Mezrabad

Space Battle (Intellivision, 1980) This is a neat game, and I've never played anything like it (up till 1980). Okay, you've got this base at the center of your little universe from the perspective of your Radar screen. You defend it with three squadrons of three fighters each. Surrounding your base is the utter void of space through which your enemies approach. There's always five groups of these enemies...I don't know why, something to do with how they evolved...coming from the outer boundaries of your radar's scanning range and from any two-dimensional, XY-axis-type of direction. Each alien squadron seems to have from 8 to 14 or so craft in them. So, real quickly, you've got to figure out which squad will reach your station first, which ones are more important to take out first, how many of your squadrons do you commit to attacking what's coming in and what do you leave behind to defend the base? Well, since you've only got three squadrons and they are virtually identical in composition, the general procedure is to send two out (any two of the three) and leave one to hang out at the base. So you send out the two lucky ones, we'll call them White and Blue, because that's their color, unless you send out Gold instead. In this case we'll just let Gold stay behind and perhaps be anhiliated by the hordes that White and Blue can't stop. Moving on, let's say you send Blue out to attack an isolated alien squadron coming in fast and you send White to a clump of three squadrons leaving one lone alien squadron to continue in unintercepted. Let me tell you what happens when one of your squadrons meet up with the little white alien dots. If your Blue squadron hits a swarm of alien ships you'll be able to enter battle with them. This involves a change of screen-ery as your radar screen is replaced by a starfield and a targetting reticle. You move the reticle around to shoot the alien "saucer" ships. Your shots take time to get to the ships (there's a slight 3d perspective, a little like parts of Atari's Star Ship title) so when you shoot at the boogers you have to shoot where you think they will be by the time your shots get there. I think it's called "leading" your target, except that's a silly term because they're not exactly "following" your targetting reticle, right? As if to prove my point about our silly semantic habits, the saucers will often make a sudden looping maneuver just before the shot you just fired gets to them. I think this is called "evasive action", a term the etymology of which I am ignorant, so I can't bitch about it. Regardless, it's easy to miss. The trick is to not only "lead" the targets, but to also try to shoot where you think they might be if they were to suddenly loop. So, this activity ranges from easy to super hard depending on the skill rating you've chosen to play at (ranging from beginning to super advanced) and involves some interesting quirks. One Quirk is that when you destroy an alien ship, it explodes with triradial symmetry, the debris from this pretty explosion can take out other ships, which, in their time of passing, also spawn flaming wreckage that can destroy other ships who have their own debris sprays. This can create a nice little chain of events from your perspective, though you can imagine the pilots of those ships saying "crap, triradial symmetry sucks!" as they perish in space-flames. They fight back, too, (Quirk Two) shooting two white dots, which are harmless, that get bigger and turn red, which are deadly--though there's only ever one pair of dots you have to worry about at a time. These two dots seem easy to avoid but get embrassingly good at predicting where your reticle will be on the tougher settings. If these macro-pixels hit your targetting reticle, you've lost a fighter. Lose all three fighters and you've lost your squadron. What's left of the enemy continues towards your mother ship with a happy little skip in their step. In these battles, you have to destroy a certain number of ships, all of them, to be exact, but stay your hand, Killer, you may want to rethink that. While your Blue is in battle and you're moving around your reticle and making the ships explode into weird geometric terms, your other squadron, the White, may have reached their objective and are getting their probability-controlled buttocks handed to them. This is off-screen Real-Time action (Quirk--what are we up to? Three?)! The rest of the universe doesn't pause while you fight, (at least not on the harder skill settings), the aliens get closer to your mother ship and squadrons that meet in battle will fight whether you're there to control them or not. An off-screen battle will take out one of your pilots for every three of theirs. Sometimes, you have to let this happen, so maybe send your less-likely-to-be-attended squadron to one of the smaller swarms of aliens. If you wish, you can jump out of your Blue battle, knowing your three remaining pilots can, most likely, mop up the remaining aliens, so you can go to assist White with their problems. It's your choice and it's really cool, because it means there's more happening here than just freakish hand-eye coordination. You've got to keep the bigger picture in mind at all times. Anyway, if you're in battle and one of the alien swarms reaches your mother ship, you'll hear klaxons which will increase in their klaxoning until Galact-, er, your "mother ship" is destroyed. At this point, you'll realize, when you're dumped to the Radar screen and it's flashing red, that you're sucking vacuum and it's game over. Why the hell doesn't the Mother Ship have any guns on her? Stupid engineers. If you take out all of the aliens, then it's All Clear and you've won. Good luck seeing this moment on the Super Advanced setting. This is a smart game and on the harder settings you have to think smart to play it. For the record, I can reach the All Clear on the Advanced setting most of the time, but the Super Advanced says to me "Here's your Turtle Wax, thanks for playing, Loser!" and then spits on my vaccuum damaged corpse. Don't be fooled into thinking Space Battle is just about shooting ships. Next entry we'll do Golf or some other sporty, mundane, real-world reflection title. 22947

True story of something that happened to me at the supermarket today! My six year-old daughter and I were at the local supermarket today and I noticed a twenty-something female. Cute either in spite of, or because of, her tattoos and peircings. We had to pass in front of her and I nodded and mumbled a civilized "please excuse us" (as we were briefly blocking her view of whatever it was she was shopping for) and continued on. Suddenly I heard her say "Hey! I LOVE your shirt!" I was wearing a 1up Mushroom shirt. She said she loved her Nintendo, and said she even had a tattoo on her lower back of a Nintendo controller. She then turned around, lifted her shirt and showed me her tattoo. Indeed, there it was, D-pad, select start, and the A-B buttons right there on her lower, lower back (or upper back-side?). I said "hey, that's really cool! (So's the tatoo!) In fact, I was just playing Super Mario Bros. today!" she said, "Cool" and I said, "Well, thanks and take care!" and my daughter and I proceeded to find tortillos. I'd hate to even venture a guess at how long it's been since a random cute chick flashed me her lower back tatoo. As a married-with-children kind-of guy, I'm afraid it just wouldn't have been appropriate for me to invite her over to play NES with my new PowerPak, but I had hoped to run into her again at check-out, just to tell her she totally made my day. Anyway, for some reason, I find myself wanting to buy more 1up Mushroom T-Shirts. My wife didn't seem to enjoy the story as much as I did the actual experience. After hearing it, she just smiled and shook her head saying "Michael, you are a simple, simple man." (Meaning, all it takes to cheer me up is a little bit of positive attention from a random cute girl, which is absolutely true.) Okay, Space Battle later this weekend...

