The latest Apple II licenses to seek resurrection via Kickstarter are Space Quest and Battle Chess. The former, dubbed "SpaceVenture" (they apparently couldn't get the rights to the original name), will be produced by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, aka "The Two Guys from Andromeda", the two designers who created the series for Sierra On-Line in the first place. The development seems to be pretty well outlined, with several notable voice actors having signed on, though I've seen no assets from the game as of yet. The final game will be installable on PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, or playable in Google's Chrome Web browser. A preorder will cost you $15 and get them that much closer to the usual half-a-million goal before the June 12, 2012, deadline.

By contrast, the Battle Chess project couldn't be more different. Subdued Software, developers of no games I've ever heard of, have licensed the Battle Chess name and have essentially completed production of an update to the classic strategy game. All that remains before its October 2012 release is to add Internet support, for which they are asking for a paltry $100,000:

… implementing a full featured online experience, like the one we have planned, will take several months. A list of features include; Skilled Based Matchmaking, Statistics, Leaderboards, Achievements and in-game chat. We also needed to factor in the cost of fulfilling rewards and running this campaign. We have carefully planned out the costs of staffing the programmers, artists and testers necessary to complete online multiplayer feature and arrived at this amount.

This modest ambition extends to the scale of the release: $100K will secure a PC-only release, with additional funding promising ports to Mac, iOS, Android, and Xbox 360. If you're counting on support for one of those platforms, one course of action is to pledge your dollars to the project — and, if they don't collect enough funding for additional systems before the June 1 deadline, withdraw your pledge. (Selfish, no?)

The lack of accessibility to Battle Chess brought to mind a potential alternative. Longtime readers of this blog may remember my discussion of a similar game, Battle vs. Chess, originally scheduled for release on Sep 28, 2010, then pushed back to Spring 2011. To date, Battle vs. Chess has still not been released in the United States, according to Wikipedia, "due to an injunction by Interplay Entertainment for trademark infringement due to its similarity to Interplay title Battle Chess." In February 2012, I received this update from Robin Kunimune, Community Manager of publisher TopWare Interactive:

… Battle Vs. Chess has not been released in the USA, yet. If it were in our power, we would do so in a heartbeat, but sadly the publishing rights remain with a company with which we no longer associate. We are currently waiting for said company to fold and declare bankruptcy (at which point we would regain the publishing rights and release the game) or to go ahead and release the game themselves.

In the meantime, the "true" Battle Chess is looking pretty polished, with plenty of neat death sequences — although the outcome is determined in accordance with the rules of chess, it's still fun to watch the characters duke it out, with each potential matchup of pieces and winners resulting in a unique encounter. Check out these three gameplay videos:

Whether you support an ambitious game that's still in the planning stage and not coming out until 2013 but for a variety of platforms, or a game that's all but finished with a meager fundraising goal and target platform — or both — is between you and your wallet. Happy funding!

Quoting a fake Apple press release, this "imaginary news organization devoted to ferreting out the most relevant stories in the world of Apple, whether or not they actually occurred" proudly reports Apple Inc.'s decision to reintroduce the Apple II to their active product lineup:

Remaining true to its original concept, the new Apple II isn't exactly a speed demon. Hypothetically, its 1MHz processor would take about an hour to download an average web page. But that assumes you could actually connect the new Apple II to the Internet — which you can't.

In fact, the new Apple II is unabashedly unconnected. With no Wi-Fi, Ethernet and USB ports, there will be nothing to distract you from enjoying the best of Apple II's two dozen apps, which include a recipe manager and an electronic checkbook.

Of course, those specs describe the functionality of only an out-of-the-box Apple II; Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB can all be added (to various degrees) with the right peripherals and expansion cards.

The report does indicate one change to the stock Apple II in the last 30 years: "Despite the retro theme, Apple has added one very handy port that allows the user to connect a turntable or cassette deck. You can’t store music in the computer, but you can use the Apple II box to store up to 150 vinyl albums or 300 cassettes." Sounds like the 8-bit iTunes that one enterprising hacker cobbled together some months ago.

It's a mildly amusing piece of news, even if it won't fool anyone. It makes me wonder if April Fool's has been an overlooked holiday among the Apple II community. I published a fake Juiced.GS press release in 2011, the same day Tim Kellers advertised the Apple II-phone — and if we don't limit ourselves to the spring, there are a number of fantastic KansasFest skits — but no other recent Apple II jokes spring to mind.

What pranks, tricks, or shenanigans shall we deviously, mischievously plot next?

