I admit it. I love video and tabletop games. Growing up, we had a Sears Telegames console (a knock-off of the Atari 2600) that I played for many years. I broke the joystick controller several times playing Bruce Jenner’s  Decathlon, violently swinging the plastic arm back and forth. We never had an Intellivision but I did get a Colecovision. I remember the baseball and football games with the four trigger buttons and the number pad were my favorites.

For Christmas one year, I got a Nintendo with the robot and pistol. I remember learning to shoot with Duck Hunt and learning every trick in Super Mario Bros. I’ve been trying, in vain, to explain to my son that the controller seen in Wreck-It-Ralph is from the original Nintendo and the secret code is from one of the games (Contra, I think).

I just finished playing the Back to the Future game from TellTale and I’m preloading Titanfall now. Since I’m a child of the late 70s and 80s, Back to the Future was one of those great movies that was a must-see growing up. The new games are a continuation of the movies with some interesting twists. The game itself is not hard, but some of the puzzles are not easy to figure out, just odd. There are a lot of references to BTTF movie and the 80s in general. The voice actor they got for Marty McFly does a great job and it does sound like Michael J. Fox. MJF does a few voices in Episode 5 so he’s not completely missing. Christopher Lloyd, who did the funny Huvrboard commercial recently with Funny-or-Die, is excellent as Doc.

Now, Titanfall is going to be interesting. I’m usually not a big FPS player; I hated Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty jumped the shark after Modern Warfare 2, but I’m a sucker for giant robots. I actually saw RobotJox in the movie theaters. That is one of those awesomely bad movies you have to watch sometime. Pacific Rim was absolutely geektastic for me. I played Battletech on the table and the Mechwarrior RPG and the old video game featuring Jade Falcon and Ghost Bear (loved my Madcat with ER PPCs). I wish Titanfall was slower and more like Battletech but the current trend is hyperfast gameplay. Oh well. There was a Mechwarrior game recently released but I had no interest in playing that game. If you are going to call it Mechwarrior, the game mechanics need to come from Battletech.

I’m also working on a project that is not ready to be unveiled but I am very excited about the possibilities. There are lot of great people working in the superhero genre with so many good ideas. When we get closer to launch, I’ll talk more about it.