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Mezrabad

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Blog Entries posted by Mezrabad

  1. Mezrabad

    DP Blogs eaten?

    By Mezrabad,

    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 efforts. To not be aware of these facts would be ungrateful and ignorant. I am neither. The fact that DP is free for me and many others is what inspired me to also have my blog over there despite after having set it up here at AA a month prior.
     
    This blog is a bit of an attempt to "give something back" in the form of reviews of some really old games about which I can find very little on the rest of the internet. It can take about three to four hours an entry (yeah, now you know). Consider this, for most titles I write about I have to: find them for sale, win them at auction (or borrow them), find the money to pay for them, receive them, set them up, play them, cajole people into playing them with me as needed, take screenshots, quicktime movies and box scans, edit/compress said photographed/scanned material, sit down and write something about them, format the entry (with pictures) and then sell them back to the world again to afford the games coming up in the chronology. All that work is done for A. My own sick pleasure and B. To write about it in this blog.
     
    Do that 145 times. Not for every game of course, but you get the picture.
     
    If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it, but that doesn't mean there's no effort. To just take all that effort offline, possibly with no hope of return, without adequate warning, seems, at best, hasty, at worst, um, really, really hasty.
     
    I'm hoping the guy was joking. If he was yanking our chains, fine. Hell, no harm done even if he wasn't yanking our chains because I had my site pretty much "backed up" over here on AA, which I backed up to my HD last night and today.
     
    Suffice to say: if my blog at DP has been put into stasis with little chance of retrieval, I am not a happy camper. The implications of this may be very complex and long-term.
  2. Mezrabad
    After my last entry, two very generous individuals offered to lend me their Space Destroyers cartridge!!!
     
    Fortunately, one of them lives right here in Austin, TX, not far from me!
     
    We met in a McDonalds parking lot and exchanged the warez (I gave him APF instructions as collateral. He's actually buying my whole APF Collection when I return Space Destroyers.)
     
    I brought it home and experienced the awe and wonder of a really good Space Invaders clone on the APF MP1000.
     
    Space Destroyers (APF, MP1000)
     

     
    This is a simple port of the arcade game, Space Invaders. I say "simple" because it doesn't try to add anything to the original, it merely emulates it and does a damn good job. The movie below is nine seconds of it in action, but beware, its almost 3 megabytes big! (Can you imagine how frickin' huge 3 megabytes must've seemed back in 1979?)
     
    (DEAD LINK to movie. I'm so ashamed. Oh goodness. Someday I hope I'll recover these. Someday I hope I just make YouTube videos about all of this stuff but honestly I do like the sound of my own typing much more than I like the sound of my own voice.)
     
    The sound effects are perfectly cromulent. The gameplay is as close to the original as one would want it. I did notice slight slow downs when there was one Invader left zipping across and a shot traveling up the screen. Other than that, I'd say, "perfect."
     
    Let me show you an odd thing about this cartridge.
     

     
    See how much bigger it is than the cart featuring our old friend, Hangin' Chad? Yeah, I know, but it gets weirder. The thing is: All the APF carts other than Space Destroyers are the same size and they were all packaged in a generic green box which had no game identifiers on it. (Just like the boxes for the Bally Professional Arcade carts.) Yet, all of the boxes seem designed to fit cartridges the size of the Space Destroyers cart. According to the gentleman that loaned me the Space Destroyers cart, he's got a few of the boxes for the other APF carts and Space Destroyers fits them perfectly.
     
    Oh, so another neat thing about this cart.
     

     
    It conveniently has a list of all the other carts that came out which work with the APF MP1000 consoles.
     
    Here's another odd thing, which I've mentioned before. My APF MP1000 console has Rocket Patrol built into it. From everything I've read, the APF M1000 didn't have Rocket Patrol built in. Yet, My APF MP1000 console is labeled "M1000." Which either means it is labeled wrong, or we don't know what the real difference between an APF M1000 and an APF MP1000 is.
     
    One last oddity is that, like a few other carts, Space Destroyers says it will only work on the MP1000.
     

     
    Yet, here it is working.
     

     
    So, go figure.
     
    Before I wrap up things for the APF, there are some errata in previous posts about some of the games, that I need to straighten out.
     
    Blackjack: I found instructions for Blackjack. Once I learned how to do something besides take a hit, the game was much more pleasant. It can deal up to FOUR decks which breaks previous deck holding records on other BJ carts! It offers you insurance when the dealer has a face up. You can win if you have five cards that don't go over 21.
     
    Boxing: I mentioned before that there are three AI driven boxing opponents with different alliterative names yet indistinguishable fighting habits. THAT was an incorrect statement. I played it again yesterday and say that each computer opponent has a boxing style primarily concerned with their offense. Horrible Harry punches every 3rd beat. (one, two, PUNCH, one, two, PUNCH). Slugging Sam swings every other beat (one, punch, one, punch) and Jabbing Joe stabs at the air every beat (jab, jab, jab, jab). Just thought I'd mention it as I wasn't kind when I spoke of the variation in opponents before. (Hey, it'd been a month or so since I'd played it. Gimme a break.)
     
    EDIT: Just added some pictures. Just got back from selling the APF. *sniff* It's the first time I've sold off a collection for a particular system in one big fell swoop! Now I have to work on selling my RCA Studio II stuff.
     
    Well, for the last time, I end the APF. I can't say the same for 1978 because if I ever get a Telstar Arcade or a Coleco Combat (or even just get to play one of them) then we'll have to warp back here again. I'm still waiting to play Atari PONG on a model C-100, too.
     
    Anyway, one last shot of the little family of carts.
     

     

  3. Mezrabad
    The slogan may be "Every game. Chronologically" but the philosophy is really "Every game I can find and afford, or, if not, emulate. Chronologically."
     
    There have been a few games that I to plan to get even if they didn't make it into my first six years of chronogaming.
     
    Atari PONG - The first killer ap for home videogames.
    Odyssey 300 - Because it was my first.
    Coleco Telstar Arcade - I'm honestly not dying to play it, but I can't forget about it, either.
    Coleco Combat - Ditto for this.
    Atari Stunt Cycle - Ditto.
    Atari Video Pinball - See above.
     
    APF MP1000 carts with the following on them (some are on same cart)
    UFO - Ooo! Another attempt at sci-fi! Possible imaginative game on MP1000 or not?
    Sea Monster - It might not suck.
    Dungeon Hunt - Earliest Fantasy based home game?
    Backgammon - I'm wondering if they had opponent AI.
    Boxing - Curious about this, too. Would've been first Boxing title.
    Roulette - Haven't seen a Roulette game since the 1972 Odyssey.
    Keno - what the hell is Keno anyway?
    Slots - First example of Slots on a home system.
     
    If there's anything that I haven't listed, I must've forgotten it already!
    I'll simply live without the experience and move on with my life, namely, 1979.
     
    Of course, there's a danger here in not being completely obsessive compulsive about it. By nature, I'm pretty lax, so it's easy to say, "well, I won't worry about playing such and such" every now and then. I mean, I HAVE a life, surely I can forgive myself for not playing EVERYthing! However, I must be careful about saying it too often, because I'm certain I'll end up missing something that I would have thought was worth playing. Either that or I'll wake up in the middle of the night 20 years from now and say "Slots!!! I never played APF Slots!!!" So, I'll try to be lax, but um, vigilant at the same time, if that's even possible.
     
