My understanding is that Niagara Falls is something of an awe-inspiring sightseeing opportunity as far as natural formations go and it’s a tacky extravaganza of shoddy, moldering love hotels as a tourist destination. You go to gamble, eat at buffets, and look at some fast water, right? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t been there in eighteen years, and my child’s-memory is fuzzy at best. It’s a cluttered jumble of images and familial inside jokes, things like eating pickle chips and weighing the odds of my survival if I jumped the railing. My clearest memory, though, is the preponderance of freak museums. Every corner boasted its own hall of mismatched curiosities, from replicas of barrels that made the falls’ descent to stuffed polar bears and any number of imaginary anthropological curiosities. I fear going back because I prefer my memory of the city’s institutionalized theater-of-the-absurd.
I check the website GameSniped on a weekly basis because, while it is intangible, it is very much a gaming freak museum. Prototype NES carts, complete Master System collections, strange promotional materials from bygone eras. It is a literal island of lost games, the detritus of the medium’s collective subconscious, interesting to collectors and freaks only. And me of course. Today’s spotlight is especially alluring, as both a historical find and as an opportunity. Some intrepid Ebayer is selling off a boxed M2 development kit. The M2 was Panasonic’s finished but never commercially released follow-up to the 3DO, meant to compete with the Playstation and Saturn. Back at the end of August, I linked to some bonafide footage of Kenji Eno’s first version of D2 running on the M2 hardware and, man, is it ugly. While Panasonic never released the M2 as a gaming console, the hardware actually powers some mundane devices these days, including ATMS and Japanese coffee vending machines. At least that’s what Wikipedia says so, you know, take that with a teensy grain of salt.
Why should you, the intrepid gamer, care about this M2 development kit? Why, think of what you could do with it! You could be the first person in the 21st century to actually make an M2 game. Talk about nerd cred! They’d give you a symposium at GDC for that kind of nonsense. That, or five people on a message board would hail you as a visionary. You could also make your own Japanese coffee vending machine. Awesome? Yes.
Related links:
Games We Will Never Get to Play: Kenji Eno’s D2 for M2
Periphery: Archaic N64 Paraphernalia is The Best
Periphery: Emotiv's EPOC is Strong in the Force
Periphery: Angry Video Game Nerd Edition