(Hat tip to Steve Weyhrich)

To mark that transition and the site's second birthday, here are some statistics about the site's growth since my last analytics breakdown:

• • Apple II Bits received in its second year triple the pageviews it garnered in its first — and nine times as many mobile visitors, almost all of them on iPad or iPhone.
• • In the past year, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and Twitter have continued to be the top social media referrers of traffic to this site. StumbleUpon is now the #1 referrer of any type; Computerworld, #1 in the site's first year, was #10 in the second.
• • In particular, my coverage of ROFLCon 2010, a biennial convention last held the weekend Apple II Bits launched, is popular among StumbleUpon users. (I'll be attending ROFLCon 2012 this week.)
• • Whereas search engines generated 25% of the site's traffic in its first year, in its second, they constituted 40%.
• • The site's all-time busiest day was Nov 1, 2011, when the site got slashdotted. That's perhaps an exaggeration: my site was not the subject of the /. post, but when it mentioned Visicalc, its author linked not to creator Dan Bricklin's site, but to my post commemorating its public debut.
• • The second most popular day ever has also been in the last year: my profile of Jeri Ellsworth.
• • Throughout the site's life, 38% of visitors have used Firefox as their Web browser; 22.5% used Chrome; 20% used Safari; 13% used Internet Explorer (hi, Peter!).
• • In the last year, Akismet blocked 56,120 spam comments (+44,169 since last April), with the busiest month being Apr 2012 with 7,919 spam. We're on track to block 67,635 spam comments in calendar year 2012, compared with 38,629 in 2011.
• • As of today, the site contains 210 posts (+110), 1,237 tags (+515), 266 comments (+189) from 84 readers (+50), and 1 blogger.

My personal life has had some curveballs thrown at it in Q1 2012, and I expect the rest of the year to be equally dynamic. I look forward to the stability this blog will offer me, but with a less demanding schedule. Thank you for reading!

Double Fine's Kickstarter success opened the floodgates to a reemergence of the adventure genre, but in a guest blog post for Wired.com, Lowe talks about why this is important: games have lost their funny bone, and adventure games can bring it back.

Lowe attributes the decline of the genre to improved accessibility to personal computers:

Adventure games were perfect for 1980s’ computer users. Back then, if you weren’t a puzzle solver, you didn’t own a computer. Remember config.sys files, autoexec.bat files, setting interrupts, managing extended memory? No? Consider yourself lucky! It’s a wonder anyone got anything done at all.

I remember discussing with Ken Williams (founder of Sierra, the leading publisher of such games) about how great it would be when 10 percent of homes had a computer powerful enough to play our games. But when the majority finally had computers, they ran Windows. They didn’t have to solve operating system puzzles, or couldn’t. And they didn’t want to solve game puzzles either.

Sadly, this was widely interpreted that new gamers preferred action and 3-D environments instead of contemplation and humor. Within a year, most major adventure-game development was shut down. And with it went humor.

I remember the games Lowe references fondly, though perhaps because the years have removed me from the frustration they inspired. Although King's Quest and its kin were often infuriatingly inscrutable in their puzzles and riddles, they often had a quirky and consistent internal logic that tickled your imagination, giving you a knowing wink and a sense of accomplishment when you stumbled across the solution. It's a kind of challenge that's often missing in today's games — or am I just playing the wrong ones? The Xbox 360's DeathSpank, created by Ron Gilbert of Double Fine, had some clever dialogue, though I didn't play it far enough to find if that sense extended to the gameplay.

And I spent about two hours this week in the practice arena of Scribblenauts Remix for iOS, interested less in completing levels than in testing the limits of the player's capabilities and seeing what unusual creations and interactions the game's designers anticipated.

What do you think — is Lowe right? Have the humor and discovery of early computer games disappeared and are now ready for a comeback? Or have they been here all along, just in an unrecognizably evolved form?

UPDATE (11-May-12): I belatedly found Phil Elliott's interview with Al Lowe in my "to read" pile. In this article from April 2011, Lowe talks about how the humor in games has been replaced by replayability, and that he has no desire or intention to exit retirement. Ah, hindsight!

(Hat tip to Robert Boyd)

I sought advice from the readers of Apple II Bits, asking them to rank eleven activities in terms of their value to the community. The rest of this lengthy post offers the results of that poll, which received 28 votes before the one-week deadline (and one vote after, due to a security hole on my part). I could offer a more granular breakdown of how many votes each item received at each rank, complete with pie charts and line graphs — but more practical is the final ranking of each item from most to least valuable. I'll present them in that order, with a brief analysis of each.

IRL: Spend time with my girlfriend

This item was the only non-Apple II activity in the poll, and it was presented more to lighten the mood than anything; such commitments are not open to popular vote! Nonetheless, I'm pleased that 19 people considered this my #1 priority. (I'm hoping the three votes that put it in last place were facetious.)