    I'll list the games for 1979 next entry.
  4. Mezrabad
    UFO/Sea Monster/Break It Down/Rebuild/Shoot (APF MP1000, 1978)
     
    I'll say one thing about this cartridge: it has motion.
     
    Getting decent screenshots of any of the games on this cart was impossible for me, due to the constant motion of one or more of the elements on any given screen.
     
    Well, except the menu . . .
     

     
    UFO and Sea Monster are reverse variations of Sea Wolf style gameplay, almost.
     
    UFO-1 just has you blasting alien drones that move across the screen. The UFO that scores the most hits, wins. Yee-haw!
     
    UFO-2 is the exact same thing, except you're blasting alien passenger saucers (or what I imagine to be saucers containing sentient beings.) hit the most saucers and you win. Yee-awn!
     
    Sea Monster has you in ships a little more domestic and floaty. This time you're shooting at Sea Monsters that traverse the bottom of the Sea Screen. There's a catch to this one. Hit the Sea Monster, gain 5 points. Hit one of the cute friendly fish and you lose all your points. One strategy is to hit the Sea Monster once or twice and then don't fire at all, thus keeping you from inadvertently destroying friendly sea life. This was a little fun.
     
    I'll mention that the sounds for these games are all quite adequate. No complaints there.
     
    Below are three links to .mov files that try to capture the essence of these games in about a megabyte, each.
     
    (DEAD LINKS WERE HERE AND ARE NOW GONE)
     
    Break it Down and Rebuild are interesting. In the former, there are rotating square perimeters at the bottom of the screen. Player to clear theirs with the least amount of shots wins.
     
    Rebuild is the exact opposite of Break it Down. You have to shoot "invisible" places at which a part of the rotating square perimeter appears when hit. Hopefully, the attached .mov's display the essence of the gameplay.
     
    (dead links were also here but this time I'm proclaiming it without using all-caps)
     
    The last game is called Shoot with three variations. Shoot a Little, Shoot and Shoot a Lot.
     
    (one more removed dead link)
     
    The variations are only in the amount of ammunition with which one starts the game. You and your competitor each control a laser-cannon-like device which fires a solid beam up the screen. You're trying to hit either of the square blocks that are going back and forth across the top. When you strike them, you gain points and they change color, speed, or both. When you run out of ammo, your game is over and the person who does the most with their starting ammo wins.
     
    I'm astonished by my lack of anything even moderately amusing to say about these games. These games are neither bad enough to activate my sense of humor nor good enough to activate my sense of fun. Maybe I'm just tired from OVGE, which was awesome by the way.
     
    We've got One. More. 1978. APF. Game! I was lucky to "win" (purchase) a working copy of Brickdown/Shooting Gallery and we'll look at that one next.
  5. Mezrabad
    Pinball, Dungeon Hunt, Blockout (APF MP1000, 1978)

     
    Oh, how sad.
     
    I'll start with my disappointment rather than with my surprise fun.
     
    Dungeon Hunt is essentially Battleship! except without the stimulating use of a coordinate system.
     
    The playfield is 70 tiles representing 70 places one can look in the "dungeon." Up to four players may each take a turn typing in the number under which they'd like to search. This action eliminates the number and either reveals an empty space on the board or reveals part of one of 8 exciting objects, er, treasures, consisting of 1 to 4 parts. Given that there can be four players, there can be "fun" in the competition to uncover the rest of the object. Since one doesn't know how large the object is, and one doesn't know what shape it will take (it isn't a uniform line like a ship in Battleship would be) it can be interesting as the other players descend upon the area where the treasure is uncovered to try to uncover the rest of it if the first to find it fails to uncover the whole thing. Damn, that's a long sentence. I blame Red Bull.
     

    The colorful things are the treasure. Feel the tingle.
     
    Overall, however, I was disappointed by the lack of "flavor" in the game. There wasn't any risk of being eaten or enscorcererolled or anything like that. It was very hard to get into the spirit of being in a dungeon. Lacking a basement in my home, we couldn't even provide our own dank and damp. When I first saw the title I honestly thought it was going to be some initial attempt at an RPG. I was wrong, though not for the last time. *sniff* No, I'll be alright, really.
     

    The TREASURES exposed in all their sparkling sarcasm. Oh, wait, that's my sarcasm. Sorry, I got confused.
     
    Moving on to Pinball.
     
    DEAD LINK was here. <-- Click here to activate your presumptuous Quicktime plug-in!
    ACHTUNG! 656K! The above is my first attempt to embed some kind of movie link. The movie isn't a great representation of the playfield but it should give you some Idea of the blinkin' and movin' going on. My camera is old, so there's no sound. I will correct this failing someday and have spiffy sound-filled feeds that go right into my camera.
     
    Pinball is . . . different. You remember Video Pinball on the Channel F? How it was just Breakout, 'cept they called it Pinball? Remember? Well, it's not important if you don't. (*sigh*) Well, this isn't just Breakout, so that's plus one over Channel F's. The screen is fairly blinky, which a screenshot can't convey so try to download the small MOV file I made (warning 656K). The ball bounces around the screen and you have a paddle at the bottom which you move back and forth to keep the ball from leaving. In its travels the ball may hit bumpers, some of which generate points, others may merely reflect its trajectory. The two sides of the play field consist of openness through which your ball may plunge, unless you press the fire button to generate sudden walls.
     
    Failed Ergonomic Design
     
    This is where we discover the failed attempt at primitive ergonomics: the fire button. Not content to make the button merely "button-like" they made the edge of it slightly concave, providing a little valley for one's finger to rest. Unfortunately, with a valley one also produces sharp little peaks. In the heat of the pinball game I stabbed my finger on it more than once. Ouch.
     

    Beware the jagged, pointy edges!
     
    Despite the pain, Pinball is some fun. There are three levels, one which includes two paddles, and they can be challenging but, alas, not interesting enough to drive me to attempt to generate any type of high score.
     
    Last but not least: Blockout
     

    This one my four-year old called "Two Rooms Mixed in With Each Other." I think she has a future as an artist who names other people's paintings.
     
    Equivalent to Checkmate on the Bally Professional Arcade or Surround/Chase on the Atari VCS, Blockout falls short of both versions in that it only allows two players (Bally's allows four) and only has four variations (Atari's has a bunch). Still, my four year old and I had fun playing "what does that look like?" after each round. (we made the word "go", the word "to," scary eyes, a duck and a bathroom, among other Rorschach-ian results). The color of the trails change each round, which is a nice switch up from always being pink, green or blue. The sound is actually a low key, almost mechanical-sounding click that doesn't come close to prompting me to turn the sound down, unlike Atari's. (yeah, if it's too loud, I'm too old.)
     
    A new twist to the genre was the addition of a barrier variant. However, the barriers are unvarying from one round to the next, which would, um, make it a barrier invariant, I guess.
     

    The color of the barriers change, but their aggregate invader-reminiscent shape remains.
     
    Conclusure
     
    Dungeon Hunt was disappointing, Pinball was better than I thought and we managed to have fun with Blockout.
     
    I think next time we'll do the cart that has UFO on it.
  6. Mezrabad
    Well, I wasn't able to bring any chronogaming equipment with me for the summer, but I was able to bring some screenshots that I've finally "processed" and moved to the computer in this place that's hooked up to the net. (Neither of my PCs seem to work with the network here. They've become paperweights.)
     