I've liked a lot of anime I've seen: Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Last Exile, Serial Experiments Lain, Stellvia of the Universe, Yokohama Kaidaishi Kikou, Future Boy Conan, Star Blazers, Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Death Note, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Lucky Star, Kanon, Air, Shuffle, Fate Stay Night, Claymore, Nodame Cantibile and The Meloncholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Sadly, I think I find myself drawn more to High School Dramas and Magical Girl Transformation stuff. Since there are many, many bad examples of these, I find myself spending more time filtering out what I don't want to watch than actually watching anything. My family and I just finished watching Future Boy Conan which starts in JULY 2008 when SUPER ELECTRO MAGNETIC BOMBS DESTROY THE WORLD!!!! I'll feel a lot better after we make it through this month. Miyazaki is good stuff, too. My daughter and I just watched Spirited Away again, today (English dub, so I don't have to read her the subtitles.) Cosplay scares me somewhat. When we were in Korea we went to a SoftMax convention. If you are familiar with the art of Hyung-Tae Kim, you might be surprised to find that there are plenty of women/girls who can actually dress up and look like the women/girl in this guy's art. It's quite a sight for sore eyes. It isn't a question of Chick or Dude as much as it is Legal or Jail Bait. I'm married anyway, so it's a moot question to begin with, but it was like being drawn into a trance...anyway, Cosplay. *shudder*

Thanks, as always, encouragement like yours is what spurs me on. I need to catch up with your reviews! I've been "away" for so long, you've probably left me a nice back-log to keep me busy for awhile. The people in the Tennis audience made me think of "The Prisoner", but I'm beginning to think of the faces as more "Trial of Zod & Co." from Superman II. I'll remain undecided until I manage to dig up actual media for careful study.

