I feel like a 7-year-old after this close encounter with destruction that one of my DS cartridges recently experienced. It's certainly something that you'd think a kid, not a responsible 34-year-old, would do.

It's not odd for a DS cart to travel across the world and find itself in exotic places; the DS is a portable platform, after all. But I never expected a DS cart to survive a journey that I unknowingly subjected it to this week.

I took a Bay Area Rapid Transit train and then a San Francisco Muni bus to the Bitmob community gathering last Friday at the Buckshot Bar & Gameroom. I didn't want to carry a bag with me, so I brought my DS and a couple of games in my pocket. I played New Super Mario Bros. and the roguelike Shiren the Wanderer as I traveled.

I got home pretty late (it takes a long time to travel from San Francisco to Dublin via public transportation, and the wife wanted me to get some milk). I threw my pants into the laundry basket. I did remove my DS, keys, and cellphone. But Shiren the Wanderer stayed in my pants. And that wasn't the only place it went -- it took a magical journey through lands of bubbles and dry, warm wind gusts.

In other words, it went through the laundry.

You'd think that Brian Shirk loves living in the past, considering that he's writing about Wolfenstein, Doom, Marathon, and Duke Nukem. But this Bitmob community contributor didn't need to break out his old 386 or boot up DOSBox to do a retro review of these games; all he needed was his Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade to take a look at the legacies of these classics and evaluate how well they play today.

Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein is often seen as the game that launched the first-person shooter. Brian acknowledges its legacy and enjoys the Nazi killing, but he's not impressed by the gameplay, large levels, and paltry amount of weapons. Dude, this was groundbreaking stuff that amazed us in 1992!

I'm about to give the Bitmob community some homework. Sorry.

One of my interests in games isn't about what's new and flashy; I care more about what people are doing with their existing games and how they are modifying and extending the experiences of those games. I'm talking about mods. And I'd like to extend that interest to the Bitmob community.

Art Siriwatt has already written a community review of Neotokyo, a Half-Life 2 mod that's a tactical urban-combat first-person shooter (think Counter-Strike) set in a futuristic Japan and partly inspired by the creators of Ghost in the Shell and Akira. I'm interested in seeing what the rest of the community has to say about it.

I couldn't resist grabbing Heroes of Might and Magic 5 and its expansions when the games went on sale recently on Steam. While I enjoy strategy-role-playing games, I foolishly held a grudge toward Heroes of Might and Magic. This had nothing to do with the game itself; I sadly admit that my grudge is much pettier than that. I loved the original Might and Magic series of role-playing games, but I felt that they got progressively worse as the franchise expanded into other genres. So I boycotted Heroes of Might and Magic as the original series floundered and faded from the role-playing landscape.

I realize that I was being a fool -- especially once I played King's Bounty: The Legend after my first layoff of the year. It didn't take long for King's Bounty to dominate my gaming time, and I played through it with each of its characters before setting it aside 2 months later.

Although the Heroes series lacks some of King's Bounty's goofy charm, it's still a fun, compelling game. Or maybe I should say compulsive. One of the problems that I have with RPGs -- and especially with strategy-RPGs -- is the desire to travel to every portion of the map, find every creature in the scenario, and claim as much of the loot as possible. And the compulsion was winning....

George Lucas is killing another small part of my soul.*

On Monday, LucasArts announced that it would start rereleasing its "classic and beloved franchises" on Steam, Valve's digital download service (the first batch hits Steam on Wednesday, July 8). Rumors circulated in advance of the announcement, and I did my best to rein in my excitement. While I enjoy LucasArts' library of adventure games, I'm a Star Wars nut, and when I read about the possibility of "classic" games coming to Steam, I started thinking about how nice it would be to play the X-Wing games without needing to jump through hoops to make them run on current PCs (or, I hope, an update to the visuals). And while Monday's announcement says that more games are coming, I really wish that LucasArts would've thought about what "classic" means when it assembled its first list of games coming to Steam.

Some of the games on LucasArts' list are undeniably classics. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a great adventure game (and would've made a much better fourth installment of the Indiana Jones film franchise than 2008's The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), as is The Dig. These are the kind of games that I want to see LucasArts rerelease. But who in their right mind would view Armed and Dangerous, Lego Indiana Jones, Star Wars: Battlefront 2, Star Wars: Republic Commando, Star Wars: Starfighter, and Thrillville: Off the Rails as "classic" games?**

I feel that I need a lock pick when I play certain games. This isn't because I have trouble opening the package; I'm not that big of an oaf. Rather, I'm tired of games forcing players to slog through their single-player components in order to unlock content for multiplayer.

