Eaten by a Grue

The archive will be on reduced hours for the spring/summer. Starting April 27, the archive will be open M-F Noon - 7pm.

This weekend's On the Media show from NPR has a segment about the rise of independent console game developers: "DIY Gaming"

We finally got an ethernet line run down next to the large flat panel display. The Xbox 360 is online and ready to go (though the PS3 still doesn't connect properly). So if you want to play online Halo 3 on the large 46" screen, you can! We also added a new Nintendo DSi this week, for your handheld gaming pleasure.

Little power surges/spikes were running through campus today, including the Duderstadt Center where the game archive lives. The only thing we seem to have lost is one of the base stations for the remote headphones; it still charges, but no longer gets a signal from the tv. Luckily we have a couple of back-up base stations, so all is well.

The Computer & Video Game Archive now has a page on facebook; become a fan at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ann-Arbor-MI/Computer-Video-Game-Archive-University-of-Michigan/58951879764

During U-M's 'spring' break, Feb 23 - Feb 27, the archive will be open only for the hours of Noon - 5pm.

Today's Michigan Daily (the student newspaper) has an article about the class Education 222: Videogames & Learning, taught by Prof. Barry Fishman (who is on our advisory committee for the archive): "Gaming in the classroom? New class says yes."

We've passed the 1000 games mark for the archive's game collection! That's the 'in-the-pipeline' number, so it includes games available in the archive to play right now—over 400—plus games on order, at cataloging, or waiting to go to cataloging. Over 650 of those games have been donated to the archive. Thanks!

I spent the morning resurrecting old non-working SNES cartdiges that had been donated to the archive. This involved opening them up, applying polish & fixer to the contacts, then re-sealing. I went six-for-six in getting the old cartridges working again!

Last week we received a donation of a Commodore 64 (actually a later-model Commodore 64C), including a disk drive, monitor and joysticks. All of which works, and also came with about thirty-five games.