What I do have time for are short, clever books about the more interesting bits of pop culture. Examples are the 33 1/3 series (examples here and here) which examine single important albums, the sadly aborted Deep Focus series from Soft Skull (see here) about films on the borderline between genius and trash, and ECW's Pop Classics series (the first titles of which have examined the disastrous movie 'Showgirls' (see here) and the strange longevity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).
Now add to this Boss Fight Books, an ongoing series of short books about seminal computer games. What especially nice about these is that, instead of going mental with original digital images or lurid game graphics, they've chosen a sleek, minimalist series design (the work of Ken Baumann) that refers slightly elliptically to elements of the game under discussion, with small icons to demonstrate the relevant gaming platform (PC, arcade or console). Click for bigger images:
I haven't read any of these yet--Gallaga aside, none of them cover games I'm familiar with. But the moment they put out a volume on Gauntlet*, Brian Bloodaxe, Bubble Bobble or Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road, I'm there.
* This classics swords-and-sorcery game allowed four players at once, and I had three friends also obsessed with it, so the amount of money we poured into this in Adelaide's Hindley Street Downtown during the mid-1980s was ludicrous.
To this day I find myself saying things from the game--like the title of this post--more often than is necessary (ie at all). And Bubble Bobble! The Bridgewater Pub near where I grew up had one of those machines, and I read in a computer games magazine that some cunning combination of joystick waggling and button mashing would give you infinite free games, and it worked, and so my brother and I spent hours playing it while our chicken schnitzels were left to go cold and our traffic-light drinks to go warm. Why, in those days [strokes long white beard] you only needed a 20-cent coin to play, and [mind wanders] what was I saying, you whippersnappers? Why yes, it is time for my lie-down.