    So . . .
     
    Boxing (APF MP1000, 1978)
     
    Oh, so, here's the obligatory menu screen.

    Ya gotta love the alliterative appellations. Slugger Sam, Horrible Harry, Jabbing Joe. This game is from a simpler time when such names could cause amusement for us. Heh.
     
    Boxing for the MP1000 kinda reminds me of playing something on the TRS-80. Remember how some, if not most, (hell, if not, all) of the games with graphics on the TRS-80 didn't really have "graphics" per se? The were just ASCII characters or rectangles arranged in such a way that looked like graphics? The Tandy CoCo was probably the same way. Anyway, these graphics look like they're made of not-so-little rectangles, just like Tandy's stuff.
     

    Two boxers, differentiated by a slight tan on the left one, start the game out in their corners (er, line segment terminals?) and . . . come out fighting!
     
    The stick on the APF controller is squeaky, so since this is actually more action oriented than most of the other games there's a lot more squeaking going on. The stick moves them from side to side, the side buttons launch a punch and pushing the stick forward blocks an incoming punch.
     
    Hey, we're looking at the first 2d fighter!!!!
     

     
    See Mr. Paler stick his arm up like that? I call that the "Mr. Fantastic Punch" for some reason. The way it's animated, it looks more like squares are being added as extensions to his arm than it looks like he's moving it. I should still mention that the animation is pretty detailed, stretchy arms not withstanding. The boxers "dance" from one leg to the other as they "float like a butterfly, sting like ..." um, Mr. Fantastic.
     

    I call this the octopus shot. Overexposing the picture lead to the combining of the two organisms into one eight-legged beast with two heads. Horrible to behold yet impossible not to stare at.
     
    This game supports two players and, impressively, supports ONE player. Yes, they've provided the three nemesi mentioned (Harry, Joe, Sam) to pose as punching bags. I'd love to describe them as three delightfully distinct opponents, each with exciting nuances that differentiate them from one another, but it seems I lack a "sense" for such subtlety. Either that or they are all exactly the same. (EDIT from corrective post I made later: Boxing: I mentioned before that there are three AI driven boxing opponents with different alliterative names yet indistinguishable fighting habits. THAT was an incorrect statement. I played it again yesterday and say that each computer opponent has a boxing style primarily concerned with their offense. Horrible Harry punches every 3rd beat. (one, two, PUNCH, one, two, PUNCH). Slugging Sam swings every other beat (one, punch, one, punch) and Jabbing Joe stabs at the air every beat (jab, jab, jab, jab). Just thought I'd mention it as I wasn't kind when I spoke of the variation in opponents before. (Hey, it'd been a month or so since I'd played it. Gimme a break.) END EDIT)
     

     
    Here's the blocking feature in action. Blocking is when one boxer holds up their hand and the other boxer's stretchy arm extension thing can't penetrate.
     

    Oh and here's what everybody is waiting for. The shot that shows one brute hitting the other so hard it DEFORMS HIS HEAD!
     
    Reporter: "Rocky, do you think you've suffered any brain damage?"
    Rocky: "I don't see any."
     
    This came out in 1978, just two years after Rocky. (Best Picture, 1976) but since my chronomachine couldn't handle going back to 1978 (after having already moved on to 1979) I can quote things from Rocky II even though it didn't come out until 1979.
     

    Makes me want to yell "YO, ADRIAN, I DID IT!!!"
     

    Or if Creed had won . . .
     
    From what I understand, when someone is unconscious from being hit in the head many times, they're not really "asleep" so those "ZZZs" are really misinformative. Can anyone give us the details on being unconscious? I try to put a little science into each and every post.
     
    We had fun with this, squeaky controllers and all. I can't remember anything about the actual sound effects for the game; it's the squeaky controllers that stand out in my mind.
     
    I don't know what I'll look at next. This entry was supposed to be the casino cart (slots!), but I didn't take any screenshots sooo, we'll see what we got.
  7. Mezrabad
    For those of you playing along at home this is Videocart #21-Bowling, for the Zircon Channel F.
     
    I wonder if they actually changed its name to the "Zircon Channel-F"? All of the carts released during what is known among Channel F fans as "The Zircon Era" have the Zircon Empire's name and address on the back of the cart. I'll scan a picture of it one of these days.
     
    Bowling (Channel F, 1979)
     
    The Title (system, year) format was one of the ways of presenting the cart title that Flack suggested, and I like it. Thanks Flack!
     
    We've seen a few interpretations of Bowling over the years. RCA Studio II, APF and the Odyssey^2 all had their own takes on the sport. It was one of the few games that didn't suck completely on the RCA Studio II and the other two systems didn't exactly get it wrong either. It felt like I wasn't able to do splits on those systems, though, that could mean I'm just not very good at splits. I could never do seven-ten splits in real life, either.
     
    Channel-F Bowling gets all the technical aspects of the sport correct. The scoring is accurate, no "15-for-a-spare-30-for-a-strike" fudging here. The game keeps track of the pins you earn after a spare or a strike and adds them appropriately. It also handles splits. I was surprised when I was able to spare a seven-ten-six split. They don't show the six (or is the four?) pin sliding over from the right to knock the seven, but the seven pin did go down. Also, like every other Bowling game, it is possible to curve the ball. At any point after you roll it, you initiate a hook or a slice by pushing the joystick the way you want the ball to go. You can't un-do the curve either, so you have to be careful not to curve the ball when you initially roll it, or it will go straight into the gutter. Hmm, gutter. That reminds me, I'd better talk about the graphics.
     
    The graphics are Channel-F level graphics. (I'll post screenshots later, so check back often!) The pins look like air hockey paddles, which is better than just a square.
     
    In fact, I bring up the pins because they were Good Thing.
     

     
    The rest of it was very sparse, like PONG sparse. The designers did go the extra mile by providing a frame record at the top right of the screen, displaying the strikes, spares and opens for each frame played. So overall, points away for graphics, but points added for screen layout.
     

     
    The thing about Channel-F Bowling that didn't work the most, was the speed of the ball and the fact it can't be adjusted. It's fast, especially for my four year old. It was hard for her to get a bead on it when she was preparing to roll it and it was hard for her to curve it when she wanted to, once it went sailing up the alley. I'm not saying that this makes the game bad, per se, but it makes it harder to play with my kids, which is bad.
     
    CORRECTION!
    EDIT: Actually what's bad is trying to play these games without having directions for game settings. The speed of the ball CAN be changed! We were playing 2 player and I must've been hitting speed 2 in response to the "S?" question, thinking it had no effect (the directions on the cart say nothing about it). But G=2 and S=1 was fine for my little girl, provided she didn't twist the joystick around the wrong way and throw everything into the gutter. /EDIT
     
    Also on this cartridge is a Bowling variation called Splits. In Splits the program sets up random configurations of shots that can be hard to make. It's a neat idea and makes for good practice. I gotta give them credit for including it on a Bowling cart first. Despite this addition, this isn't the title I'd pop in if I wanted to play a Bowling game.
     
    In the Bowling system wars, I'm going to have to consider the Odyssey^2 to currently hold the title of "Best Bowling Game, So Far". Odyssey^2 Bowling is pretty, has a four player option and is the most fun.
     
