Planet Puzzle: Ball pyramid thingy

 

It's past time for the middle post of an off-week, and I decided on another puzzle post. This time, I have something I've had lying around a while that I encountered long before. It comes from the 1970s, the probable golden age for this sort of thing. As an extra gimmick, it claims to harken back to ancient Egypt. It's called Tut's Tomb, and for extra amusement, here's a pic of the box I found online.

Notwithstanding the hype, this puzzle was manufactured by Mag-Nif, a once-prolific company that still has a website up but doesn't seem to have any content up. The puzzle was reportedly first released in 1972. I obtained mine without undue difficulty back in 2008. The name Imhotep is in fact that of a semi-historical figure believed to have lived around 2500 BC (2,500 years later than the box would indicate), who ended up credited for many of the actual or claimed inventions and achievements of ancient Egypt. It's part of a genre of "ball pyramid" puzzles dating mainly from the 1970s, though for once, there's no evidence of the item being reissued or directly copied by any other company. Here's a lineup of the pieces.

For my history, I first encountered this puzzle while staying with older friends of my family in late elementary school/ early 1990s. I remembered both the puzzle and the hyped-up directions; I also remember one of the pieces had broken in two. It was a fond enough memory for me to look it up and buy it years later. What I didn't realize until I got it is that this is incredibly easy, enough that even one minute was far longer than I needed. Even compared to the copies-of-copies party favor puzzles I have covered before, this did not generate any effort or investment of time or thought. Thus, it quickly went on the shelf and remained there until I thought of it for this feature. Here's a pic of it mid-assembly.

Turning to the details, the whole puzzle is only four pieces in two shapes, one consisting of four balls in a line and the other of six arranged in a rectangle. The key is to lay the two "grid" pieces at right angles to each other. What's tempting is that it looks like you ought to be able to arrange the pieces in different shapes. I have indeed seen building systems based on this lattice system (which Rob's Puzzle Page traces to mathematical constructs in the 1800s), but all these do is stack awkwardly. Here's one more pic of the grid pieces in position.

That ends this trip down memory lane. It's fitting enough that this would be a "quick" post that actually got done early, given how little time the puzzle took. I can't say I regret buying this; at the very least, it looks nice, though my shelves are already cluttered with things you could say the same thing about. Some things you get because you remember them, some things you don't because you prefer to just remember them. And that's all for now, more to come!

Handheld hotspot: No-bit gaming!

 

It's my day off, and I decided it was time to return to handheld games. As it happens, I had just found something that I had in mind when I thought of this feature. Nowadays, it's fashionable to make fun of 1980s LCD games, which I covered last time.  What has long since been forgotten is that those games were the successors and potential competitors to a much older class of handheld mechanical games. I speak of the handheld pinball game, and if Tiger games were the cave man's videogame, these were what you would find in a Paleocene lemur's grip at the bottom of Lake Messel, and I was playing with them well into the age of Game Boy. Here's a pic of the game with the full load racked.

The real backstory here is that in the 1800s and 1900s, the first mechanical pinball machines were developed, based on the game of bagatelle. These rudimentary machines had little in common with later pinball games, as there were no flippers. Around the late 1950s, the lineage split in several directions. In American arcades, they became the modern pinball we know. In Japan, they were upgraded with electronics into the pachinko machine. But in the meantime, the original concept was scaled down into handheld games for children. Here's a pic I found of example I've sighted in the wild previously. There's nothing for scale in this or any other pic I could find, but I can attest it's quite large, with a metal back that gives it extra robustness.

Of course, these things stayed in production long after kids knew anything about the pinball name. I just thought of them as ball-bearing games. Many of them lacked the launcher, which made them closer to "dexterity" puzzles I've covered elsewhere. The one I have the earliest and clearest recollection of is a baseball-themed game, with the baseball part just consisting of a picture of a baseball player. The present specimen must have been picked up later. In fact, when I looked it up, I found out it was made at the mindbogglingly late date of 1987 by Tomy, previously featured for their windup bots. Here's the back of the game, which is just a little smaller than a paperback.

