Videocart # 10 - Maze and Backgammon
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#10 - Maze
This was fun, but would have been more fun with the directions. We weren't quite sure how to set up the mazes we wanted to play. Of course, now I know where the instructions can be found, but not having them made our selections a little random.
This is a maze cartridge that generates lots and lots of random mazes. Apparently this cart is "special" as it is one of the few carts with an extra chip in it (a 2102 SRAM, if you're curious) to help it handle all the work it does. (The other cart is hangman). The maze variations are interesting: Regular Maze, Jailbreak, Blind-man's Bluff and Trailblazer. Regular maze is pretty straight forward. Two mice in a maze first one out wins. (Presumably, cheese.)
-Cat and Mouse-
NOTE: This is the second game entitled Cat and Mouse on a Home Console system. Can anyone name the system on which this game has also appeared? Hmm?
We really had a good time with "Regular Maze" Cat and Mouse. Cat and Mouse involves you and the other player controlling the "mice" in the maze while a fast "cat" square hunts you down. It's pretty exciting when you're cornered and the cat is closing in. Sometimes you'll escape because the Cat may take a different branch before heading down yours, but other times you'll know it it's just a matter of time until it gets you. My seven year-old and I had a pretty good time playing this variation. Another Cat and Mouse variation is called Paranoia. A mouse can't leave the maze until the other mouse gets eaten. Kinda sick, but we liked this one, too.
-Blindman's Bluff-
This maze variant blanks out the whole maze and you have to "feel" your way through it. This gets old quickly because your trails aren't permanent. EDIT: What I forgot to say is that you can draw a trail behind you to help you find your way, but as you back track you erase your trail. It just wasn't a lot of fun moving around a blank maze "blindly".
-Jailbreak-
Jailbreak was more fun than Blindman's Bluff, but less so than Cat and Mouse. The entire maze is a grid. You get through the maze by pushing your way through "weak" spots in the grid.
Trailblazer is similar to Blindman's Bluff, but instead of a blank maze, it's a completely "full" maze and you have to figure out where the trail is. One of the interesting things about the game design is you can leave a trail for your opponent to follow so that it either helps them or hurts them. Our exploration of this title, however, didn't inspire us enough to fully explore the subtleties of this feature and I leave it as an exercise for the reader. Actually, when you think about it, Blindman's Bluff, Jailbreak and Trailblazer are really all the same game. You're trying to get through a maze which has its paths completely obscured... Hmm. Yeah, well moving on . . .
We stayed on this cartridge for about 30 minutes and didn't go away hating it. We'll probably never put it in again, regardless.
#11 - Backgammon
This Videocart actually taught me how to play Backgammon. Something I hadn't managed to do for myself in 37 years of life. My son managed to pick up the rules, but lost interest pretty durn quickly. He's just not interested if there's not a shread of Narrative to make a game less abstract. I guess I could have made something up about pieces representing prisoners and they can only move so far, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. I doubt he'd have bought it, too.
I had no problem with the implementation of this game. The rules were there and they were enforced by the computer. The graphcis were ugly, but that's really not worth quibbling over during the "baby steps" of this era. The problem that I do have with the cart is that it only supports two players (As opposed to a single player variant against the AI). Wouldn't it be easier to just play with a regular Backgammon set? I can understand why it might have been difficult to program an AI, especially one to support different levels of difficulty, but if you're going to make a videogame a "port" of a boardgame commonly found in the real world (or at least it was, back in the 70's, just flip over your checkerboard.) at least give someone a reason to prefer it to the boardgame other than it being on TV.
That's it for now. Next entry: Baseball, I think.
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