It's time for a multiplayer lock pick.

Mario Kart Wii is the embodiment of my plight. It's one of my favorite multiplayer games. It's also the first version of the game that my wife feels comfortable playing. She has trouble using a standard controller to drive in games, and the Wii Wheel allows her to not only play the game but to also have some success at it. This is swell, because this means that I have another game that I can play with her.

This question has been weighing heavily on my mind in recent weeks -- at my age (34), why are videogames still an attraction? I'm getting closer to middle age (the gray hairs on my head argue that I'm already middle-aged). I own a home and have a mortgage, and everywhere I look in the house, I notice things that I want to tinker with. My wife and I are preparing to start a family. I rarely have time for my other hobbies, like golf, music, and model building (the latter two are hobbies that I haven't pursued in years and dearly miss).

Why do I still play games?

Ben Ross has one silly, strange sense of humor. He likes to get his kicks by sending an 8-bit yeti on a series of point-and-click adventures, from tangling with the lord of trendy mechanical gadgets to facing off with a fairly renowned plumber of Italian ancestry.

Ross is the creator of Yeti Knight Adventures. It's a series of short Flash games starring an armless yeti who finds himself wrestling with big moral decisions, like whether he should listen to the sparkly disembodied head of President Lincoln and destroy a village that's really a dandelion. OK, so maybe these choices aren't "big moral decisions," but each choice leads you to a zany ending. Yeti Knight Adventures stands out because it's not just a point-and-click adventure, but it's also a blog of sorts. 

We asked Ross what drove him to develop a series of Flash adventures, and if he really does hate Steve Jobs and the iPhone.

I like to bring my Nintendo DS with me when I'm out and about. Playing my DS not only helps me relax, it also helps me prevent my neurotic mind from pitching an anxiety fit while I'm waiting for things such as medical appointments (I'm so neurotic that I think the doctor's going to tell me that I have cancer even if I'm only there for a checkup). I especially enjoy bringing it with me when I travel. I'm far too much of a workaholic to take vacations, but since the economy has conspired to put me on an "extended vacation," the wife and I decided to take a short jaunt to Reno this past weekend.

I suffer from a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Before I go to bed, I need to check that the doors are locked (my wife, god love her, locks the door when she gets home from work in an attempt to make an end run around my condition). I can't walk away from my car without hitting the lock button on the key fob several times -- even after I hear the horn honk after the doors lock.

As a fan of role-playing games, my OCD takes control of my gaming on a regular basis. I recently got to the point where I can actually pass up items that I don't need in action-RPGs such as Sacred 2 (sadly, I still feel compelled to get every item in standard RPGs, like Neverwinter Nights 2). I'm still working on the Icewind Dale series; while I've beaten the games, I still haven't beaten them with every character class in the series. Yes, I'm that OCD about my RPGs.

But after playing Red Faction: Guerrilla for a couple of days, I'm afraid -- very afraid. This game's sending my OCD into overdrive.

My wife turned to me, and in her cute little apology voice, she said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it. I never mean to do it."

She had taken all of the loot. Again.

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced my wife to Sacred 2: Fallen Angel and the realm of action-role-playing games. She plays games such as Tetris Party, Lego Star Wars, and Mario Kart Wii with me. But she's never tried anything this complicated, detailed, and, dare I say, nerdy.

Some of my earliest -- and favorite -- gaming memories involve the role-playing adventures of the '80s, games such as The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, and Wizardry. My memories of playing The Bard's Tale on my Mom's Apple IIGS, mapping Mangar's Tower on a pad of graph paper while stealing a glimpse of my middle school crush as she walked by my house on her way to visit a friend after school, are fond indeed.

I miss those days.

Two years ago, Etrian Odyssey stoked those memories. The game's design, a purposefully throwback approach, was a delight, and I spent many commutes to work and late nights in my recliner exploring the labyrinth. The same sense of glee accompanied the game's second outing. Mega Man 9 and 1942: Joint Strike hit my retro sweetspot as well. (I apparently enjoy living in the past; I even wrote this commentary with the swingin' sounds of Les Brown and the Band of Renown in the background.)