In addition to their windups, Tomy was a prolific producer of pinball games, including the Waterful line. With this game, the main gimmick is that there's a magnet to catch the balls as they launch until they form a line. I found certain other variations, apparently dating back to the late '70s. notably including one made to look like a helicopter rescue. This game desperately updated it into a knockoff of the already venerable arcade game Centipede. The problem is that after about the fourth or fifth ball, the magnet gimmick starts wearing off. Then the balls either bounce off or stick to the ones higher up in one big knot. Here's a typical outcome.

You might think this was the end of the line for Tomy mechanical games. In fact, Tomy was already making LCD games. They also continued to make wind-up handheld games that approximated the tech of electromechanical arcade games, which had survived long enough to be featured in Dawn of the Dead (see video here). Early examples had imitated arcade classics like pace Invaders, while later examples included licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tie-ins. This led to the even more incomprehensible experiment known as Game Buddy. My own recollection from this strange dead end is that I saw a few mechanical handheld games at a discount mall in the mid- to late 1990s, complete with the scrolling background. I had no idea what they were at the time, and I still cannot find any record of who might have made them (I'm sure they were way below Tomy's standards). Now, I regret not buying one just to have an example, but having seen footage of other examples, I can't call it a loss.

That ends this trip down memory lane. For this particular game, I can at least say it's still mildly entertaining, if only to see the carnage when it doesn't work. If there's a lesson, it's that even the "bad" people remember usually isn't the worst. That's all for now, more to come!

Planet Puzzle: Retro Rocket Ships

 

As I write this, I'm just about done with a month back on my old masochistic pace of one blog post every weekday. I decided my best bet for a quick post was to bring back this neglected feature. This time around, I only have two items, both acquired in an online lot a while ago. They're two more examples of the vintage keychain puzzle, covered in the last post I did for this feature. Judging from prices, they're among the more sought-after examples out there. I acquired these for more than I care to mention, in very iffy condition, still for less than a typical price for one. Here's a pic of what I got for the money, with the Galaxy Laser Team Commander and Turtle-Crab Alien plus the original/ mini astronaut for reference.

From the information at hand (see Rob's Puzzle Page, again), this puzzle was first made in 1952 by Champion Plastics and several different companies thereafter. I'm satisfied that at least one of these is from the original manufacturer, unless someone thought the pink nosecone was a good idea more than once. The mechanics are similar to the ray gun: A notch in the midship piece lines up with a projection on the tip, and then the whole thing comes loose. The difference is that here there's a visible external indicator where the notch is, which I still didn't notice until after I took apart the puzzle by chance. Unfortunately, neither ship is very functional as a puzzle. The one with the pink nose has a bad crack that requires careful handing, while the one with the blue nose is so stiff and crusty that it's brutal to twist the middle piece. Here's the only pic I got of the blue-nosed ship partly disassembled.

Now, here's the full disassembly. It's simple enough that this is really more like a "take apart" toy than a real puzzle. It looks like the parts could be mixed and matched, but that's one more thing I'm not taking chances with, particularly since both ships have a broken nacelle anyway

With that, I'm already through the pics I had, and ready to wrap this up. It's a nice design, and an interesting transition between the simple Gernsback rocket and the more elaborate starships of Star Trek. Still, it gives me the same underwhelming feeling I've gotten from other puzzles. The 1970s and '80s puzzles weren't great, but they were still much better than this, at least when it came to durability and functionality.  The upside is that old puzzles like this remain appealing and interesting long after their usefulness as puzzles has passed. And that's all for now, more to come!

Handheld Hotspot: Good LCD Games???

