My homage to the original Donkey Kong

Oh man. I came across this site today that had a "Game Console Controller Family Tree". I know, what's it coming to, but still... I started looking at the controllers and saw this tiny little picture of this very familiar looking, burnt-orange, flip-view handheld game. I clicked on it, and a flood of memories came rushing back to me.

It was the early 80s and i was somewhere between six and eight years old. My most valuable possession was my Donkey Kong game. As soon as I saw the "Game & Watch" logo, I instantly remembered the mini-collection of hand-held games I had at the time. Donkey Kong wasn't the first. There were predecessors.

I remember, quite vividly, playing Greenhouse, Ball, Octopus and Fire, before my parents were kind enough to give me my first flip-view handheld, Donkey Kong. I remember how much those games meant me, and how in awe I was of them. When Donkey Kong came around, I remember neglecting the others for it. It was an amazing game.

Reading Sock Master's description of it made me realize how incredible this game really was. He calls it, "perhaps the single most influential innovation in controllers of the last 25 years." The Game & Watch Donkey Kong was the first game ever to feature "the invention of the cross-shaped control pad." Ho-ly Shit. We're talking ancestral here. I couldn't tell you if I was in love with the game because of its control pad, or it's flip-view, but I can tell you that there was a lot of love in my heart for this game.

A while later, I remember Donkey Kong 2 was released. I remember being insanely excited to get the long-awaited successor to my very precious video game. I played it, and loved it, but it wasn't the same. The magic of Donkey Kong wasn't there. It didn't compare. It couldn't.

It turns out Game & Watch games were made by Nintendo. Before I ever knew what Nintendo was, it was already a huge part of my life. I'm not a gamer, nor have I been one since those days way back then, but I have to say that in the console-wars, Nintendo will always win in my book.

-rohit

ps. the colors of the games were orange and brown... is there some deep-seated, subconscious color-scheme bias going on with tigertronic.tv?

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Dropbox - cloud computing is here to stay

I stumbled across this company called Dropbox earlier and set up an account. These guys have found a pretty solid way to share files/data across computers efficiently, and without headache.

I work on multiple machines, and often have the need to send a file from one computer to another, or even to my phone. Until now, I would have to either email it to myself (if the file was small enough), put it on a thumb drive, or upload it to the website and then download it from the other machine. All those methods are going to be obsolete for me from here on out.

Dropbox syncs a folder across multiple machines. Anything you have in your Dropbox folder on your Mac, is instantly available on your PC (or your iPhone or any other computer you might want it accessible on). It's cloud computing at it's simplest, which always ends up being the best way.

Another thing that's cool is that anything in your Dropbox folder is also accessible online. You can put a file in a folder, right-click and select "copy public link" and then give the link to anyone you want to download the file. Ingenious.

By the way, I'm not in any way affiliated with these guys, so this isn't a peddled piece of news. Let me know if anyone decides to try it out and what you think of it.

-rohit