively change the nature of the show.”

Obviously the wrong people have been trying to crack this particular nut. Do they even watch the show? The Doctor outthinks his opponents rather than beating them to a pulp; putting that into game form is difficult. The Wiimote-as-sonic-screwdriver is almost certain to be the key to cracking that particular puzzle, however.

I’ll be the first to admit that the screwdriver is overused in the show itself, but it could be a lot of fun in the game if implemented properly. And sonic or not, there’ll be plenty of opportunities to shoot things up, since:

It will also feature key Doctor Who baddies including the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Silurians.

Can we say: “Doctor-less, all-baddies death match mode”? Thought we could. As long as that mode isn’t the end-all and be-all of the game, I have no problem with it being incorporated as an option.

And finally, I’m so excited that I’m nearly shaking at the article’s implication that this is a Nintendo first-party title, not farmed out to someone else. One need only look at Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort – and the fact that folks like the head of EA have spent so much time bitching about the fact that they can’t seem to get the general game-buying public to adopt any non-first-party sports games for the Wii – to see that Nintendo has the best handle on making unique games for its own system. Naturally they do, but in the case of the Wii, the gulf in fun and playability between first and third party games is, at least in my experince, vast. Nintendo integrates the Wii controller into its game play where it seems that a lot of other developers cash their checks after using it as little more than a glorified mouse pointer or light gun. I’m elated at the thought that Nintendo is doing this, because, again as the article quotes a BBC insider:

“We’re delighted to have finally nailed down a deal. We went with Nintendo as they have huge appeal for families and Doctor Who is very much a family brand. The Wii console is key for us as it’s something families play together.”

…and that, in the end, is what it’s all about. I look forward to boarding the TARDIS with my own little companion.

Don’t forget to release this in North America, guys.

I understand that OEGE isn’t, and can’t be, a “retro” video game event, unlike OVGE and CGE, but with their school backing they have some unique opportunities and some unique advantages; these guys could actually get some guest speakers and charge it to the glorious cause of Educating People. Last year I was suggesting folks like Richard Garriott, who are reasonably close to OKC, but this year’s show already has a guest speaker lined up, and I have to say I’m impressed – they really seem to be going for the gusto, lining up Ralph Baer, the inventor of home video games, to speak via Skype during the show.

Okay, I’m interested now – and seeing as my chief product for sale is a series of DVDs on video game history, which includes Ralph Baer’s wonderful invention, it’d be just this side of stupid for me to not be there selling this stuff. I’m also well known for setting up shop at both of the Oklahoma shows every year with a working Magnavox Odyssey – the first home video game system, which Mr. Baer invented – so, yeah, I think it behooves me to be there so that the “video game history” angle is out there on the show floor as well as in the lecture hall. Because this stuff isn’t dry history, it’s all still fun.

Unlike years past, I’m not going to break my back trying to get a new DVD ready for this show. I just don’t have the time right now, I don’t think I could crank out anything worth anyone’s time in just 47 days, and frankly, I still have plenty of copies of Phosphor Dot Fossils that I burned for last year’s OEGE and OVGE that still haven’t sold. I’m not planning a hugely elaborate display – just a TV showing the usual loop of the various Phosphor Dot Fossils and Classic Gaming Expo DVDs, a TV where folks can see and play the Magnavox Odyssey (not something you get to do every day), and so on. My DVDs also deal heavily with the Odyssey and its descendants, with actual footage from the machines. It makes sense for me to be there.

Hopefully all of this good news means it makes good sense for you to be there too. (If not, you can always order DVDs from me directly, hint hint!) (Previews of segments of the DVDs can also be seen if you become a fan of Phosphor Dot Fossils on Facebook – just sayin’.)

I’m taking copious amounts of photos and video, will post later. TV Death Squad is playing right now – cool stuff, but I can barely hear myself think.

I’ve also gotten confirmation that the DVDs have arrived in Ohio for CCAG; if you’re going to be in Cleveland this Saturday, go see everyone at CCAG. There’ll be old video games aplenty, up and running (and for sale too, of course!).

