Dick and Jane try to ignore the Baseball player standing on one foot in their living room.
Baseball for the RCA Studio II isn't terrible. If you can look past the monochrome graphics, the sluggish control of the outfielders, the uninteresting beeps, there's actually a game that's merely annoying.
Player at the "A" keypad starts off at bat. Player at the "B" keypad pitches and plays the field first. To pitch, player "B" depresses "5" to send a straight ball, "8" for a hook left (up, relat
My son and I took the trip to Houston yesterday and had a blast.
We got to see some rare cabs, (PONG, Q-berts Qubes) and I got to play a few arcade games I thought I'd never get to play on the "original hardware" (Major Havoc, Quantum). I took a ton of pictures, but my camera memory card is being used by my son today in a school science experiment so I won't be able to make an album until later.
We entered the Parent-Child tournament which was to be on a Gilligan's Island pinball machine
Hangman aka Spelling, Atari VCS, 1978
If you are from a family that can afford an Atari VCS but can't afford a pencil and paper, this game is for you!
Hangman is the time-honored game of guessing a word by suggesting letters and punishing someone else by hanging them if you guess too many letters wrong before guessing the word. This used to be real fun, until someone suggested that it was illegal. At that time, we, as a society, had to resort to merely drawing the poor co
Amazing Maze / Tic-Tac-Toe (Bally Professional Arcade, 1979)
I know many of you are very anxious to hear just how the Bally performed in Tic-Tac-Toe against the Fairchild Channel F's built-in Tic-Tac-Toe AI, but before I get to that, I have a solution regarding the heating problems some of us have been experiencing with the Bally Pro Arcade.
Bally vs. Fairchild: Tic-Tac-Toe
In order to get a statistically significant sample we figured we should p
Okay, we've been here before.
Last time we were in 1978 was back in October of 2005 or so and I'd finished doing all the APF carts I had. I ended with Brickdown/Shooting Gallery. At the time my copy didn't work. Now it does.
Brickdown/Shooting Gallery (APF M1000, 1978)
Brickdown is a sideways version of Breakout. If I recall correctly, it's similar to the version The Woz did for the Apple II in terms of sideways.
The game
Welcome back to what I'm now calling Chronogamer LE. The LE stands for Low Effort. If I have to really work up any enthusiasm to play something then that's too much effort, so I will learn what I can about it, read the manual, maybe do some research and play it for as long as I can stand it. If I try to get more involved in it, I'll end up going down a sort of procrastination rabbit-hole where I put it off for, like, half a decade or more and it blocks me from moving forward. I've recently learn
Codebreaker, Atari VCS 1978
This cartridge contains two games, Codebreaker, which is a videogame version of the tabletop game, Mastermind, and Nim which is a videogame version of the ancient game Nim.
I've already written about the Fairchild Channel F version of these games, Mindreader and Nim. Go back and read it if you want. It's not funny, but it's informative. Bottom line is: I like playing Mastermind-clones and Nim. Sue me.
Now, let's talk about the Atari
I discovered another Chronogamer! A writer over at Retrogaming Times Monthly is chronogaming the NES, starting in 1983! This is the same guy that wrote the always interesting Syntax Era, so it should be good.
Anyway, here's the link to the issue with the first NES chronogaming. The column is called "Nintendo Realm". (You have to scroll to it.)
http://my.stratos.net/%7Ehewston95/RTM19/RTM19.html
No, he doesn't call himself a "chronogamer," and as far as I know,
For those of you who don't know. Nim is a game where you start with a quantity of piles of items. You and your opponent take turns removing any number of items from any pile, including the whole pile. The idea is to be the one to take the last item left. In this port of the ancient game, the piles are represented by numbers in blue squares. The controller works well for this one, too. Move the joystick in a direction to choose the pile, twist the stick to add or subtract from the pile, push the
Baseball. In the real world this game was what America's "pass-time" used to be. Back before videogames.
Like Odyssey's Football, this game is asking you to pretend that you are playing a simulation of the game of baseball, however, this game takes one step towards being cooler than the Odyssey's attempt at a football sim: This game introduces Player Stats. Ooooo! It's probably the first example of persistent player stats in a home video game.
When selecting your team, a
Videocart #14: Sonar Search
This is a "port" of the real world game "Battleship". You have a blank blue playing field. You move a targeting reticle over the deep blue sea and sound a "ping" at a strategically chosen location. The length of the ensuing sound gives you a clue to how close an enemy ship is. Your opponent does the same on the same blue field, but he only detects your ships. There's no "cheating" by listening to what your opponent hears because their pings are bouncing off of a d
Bowling (Atari VCS, 1979)
I was in a bowling league when I was in middle school. My team won the league championship two years in a row. I don't remember my average, but when I was 13 years old, my high score was 191. I don't think that's a great high score, (though I've never beaten it since ), and I'm certain my average wasn't very impressive, but it disturbs me to suddenly realize that I may actually be more qualified to talk about videogames based on bowling than videogames based on
Cosmic Conflict! Odyssey^2, 1978
Okay, as I said in a previous entry: for flavor I'm trying to include close-up photos of the player-controlled avatars in these games. It doesn't really work for something like Blackjack, and honestly, it doesn't really work for something like this game, never-the-less, here's what you control in this universe:
That's your targeting reticle in Cosmic Conflict! The game consists of you "piloting" that reticle (1st person piloti
October, 1977
(EDIT: Apparently the original shipping date was scheduled for October of 1977, but somewhere in the years since 2005, I seem to remember hearing it didn't actually ship until November. I don't recall the source and I'm too lazy to look but I thought I'd mention it.)