Tennis (Intellivsion, 1980) I know I said we were going to do Space Battle but with this being "Wimbledon Weekend" I figured this would be the best chance I'd have of getting my wife to play Intellivision's Tennis with me. She actually consented to join me for about 10 minutes! However, I think that because of the fact that she'd just seen one of the greatest, and longest tennis matches of all-time (Federer vs. Nadal) she just couldn't feel the thrill of our little pixel-fest. First off, a couple of things I've been noticing about the Intellivision's manuals for the first year of its release. ONE: every manual so far wants to remind you that these games are FOR COLOR TV VIEWING ONLY but that colors on your set may vary slightly from colors described in their little booklet...and TWO: The manuals are uniformly excellent. They acheive this by clearly explaining everything that's in the game. Notice that I said "everything that's in the game" and not "everything needed to play the game". These aren't documents to just get you up and running, these epistles could serve as design documents because their descriptions of a game's features are so detailed. It might be too much information for those who just want to start playing (*cough*VCS owners*cough*), but for those of us who like knowing what we're doing rather than risk getting frustrated with a game, they're great. Unfortunately for you, I really feel like talking about the manual first. The front cover reads like ad copy, and it probably served as such. On most of the Intellivision manuals I've seen so far (if not all) there's also an all-cap bold statement: HOW TO WIN. which basically says if you want to win, read the fine manual. Once inside the booklet there's a brief description of the object of the game (yes, even for well known games like Tennis) before going over the equipment setup; from checking the hook-ups for the Intellivision MASTER COMPONENT to inserting the Tennis overlays into the controllers. Getting into the game itself, the manual takes two pages to outline the actual rules for a "real world" game of Tennis. It explains the scoring system (for which I blame the French), the serving procedure and the boundaries. It even explains something called a "let" which is when the ball hits the net during a serve. My wife has watched Wimbledon for the last 18 years I've known her and I've never heard that term even once...probably because I usually have my headphones on and I'm at the computer, but that's another story. Anyway, the manual then gets into explaining the controller layout for another page before launching into a detailed explanation of gameplay execution. Pages 5 to 21 are all about what happens in the game and how the players control it. This is followed by an explanation for every sound effect, another review of the game rules, tips for winning and a Tennis glossary. If you've never played or seen a game of real world tennis in your life, you could read the Intellivision's manual for its Tennis cartridge and you'd be able to walk yourself through a complete game of tennis in the real world without sounding clueless. I'm not saying you wouldn't look completely clueless; learning what your body is supposed to do is different from knowing the specialized semiotic domain of a subject, of course. Across the board, from what I've seen, Intellivision presents the same quality manual for Tennis, Horse Racing, NFL Football, Auto Racing, Poker & Blackjack, Armor Battle and Major League Baseball. I speculate that the good Blue Sky Rangers knew they were writing for first-time videogame system owners, i.e. anyone that hadn't gone out and gotten an Atari yet, and they didn't want anyone to get frustrated for lack of clear instructions. About the actual game: it's two-player only! No single player version on this cart. Playing alone using both controllers is right out of the question and don't think I didn't try. So this is another game for which I had to recruit the long-suffering members of my family. As mentioned above, my wife (43) joined me for about 10 minutes, as did my daughter (6) for about three minutes and my son (10) for about 20. As interesting and well done as I thought the game was, they just couldn't share my enthusiasm. At the title screen, you have an opportunity to choose the speed of the game by pressing 1, 2, or 3 on the controller. 3 is Beginner, 2 is "Club", 1 is "Pro". Default (if you just hit the disc without pressing a number) is "Wimbledon". For the record, starting off with Beginner was painfully slow, while Wimbledon was just a tad too fast. We stuck with Pro and had a comfortable time learning, though not comfortable enough for anyone to stick around very long. Maybe I just smell...? The screen presents a sideways view of the court, Red player on the left, Blue player on the right. (Red vs. Blue again!) Red serves first. Red's player serves by selecting a serving area using their controller keypad (Inner, Center or Outer). This sets the server up in the proper position and gives them the ball (which appears in their hands). They hit one of their swing buttons to toss the ball in the air and a swing button again to hit it. The game gives you two options for your swing. Hard and Soft. The soft swing gives you a greater chance of hitting the ball so that it stays within the boundaries of the court, but at the same time this gives your opponent a gentle lob that's easy to return. The hard swing nails the ball, but if you don't time it correctly you'll fault by serving the ball out-of-bounds, or by missing the ball on your swing (whiff!). If your opponent sends you a lob and you return it with a hard swing, it gives you an opportunity for a SMASH. A SMASH has a nice satisfying feeling to it and causes the creepy, vaguely-minimized human faces in the crowd to cheer, but visually retain their stoic impassivity. For some reason, the faces in the crowd remind me of the 60's British TV series, "The Prisoner". Dark, deep eye sockets on every member of the cloned audience follow the ball's every move. I get chills just thinking about it. Now for the Intellivision...Nightmare Tennis! The game provides a shadow for the ball to allow you to track it more easily which, I would venture to guess, makes this a 3D game in the same way Atari's Basketball was. The shadow is a good indicator of where the ball is going to go as the ballistic path of the actual ball can be confusing given the lack of apparent screen-depth. (Does that make sense?) Anyway, the manual says to watch the shadow, so that's what I do. In addition to using a Hard or Soft swing, how you time your swing and where in your swing the racket actually hits the ball will determine towards what side of the court the ball will go when you return it. We didn't get good enough to actually do anything with this information, but it's good to know it's there for when we reach a "higher level" of play. In real tennis, the winner of a full match is determined by the first to win three out of five sets. The winner of a set is the player who wins at least six games first and win two games more than their opponent. The winner of a game is determined by the first to score at least four points and have at least two points more than their opponent. Intellivision's Tennis follows these scoring procedures and a full match can take a little while to play. I don't know how long this actually does take because both my son and my wife were anxious to do something else after the first set. I suppose if you wanted to simulate today's record setting 12-to-15-games-long sets in Wimbledon Gentlemen's Finals 2008, you could, but I wouldn't recommend it unless there's a big check and a heavy looking plate involved. Two things about controlling your Tennis player: First thing, the disc: You use the 16-point directional disc to move your player around the court. This is actually not unpleasant because your on-screen persona ALWAYS faces the net. Moving them with the disc just pushes them around the court and isn't at all frustrating. Either the designers used the disc better in this game than the others we've played or our thumbs are getting used to it. Second thing, the side buttons: What is frustrating is the buttons on the sides of these Intellivision II controllers, there just isn't any feedback or play in them to give you a clear indication of when you're actually activating it. It's not a deal-breaker but I look forward to being used to them...someday. Next entry I'll do Space Battle, which is for one OR two player, unless I decide to do something else. (22730)