I’ve spent this week and much of last week getting ready for OVGE full-time; literally all that’s left to do on my end is print the above price lists for folks to pick up from my table, pack up the car, pick up Kent at some ungodly hour of the morning, and head west. I guarantee plenty of fun for those who head west at a marginally more godly hour to visit the show.

Leave your troubles and your swine flu paranoia behind, and catch some Pac-Man fever. See you there!

The MobilePro does have Windows Media Player, but I haven’t seriously entertained the notion of using it to play music or movies; I doubt it has the memory overhead for the latter, and its mono speaker makes the thought of playing music on it a little unappealing. Also unappealing is its on-board entertainment software: Solitaire. And that’s it.

NEC MobilePro 900 – one of the last models made before the line was discontinued because nobody knew what to do with it just yet. Jutting out of the right side slots are a 2gb thumb drive and a wi-fi card.

I had tried to get MAME CE (a build of the MAME emulator for the Windows CE OS) to work on my old MobilePro 750, but it never did and I forgot about the emulator for a long time; I recently tried it on my new MobilePro more or less on a lark. It turns out that it does work: the 900 series MobilePros had an ARM processor, while the earlier models were build around MIPS processors, which MAME CE simply didn’t work with. The installer program chugged away for what seemed like five minutes, eventually adding a new Start Menu category – Games.

For reasons unknown – though I’m going to guess that it probably has to do with having to keep the memory overhead required by the emulator apps manageable – MAME CE is split into “Red” and “Blue” versions; they each play different games (though all the ROMs are stored in a single directory, in this case on my 2 gig thumb drive). It’s not as simple as one version playing shoot-’em-ups and another playing cutesy games; Red and Blue are probably geared toward emulating different central processors.

A lot of ’70s and other early games appear on MAME CE Red…

…and yet MAME CE Blue plays older games as well, including early Namco games like Bomb Bee and Cutie Q.

One of the biggest liabilities I’ve run into is the somewhat counterintuitive arrangement of the arrow keys on the MobilePro. As with the full version of MAME, MAME CE will allow you to reconfigure the keys to your liking; the problem is that I really haven’t found a better combo that solves my problems. The action/fire keys start with A, then S, and onward from there.

Another issue is, with the MobilePro’s horizontally-oriented, half-VGA display, how big is the screen? This gives you a good idea. It looks great close-up, but a typical square display for a vertically-oriented game takes up less than half the screen.

Horizontally-oriented games like Lode Runner fare somewhat better; it still doesn’t occupy the entire screen, but it takes up well over half of it.

Pole Position is a good case study here; I found that while it occupies less than half the MobilePro’s screen, the resulting display is still larger than I’d get playing Pole Position via Namco Museum on my GBA SP. The game itself, however runs a bit slow – there are games to which this platform is better suited than others, and once you start getting into heavy-duty, full-screen 3-D graphics like Pole Position or I, Robot, there is a noticeable slowdown in game play.

I’ve also noticed that MCR (Midway Cart Rack – i.e. Kick, Satan’s Hollow, Tron, Discs Of Tron, Domino Man, etc.) games are stretched out to the point that they nearly fill the display – great if you absolutely demand that all of your screen real estate is part of the game, but not representative of how the games are meant to look. The horizontal exaggeration can also cause you to misjudge movement during a game.

For analog controlled games, MAME CE on a MobilePro is a lost cause, moreso than trying to control these games at a desktop machine. The MobilePro’s keyboard is, out of necessity, engineered a bit differently than a typical 101 keyboard, and it makes controlling games with somewhat subtler movement extremely difficult, almost to the point of no longer being enjoyable. Centipede is off the table. Games with simple control schemes revolving around a four-way joystick and one or two buttons are your best bet.

