LED games on your iPhone and iPod Touch
If you’re around my age or older, you definitely remember these little things. There’s just something so damn addictive in their complete simplicity. Of course, to snag one off of eBay now would cost a friggin’ fortune for something that just has some lights and beeps at you. And, yes while those would be a lot better to have, there are people like me who want them, but don’t want to shell out of the money some of the nutballs want for them on there.
That’s where the iPhone and iPod Touch comes in. Someone has gone through the trouble of making as exact remakes of these games as possible on the platform, and they work great. Everything is handled from the clicks and beeps for sound, to the glowing LED lights. Hell, even that mechanical click of the buttons.
I used to have some of these when I was a kid, and while I have never really given two shits about football, I still played the hell out of the LED game for some reason. It’s just that approachable and that addictive.
This guy has released LED Football, LED Football 2, LED Basketball and, most recently, LED Basketball ‘78, which plays a lot more like an actual basketball game compared to the former where you just shoot your shots and try not to get them blocked. And they’re for my favorite handheld platform. Yes, even above the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Anyway, they’re $0.99 apiece, though I got the original LED Football free when the big football game was going on, so it’s up to you as to whether or not you wanna wait it out or not.
Below are some screenshots. They’re definitely worth nabbing if you have even a passing interest in the games of yesteryear and wondered what the hell people were playing before the Game Boy came along.
And if you want to give them a try for free, you can head over to Peter Hirschberg’s site where he has remade them for Windows (well, not ALL of them, but still). While they’re not in your pocket and they aren’t quite as slick as what’s on the iPhone and iPod Touch, they’re still friggin’ great remakes. And there's more OF them. There's Armor Battle, Autorace, Baseball, Basketball, Football, Football II, Hockey, Canadian Hockey, Ski Slalom, Soccer and Space Alert.
Don't let the simplicity of this stuff get to ya, or the fact that most of them are sports games. You're lookin' at a guy who can't watch a football game for more than about 10 seconds before he gets bored. And even I play this stuff.
Super Mario Bros on an 8×8 RGB LED
It's still in the extremely early stages, but I'm definitely interested in seeing how this goes. And hopefully once it gets a little further along the guy releases the code for the game itself, because this looks like it'd be pretty fuckin' cool. You can check out the rest of the article right here.
But yeah, I would definitely be into trying to build something like this, though I would have to get someone else to do the soldering because I can't keep my hands steady enough to reliably do it myself. Either way, pretty cool stuff and I can't wait to see how it turns out.
It looks like one of those old school LED handheld games, only on a hell of a lot of steroids. That reminds me, I've gotta get some of those. I remember loving them when I was a kid. Either way, check out the video.