Horse Racing (Intellivision, 1980) For any of you that read this blog whenever I actually post something, you might be painfully aware that I neither enjoy gambling nor sports. I usually bitch and moan about most Blackjack carts I have to play and while I do my best to muster up enthusiasm for the sports titles, I'm sure it's obvious that my heart usually isn't in them. In fact, beyond an appreciation for graphics and/or feature set, I can barely tolerate sports and gambling titles. Also, with my limited appreciation for "board to video" ports of games, (i.e. Checkers, Backgammon) I'm sure you can grok why I might have a difficult time getting through 1980 on the Intellivision. Now, take the cart Horse Racing. You'd think, given that I'm not into sports and I'm not into gambling, that this title is sure to get an instant "meh" from me. Well, maybe you wouldn't think that, but if you did you'd be wrong. First off, Horse Racing is for one to six players. That's SIX. Now, the math folk among you may be asking yourselves, "Did he say 'SIX'? How in the square-root-of-effing-two could there be SIX players with only TWO controllers?" Well, let's go over the concepts first. When you turn on your Intellivision console with Horse Racing in the slot, you're really giving the computer the go-ahead to synthesize eight healthy horses. Each horse has its own secret, built-in set of intrinsics governing its speed, stamina and ability to run on certain surfaces. You have $750 and ten races to try to observe and figure out just what these horses can do. If you run out of cash in the process, your game is over. (Beatings with a pillowcase full of oranges is optional, though not recommended.) Each horse, by the way, is named a color: Pink, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet and White. For each race, four horses race on one of three different surfaces (Dry, Turf or Muddy) for eight different distances (three to ten furlongs). The instruction manual (another excellently written Intellivision manual, btw) suggests keeping track of the length and conditions for each race, the entries and the results -- including the winning time. So, every race, via the results, you're given a handfull of clues about how each horse performs. The better you get to know the horses, the more confident you may bet on them. This can result in wads and wads of well-earned imaginary cash. For instance, in the very first race, I watched Blue, Violet, Green and Orange race for three furlongs on Turf. The finish was V-O-G (Violet, Orange, Green) with Blue trailing. So, what does one glean from this? Well, over a short distance and on turf, we'll tentatively conclude that Violet can beat Orange, Green and Blue. This isn't really a lot to work with, but each race gives you the opportunity for making and/or supporting a hypothesis and this allows you to refine your betting. The second race put Orange, Green, Red and Violet against each other on eight furlongs of turf. I thought "Pfft, I know Violet should at least beat Orange and Green" so I bet on Violet, figuring my only worry would be Red. WRONG! Apparently, while Violet is faster than Orange over three furlongs on turf, Orange has more Stamina and can beat Blue in eight furlongs! The placing was Orange, Violet, Red and Green. Well, at least I can be pretty certain that Green is slower than both of them... So, using the characteristics of each race and the results, you start to put together composite sketch of each horse. It's very interesting and fun. When you get enough "horse sense" you can start placing Exacta bets. An Exacta bet is when you try to predict the placement of the two horses to come in first and second. Exactas pay 15 to 1, which is a good deal more than what you can get for merely picking what may have become an obvious winner. You might ask, "Well what fun is that? After a days at the races, you'll know how to rank the horses!" Well, that's where the beauty of randomly generated qualities comes in. After your day at the races, it's off to the metaphorical glue factory for the whole stable of them. Each time you start a set of races there's a new set of horses; same colors, different abilities. So, how can six people play? Well, each of you gets an account, numbered from one to six. Before each race, you pass around the controllers and everyone gets a chance to look at the offered race and to place their bets. You can let everybody just watch the races or two players at a time may choose to jockey a horse. For every race, the two horses that start closest to the guard rail (towards the top of the screen) are jockeyed by the computer. This means that the computer decides at what position on the track each unjockeyed horse runs, when to coax the horse to run faster and when to apply the whip to inspire a final, potentially crippling, burst of speed. The bottom two horses are optionally controlled by one player each. When I played by myself, I simply let the computer jockey all four ("hands-off" playing). With a group of people, it is possible for any two players to jockey one of the two, non-computer jockeyed horses. A jockey gets to coax and whip the horse as well as decide its positioning -- closer to the guard rail (towards the top) means it's traveling a smaller circle around the track and likely to wear out less quickly than if it were traveling on the outer track. However, there are drawbacks to people having the ability to jockey. If someone jockeys a horse that they haven't bet on to win, then it's too easy for the unethical jockey to apply the whip early, steer the horsey to the outside of the track and poor little Sunny Muffins hasn't got a chance of winning. In a nutshell, the controls allow "fixing". During my second time through by myself, if there were jockeyable horses that I hadn't bet on to win, I'd run those mounts into the dirt. This would allow the horse I bet on to have a better chance of winning. Aside from the potential of burning in Cheater's Hell, this has a practical downside. Say that you've been forcing Pink to lose for three races and then suddenly she shows up against horses you've also forced to lose. How, then, do you bet? By tampering with a horse, you lose the chance to gather information. So, while the chance to jockey is there, it's an extra variable I'd rather do without though I certainly understand the need for its inclusion. Most people would want to actually play videogames, not just watch them. That being said, Horse Racing, however, is indeed fun even if you're just watching the races to observe the equine behavior. If I can ever get six people together to play, I'll let you know how it goes. In a continuing attempt to procrastinate the other sports titles, I think we'll try Space Battle next entry. 22652

If the perspective was overhead then seeing them as we did was all wrong. It was more of a schematic. The Dragon is "here"...You are "here"... The Dragon moves closer, what do You do? GO EAST The Dragon follows You east....etc. Reading backwards...yeah Icons, that's it.

NFL Football (Intellivision, 1980) NFL Football is one of those games that doesn't register on my radar longer than it would take to say, "Hey, those guys look they're really running--oh look, Space Invaders on the Atari!" I'm just not into sports, so if I sound less than enthusiastic about a well done sports title, remember, it's not the fault of the title. We played this months ago and it's taken me this long to get around to writing about it not because it's a bad game, it's just that I don't have anything intelligent to say about it. Neat features of the game: 1. Scrolling football field. If I'm not mistaken we saw this feature first on the Bally Professional Arcade. Your TV is a window into a segment of the field, rather than the whole field itself. Like Auto Racing the scrolling feature lends the effect of feeling like you're part of a larger world and actually moving around in it rather than confined to a tiny rectangular world that just happens to be the same size as your TV screen. 2. Cheering fans. Like Baseball, you've got a "crowd-track". You've also got other sound effects that add to the playing of the game including a ref whistle and a gunshot to signal the end of a quarter. 3. Three time-outs per player. If you know how to strategically use a time-out, then you can do it in this game. 4. Everything you'd expect in a game that said "football" on it. Passing, kicking, punting, safeties, touchbacks. They did a good job with this, the only thing missing is announcers. 5. Excellent manual. The manual is a little over 20 pages long and that doesn't include the playbook for each player. 6. Big playbook combinations. There are nine formations to choose from for each side (Offensive or Defensive), that just sets up where your players start. If you're offense, then you pick from two receivers and from nine passing zones. This is the sort of thing that blows my little non-football playing mind. ONE Drawback: The CONTROLLER. Yep, that's pretty much the trouble. Sure a keyboard controller with an analog disc looks great on paper, but try using it actively and the pain begins. Getting the controller to accept our plays is Madden-ing (heh, I made a pun) geting the players to run where we want is frustrating and painfull. Maybe we just need better controllers. (We're playing on an Intellivision II so I'm sure you can feel our pain.) Overall, I'd say the design and content of this game is enough to keep it on anyone (American) football fan's fond memory list if they are the type to miss football in the off season. If you like watching football with your dad and friends then this game is probably a good substitute during the long spring/summer months without NFL action. For people who like videogames, but are not fans of sports you will appreciate the manual and the feature set but, then again, you're probably too busy enjoying your VCS to care. Next entry: Hmm, it's been so dang long since I looked at my list, I've got no clue what I'm playing next! 22235