    Next entry it's back to the MESS emulator for Slot Machine.
  8. Mezrabad
    Checkers (Channel F, 1979)
     
    This was what the U.S. got instead of the Saba Schach game I wrote of a few days ago.
     
    Checkers?
     
    Don't misunderstand me, I like the game of checkers, it's what most people learn before moving on to Chess and I'm no exception. The US gets Checkers and not Chess? It just seems wrong, insulting even.
     
    How does it rate as a checkers game? Not bad. The controls make enough sense that one can jump right in. My only complaint is that the AI always gets to go first and there's no option for two people to play against each other. Of course, the big plus is there IS an AI to play against! It just isn't a huge challenge and I'm not aware of any difficulty settings that can be changed.
     
    It should be noted that I don't have the Checkers cart. It's pretty rare and the few times I've seen it on ebay it was in big lots with other stuff and was going for a pretty penny. A pretty penny I wasn't willing to part with, especially since it was emulated well enough for a game of Checkers.
     
    With regards to sound: Thankfully, there's very little sound. What they do choose to use is really annoying. When the computer player picks a piece to move, the piece blinks and you hear a high pitched "beep beep beep". I don't know if it would be so painful coming out of the actual console, but coming out of my TV it hurt me the first time I heard it. I turned the volume way down after that.
     
    Here's the screens from the MESS version.
     

     
    Nothing terribly impressive to look at but not un-fun to play. If you're a kid and no one wants to play checkers with you, this isn't a bad cart to have.
     
    Next entry, we go Bowling!!!
  9. Mezrabad

    1979 Protoview

    By Mezrabad,

    The 1978-1979 school year was significant for me.
     
    Other than seven people to whom I'm related, I no longer know anyone I'd ever met prior to the school year of 1978-79. Anyone I knew, peers or otherwise, before that school year, is either dead or is now 28 years in the past and I've got no hope of getting in touch with them and even less hope that they'll remember me.
     
    I almost got into just how many friends I've made and kept each year since 1979, but the amount stops growing in 1991 and has remained exceedingly small ever since. Now, before I depress myself, what the fuck was my point . . . ?
     
    I had one, I swear.
     
    Oh, yeah, the Videogame line-up of 1979!!! Anyone with whom I've ever played a videogame, other than my family, I met after 1979. That's all I wanted to say. I honestly had no intention of getting into counting the number of friends I've made since then but what a nice, cheery way to start an entry!
     
    In 1979 there were still five, count 'em, FIVE systems on sale to the general public: the Atari VCS, Odyssey^2 by Magnavox, The Bally Professional Arcade, the ??? Channel F and the APF M1000.
     
    The APF M1000, or MP1000, was about to morph into the Imagination Machine in 1980 and then it would die a horrible death. 1979 marks the last year a game was released for just the original console portion and that game was:
     
    Space Destroyers (APF MP1000, 1979) which I don't have, so don't even go there.
     
    Fairchild Semiconductor stopped selling the Channel F in the US in 1978. A company named Zircon bought the rights and began selling the system with seven games that hadn't been released previously. According to some sources I've read, Zircon did this in 1982, other sources say 1979. Have I kept track of those sources? No, because, damn it, I'm a time traveller, not a frackin' historian. For the sake of getting the Channel F "out of the way" as well as keeping it out of the log jam of systems that's going to occur farther down the timestream in 1982, we'll be covering its remaing US games, this year, with two special mystery games, one from across space and the other from across time.
     
    Zircon Channel F
    #19 Checkers
    #21 Bowling
    #22 Slot Machine
    #23 Galactic Space Wars
    #24 Pro Football
    #25 Casino Poker
    #26 Alien Invasion
     
    The other two are surprises, but you won't have to wait too long.
     
    No, I'm not telling you right now! You'll have to wait. Or guess. And, no, they've got nothing to do with porn! Jeez, ya pervs . . .
     
    Bally Professional Arcade had a short year, but it was easy to find almost all of them.
    Amazin' Maze / Tic-Tac-Toe
    Astro Battle aka Space Invaders
    Bally Pin aka Astrocade Pinball
    Blackjack / Poker / Acey Deucey
    Star Battle
     
    Odyssey^2 had a fair sized crop.
    Alpine Skiing
    Computer Intro
    Dynasty
    Hockey / Soccer
    Invaders from Hyperspace
    I've Got Your Number
    Out of this World / Helecopter Rescue
    Showdown in 2100 A.D.
    Thunderball
    War of Nerves
     
    And last, but certainly not, well, you know, the Atari Video Computer System had a biggish year:
    Backgammon
    BASIC Programming
    Bowling
    Canyon Bomber
    Casino
    Football
    Human Cannonball
    Miniature Golf
    Sky Diver
    Slot Machine
    Superman
    Video Chess
     
    Now, there's been some question about many of the Atari games and the actual year of the release vs. copyright date. For instance, Superman is copyright 1978 by Atari but 1979 by DC comics. Maybe they wrote it in 1978 and got permission to release under DC license in 1979? I have no idea. I went through Atari Age and the Digital Press Collector's Guide for my dates, I wrote down the games for that year and moved on. I wasn't Mr. ErrorChecker. So, if there's a game in the wrong year, please let me know. I won't necessarily move it, but I'm curious enough to know about it.
     
    I'll say it again, mostly to remind myself, this is for fun. If I spent too much time playing historian I'd never get to play anything.
     
    Speaking of history, as I understand it, the Intellivision was only test marketed in 1979 and only in Fresno, California. It didn't go nationwide until 1980. So, despite all the games with 1979 copyrights, I'm not playing INTV until we start 1980.
     
    Back in October, I said I'd be done 1978 by Thanksgiving 2005. ROFLMFAO! I guess I'm neither psychic nor very smart. I'll finish when I finish, but it may get a little tricky over the summer with some other stuff going on.
     
    Next entry we'll skip right over the APF MP1000 (I don't have the one cart, Space Destroyers, from 1979) to the Channel F's first Mystery Game! Be sure not to avoid it!
  10. Mezrabad
    Lots of pictures, thought I'd make it its own entry.
     
    Here are the participants that took, what, 6 months to play through?
    They seem like such tiny piles . . .
     

     
    Here we have the 1978 Atari VCS family with their enlightened 7800-only cousin from the future and the underused but kinda cool keyboard controllers. The Cuttle Cart 2, for those who don't know, is used to play games on Atari hardware for which I no longer have the original carts.
     

     
    Here's my little APF collection. I included the manual, Cartridge Club card and catalog sheet just to make the picture more interesting. If it ain't here, I couldn't play it. Except for Brickdown / Shooting Gallery, which was here, it just didn't work. There are emulators out there for this, but I've found no ROMS.
     

     
    This is the Bally Professional Arcade console with its 1978 progeny. I used MESS to get to the ones not present in physical form. BTW, that Red Baron cart is dead, but its appearance would lead someone to think otherwise. Oh, also notice my butt-ugly homebrew Bally controller frankensteined from Atari controllers. It's not only ugly, it's a pain in the ass to use, too.
     