 

I'm just coming out of a rough week with franchise movies without anything new in mind that won't be a followup to my movie reviews. For the moment, I'm doing something different (except for the last time I did it), which happens to be what every blogger and Y*utuber has been doing forever: Looking at "retro" video games. But I'll be dealing not with Atari or NES, but with what are now commonly held to be the worst of the worst, handheld LCD games (and possibly some even more archaic and eccentric tech), starting with a lineup of entries from the most famous or notorious manufacturers. So were they "that" bad? Well, let's see, starting with the first item in our lineup.

Right off the bat, a major "myth" to correct is that Tiger Electronics wasn't the only player on the field, nor was it immediately clear that they were or would be the leading producer people remember them as. From my own recollections, many if most of the specimens I ever had at home were from Radio Shack, actually supplied by their parent company Tandy. Even for the 1980s, these were cheap and generic-looking. However, they were possibly the best in terms of reliable functionality: The controls were responsive and intuitive, the graphics were comprehensible, and it was usually easy to figure out what to do. This one is typical of their "'keep it simple" approach. You control a cyclist at the bottom of the screen, moving left and right Space Invaders style. Other bikers come down from the top, with a relatively sophisticated 3D perspective that was surprisingly common in these games. It wasn't a favorite, but I played it long and often enough to max out the high score, typically the only way to "beat" these games. The one flaw of the game is that it doesn't have an on/ off switch, so it simply ran until its one tiny battery ran out. I could change the battery with a screwdriver, but never cared enough to do it. Moving on, here's a game really from Tiger, and by consensus the good one.

Tiger has of course been ground zero for controversy and criticism, drawing the wrath of none less than the Angry Video Game Nerd. Having seen the onslaught of venting, my feelings have been mixed. Make no mistake, the critics aren't wrong, but they aren't giving the whole picture. The chief causes of Tiger's infamy are, first, that the company kept making LCD games long after they were "supposed" to be obsolete, and second, that they went completely overboard on licensing. What really happened was that the company went from making a relatively modest catalog of functional and sometimes entertaining games to a vast catalog of hastily churned-out titles that would have been as interchangeable as paper dolls if not for their idiosyncratic flaws in design and play controls. What's hard to assess is just how early this slide started and how long it took. They got on the tie-in gravy train very early, notably with a series of King Kong games in the early to middling 1980s (see Electronic Plastic and Handheld Museum for two comparatively intriguing examples). On the other hand, it didn't go into overdrive until as late as the 1990s, when they jumped on properties like Batman and Jurassic Park. To my best recollection, I got this one at the same time as the Jurassic Park game, and the difference is night and day.

What should have been a warning sign for that pair is that the Pinball game is dated 1987, at least six years before JP.  It was a simple, attractively designed game that must have sold well enough to stay in production for many years. The long-lost Jurassic Park game was by comparison quite possibly the worst LCD game I ever played, with a clunky layout (prominently featuring the pseudo-3D gimmick), overcomplicated graphics and gameplay, and stiff controls that were literally painful to work with. In further hindsight, the Pinball game had more than enough of its own problems, including unrealistic and oddly predictable ball mechanics. But compared to the 1990s onslaught of junk, it was a gem to be thankful for. Here's some pics I tried to take of the game in action.

That brings us to the final piece, easily the best LCD game I played. This was part of a series of LCD games from Konami, or so the labels say. Certain accounts say that they were really made by Tiger and released under the Konami name, but I have yet to see this substantiated. Konami's entries mostly stood out for their weird, oversized shells. Fortunately, this was more than made up for by their ergonomic shape, standardized controls and functional-to-good game play. The present item is noteworthy because it was the only Garfield video game I ever saw on sale as a kid. (I now know there was an NES/ Famicom game released only in foreign markets.) I begged for it and got it for Christmas, and it was... okay. But again, a handheld game had a really, really low bar to clear, especially if if had Garfield. Here it is in full glory.