My son is a very enthusiastic Super Smash Bros: Melee/Brawl player, anything Pokemon and a big Kingdom Hearts fan. In addition to what he plays, he's interested in playing anything modern I happen to be playing (sometimes, to my wife's dismay). He has come home from school expressing shock over learning his classmates have never heard of Final Fantasy XI Online or System Shock. He's also my playing partner for Chronogamer and is a very good sport about playing some of the "less interesting" two-player only games offered in the late 70s early 80s. On the positive side, playing Chrono Trigger when he was five was a strong incentive for him to learn to read, which he does very well. On the negative side, whenever we want him to do something at home "besides playing videogames" he finds himself at a loss to occupy himself (though he has discovered that he enjoys reading for fun). My daughter (6) is interested in playing videogames but the material she desires to play is usually very disappointing licensed crap (anything Barbie-related, for instance). I keep trying to steer her towards Spyro: Year of the Dragon (which was my son's gateway game) but she's just not interested in it enough to learn the moves essential for playing the game. She totally OWNS at Wii Bowling, however, and she the highest score in the house (though I can't remember what it is at the moment, something in the mid 200s) Air-Sea Battle Entry with picture of daughter playing Air-Sea Battle.

Happy BirthPiDay!

I think a hack could be considered a "derivative" of the original work and if the original copyright holders aren't protecting their property when their copyrights expire then the copyright transfers to the person who was last given permission to create a derivative work. Of course, most hack aren't derivatives created with permission so I have no idea where they'd stand legally. Not entirely relevant, of course, we are decades away from the expiration of copywritten material created in the 70s. There was a case fairly recently, however, of a Coca-Cola trademark's copyright expiring and an freelance artist who had recently been comissioned to create a derivative work of the trademark suddenly found himself a) in legal ownership of a formerly owned by Coca-Cola trademark property and b) under heinous attack (both legally and personally as they attempted to defame his reputation in the process) by Coke's corporate lawyers to get the property back. Hmm, I guess I'll have to find a link on that somewhere. Anyway, my point is, if the material is not being protected by the original creators and someone creates a derivative work (even without permission) then my understanding of it is that the derivative work is in fact the intellectual property of the person who made the hack. Now, with regards to that label, that looks a lot like a legitimate Wolfenstein property to which I doubt very much the artist who made the label had permission to create a derivative work of the Wolfenstein IP. The creators are probably still protecting their rights to it, it's a pretty recent thing isn't it? As I understand the copyright thing (which is admittedly a minimal understanding), the owners of the Wolfenstein trademark have more grounds to sue the label artist than the label artist has grounds to sue the unauthorized seller of his unauthorized derivative work. Perhaps someone with actual legal training could tell us more about this as I've probably gotten more than a few concepts wrong. Regardless of his rights or lack of right to sell it, I'm glad he pulled it and apologized. This is a community and people shouldn't be sponging off the creative efforts of others.

I never figured out how to stream to my old Xbox, but having recently got an Xbox 360 an finding out the thing had the feature built in I was excited. We regularly download our TV shows via Bittorrent and watch on the old Xbox, but anytime I wanted to put something on the old modded Xbox, I had to move my download laptop over to it, hook it up and ftp the media on to the harddrive while deleting the stuff we'd already watched. With the 360, I just download what we want to watch and turn on the 360 and watch it on the HDTV. To set it up I only had to upgrade to the latest Windows Media Player. I am bothered by the whole DRM thing, but didn't realize that all of the grey-area stuff I download via bittorrent (anime, amazing race asia, lost, survivor) are treated as "Home Movies" and WMP doesn't seem to care. I guess my image of DRM was that it wouldn't let me watch anything unless it had the DRM seal of approval on it. Anyway, I share your joy. It's cool not having to haul and hook the laptop up anymore to watch what we've downloaded.