     
    Here's the Bally Box. Notice the arcade cabs on the front. There's Sea Wolf. See it on the left? Ya can't take that home on a cart! From Sea Wolf we see Tornado Baseball, 280Zzzap, Checkmate, and Gun Fight. I thought this picture was interesting because you can see they were selling two levels of experience here. First, they were trying to get across that playing the home system was like playing the games in the arcade. Second, by putting costumed persons next to the games (at least the Sailor and the Umpire) they were trying to sell the idea that playing these games was like doing whatever it was those games were having you pretend to do. Something else to notice is the age range of the players at the cabinets. Kids at the Baseball cab, granny at the Checkmate cab. Back in 1978, the "powers that was" were trying to get everybody to play videogames. Young and old, regardless of gender, were part of the target demographic. Of course, all types play games now, too, they're just divided up onto different platforms: console gamers, pc gamers, MMORPG gamers and casual gamers. Not meant to be a comprehensive list.
     

     
    Hey! I do have the instructions for Video Whizball, after all! I'll have to type them in some day. If I had remembered I had them when I wrote Whizball's entry I wouldn't have gone all apeshit in making up a backstory for it.
     

     
    I think the Odyssey^2 boxes are purty. Odyssey and Odyssey^2 did a really nice job staying consistent with their box designs. Notice on the bottom right, the glorious Odyssey^2 Multi-cart.
     

     
    Here's the first "Ultimate" System! Can YOU name every "Ultimate" system there's been?
     
    Next entry, I'll try to show the "Unplayed, but not forgotten" for 1978.
  11. Mezrabad

    1978 Retroview

    By Mezrabad,

    There's already a list of all the games that came out in 1978 in this entry here. Rather than rehash that list with the only change in it being the addition of smilies or frownies, I think the electrons would be better spent on picking out a few of the standout titles from 1978, by system, while giving each system a general rating.
     
    APF MP1000 -- Not Nearly As Fun-Free as I Thought It Would Be
    This system really seemed to have some potential, but it was wasted on unimaginative games. Still it should be said for the record that it boasts the best looking Blackjack and Hangman to date, and the second best looking Baseball game (Bally beat it, graphics-wise).
     
    EDIT: I almost forgot, APF MP1000 beat all the others to the punch on one thing: AI opponent in a videogame version of a boardgame. Catena, the first videogame version of Othello, had an AI opponent. I imagine the APF Backgammon had an AI opponent too, but I'm just speculating.
     
    The APF doesn't come close to threatening the RCA Studio II's title of Worst Game Library Ever and it was a unique and pleasant experience (despite my whining) to get a look at the games I was able to find. However, I'm really disappointed that not a single person has volunteered even a description of any of the games for this system that I wasn't able to find. Either it's a lot less collected than I think it is, or people are just really unwilling to share their experiences, as rare as those experiences may be. Specifically, I'm really, really curious about Dungeon Hunt so if anyone can tell me anything about it, with screenshots, I'd still be much obliged.
     
    BTW, if anyone can lend me the games that I still need to play for the APF MP100, I'll purchase an additional $50 worth of stuff for Child's Play during this year's drive.
     
    Odyssey^2 by Magnavox -- Much, Much More Fun Than I Thought It Would Be
    Let's just say I had really low expectations for this system, my experience with it having been limited to emulation. That's no insult to the emulator, it's more of a comment on how much better a game library can be when you use the actual console and controllers for which it was designed. I'm not saying I had a spectacular time, it just was much better than I imagined it would be. While not spectacular, I should admit that I spent a whole lot more time playing Baseball, Cosmic Conflict, Computer Golf and for some reason, even Las Vegas Blackjack than playing games for any other system to date. For example, I probably spent two hours playing Computer Golf. That's got to be a record. I don't even like playing golf.
     
    Atari Video Computer System -- Almost, But Not Quite As Much Fun As I Remember It Being
    Okay, my expectations for this were a little higher than what was met, but not by much. I was expecting to be "Very Happy" and was only "Happy", which is acceptable. This system has the longest list of games we enjoyed: Basketball, Braingames, Breakout, Codebreaker, Outlaw, Slot Racers and Space War. It also has the longest list of games released for it in 1978.
     
    Bally Professional Arcade -- Less Fun Than I Expected
    My experience with this system was darkened because my controllers weren't and aren't working up to spec. In a poetic, forgiving mood, I can say the difficulties with the broken controllers probably serves as a temporal echo of the technical problems that hassled this system during its first year of release, most notably the faulty systems shipped during its launch and the overheating problems that plague most of these consoles to this very day (I'm referring to 2006). In a less poetic and less forgiving mood, I just curse, though I try to make it rhyme. I think I'll start hunting for a broken system to salvage its controllers, otherwise, future games, no matter how good, just won't be enjoyable. 1978 games that I did like for this system, despite my wonky controllers, were Gunfight, Football, Tornado Baseball, 280Zzzap and Clowns. I would consider this system's launch year library and its initial purchase price as the least bang for the many bucks needed to get this console.
     
    Fairchild Channel F -- More Fun Than It Should Have Been
    This system just doesn't get the love I think it deserves, but I can understand that, as I can be exceptionally forgiving of underdogs. Dodge-it and Video Whizball were neat concepts and we had more than a little fun playing them. Still, the number of titles released for it in 1978 was small and it doesn't come as a huge shock that this was the last year that Fairchild released new games for this system in the U.S.
     
    As per usual, I'll have pictures up of all of the "new" stuff used for this year's crop of games, but probably not until tomorrow. Next entry will be looking forward to 1979.
  12. Mezrabad
    Y'know, I'm certain there's a way that I'm supposed to be listing the title of the game. I'm sure that, for my humble intentions at least, the way I'm doing it now is just fine and dandy for all those involved. I'm taking a technical writing course this session and I'm beginning to think that for everything that I've already written, there's a "better" more "appropriate" way of stating it. Of course, if I wrote these entries as "technical writings" then this would be less of a blog and more of a "technical journal". Still, it'd be nice to be able to describe things a bit more succinctly. I'm hoping that my course will help me with that without ruining my unrefined charm. Heh.
     
    Sea Wolf, Bally Pro Arcade, 1978
     
    Previously, I've been playing and talking about these home videogames as if I were a shut-in, or very young child (Which I would've been circa 1972-75). The idea of doing that was to limit discussion to the arena of the home, somewhat, and to keep things from getting too complicated. Yes, I've already written about a few arcade-to-Home conversions without comparing them too much to their progenitors, but overall I've been acting like the arcades don't exist. I guess, one could say, it keeps the lab cleaner.
     
    We're going to take off the clean room suits now and officially acknowledge that home videogames, in many cases, existed in the arcades prior to their debut on home videogame consoles. Yes, I might have mentioned them before, in passing, or in an out-of-character/chronology moment, but here and now, let me just express that I will refer to a home videogame's arcade precursor more often and with the expected forms of due reverence.
     
    The Bally Pro Arcade does a lot of home ports. Their first year of existence had a few arcade titles, of which, 280Zzzap immediatly springs to mind.
     
    Sea Wolf and its cart partner, Missile, both share the characteristic of having been brought home from the arcades. Why do I mention it now? Well, because playing Sea Wolf in the arcades was a unique experience at the time and this home conversion just doesn't cut it.
     
    The arcade version of Sea Wolf had a special controller. It was made to resemble a periscope. You look through the viewfinder to see your playfield, which was the ocean, and you rotated the periscope to aim your torpedoes. There was a pinging sound; there was a fire button on the periscope; the whole setup gave me a wonderful feeling of immersion. Yes, that turned out to be a pun, and you should be laughing out loud at this very moment, but I tell you -- "immersion" is the best word to describe the Sea Wolf arcade experience. "Immersion" is also the exact word that could describe what the home version lacked.
     