One more forgotten virtue of LCD games that this one presents front and center is that the cell-animation sprites really looked like what they were supposed to be. Even on NES, the Ninja Turtles and Darkwing Duck suggested rather than represented the characters, but Garfield looked like he came straight out of the comics. What made it all the more appealing was that they built the game around one of the longest-running gags on the strip, Garfield's unwanted song-and-dance performances and the incoming barrages of the unseen neighbors. Of course, they still overcomplicated things by having you rescue Odie from the moon, which you can only do by collecting enough lasagna from John. The most unusual feature is that you actually have a health/ energy bar, which makes the game possibly too easy. Add in 6 stages, plentiful powerups and a score that maxes out at 10,000, and you have a game where you can blow through any milestones very quickly. Still, it's fun with enough challenge to set your own goals and still have an interesting time. Getting through in one life is a decent benchmark; in many ways, it works best to aim for a lower score like golf. I tried to take some pics, but alas, either the batteries are low or the screen is finally giving out. If you look really hard, you might see Odie.

So, are these games any good? The real question is, what kind of expectations you bring to it. If you're used to getting days and weeks of gameplay out of a title, then these will disappoint very quickly. If you want 10 or 20 minutes of entertainment at a time, and you happened to have one of the games that was functional and entertaining, then there were worse things to make do with, especially if you didn't have a console or TV. The bottom line is, even if you grew up with these things, you're not going to get much out of them in the era of smart phones, and you probably didn't really get much further even then. What the old games deserve is a little respect for trying to do something new and different, because without that spirit, we certainly wouldn't have gotten any further.

Planet Puzzle: Retro ray guns and other vintage key chain puzzles

 

I'm back with I feature I would have expected to do a lot more with by now. In fact, the lot here is material I had already gotten last time, but ended up sitting on while my format and posting frequency was in flux. I got these in the course of a minor binge of online shopping for keychain puzzles, the ancient ancestors of the party favor puzzles I grew up with. In the end, I ended up with a lot of lost bids for big lots that sold for a lot more than I would have paid, and all of three purchases I paid relatively high prices for. To kick off the lineup, here are my prize acquisitions, two copies of a puzzle first made in the 1950s, obviously modelled on a Flash Gordon/ Buck Rogers style ray gun.

I got these separately, one advertised as a "vintage" puzzle and the other as a packaged specimen of unspecified age. It should already be apparent that the one in close-up above is the vintage one. I believe it dates from the 1950s (the awe-inspiring Rob's Puzzle Page gives a date of 1954 for the design), while I'm sure the other one is at least a decade more recent. The older specimen is hard plastic with a solid feel and primary colors that are still bright. The copy, on the other hand, is mostly made of almost translucent plastic with a singularly flimsy and unpleasant feel that makes me think of handling very old paper. (The "packaging" was a tiny bag with instructions printed on it.) Ironically, it was the copy that I was able to disassemble, mostly because it's rickety enough that it is close to coming apart to begin with. By comparison, the original is solid enough that I spent days twisting the key piece before I gave up. When I was preparing for this post, I finally managed to take it apart. Here's some shots with my phone camera of the ensuing disassembly. Again, it should be quite obvious which parts are from which version.

Here's a few close-ups of the piece that caused all the trouble, a sort of nose cone. The "trick" is to line up a notch on the inside with a protrusion on the grip piece; the totally unfair part is that there's no external indication whatsoever where it is. I finally tried turning the piece and tugging a few degrees at a time. It turned out that the notch on the original was just a nudge counterlockwise from a minor imperfection I had been looking at all along. On further examination, I found a visible white residue on both specimens, I'm sure from wear, as further indicated by a rough edge on the central piece which I have also photographed.

One more thing I found on close inspection is that the geometry and proportions of the two specimens are subtly different. The copy is narrower in the two main pieces, no doubt to slightly reduce the amount of plastic used, while the nose is less rounded and closer to a true cone, which may have simplified manufacturing but has no obvious further benefit. There's also visible differences in the supports for the sight on the center/ grip piece, which was already strangely proportioned on the original. It's clear from these differences that the copy was made without access to the original molds. Again, the original is better and flat-out more pleasant. Here's a few more close-ups.