Depending on how you feel about it, another big plus – or minus – is the lack of sound. The MobilePro does have a speaker and isn’t afraid to use it, but MAME CE produced no sound. Midway Cart Rack games and Exidy games display sound hardware errors as the ROMs “boot up”; a few other titles do this as well. Considering that I’m most likely to play MAME CE in a public place, or in the passenger seat of a car, or – let’s face it – on the can, the lack of sound doesn’t break my heart. For some gamers, however, it might be a deal-breaker.

This is the first emulator I’ve tried on the MobilePro that’s worked; now that I’ve gotten MAME CE more or less figured out, I’m going to try a few others, starting with Atari 2600 and Apple II emulation, to see what works and what doesn’t. MAME CE is a neat little distraction, but not something I spend gobs of time with: I still spend most of my MobilePro time writing stuff, checking e-mail, reading news, and annoying people on Facebook. But it’s nice to finally have something other than Solitaire to play (though I’ll still admit to playing Solitaire sometimes: when I’m staring down the barrel of insomnia and need to go to sleep, for example).

I’ll probably have my MobilePro with me at OVGE in a couple of weeks, so feel free to hit me up for a MAME CE demo in person.

Metal machine music. After years of work (as in upward of 15 years) and months of renewed speculation, Silva Screen is releasing the surviving music tracks from both of the 1960s Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies on a single CD, with a lavish booklet to boot. The track list (posted at the Doctor Who News Page) is:

Dr. Who and the Daleks

1. Fanfare And Opening Titles
2. TARDIS
3. The Petrified Jungle
4. The Petrified Creature And The City
5. Four Return To TARDIS
6. The Medicine Box And The Climb To The City
7. City Corridors
8. Captured By The Daleks
9. Susan Leaves The City
10. The Jungle At Night
11. Susan Returns To The City
12. Escape From The Cell
13. The Trap
14. The Swamp
15. The Mountain
16. The Cave
17. The Jump
18. The Thals Approach The City
19. The Countdown
20. The Countdown Stops
21. Finale And End Titles

Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

22. Smash And Grab
23. TARDIS Departs (Sound Effects)
24. Opening Titles
25. TARDIS (Sound Effects)
26. London 2150 A.D. (Music And Sound Effects)
27. Daleks And Robomen
28. Message To Grandfather And The Dalek Saucer Takes Off (Music
And Sound Effects)
29. The Mine Workings And The Cottage
30. Preparing The Bomb Capsule (Music And Sound Effects)
31. Smash And Grab (Reprise) And End Titles

The Singles

32. The Eccentric Dr. Who
33. Daleks And Thals
34. Fugue For Thought

Dr. Who And The Daleks – Bonus Tracks

35. Fanfare And Opening Titles (Soundtrack Version With Effects)
36. TARDIS Effects
37. Dalek City Effects

According to Mark Ayres, who cleans up sound on everything from the classic series DVDs and CDs to the much-lamented extinct classic series music soundtracks, there was no source material for the second movie that didn’t have the sound effects mixed in with the music – it was unavoidable. The real prize, however, is that the music from the first movie is free of effects; for those who haven’t done their reading up, Dr. Who & The Daleks (the 1965 movie adaptation of the second story from the TV series, which introduced the Daleks) was a key influence on Austin Powers, maybe second only to In Like Flint and Our Man Flint. This soundtrack will be coming out on October 5th, and I’ll definitely be getting one. Oh yes, I will.

Final Yamato…again. Here’s a trailer for Uchuu Senkan Yamato Fukkatsu hen, coming out in December in Japan. What the heck is this? The English translation is, roughly speaking, Space Battleship Yamato: Rebirth Chapter, a continuation of the original animated series and movies (which we in the English speaking world know as Star Blazers). Before you ask…I have no idea if this is going to be dubbed or brought to the English-speaking world in any form, or when.