    Instead of a periscope, you move a pink submarine across the bottom of the screen and launch torpedoes at the various ships that cruise overhead. Without the periscope from the arcade, this game becomes nothing special. Instead of feeling like you are in a submarine, you're merely controlling a toy submarine (pink!) that is now in your living room.
     
    So, what's my point? Sea Wolf is notable as being the first arcade to home conversion that was severely diminished by its voyage home. The simple fact a periscope couldn't be attached to my TV is what killed this game for me.
     
    Some of you will disagree with this and may point to home games like Indy 500 or 280 Zzzap as neutered driving games, when bereft of their driving controller. You're not wrong, but neither fell as far as Sea Wolf did from its below-sea-level arcade origins.
     
    Missile is from the arcade game Guided Missile and doesn't lose much in its translation. It's like Sea Wolf exept you control the missile during its flight to destroy trucks and other moving land based targets. It is also not a lot of fun. In fact, were I not determined to at least mention it briefly I would have ignored it altogether. All it's doing now is detracting from the poignancy of what I was trying to express concerning Sea Wolf. Cripes. Stupid flipside game.
     
    That's all for 1978. I may do a run down of 1978. I've been stuck in 1978 since September of 2005. I'm really looking forward to moving on to 1979.
  13. Mezrabad
    Skiing (Atari VCS, Dec 1980, Activision)
     
    To me, Skiing by Activision will always be that cheesy commercial with the guy doing the bad French accent and playing the game poorly. I didn't really understand at the time what was going on with these "new Atari games" that had a different box style and didn't seem to be by Sears or Atari. The commercial for Skiing (which my friends and I thought was hilarious) really stands out in my mind, even though it doesn't strike me as funny today. Yes, it's on YouTube.
     
    I do remember spending a very focused Saturday afternoon trying to qualify for the Activision Skiing Team. Apparently this has become known as Game 3b (because one plays the third game on the cart with the difficulty settings on "b"). To qualify, your time had to be under 28.2 seconds. I distinctly remember beating qualifying, but I don't remember if I got 28.17 or 28.19. I think I took the actual picture. I never sent it in for the patch, though. This is among my few remaining childhood regrets. Fortunately, um, most of my childhood regrets have been vastly overshadowed by my many adulthood regrets. Such is life.
     
    There are two types of Skiing games: Slalom (Games 1 - 5) and Downhill (Games 6 - 10). The games increase in challenge, but it is possible to get to know each course well. Tonight, I popped the cartridge into my Atari Video Computer System, reviewed the manual, selected Game 3b and after about four tries had my time down to 28.46. A few more tries it was at 28.21 (grrrr) and then finally I hit 28.14. I'm still a spiritual member of the Activision Skiing Team. Go me. Yes, I took a picture.
     
    I had forgotten that the left difficulty switch when set to "a" would let your skier ski off the trail and through the woods, even making it possible to ski around the mountain. I remember finding that concept very interesting as a teen. I loved the idea of parts of the "world" persisting off-screen. All in all, Skiing is one of my better remembered games from back in the day and I honestly feel that Activision can thank their marketing department for selling it to me with that cheesy commercial.
     
    Addendum: I think one of my fondest memories of the Atari was being stuck on the couch for a couple weeks with a broken ankle playing Adventure. I'd broken it while skiing. Maybe that's why I had to get the cartridge.
     
    Addendum duex: Anyone else remember the Flintstones episode where there were spies and one of the code words was "slalom"? Was this the cold war creeping in on our childhoods?
     
    Okay, we're done with 1980 for the Atari VCS and it only took me from August of 2009 until April of 2021. Ha. I'll start working on the games for the Odyssey^2 next. It's been a very long time since I hooked up my Odyssey^2. Looking forward to seeing how it goes.
  14. Mezrabad
    Golf (Atari VCS, Jun 1980, Atari)
     
    (Credit to Random Terrain for his awesome and well-researched list which helps me play Atari VCS games in chronological order with much more confidence.
    https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-history-1980.html)
     
    So, earlier "this year", I played PGA Golf on the Intellivision and there was some discussion of the phrase "below par". I dislike what I considered its misuse in language to suggest poor performance while at the same time in Golf parlance it means a good performance. An astute and always wonderful reader, Nelio, pointed out that the phrase "below par" had usage outside of golf. Of course, he was correct and 13 years later, I decided to look into it. The phrase originated in a financial context and appeared in a financial journal in the early 1700s. I don't know why it became opposite in the game of Golf.
     
    A poem was written about it which I publish here without permission from anyone:
     
    Above And Below Par by Leon S. White
    When you say about a chap, that he’s above par
    Exactly what it is you mean, depends on where you are.
    If you’re on a golf course, you’re referring to his score
    Which, relative to even par, is at least one stroke more;
    But in a different setting, above par means
    Excellent, outstanding, even sterling genes.
    So above par’s opposite is that which golfers seek
    Otherwise below par is really rather weak.
    However when below par play leads to an above par score
    Then the seeming opposites are opposite no more.
     
    (By the way, that PGA Golf entry "earlier in this year" was entered in August, 2008, almost 13 years ago, and holy crap how time flies.)
     
    Intellivison's PGA Golf had a great deal of detail to it. You could slice the ball, hook the ball, worry about the wind, worry about the material of your golf club... it really did a great job, in my opinion. Have I played it since? Well, no. I don't really love golf. However, it did make an impression on me.
     
    Golf for the Atari VCS is more like the beer and pretzels version of a golf video game, which isn't to say it lacks in charm. The Atari came out two-ish years before the Intellivision, so it's reasonable that any game on it will be less complex. This game of Golf kept me interested longer than I expected and I managed to play it for about an hour. With other people and beer and pretzels, I might play it longer. (Though, I'm trying to cut back on carbs so perhaps some healthier snacks.)
     
    There's a single-player and a two-player game each with easy and hard modes. The player is shown on an overhead view of the whole field. There's a "green" with a hole on it and that's the ball's destination. I have no idea whether it would be possible to get a "hole-in-one" on any of these holes. It felt inconceivable. Your mileage may vary.
     
    There is no variation in the club material or weight that you use, just the amount of power you put into swinging your little stick of jagged pixels. The learning curve is mostly spent getting used to the angle the ball will travel depending on the angle the golfer is facing when starting its swing. At first, it can feel counter-intuitive but one can develop the knack.
     
    After a swing or two (or five or eleven, don't judge me) the ball will make it to the green. The playing view switches to a closer view of the hole and its surrounding putting green. The mechanics of aiming the ball really isn't any different from the long-distance swinging, but the power of the swing feels a tiny bit more nuanced. I'm probably imagining that. In hard mode the hole looks tiny, and is about a quarter of the size of the hole in easy mode.
     
    There are nine different holes. There are hazards on the field that can be gotten over if you've hit the ball hard enough. The ball will will soar over lakes, sand traps or trees if given the momentum. These hazards will stop, trap or deflect a ball, respectively. If playing in hard mode, it's possible to lose the ball in "the rough". When the ball flies off the course it will disappear in the blue area, representing the untamed wilderness beyond the boundary of the course. The ball can still be hit (your club will angle towards it), but it cannot be seen and it will take several strokes to get it out of the rough and back into visibility.
     