Meanwhile, I had two more puzzles that I got in one lot. The first was a readily identifiable Steinhardt cube, which I previously featured in the prize puzzle box. It was interesting mainly as a demonstration how closely the pattern has been copied. Here's a couple comparison pics.

Finally, there's perhaps the most interesting piece, a bowling pin. The big gimmick here is that it has a compartment for a ball in the middle for a ball, which was still with the puzzle. The cover has a notch that makes it easy to remove with the piece on top. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the two pieces of the body, which I simply can't budge. I'm convinced this is because the plastic is either warped or decayed into gunk that fused it all together. At least it still looks nice. Here's a couple pics.

All in all, I have to say these acquisitions were a letdown, especially for the prices I paid for them, to the point that I called off or held up other purchases I had been considering. I suppose this is a non-trivial reason I haven't done more installments a lot sooner. All in all, they look good, but no great shakes compared to the large and decorative puzzles of  the 1970s-'80s (see the last post), and even compared to the prize puzzles, they lose out in durability and ease of use. One can be glad they existed and still exist, but time has moved on and we have done better. With that, I wrap this up. As always, more to come.

Planet Puzzle: 1970s plastic puzzle haul

 

It's my day off, and I still ended up needing something quick, so I'm back with another installment of puzzles. This time, I'll be covering a lot I got online after making the only bid, all from a company called Reiss. I remember playing with a few games and puzzles from this manufacturer growing up, but these puzzles were familiar simply because they were clearly the basis of more recent and inexpensive puzzles I have been encountering for decades. To start with, here's the best of the lot, in the box.

This particular puzzle has been sold both by the name Equilibrium and UFO seen here. I know the pattern from one that came from the same bulk lot as several I covered for Mystery Monday. I have found further evidence of earlier versions manufactured in the 1960s or earlier. I have considered it a personal icon, in opposition to a certain group that uses puzzle pieces as a symbol. What I like is that every piece is essential to the whole. The one featured here looks about twice as big as the cheap one I already had. It looks quite nice, and is pretty easy to handle, though the sliding action of the "key" piece is a little hit or miss. It came in a sealed box, as did the others, but it was clear from the price that opening them wasn't going to be a big loss.

The next two were sold as The Star and Cell Block. They both arrived already unmoored within their packaging, and I haven't tried to get them back in. The first is an archetypal pattern I had seen frequently before. The second is one I'm almost certain I encountered at least once before. The same pattern appears to have been used by another manufacturer for a puzzle called Curious Cross that seems to have been manufactured in good-quality reissues quite recently. Unfortunately, I haven't quite worked out how to take it apart. Here's the pair together, plus a pic of the unsolved puzzle with the pieces slid out.

And, here's a pic of "The Star" with a cheap counterpart.

Finally, here's one more that came with the lot. It's a big version of a "pinball" puzzle, with an extra tricky twist. I would probably go nuts if I spent more than 5 minutes working with this thing.

All in all, these have been nice additions to my collection. They aren't exactly a trip down memory lane, but they are a glimpse of what came before, familiar but just a little different. With that, I wrap this up. As always, more to come!

Planet Puzzle: Am@zon prize puzzle boxed lot

 

After the last Mystery Monday, I decided it was time for yet another new feature that could keep me going for a very long time, on puzzles. In keeping with the usual subject material of this blog, I'm starting with the cheap and semi-anonymous. This time, however, I'm working with something new that can be purchased online, because as I keep saying, some things are immortal. Here's the lineup.