Major League Baseball (Intellivision, 1980) Major League Baseball is the game I saw being played at every Sears I walked into when the Intellivision was being introduced. I'm not a fan of baseball, but to me this game will always represent the tantalizing first glimpse of the Intellivision's exciting potential. In fact, prior to acquiring an Intellivision for chronogaming, Baseball was the only game for the Intellivision I'd ever played on the original hardware. Upon further reflection I find myself a little annoyed at the one and only friend of mine who actually had an Intellivision but never invited me over to play it. (Though he did demonstrate his AD&D cartridge to me the one time I was there so I guess I should be grateful for that.) The screen layout, predictably, looks like a baseball field. At the start of the game all nine players on the home team come out onto the field from their dugout (left side for home, right side for visitor) and take their positions. The opponent's batter takes its place at the home plate. Using the disc, the player whose team is in the field can have the pitcher pitch a ball with different levels of speed and curve but with no "telekinetic" control over the ball while it is in flight. A batter can hit either a foul or a home run and the fielding team doesn't do much about it. Anything other than a foul or a home run, however, is treated as a grounder and that's when it gets fun. The Intellivision keypad is used to great effect here as each position on the field is represented on the overlay. If the ball gets hit into left field you activate the left outfielder by pressing the player on your keypad and then you move them to the ball using Disc controller. When they've gotten the ball, you press the field position to which they should throw the ball and try to tag the running player out. In fact, you can even commit an error. If you decide to throw the ball to first base but in the middle of the throw decide to activate the second baseman, you'll deactivate the first baseman and the ball will land on the ground. This allows the runner to take advantage of your mistake and stretch the hit out into a double or triple. This mechanic adds a flexibility to the gameplay lacking in the other baseball titles we've seen. For instance, some previous games have determined how far the runner gets (single, double or triple) depending on where the ball is hit. In fact, unless my memory is rotten (and it could be) I don't think any other game offers the freedom of throwing the ball to whatever position the player feels like nor do any allow the runner's player to make any decisions going around the bases, which I'll get to next. On the running side of the game, the player at bat has complete freedom over the lead runner and can have them run in either direction (towards the next base or back to the most recent one touched) whenever they feel it's to their advantage. When the pitcher is getting ready to pitch, it's possible for the runner to take a nice lead towards the next base in an attempt to steal. To counter this, the pitcher can throw to the baseman to try to tag the runner out. In addition to base stealing this play mechanic allows for a form of emergent gameplay which I think baseball players call "monkey in the middle". Specifically, this is when a runner gets caught stealing a base and the basemen throw the ball back and forth to trap the oscillating runner between them. It isn't behavior that's "programmed" into the game, but because of the simple gameplay mechanics and the design choice of leaving it up to the players the situation can emerge just like it does in a meatspace game of baseball. I might be wrong, but the sound effects sound either like digitized samples or very masterful programming of the sound chip. The first time I heard the "YER OUT!" I thought it sounded like an umpire growling the actual words. The cheers and whistles of the crowd also sound pretty good. I wonder if any game has the crowd cheer louder for the home team? It would make sense, wouldn't it, I mean it stands to reason there will be more fans of the home team in the stands...but I digress. The one drawback to this cart is that it is only for two players with no solo play option but this can be a plus as it encourages people to play videogames together. The bright side of this meant I had to recruit my son (now 10, he's been chronogaming with me since he was seven) to play Baseball with me. This sort of situation is always a treat for me but depends on the game whether or not it's a treat for him. He picked it up quickly enough but was lamenting that we had to play for Nine. Whole. Innings...actually it was only eight and a half. After it was over he was very happy to get back to playing Oblivion. I did get a big kick out of seeing him seemingly embrace the stealing bases tactic, though towards the end I think he was doing it to end the game faster. I should mention something about Major League Baseball being an Intellivision game which utilizes the practice of licensing trademarks from professional sport leagues. We'll see it again for every early Intellivision sports title I can think of, including Backgammon. Does anyone know if this strategy paid off for the system? It does nothing for me personally, but does anyone out there in, um, chronoblogosphere remember how they felt about licensed sports titles on the INTV back in the day? Was it more exciting to play Major League Baseball than it would have been to merely play Baseball? Next time we'll play Football, though I should call it NFL Football to get you NFL fans out there excited. 19937

Armor Battle (Intellvision, 1980) Don't get me wrong, I really love Atari's Combat; it will always hold a special place in my heart. However, Armor Battle immediately strikes me as being a "next generation" tank game: two tanks for each player, obstacles, variable terrain (road, water, woods, grass, buildings), mine laying capabilities, 240 different terrain maps, tanks that take multiple hits...jeez, the feature list goes on and on, doesn't it? Each player has two tanks under their command, but may only control one at a time and must switch between them at the right moments. While you're controlling one tank, the other is a sleeping husk. Fortunately, the battlefield is littered with obstacles and terrain that will slow a tank down as well as limit the range of its shells. One move my son performed was to hide one tank behind some buildings (which shielded it from my fire) and immediately switch to his other tank to take advantage of my pursuing tank's exposed rear while his first tank was protected. Another fun tactic available is the laying of an invisible mine. You can lead your enemy on a merry chase through a narrow pass while dropping a mine behind you. You only get one mine per round but it only takes one mine to rip through the soft underbelly of these tanks. When your tank is destroyed, either by a mine or by shots, its hulking wreck is left as an obstacle on the battlefield. Very cool. By the way, that mine is also invisible to you, so don't forget where you left it, or you may find it in the worst way. The game automatically ends when one of the players has lost 50 tanks, so we're talking a minimum of 25 rounds if you do it that way. If you establish a limit to the number of rounds beforehand then the winner is the one with the most tanks left after the pre-determined limit. One thing I appreciate about the game is the attempt to present the tanks in a pseudo-isometric perspective. Despite appreciating the effort, I think they look a little like the tanks I used to draw in grade school, only pixelated. I prefer the more pixelated but overhead view of the Atari Combat tanks, but this is a preference and not a comment on the artistic merits of either. I feel the only drawback to Armor Battle would be the Intellivision controllers. Intellithumb took my son out before we could rack up too much time playing. Yes, he needs to learn not to press so hard, but I do my best not to over press and I still find my thumb getting sore after a little while. Another problem was that his controller would spontaneously switch tanks at inappropriate moments. Obviously, there's something wrong with my particular controllers and this isn't a problem with the game in itself. I'm using an INTV II so if I ever have the opportunity to switch out the controllers, I'll take it. The only additional feature I would like to have seen in Armor Battle would be a limited ammo supply and maybe a reload station. Granted, the nature of the game is such that you want to make every shot count regardless of supply as a missed shot is a missed opportunity to hurt your enemy. Yet knowing you only have a few shots left can be pretty exciting and in my opinion would've added to the gameplay in this case. We saw limited ammo on Odyssey^2's tank game, and I really liked it there. Its absence in this tank battle is noticeable, but I feel I'm just being greedy. I can see how Intellivision could be a strong threat to Atari's dominance in the minds of those who want deeper gameplay. I've only chronogamed three titles from the INTV library so far and I can already see that there's a "depth trend". Atari VCS games take a simple idea and provide as many variations on that idea as they can fit on a cart, (see Combat, Street Racer, Surround, Sky Diver, Canyon Bomber, etc). Intellivision games seem to take a simple idea (card games, racing, tank fights) and flesh it out with nuanced bells and whistles. I'm not saying this makes a given game necessarily "better" than a version on the Atari, just "deeper" and hinting at a potential for more immersive gameplay. Next cart will be Major League Baseball. 19670

Bumpy

Bump, new item for sale.