    Even after the angle of the swinging is understood, the game is still challenging and I did find myself resetting it to play it one more time, twice. I actually wanted to play it a fourth time, but I knew I still wanted to write this entry and I didn't have all night. (If you must know, the par of the course is 30. I was waaaay over par, getting 97 on my first game (easy mode), 68 on my second game (hard mode), and 60 on my third game (also hard mode).)
     
    Not gonna lie. I enjoyed myself playing this. Overall, I found myself smiling.
     
    There were two choices the developer made that stood out to me.
     
    1. When setting up the swing the player may choose to back away from the ball before they release the button to commit to the swing. This doesn't count as a stroke if it doesn't hit the ball. I thought that was a really nice touch. It's a little difficult at first to get a feel for where the ball is going to go as one maneuvers the golfer and its stick around the ball. Having this option of a few "practice strokes" to better understand my aim did save a lot of frustration.
     
    2. Something I wasn't crazy about was when one gets the ball into the hole, one is instantly transported to the next hole. No fanfare. Nothing. I would have preferred to be given a moment or two. Just to breathe and check my score while I was still in the context of that hole.
     
    That's it. Tune in next time. yada yada yada.
     
    PS: (While playing Golf, I did find myself thinking "If only I could shave two strokes off my golf game!" and "Existence is pain!". I don't know where that could have come from...)
     
     
  15. Mezrabad
    Checkers (Atari VCS, Jul 1980, Activision)
     
    “Chess is like looking out over a vast open ocean; checkers is like looking into a bottomless well.” -Marion Tinsley
     
    Marion Tinsley was the World Champion of Checkers from 1950 to 1990.
    Other people only gained the title if Tinsley didn't show up to play.
    He won the World Championship whenever he chose to play for it.
     
    Jonathan Schaeffer was a computer scientist.
    He lead the team that developed Chinook.
    Chinook is the computer program that plays checkers.
     
    Their story is a great story which I would love to tell you.
    Instead, I'm going to tell you the short and crappy version of that story.
     
    Chinook almost beat Tinsley in 1992.
    In 1994 they played against each other again.
    They played six games to a draw.
    Tinsley had to stop playing because he was in a lot of pain.
    The pain was cancer.
    He died a few months later.
    Chinook never defeated Tinsley.
    Tinsley's death inspired Schaeffer.
    Schaeffer's computer program "solved" Checkers in 2007.
    What that means is that the computer knows all the ways to play the game so that it either wins or draws.
     
    A much better version of that story can be found here:  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/marion-tinsley-checkers/534111/
     
    I don't really have anything to say about Activision Checkers.
    It's a good version of Checkers. It's easy to play.
    The graphics look fine.
    There are a total of four games on the cart.
    Three games against the computer. (Novice, Intermediate, Expert)
    The Novice game takes about 15 minutes.
    The Expert game can take about 2 hours because the computer takes longer to think.
    The Intermediate game takes more time to play than the Novice game and less time to play than the Expert game.
    I bet you already knew that part about the Intermediate game.
     
    The fourth game is a two-player game.
    For the two-player game I needed to find another person.
    Every person I tried to drag into my house ran away from me.
     
    I decided I would cheat by having another computer program choose my moves for me.
    I chose the website MathIsFun, which has a Checkers game.
    I put Activision Checkers on Novice.
    I put MathIsFun Checkers on Hard.
    Activision Checkers won.
    Apparently that website is for kids, so don't be impressed.
     
    You might have thought I was going to have Chinook play against Activision Checkers.
    That would have been smart, but I didn't think of it until just now.
     
    Chinook is here: https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/play/
    Let me know if you win.
     
     
  16. Mezrabad
    Video Checkers (Atari VCS, Dec 1980, Atari)
     
    In 1980, Checkers feels like the new Blackjack.
     
    Blackjack seems like it was a requirement to be on every system. Checkers... well, maybe not on every system. It was already on the Fairchild Channel F (which, I missed back when I played through 1978 like... more then a decade ago, but less than 40 years ago. I'll get to it soon.) and we've seen it on the Intellivision and Atari. Now we get to play it on the Atari again.
     
    This time, I did think about going to use the world-famous A.I. Checker Program, Chinook, but alas, I wasn't patient enough to sit through the Atari's "thinking" phases at its top level, so I'm just going to go over the features that this Checkers has.
     
    Nine levels of difficulty: Games 1-9 represent Checkers against the Computer in 9 levels of increasing difficulty. Game 10 is human vs. human in case all of the checker boards in your house had been stolen or something or you wanted the novel feeling of playing the game on the TV. I'm not judging you for this. The computer takes longer to decide its move the higher the skill level. Ranging from less than two seconds on Level 1, to 30 seconds on Level 6, to 15 minutes per turn on Level 9.
     
    "Giveaway" Checkers: Games 11-19 are called "losing" or "giveaway" Checkers. Giveaway Checkers is a variant of the game where you try to lose your pieces first by forcing your computer opponent to jump your pieces. I honestly had never of this version of Checkers before. Skill level of the computer increases as you move from game 11 to game 19, of course.
     
    Game Select (to change skill level) functional during a game: Something interesting about the Game Select switch. You can start playing a game on a skill level and decide, in the middle of the game, (but not while the computer is thinking) to increase the skill level. I thought that was kind of neat.
     
    Checker notation is used: Atari's Video Checkers uses checker notation and it's noted at the top of the screen. The manual specifically mentions playing other computer opponents and using the Checkers notation to convey the moves to avoid any confusion. (I tried playing two computers against each other when the board is inverted on one. It is hard (for me) to turn my brain around like that. The number system makes it easier to translate the moves to the other computer.)
     
    Checker Notation bonus: The B/W switch lets you change up the numbering system in case the computer playing against the Atari is less flexible. This was thoughtful to include and makes the Atari seem to be the more gracious opponent. ("Oh, of course, binary opponent. This unit is happy to adjust its numbering settings for you! It's no trouble at all!")
     
    Set up your own board: Moving the left difficulty switch to "a" allows you to set up the board however you like and then play it by putting the switch back to "b".
     
    Actual instructions on playing Checkers!: Yeah, I mention this because Activision's manuals are pretty light in general (which was mostly fine). Their manual for their Bridge game didn't fuss with giving the rules at all and their manual for Checkers was also quite brief. Atari's Video Checkers' manual seems absolutely luxurious in comparison.
     
    My impression is that the feature set of Video Checkers is pretty rich. I'm not knocking the others (and I'm not going back to actually compare them, lawds no.) but if I had to pick the one I've liked the most so far, I'd have to pick Atari's Video Checkers. I still need to look at Checkers on the Fairchild Channel F though.
     
    One game left for the Atari in 1980, Activision's Skiing.
  17. Mezrabad
    Old people: "Play new games but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold"
     
    It's me. I'm Old people.
     
    There's a game we play our entire lives called "Explore vs. Exploit". When seeking to entertain ourselves we are faced with the decision to Explore something new that we might enjoy, or to Exploit something we already know we enjoy. This idea is talked about more broadly in a book called "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. If you haven't already read it, I do strongly recommend it.
     