I’ve gotta say that this is looking really good. Color me very interested… as soon as it’s dubbed or at least subbed. I’m heartened by the use of the music of the late Hiroshi Miyagawa in the trailer; I do not, however, envy whoever winds up scoring the movie. The thought occurs that they could track the whole thing with Miyagawa’s existing works (the awesome-sounding Symphonic Suite Yamato, a.k.a. possibly the best CD I’ve ever imported from Japan in my life, might actually become the official score to something after all). Anyone new coming into it will have to strike some kind of awesome balance between referring to the existing Yamato musical canon and adding their own voice to the proceedings. And while the transitions between traditional-looking animation and CGI are a bit jarring – almost as jarring as the ol’ BBC “video-in-studio, film-on-location” look – that shot of the Yamato blasting out of the ice is just effin’ awesome.

Good deal! After quite a lengthy stretch with few updates due to a number of family crises, my friend Michael Thomasson is back in business as Good Deal Games. He’s revamped the mission statement though: instead of keeping a large collection in stock, he’s become a clearing house for homebrews for every system imaginable. At some point a while back he seemed to be considering selling the whole kit and/or kaboodle, and I’m glad he didn’t. Michael is one of the rock-steady pillars of the retrogaming hobby: he’s been there since before I popped my head into the hobby, and he’s still there now that I’ve become a slightly reclusive cranky old bugger (see actual photo above). What he says, he does, and if there’s a more reliable person in the hobby to do business with, I’m not sure I know who it is. And let’s face it – the idea of an all-in-one-stop homebrew shop is a brilliant idea. There have been too many fragmentations and schisms for such a small hobby, and a lot of stuff gets “lost” because it’s an exclusive on one site and isn’t welcome to be advertised on another. Good Deal Games can now serve as a kind of retrogaming Switzerland – completely neutral territory, everyone’s welcome. And if that’s not incentive enough for you, Michael’s carrying Odyssey2 and Videopac homebrews that I’ve done the artwork for, and even a 2600 game or two that has the same dubious honor. (Just checked, yeah, he’s carrying the version of Backfire that has a heavily-photoshopped picture of me on the label looking like I’m about to be hit by a bus. Doesn’t that make you want to go and buy one?) They’ve even got repros of an unreleased Star Trek V: The Final Frontier NES game that I’ve never heard of before. Somebody hold me back. What does God need with an 8-bit cartridge?

The long and short of it is that GDG and Michael get my highest recommendations. The place chugs along on the pure love of the hobby – it’s hard to go wrong getting stuff from them.

Goodbye, farewell and amen… I saw in the news that Larry Gelbart, who developed M*A*S*H for TV and was its showrunner for the first few years (i.e. the Trapper / Henry Blake years), died of cancer last week. The number of other things Gelbart wrote in his long career would not only take up its own blog entry but, in all likelihood, its own blog. I’m a second generation M*A*S*H fan – my mother was a huge fan of it, and wouldn’t miss the nightly strip syndicated version of it or the new shows until it went off the air. I’ll be the first to fess up that I didn’t “get” it at the time; my own deeper appreciation for it would have to wait until the years that I spent – ironically – running tapes of it at another local station that had it in strip syndication. Great stuff, and at times difficult to swallow; I suppose M*A*S*H was to my mother what the new Battlestar Galactica was to me. Probably no coincidence that their respective series finales were structured somewhat similarly. (Actually, having made that statement, the more I think about it, it’s very similarly, not somewhat similarly.) M*A*S*H may be one of those shows that’s about a specific historical event, but has only gained more significance with time.

OK, enough geeking out from me for a while. I have kitten bellies to tickle.

This year’s Vintage Computer Festival East will be held September 12-13 at the InfoAge Science Center located in Wall, New Jersey.

VCF is a public event celebrating the history of computers from the 1940s – 1980s. The morning schedule is for lectures and workshops; the afternoons are an open exhibit hall where everything is turned on and working.

Among this year’s highlights are the keynote address about RCA computers in the 1950s, an 8-bit musical concert, BASIC programming challenge, and the build-your-own terminal workshop.