We've played this game a bit more since this entry was written. Even though it can be pretty fun, we still don't count it as worthy of causing us to miss an episode of Ultraman which is the cutting edge of both cheesy TV special effects and Japanese import grooviness. Remember, the score isn't about the inherent entertainment value of the game, its about the opportunity cost. Now if they'd called it something like "Telekinetic Tennis" and the incorporation of English represented our ability to mentally manipulate the trajectory of the ball...well then, that WOULD be cooler than Ultraman and we'd play it much longer, making Theremin sounds the whole time. ...which means we COULD just call it that, make the sounds and enjoy it a whole lot more...and ditch Ultraman. I'll count your overrule when I finally publish the treemeat version of this blog. By the way, thanks for reading and commenting. I didn't think people were still going back to these old entries and checking them out. You've inspired me to try cajoling my son into playing "Armor Battle" with me tomorrow!

Auto Racing (Intellivision, 1980) We've seen an overhead view in our driving games before. Indy 500 and Speedway took the "camera" and hung it high over the track so that the field of vision encompassed the entire course. Such a viewpoint is useful for seeing "the big picture" but it limits the amount of detail one need bother to show. Auto Racing for the Intellivision takes a different perspective, or, more specifically, a lower, more mobile perspective. In this case, the camera hangs directly over the player's car at all times, moving with it, and the vantage point is so low that we can only see a portion of the track at any given time. This gives the game a feeling of driving in a larger, contiguous world rather than several different isolated arenas. In fact, the five tracks offered are all on one big map. You can see and even access the other tracks by leaving your chosen course and driving through someone's lawn! Like putting shifty eyes on a blackjack dealer, this feature adds nothing to the gameplay in itself, but gives an ineffable boost to the experience overall. While some of the Indy 500 games are about getting around the track as quickly as possible during a single race, Auto Racing is about trying to improve your driving skills so that you can get around each turn of the course as efficiently as possible. Navigating your, um, auto, around a course is a collection of subtle steering nudges, careful braking and controlled drifting . . . LOL, does anyone ever call them "autos"? I mean, "auto racing" isn't an unfamiliar term, but "auto" by itself just sounds weird. "Hey, you kids, get off of my auto!", "I need a jump, my auto battery died"! *snort* "I've got to hurry, I'll be late for my Auto Pool", heh. heheh. Yeah, what was I saying again, something about navigating a track? You want to be good at navigating the track because if you go off the track you may hit a tree, a house or have to crawl painfully slow through a lake. The grass also slows you down a good deal, so keep off of that, too. Something realistic about the steering: if your car is not moving, you can't change direction. Yes, this seems like it would be an obvious requirement, but its addition reminds me of how much I didn't miss it in Indy 500, where cars could spin in whatever direction you wanted, regardless of motion. The version of this game that I have uses relative steering. You push the disc to the right of "midnight" and your car steers to its right. There's also a version called absolute steering which points the car in whatever direction you push on the disc. Can't say which I'd prefer as I haven't tried the absolute version. I suppose one is just as easy to get used to as the other. You get to choose your "auto", by the way. You've got five in your garage each with its own intrinsic characteristics. Besides each having a unique color, some are faster than others while others handle the "cornering" better. Two of the cars are differently colored, but identical in speed and handling. This is for the purpose of two-players racing against each other. Which brings me to where this title can really do whatever the opposite of shine is: two-player races on Auto Racing can be a real drag. Because of the close overhead perspective, (which is a Good Thing in single player,) the maximum distance between you and your opponent is limited. If one of you gets to far ahead of the other, you are both yanked back to a checkpoint. For instance, if your opponent slides into a tree or a house and you keep going...yank. I suppose it could be enjoyable if both racers were skilled enough to not crash at all, but one race can take a long time otherwise. It is Auto Racing that has introduced me to the affliction I'm calling "Intellivision Thumb". The disc on the Intellivision controller is interesting and innovative, but in trying to control my race car I'm afraid it can become a little painful. Perhaps this is the type of pain one gets used to over time, but while intently trying to improve my cornering, I began to feel discomfort which eventually outweighed my desire to continue playing. If I were more literarily inclined, I might do more of a compare and contrast between Auto Racing and Indy 500 since the two were similarly themed games on systems known to be rivals. However, since I'm getting tired of typing, and you're probably getting tired of reading I'll leave it at this: Auto Racing is more realistic than fun and Indy 500 is more fun than realistic but both have their thrills and laughs. Sorry, no screenshots or videos this week. I'm finding that the prospect of adding those is more often a demotivator to writing an entry due to the extra work involved. I think I'm going to focus more on actually playing the games and writing about them rather than adding the "multimedia flair" with the hope that this will allow me to get to more games and entries. I mean, I'm still in 1980 for crying out loud, I was hoping to be in 1983 by now! Next entry will be Armor Battle. 18995 EDIT: crap, I didn't save my initial edits correctly so you were forced to read my crappy grammar and poor spelling which I thought I'd corrected. Jeesh, I'm going to have to hire an editor someday.

What blew my mind was that you built an entire city for that label...that's just incredible. I was just glancing at the pictures first (before reading the captions) and I had just assumed it was an actual picture of a city. Anyway, nice work guys and thanks for sharing your process.

Heheh. I enjoyed this review, not just for the information but for the lonely soul theme. Figuring out some of the old games is a real challenge sometimes and half the time one can end up feeling that it was a waste of effort as the game can turn out not to be worth it. Still, exploration isn't always about finding the cool places to which to invite others, it's also about finding the awful places about which to warn others. Thanks for the advance warning.

I think owning a bolo tie is actually a requirement for residency as I understand it, ever since the "You Have to Own at Least Two Bolo Ties to Live Here Act of 1987" passed. Thanks for the picture references, I guess it's just "a dealer tie". Hmm, that's a shame, I really wanted to get some mileage out of the bolo tie schtick.