I picked up this one in the last few weeks, when it started to look like my area would be on lockdown again, along with a five-pound bag of candy. I had looked through a lineup of bulk lots for sale online, mostly from different companies and sellers that were almost certainly getting their stock from the same factories. I chose one that was a little cheaper and had a lot less material that was junk even by my standards. I was a little surprised when it arrived in an actual box. More intriguingly, it had a company name "Hi-Partner", albeit probably a bulk buyer rather than a manufacturer, and packaging that seemed aimed at adults. As seen above, it's labelled "Fidget Toys", which would usually have me at "Fidget", and an extra bit of promotional text, reading in full, "Stress and Anxiety Relief." It left me wondering if the target market is employers trying to reward employees, without having enough money to put the company name and logo on their junk.

In any event, it turned out about half the box were squishy rubber toys I didn't bother to photograph. That still left a good selection of puzzles, without having 10 or 12 each. Of these, the ones I had been after to begin with were a set of puzzle balls and cubes made on the same pattern as a vending-machine toy featured on the Mystery Monday puzzle installment. Per the awe-inspiring resource Rob"s Puzzle Page, the pattern came from a patent by Irving Steinhardt, originally used for a souvenir sold at the 1939 World's Fair. Of course, I wasn't expecting a new challenge, but I like the aesthetics of plastic puzzles well enough to pay for a few more on a different scale. Here's a few pics, including a lineup of the pieces.

We've discovered a planet of strange monuments, all with the inscription "CHINA"....

You should be able to see from the lineup just how consistent the pattern is, even when converted from ball to cube. What you won't see without handling the things is how cheap they look and feel. There's places with rough edges that won't be obvious without very close inspection, and some pieces require a bit of force to go in, especially the first few times putting them together. Even with these allowances, I have literally been afraid of breaking them, especially the spindly bits on the fourth and fifth pieces. An upside, I can still do the gag with the key piece.

The items that quickly proved most interesting were a set of "snake" puzzles. It's supposed to be possible to create your own shapes, but so far I haven't got much past straightening them out or putting them back into the polyhedron they start in. Again, they feel cheap, but the motion is smooth enough that you don't need to push hard enough to risk real damage. They also look very nice. Here's some pics.

On the other hand, the one total washout here are a set of Rubik's cubes. It would seem like a very simple thing to copy the design, but there's complicated mechanics if you think about it. Still, I've seen keychain-sized ones in vending machines that looked decent enough, so it shouldn't be too hard to meet a minimum standard of quality. These, however, are so cheap and loose that the parts almost slide under their own power. What's tricky (and makes me think twice about the capsule toys) is that they come wrapped in plastic that holds them tight. Even on a flat surface, they still look okay, put as soon as you pick them up, it's a horror show. I personally have never been any good with these things, but I liked the idea of having one on hand to play around with. I nd no such pleasure in ones as crude as these. Here's a pic to show just how bad it is.

The rest of the lot are a set of what I think of as "ball bearing" puzzles, which I now know are descended from the original pinball machines. I remember having some of these around when I was a kid. In the 1970s and '80s, they still came elaborate and sophisticated enough to be offered as competition with the Paleolithic handheld video games. As electronic games reached tolerable quality, they faded away into cheap prizes that usually broke quickly. For anyone with my level of experience, these are middle of the road, clearly sturdy but with a tendency  for major components to go askew with a good shake. The one I've really tried out looks like a mound with two spiral ramps; it's a genuine test of problem-solving and dexterity to get the ball to the top, which also takes advantage of the three-dimensional space. There's a seesaw that's worth a second look, though it strikes me as more gimmicky. The other two are simply random, especially the black one, which you just have to shake untilthe ball goes in the single cup in the center. Here's a lineup of the lot.

All in all, it's a bit of a letdown for the relatively high price, but still some good fun. It's of further interest that these are being sold for adults, I suspect in the further hope of appealing to nostalgia. I have to say as someone who grew up with these things, I don't see it apart from the puzzle balls. These are nice to try out, t least for a while, and they were never meant to be more than that.