Details are posted at http://www.vintage.org/2009/east/ where you’ll also find the latest VCF news. A 2-minute video montage of last year’s show is on YouTube. Or refer to the simple event brochure. Tickets are $10 for one day or $15 for both days; 17 and younger get in free.

The event benefits the InfoAge Science Center, which is a 501c3 non-profit.

RCA computers from the ’50s? Does that include the Studio II? Oh…wait. Studio II was the ’70s. Not that you could tell by looking.

I also wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the August edition of Le Geek – Ben may not get his site updated as often as he’d like, but it’s always worth the read. I also like the fact that the site is now in gamma – screw being in beta, we’re going straight to gamma! I look forward to the delta and epsilon editions.

With a not-even-remotely-heavy heart, I’ve decided to close my long-dormant MySpace account. I think tonight was the first time I’d logged into it in 2-3 months. Since almost everyone in my friend list over there is in my Facebook friends, I doubt anyone will be too disappointed (in fact, I’ll be surprised if anyone even noticed without me mentioning it here).

Still. No. Kittens.

• I am planning on having copies of my DVDs available at the CCAG show in Cleveland this October. There won’t be a huge number of copies on hand, because frankly, CCAG falls on exactly the same day as OVGE in Tulsa, and I just don’t have it in my budget to do a build-up of a huge number of copies for two simultaneous shows, but there will be some there. These will be at Tim Snider’s table, and all of the DVDs I’ve done so far (PDF, CGE 2K7, Best of CGE ‘03 and Best of CGE ‘05) will be available there.
• Did he say Best of CGE ‘05? Yes he did. I’m editing Best of CGE ‘05 right now, it’s looking good, and although it’s not true HD, it’ll filler yer HDTV with a great big widescreen picture. Best of CGE ‘05 will be a two-disc set, however it’ll be a buck or two more than Best of CGE ‘03 because one of those discs will need to be dual-layer, and dual-layer Lightscribe discs aren’t cheap (see also: CGE 2K7). This set will be ready in time for both OVGE and CCAG, with online ordering beginning after both shows.
• What about that book? I had been crazily trying to get VWORP! together in time for October as well, but I have to announce that it’ll be delayed until the beginning of 2010 now. There are several reasons for this: with the OVGE/CCAG weekend being the target date for Best of CGE ‘05, that’s the item that needs my attention most right now. Putting VWORP! out anytime before the end of 2009 is kind of like writing a book on everything you need to know about the New World in 1491. There’s a heap of interesting stuff happening right as VWORP! would have to cut off for an October publication date: the tenth Doctor’s final episodes, Sarah Jane season 3, the Hornet’s Nest audios with Tom Baker… it just seemed like the least desirable cut-off point possible. VWORP! will wait until January 2010, where it’ll make a hell of a lot more sense to release it.
• And the next book after that? A little thing that we around here like to call Phosphor Dot Fossils. Like I was gonna leave that off the list! Hopefully no later than late summer 2010. After the book, I’d think that the next step for PDF – aside from it being the cool web archive that we all know and love – would either be as a TV project somewhat grander than the existing DVDs, or maybe as a brand name for a line of fine cat care products. Between you and me, I’m holding out for TV.

That’s all for now. Whether you’re in Cleveland or Tulsa on October 24th, in a way, I’ll see you there!

Oh, and one other thing – today is the absolute last day for Summer Byte Bundles! Those ordering links will stop working in the wee hours of the morning. Last call!

1. It wasn’t as bad as I had been telling everybody
2. I could cover up the shaky bits, for the most part, with game video or something else.

The main problem was the state that the tapes themselves were in; I’d stored them in a safe place, but, frankly, they’re old tapes at this point. There was some serious damage to the tape of auction footage, so that event was reduced to “excerpts” (i.e. the parts of the tape I could actually play and/or recover). Everything needed some restoration work to some extent. It’s also not every-minute-of-every-keynote like the 2K7 set was; I didn’t even go to every keynote in 2003, but the flipside of that is that I did record the interesting ones that have turned out not to be recurring phenomena: guests who only came to the 2003 show, or haven’t shown up since 2003. In that respect, this set has some fairly atypical CGE goodness. If there’s one “atypical” keynote that I missed in ‘03, it was the Entex guy, which I now sorely regret; but it works out okay here in that what I do have fills out two 2-hour single-layer DVDs nicely.