One friend privately offered me this advice: "If the problem is she doesn't 'get' why you spend time playing with old junky computers, then she's right out, and you can replace her task with finding another one." I wholeheartedly agree. But who do you think helped me stuff envelopes with the latest issue of Juiced.GS?

Juiced.GS: Edit & publish quarterly hardcopy issues

I recently published my 25th issue of Juiced.GS, making me its longest-running editor-in-chief. Editing is an interesting line of work: when done well, it's completely invisible. Everyone can name the authors of Harry Potter, Pet Semetary, and The Da Vinci Code — but how many of you know who those authors' editors were? I assure you that they played a vital role in directing the authors' raw talents and shaping their stories.

The best feedback I've ever gotten on this subject was an email Bruce Baker sent to the KansasFest email list on October 8, 2010: "I was going through the last Juiced GS. I think Ryan did a wonderful job and remember some others too. But I think Ken Gagne's approach has been pretty close to genius. I cannot put my finger on it, but the little magazine has improved in readability. All the content is interesting. When I finish, I wish for more." The very fact that Bruce can't articulate what makes Juiced.GS better means I'm doing my job well.

The publishing aspect of Juiced.GS may be less personal: find a printshop, buy some stamps, pay the bills. But I enjoy editing, which entails looking for and conceiving of article ideas, finding writers whose strengths fill a void, and putting together the whole picture. Although it makes for a stressful week the end of every third month, it's worth doing, and worth doing well.

Open Apple: Record & publish a monthly podcast

I was honestly surprised to see Open Apple rank so high, only because it's so young: we've published only 14 monthly episodes in just over a year, producing a body of work that's dwarfed by Juiced.GS or KansasFest. Yet because the other two are offline commercial ventures and Open Apple is online and free, it has perhaps the largest audience of the three, so it makes sense that more people benefit from it and want to see it grow.

Behind the scenes, Mike and I have been more regularly swapping responsibilities, to ensure we each have a better sense for what the other host is doing. This makes us more able to fill in for the other and takes the pressure off any one person being irreplaceable.

For my part, I've started being slightly less meticulous in the editing. In the beginning, I closed any gap of silence and eliminated every "um", "ah", and "er". But it should be okay for listeners to realize we're human, too. I think we'll also be unlikely to employ the optional "Retroviews" segment, as even without it, our average episode length has grown from 30 minutes to 90. And show notes will continue to include links to discussed topics but will likely omit passing references.

Apple II Bits: Blog twice a week

Now we're getting down to where real changes need to be made: in the poll, Apple II Bits didn't make the top three and is the first item on the list that nobody voted as "most important".

I have consistently published twice a week for the last two years, resulting in 209 posts. By contrast, when I was associate editor for Juiced.GS, I wrote 16 "A Word or II" columns in four years. I am writing for this blog 25 times more often than I wrote for Juiced.GS! The time to write each post consumes one lunch break, and when I go away for vacation, I need to write and queue several posts in advance, adding to the already taxing trip preparation process.

These posts have been invaluable, connecting me with the community and producing ideas for podcasts and articles. Three posts got scrapped before publication and were diverted elsewhere: one became a part of another writer's Juiced.GS article; another became a standalone Juiced.GS article; yet a third was published on PCWorld, of all places.

I have more than a dozen blogs, and Apple II Bits is both the only one where I've committed to a regular publication schedule (every Monday & Thursday). As a result, it's also my most popular blog, despite (or perhaps because of) its niche focus compared to my more mainstream sites. But Apple II Bits is likely the outlet that's easiest to reduce my commitment to without eliminating entirely, and despite its audience, it's probably the one people rely on the least. I'm rarely wanting for topics to write about, as there's always something going on in, or of interest to, the Apple II community, so I'm going to continue scouring the Internet and my brain for ideas. But starting Monday, April 29, I will be publishing only once a week. If I have an idea that simply must be aired on any other day of the week, I may break from that schedule for a "bonus post".

Juiced.GS: Write articles

Writing is the activity that opened the way for me to be a contributing member of the Apple II community. It's still something I enjoy, but as my interests have evolved from reviews to features, it's also become more demanding. To that end, over the years, I've delegated as many article types as possible: Andy Molloy now writes book reviews, Mike Maginnis conducts interviews, and Eric "Sheppy" Shepherd writes the back-page column. In fact, I consider it a success when I can publish an entire issue of Juiced.GS without having written anything more than the required (ie, the editorial and the news section) — even if its more expensive to do so, since writers get paid but editors-in-chief do not!

But an article type that still seems unique to me are features, those being the last two March issues' cover stories, which dealt with interactive fiction and crowdfunding. These features are so in-depth that only one or two a year, so it's no great commitment to continue writing them.