!!! Y'know, I think you're right. At one point, when I was unsure about when the Zircon Channel F carts came out, I had thought their's was the first with card dealer AI beyond the standard blackjack "hit at 16, stick at 17" I've since decided that didn't come out until after this one sooo... YEAH! this would be the first where the Dealer actually has a betting routine. Dang, I should've noticed that. I guess this ain't like riding a bike. As for following the rules the dealer seems to do fine. It's possible to bluff in the stud poker games early in the hand and cause the dealer to fold. I wasn't able to bet over 99 in a betting round but if I tried to bet over my cash I got a "Get Lost!" from the dealer. That's interesting about the TI 99/4a cart. If I were more of a card player that would be something I could explore further. I've never given the card games as much attention as they deserve. In fact, my interest in this game was only piqued because of the "lifelike" dealer and the fact that when I won with a flush I could see the words "Pot" and "Flush" on the screen at the same time. Heh. Hmm, I forgot to mention that in my entry, too, jeez, I've really let myself go.

Welcome back! Did you get done what you needed to get done?

Las Vegas Blackjack & Poker (Intellivision, 1980) Note Bene: There will be a YouTube video supplementing portions of this entry so check again later for the link or just check out my YouTube page at: Chronogamer's YouTube Page where it will eventually appear. Intellivision was test-marketed in California in 1979 and sold to the rest of the United States in 1980. Rather than going by the copyright date given on the title screen of Blackjack (1978) to determine the appropriate chronological order of this game, I decided to go with the earliest year I would have been able to play it, which would have been 1980, had I been fortunate enough to own an Intellivision at the time. See this isn't a nostalgic thing for me, it's a "do it now because I didn't then." Oh, just a quick economic factoid. Intellivision's initial retail price was $300 (okay, it was actually $299, but I try not to think in those types of prices). $300 in 1980 US dollars is $803.29 in 2006 dollars. This means that the same food, clothing and shelter you could buy in 1980 for $300 would cost $803.29 in 2006. In the past 28 years while the cost of a new home videogame console has gone up a bit, the cost of other things has gone up even more, making the opportunity cost of a new console actually less than it was in 1980. I think I need to bring that up to my wife the next time I get a hankering for an Xbox 360. So, another Blackjack? When Mattel said, "Hey, let's put Blackjack in the box with the system!" what were they thinking? There were already at least three other carts that played blackjack in circulation (two for the VCS and one for the Odyssey^2 not to mention a few others); what did Mattel think they could do better than what other systems had already done with a game involving little more than testing to see if a one sum is closer to 21 than another? Well, there's a major component to this game that sets it apart from all Blackjacks/Pokers before it: your computer controlled dealer has a human face! Never before have we stared at a home videogame and had a computer generated face staring back at us. Taking a census of facial features we can count two each of eyes, ears and eyebrows as well as one each of a nose and mouth - it's even got a moustache and goatee. If I had to pick someone, I'd say it looks a lot like Bruce Campbell, but maybe that's just me. Quick aside: can we talk about the tie for a second? Is that a bolo tie? How often does one see the official neckwear of Arizona (since 1971) and, later, New Mexico (since 1987), in a videogame? Feel free to actually answer that question if you know. If that isn't a bolo tie than what exactly should it be called? Thanks in advance. Okay, back to the entry. In addition to having a face (and the tie), the dealer actually deals the cards to each player, sending the cards spinning down the playfield to rest in the appropriate spots rather then them simply "popping" in when they are dealt. You can see this in action whenever I get my video up to YouTube. All that would be cool enough, but instead of being satisfied with providing a face and the animation of cards being dealt, this cart goes one step further by giving the dealer a simple approximation of human emotions. Most of the time, the dealer wears the "poker"-face one would expect from a professional card dealer. However, under certain circumstances, this dealer's composure will crack a bit, making him seem all the more human but not in that creepy Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within kind of way. His Blackjack behavior is quite simple. If you go bust he'll smile cheesily about it. If he goes bust, he'll give you the angry face. His poker behavior is more complex. For five card draw poker he'll only give the smile when he's confident in his hand and raising the stakes. For the five and seven card stud poker he'll still smile when raising the stakes, but when you've got a hand that looks good and are not betting, he'll get really frustrated because all he can do is call your non-bet. In addition to all the cool graphical touches and emoting by the dealer, there are four card games to play: Blackjack, 5-card stud, 7-card stud and 5-card draw. The mechanic for viewing the cards in the poker games is simple, just ask your co-player to look away and press the directional disc to reveal your cards. You may choose a new game at the end of a hand, play the same game or you can let the dealer choose what to play. You carry your wallet balance from hand to hand regardless of what you choose to play. If you go bankrupt, then your controller becomes inoperative and it's game over while your playing partner gets to continue until they go bankrupt. Overall if you want to play Blackjack and/or Poker on a TV this cart is a good way to do it. If you don't already own an Atari or an Odyssey^2, Las Vegas Blackjack & Poker this is (meaning: "was") a fair argument for getting an Intellivision (Moms & Dads in 1980 understood Blackjack and Poker, just like Moms & Dads understand Wii Bowling today). It's not as addictive as say, the Poker Solitaire game on the Casino cart for the VCS, but it can still be pretty addictive . . . and I don't normally like videogames based on card games. Next Entry will be Auto Racing for the Intellivision. 18461

Okay, not a chronogaming entry per se, but the gallery contains the promised pictures of the machines we saw at the awesome HAAG Expo from 8 weeks ago so that should be good for a look-see. That's all for now. EDIT: Oh, I noticed that linking to a Gallery in an entry puts pictures in the entry. Here's the link to the Game Shows gallery. (Just click on the HAAG 2007 link) Gaming Expos HAAG 2007 Gallery And if you like pretty lights and getting motion-sickness... HAAG 2007 Fly-Through (Sorry, this video is no longer available.)