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Retronauts had a podcast episode on the Magnavox Odyssey². It was a more powerful system than I realized! (I guess I get it confused with its predecessor, which was pretty primitive and relied on overlays.) Prior to this mostly I thought about Monkeyshines, which I knew from a screenshot in Games magazine.

Here's every game:

I love that there was a German game called "Kinder im Verkehr" or "Kids in Traffic". (I guess it was a teaching tool but beautiful concept for a game)

"Smithereens" was highly recommended, along the lines of artillery games like QBasic Gorillas or Scorched Earth.

Also I love the indirect combat of "War of Nerves", but not actually a great game - still might have set the idea of an RTS where you play as a character in the game, ala "Herzog Zwei".

The podcast mentioned they dealt with the memory limitations of the time by hardcoding some default graphics - it reminded me of this evocative character sheet from the Sharp MZ-700 computer:

You can see some of those in action in this video...

I was trying to think of what other systems did that. Like Commodores had PETSCII, Atari 8bits had its thing, and even PCs had that ZZT thing...​​​​​​​

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Tonight I indulged in JP Honk's founding tradition, the Dunster Road Halloween Block Party!

I was a little worried lights might have distracted from the skeleton vibe but i think the result was pretty awesome

Also just for convenience here is an animation of how the setup can look: