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When I was a kid my parents got us a Commodore 64 computer. I must have been around 1983 or 1984. What an amazing machine it was, my brother and myself spent countless hours on it. The machine was very successful worldwide, and according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Commodore 64 remains the best selling single computer model of all time (!)

Anyway, so we accumulated a vast collection of video games for our C=64, trading them in tapes with other kids all over the world. I seem to recall we had about two thousand. About 10,000 software titles in total were made for this computer, quite amazing. Numerous emulators let you run the old games on pretty much anything today (PCs, PocketPCs, Macs, etc.)

There was this game called Impossible Mission, released by Epyx in 1984, that is one of my favorite c64 games of all time, and arguably the best c64 game ever produced.

The basic plot was to defeat a mad scientist named Elvin by searching through all of the rooms and gaining enough puzzle pieces to learn the password and stop him. You have 6 hours of real time to finish the game, but each time you die you lose 10 minutes. You also have to avoid killer robots that are in each room that try to electrocute you. There are also some smaller puzzles in the game like the checkboard rooms. In the checkerboard rooms you have to play back the musical notes from lowest to highest note, and if you're successful, you'll win either a snooze or a lift reset. Its a fairly challenging game.

Needless to say the game had a profound impact on myself, and I am sure thousands of other gamers. Everything about it was great, from the graphics to the sounds, and the digitized voices, which were rare at the time. I remember all the game sounds clear as day. Here are some of them:

Evil Elvin Welcome (...stay a while, staaay foreeeever!)
The walking sound
Evil Elvin asking robots to destroy you

and more importantly, the all famous scream from falling into one of the many traps

Aaaaaahhh

Below are some game caps.

Been watching a couple episodes of Heist, a new show this season, not bad, but I doubt it will make it.

It's got the cool Marika Dominczyk as "Lola."

I've been slowly gathering a collection of Math books and lecture notes in electronic format (mostly PDFs,) covering a wide range of subjects: Algebra, Analysis, Geometry, Probability, Topology, etc.