The Atari VCS is born!
The system that started a lifelong habit for most (edit: many) of us.
I can't say anything about this system that hasn't already been said. Serious
Last night, I read an announcement that DP blogs were going to be lost in a transfer to the new bulletin board system. The announcement posted at 9:20 the site went down again at 11:50 (central time.). 150 minutes to find the announcement and back up a blog was given to us.
Things of which I am aware: DP is free for me. Many people work hard and spend money to keep it running at no cost to me. The person doing the conversion was doing it in his free time and I am not ungrateful for his effor
Breaking format before I start talking about each of the 1973 games.
There's a really excellent thread over at the Digital Press forums and I highly recommend it to anyone who is remotely interested in the original Odyssey.
Go to it here.
The discussion was started by a man named Don Emry and, according to him, he was the designer for three of the 1973 Odyssey games. (not that I don't believe him, I just thought I should be specific about my source.) Here are some of what I consider
NBA Basketball (Intellivision, 1980)
Wow, I've started and stopped writing this entry about five times. I'm just not sure what to say about this game. Like the era in which this game was born, I find it difficult to resist the temptation to compare it to the Atari Basketball title that proceeded it. As George Plimpton might've said, NBA basketball is clearly more sophisticated and lifelike than its Atari counterpart. There are three players on each team, instead of one, and you can pass the
Welcome to the era of the dedicated Pong machine. It's a mercifully short era, over most of which I shall skip.
Before we talk about the first 1975 Odyssey, I must tell you there is another 1975 Odyssey: The Magnavox Odyssey 200. Apparently it is a different color than the one we are about to discuss. Dang, I guess I'll have to find one of those now, too.
The Magnavox Odyssey 100 is a garishly orange, slightly sleeker looking version of the original Magnavox Odyssey. (The original is pic
Actually, it wasn't until August 1976 that the Fairchild Video Entertainment System came into existence. So we've got some other ground to cover until then.
First of all, let's list the dedicated PONG machines:
In the PBS version of this blog, which is now airing in a few select viewing areas, this scene occurs in episode four.
I start reciting the list of different PONG systems available during the great PONG Rush of 1976. Every time I say the name of another dedicated PONG machine,
This is one of those filler episodes that tell you what happened during all the previous episodes of the season, like that really lame episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation at the end of Season II where instead of actually writing a plot they just put Ryker in a coma and had him flash-backing the entire episode.
What's worse is that, not only is this a flash back episode it's a two-parter!!!
For those of you who are new (as if any of you are new) this blog is about go
Word Fun (Intellivision, 1980)
Hey, did anyone else notice the complete revamping of intellivisiongames.com? They've had the same site up for years and its always looked circa 1999-2001 design style, but now they've got something that looks like it's database driven. Well, good for them.
I actually have a Word Fun cart, purchased in Tulsa, Oklahoma for $5 in 2006. It wasn't until I plugged it into my Intellivision II in August of 2008 that I found this sucker doesn't work with Intellivis
Football, Odyssey^2, 1978
Wanna dance?
Like Bally's Football, Odyssey^2 Football does a good job of offering the plays and the interaction that the real sport promises, without the bone crushing, spine shattering injuries.
Major difference between this and the Bally is that the Bally shows a "slice" of the football field and scrolls the field to accommodate movement, while the Odyssey^2 Football shows the whole field all the time. The Bally animat
Sorry for the hiatus, real life and such, yada yada yada.
Slot Machine (Channel F - Zircon, 1979)
Jerry Lawson, the designer of the Channel-F, in a panel discussion at CGE 2004 revealed that he'd made Slot Machine for his mother, who was fond of going to the casinos and playing the slot machines. I don't know if he gave it to her for Mother's Day, but in honor of the sweet sentiment: Happy Mother's day to all the mother's out there who tolerate videogames in their homes.
Okay, one last "gone before" entry.
1977 was when things started rolling, with the introduction of the Atari VCS, but 1978 was when things started rocking. Five programmable videogame consoles available that year.
Atari VCS
Fairchild Channel F (formerly VES)
Bally Professional Arcade
The Magnavox Odyssey^2
APF MP1000
Atari VCS 1978
Basketball
Braingames
Breakout
Codebreaker
Flag Capture
Hangman
Home
This review bears no relation to the Kiss album from 1979 with the same name. That album came out in 1979 and now it's after 2000, man. For you Kiss fans, it doesn't take x-ray eyes to see that despite their charisma they could be accused of dirty livin'. If you get the joke then you sure know something. Yes, even in hard times, I've got a magic touch. Hah! I know, I'm hysterical, but save your love for the Odyssey^2.
I've been reorganizing my "house of doom" into a single "wall of doom", i
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