The A/V quality benefits greatly from using Nero Recode instead of the combination of SUPER(c) and VirtualDub that I used on PDF Level 2. Nero Recode does a dandy job of de-interlacing video, which is a problem that did get me in a few places on PDF Level 2. The end result is the clearest, crispest video I’ve turned out yet – with the restoration and color balancing, it’s probably better than the original master tapes at this point. I decided to go ahead and salvage every second of raw video that I could, grouping them into two “bonus features” (show floor and CGE Museum), so what you wind up here is, more or less, every surviving piece of video that I shot that weekend. (Well, except for walking through Star Trek: The Experience. I wasn’t sure how well that’d go over on a Classic Gaming Expo DVD… but then again… Star Trek: The Experience doesn’t exist anymore, does it? w00t! Instant collector’s item.)

I’ve already completed the first segment of Best of CGE ‘05, which, as I’ve stated before, will be an all-widescreen extravaganza (because it was all shot 16:9 instead of 4:3). Nero Recode also makes this less of a headache, as it can crop video while recoding it. So the result won’t be a letterboxed picture in 4:3, it’ll be something that’ll fill your HD set from end to end – real live anamorphic video! The first segment finished is Jerry Lawson, who led a group of self-proclaimed “mavericks” at the otherwise rather staid Fairchild Semiconductor to create the company’s only foray into video gaming, the Fairchild Channel F. Fairchild’s machine was the first cartridge-based machine on the market, and Lawson was one of the first (if not the first) African Americans in the video game business at that time, and all of this adds up to some fascinating stories, which the man himself tells with a great sense of humor. Other keynotes recorded in 2005 were the Atari programmers’ panel, the Atari hardware panel (Al Alcorn, Steve Bristow, Steve Myers), Activision vs. Imagic, and Bill Kunkel, along with a truckload of show floor footage (what we in the teevee biz call “B-roll”).

At least two of those panels run nearly 90 minutes. If there’s a drawback to this abundance of material, it’s this: one of the discs may have to be dual-layer, or the set may expand to three DVDs; both options drive the price up just a bit. We’ll see where things land after I’ve gotten more editing done.

In the meantime, I’m still not having much luck on the job front; I had what I thought was a promising prospect in northwest Arkansas, but it turned out not to be. Or perhaps I was less promising than they thought. One thing I’ve run into a few times is that at least half of the previous workplaces on my resume no longer exist, or they’ve changed hands. One TV station I worked for is gone altogether, and the entity that, in theory, holds my employment records now deals only in radio. My resume tries to lay all this out, but it was cited this time as something that bit me on the ass. And…there’s not a lot I can do about that. What’s the preferred solution? Only list the places that still exist and leave gaping holes in my employment history for the others? This is right up there with the numerous rejections I’ve gotten from potential employers in northwest Arkansas who refuse to hire anyone from “south of the tunnel.”

I have applied for one job that’s a once-in-a-lifetimer; it’d make good use of my years of teevee experience, and believe it or not, the two and a half years I’ve been sitting at home doing these little documentary projects may actually help this time. (Even scarier? The years and years I’ve spent doing theLogBook could even be considered preparation for this gig.) There are only around 50 jobs like it in the country…and yet at the same time, my gut instinct tells me there’s probably not a heap of competition for it. But it would be such a better use of what I can do than going back into commercial TV or slithering back into the teevee nooz biz. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for it. If you want to do the same, I can’t imagine that it would hurt.

He got the hang of it pretty quickly… …by exiting the game and playing the heck out of this menu screen:

Someday I’m gonna show him games on my old machines, and he is gonna laaaaaaaaaaugh.