For anyone thinking that my byline is not a selling point: I completely agree! What's far more important is that the content be written, regardless of by whom. But I'm intrigued that a few people voted this commitment as more important than publishing Juiced.GS. Where would the articles I write be published?

Juiced.GS: Create new products & resurrect out-of-print products

Wall calendars and PDFs may not incur the demand of Juiced.GS's flagship subscriptions, but they play a valuable role: the are low-cost to produce and generate revenue that adds to the bottom line. I can confidently say that the colorful artwork and photography that has graced the last five issues of Juiced.GS starting in 2011 would not have been possible without the sales of the Concentrates that were introduced in 2010. The products may be more valuable to the publisher than to the customer. I understand their value unto themselves may be limited, and I'll take that into consideration — especially since the creation of these products can be more easily outsourced than any other aspect of Juiced.GS.

KansasFest: Record & publish videos of sessions

At least one KansasFest alumnus was attracted to the event by watching the videos that were recorded in 2010. As a budding archivist, I consider it essential that these videos be produced and published. It seems like a fairly easy assignment for someone else to take on, but no one yet has. There have been plenty of other cameras, both digital and analog, running throughout KansasFest, but I've never seen their output shared with the community. One presenter commented to me, "You have a good record of actually getting these things online" — and that's the most important step. What value is our history if it never leaves someone's basement?

I don't enjoy recording KansasFest but do it because I think it must be done. If someone else wants to help with one of three steps of this process — shooting, editing, and uploading — please let me know.

KansasFest: Community outreach, Web site maintenance, publicity

The KansasFest committee brought on a writer a few years ago to help me with press releases and the like, and at first, he was a great help in that department. Then we stopped outsourcing our graphic design and brought it in-house, and that's where Peter Neubauer's talents really began to shine. The work he does is inspired and inspiring, and I cannot in good conscience draw him from that task to help me smith words.

Yet publicity remains vital. Every year, there are people who are shocked to discover that the Apple II community exists and has its own annual convention. Recently, I even received an email from an Apple II user right in Kansas City who'd never heard of us! We need to get this word out as broadly as possible. articles like Harry McCracken's help; who knows where he heard about KansasFest from?

Fortunately, except for when something significant happens, like a keynote speaker is announced or registration opens, the actual publicity aspect of KansasFest is pretty low-maintenance.

KansasFest: Give presentations

None of my KansasFest 2011 presentations were delivered until the last day, and I was antsy all week. As a former community theater performer, I thrive in front of a crowd. But years in which I've given a half-dozen presentations, on top of doing everything I can to help run the event, were just too much. I'll try to cut back in this regard.

Fortunately, our schedulemeister Andy Molloy does a great job soliciting sessions from talented attendees, and we're never left with empty slots in the schedule.

Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Google+

This feedback contradicts the results of the Open Apple survey, which indicated listeners want to connect with the podcast on social media services such as Twitter and Google+. And perhaps they do, but not at the expense of the above outlets to which I can instead commit myself. At least, that's the way I'm choosing to interpret the contradiction.

Social media: Help Apple II users with WordPress

I love the open-source content management system known as WordPress, which is in widespread use across the Apple II community. I thought to marry these interests and experts by creating a Web site that offers WordPress advice from a retrocomputing enthusiast's perspective.

But in reality, I don't have time to commit to yet another blog, and I have to take to heart the idea's placement at the bottom of this poll. Even though I've registered the domain name and designed the site, complete with custom logo and basic pages such as About, Contact, etc., I'm officially tabling this project for now.

I don't know what feedback and changes I was hoping this poll to generate, but I'm glad to have had the support and advice of so many friends and readers. I look forward to being a part of this wonderful community in many interesting ways, old and new, for decades to come.

One of my favorite ways to demonstrate my heritage has been to use an Apple II-inspired screensaver on my MacBook Pro laptop computers. Alas, when I updated to Snow Leopard a few years ago, that particular saver stopped working, and I couldn't remember where it came from to see if there was an update. But when the Apple II turned 35 earlier this week, Paul Horowitz included that same screensaver in his celebratory roundup. No wonder I couldn't find it before: it's one of 200 screensavers in a single archive!

The screensaver features many customization options.

Even cooler, the package comes with a VT100 terminal that emulates the display of the Apple II, "complete with screen noise, random color flickers, a permanent caps lock, and other peculiarities unique to technologies of a bygone era." I have tested the screensaver and the utility on both Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Lion (10.7), and they work great.

Apple II Bits has never been more beautiful.

So what are you waiting for? Put your Apple II on your desktop for all to see!