    I know this sounds crazy, (we prefer the term "mental disorder", btw, thanks.), but I always struggle with deciding on what to play and I've literally wasted entire weekends on this indecision. Having every game available to me from 1972 to around 1995 has not helped me at all when trying to figure out what exactly to play when I'm trying to catch up on what I missed when I wasn't paying attention.
     
    Dragster (Atari VCS, Jul 1980, Activision)
     
    I never really understood this game back in the 80s. I don't think I ever owned a copy and the concept behind it (efficient gear-shifting for maximum speed over a limited distance) was outside of my experience. I do blame this for never having learned to drive a stick-shift until I was in my early 20s.
     
    You can play Dragster over and over and over and afterwards find you've only been playing it for about 10 minutes. If you don't have any idea of how you shift gears in a car with a stick-shift then it can be quite frustrating, at first. My first few times I simply blew the engine out and my vehicle didn't even move until I re-read the manual and realized I was trying to shift incorrectly.
     
    It's a fun game for what it is. Learning how to quickly engage a learned sequence of actions while perfecting the timing can tickle a challenge urge in us that we sometimes find it interesting to indulge. (I never beat 6.33 seconds. I will never be worthy enough for a patch. So be it.) The second game on the cart adds the challenge of steering. I found that additional challenge interesting but it didn't quite engage me after all the time I'd spent grinding my gears on the first game.
     
    If you decide to try it, I do recommend reading the manual as well as being aware that you can reset the game after an attempt by pushing the joystick to the right. It's better than leaning forward to hit the reset button a couple dozen times.
     
    That takes us out of July 1980 for the Atari VCS. We've covered a bunch of the other 1980 games already (some were 1981 games that we covered pre-maturely, oh well) but all we have left in this year (for the Atari) is December's Video Checkers (Atari) and Skiing (Activision). I still haven't even gotten to the Fairchild Channel F or the Odyssey^2 games, yet. This seems like a long year, because it's taken me 13 years to get through it, but it's not even half as long as 1982 is. Hopefully I'll get back into the rhythm.
  18. Mezrabad
    Pele's Soccer (Atari VCS, 1980)
     
    As I've said before: "I'm not a sports fan" so how I felt about this game surprised me.
     
    Contrasting from our recent excursion into third-party software that had only two games to a cart, Atari's (the party of the first part) Pele's Soccer has 54 games promised for it on the front of the box and it delivers with 28 versions of two player and 28 versions of single player. The "versioning" is three variations each on modes of speed, modes of challenge and goal size. The playfield is interesting in that it's a scrolling vertical field. As you move the ball up or down it, the field scrolls up and down with it. It's another good example of "there's more to this playing area than meets your eye" that was emerging from videogames more and more. Yes, some videogames don't need that, Fishing Derby and Boxing, for example, do just fine without it but I really like the idea of using it to allow the player to focus on "what's happening right now" while being aware of a bigger picture. That's not a very good way to articulate it, but I do like this style of game. I can see how it might not work as well for sport-ports like hockey (where seeing where your team-members are helps) or basketball (important to see the big picture) but for this simplified version of soccer it works.
     
    You only have three players for each team and they're locked into a triangle formation, the "forward" at the apex of the triangle and two "backs". You can pass the ball among the members of your little triangle but it takes some practice. I started playing the easier two-player game (game 28) (EDIT: Nelio correctly points out that this is a typo and I was playing the easier one-player game. It's entirely possible though, that I WAS playing the two-player game by myself, which would indeed make it pretty easy.) and unexpectedly found that I enjoyed it. I advanced through a number of the variations, trying them out as I went, finding that the harder it got the more work it felt like and the more my button-thumb began to protest. Regardless, it kept my attention for far longer than I thought it would. I've yet to play it with either of my kids, but I look forward to trying it out with my son, who used to play soccer (ages 5 to 8ish)
     
    I think the real plus of this game is how, even on the easiest level, if you're doing pretty well (say, you've scored twice and your console opponent hasn't scored at all yet) the computer player improves its game. The goalie becomes more reactive and I'd swear the blue triangle of the enemy move faster, but again, I tend to imagine these things. Your mileage may vary.
     
    For me, personally, it was a lot more fun than watching professional soccer, which, to me, consists of a lot of this:
     

     
    There are penalties in the two-player games that do not exist in the single-player variations that I'm looking forward to experiencing with my son. It would be nice if they could simulate penalties for excessive ear-flicking.
     
    While I don't like watching real world Soccer, I must admit there are sometimes amazing moments like this one:
     
    (EDIT: Awww, I can't even remember what this gif was, but the link has died. Oh well.)
     
    which even makes an "professional sports neutral" person like myself feel begrudging admiration even to the point of tingles.
     
    Anyway, sorry for the "half-entry", I really can't count this game as "completed" until I've enjoyed it a bit in the two-player mode. Since I'm a bit retentive about splitting entries into two parts, I'll just edit this one with the two-player information after I've played. (Edit: no, this never happened because OF COURSE it never happened.)
     
    Golf is the next game in the pile. (EDIT: When I pulled a bunch of games out of the closet I'd actually thought about doing Golf, but then I noticed Bridge. Bridge is one of those games that I was never able to get myself to play and now that I've finally done so, I'm SO glad it's over. I should do Golf soon. It's funny, because Golf and Bridge are both games that my parents both like to play fairly regularly in real life these days and I just cringe thinking about either.)
  19. Mezrabad
    Fishing Derby (Activision, Atari VCS, 1980)
     
    There are actually Fish Derbies in the real world, which I don't expect to be shocking news to any of you. However I thought reading the rules to one would be interesting.
     
    http://www.valdezfishderbies.com/pages/contest_rules.php
     
    It's possible that I wasn't entirely correct about it being interesting. Sorry if you just spent 30 minutes of your life there that you will never get back.
     
    Fishing Derby is by David Crane. David Crane apparently also programmed Outlaw (1978), Canyon Bomber (1979) and Slot Machine (1979) all for the Atari Video Computer System. Atari doesn't let anyone know who designs their games. Game designers are kept frozen in a vault under Atari Headquarters and only brought out of the vault when a new game is needed. One night, someone left the door to the vault open. Four designers escaped. Not being able to feed themselves due to not having any marketable skills, or even human language, they had to do the only thing they knew - game programming. All of this has been carefully documented elsewhere in case you think I'm making this up.
     
    Fishing Derby consists of two fishermen sitting across from each other on docks. The goal of the game is to collect 99 pounds of fish before the other. On the playfield there are six rows of fish. Rows 1 and 2 weigh 2 pounds each, rows 3 and 4 weigh 4 pounds each, rows 5 and 6 weigh six pounds each. Each fisherman lowers their lines and tries to hook a fish by moving the hook in front of the fish. When the fish is hooked it will slowly swim to the surface. When a player presses the red button, they're able to reel the fish in faster. There is a hazard of a shark swimming above the topmost row that will eat your fish off your hook so one must always be wary of the shark. Also, there's an interesting mechanic that only one fish may be reeled in at a time by either player. So, if you've both got a fish on the hook, the person who hooked theirs first may reel it in while the other waits. I guess there are ways of using this to your advantage, to not just delay the other person's poundage accumulation, but also to wait for the shark to be more on their side. I did not explore this tactic, but it's a thought.
     
    This game is fun. It has moments where you think you're going to get a fish up and, suddenly, you hit the shark losing your fish. There are many "so close!" moments. This is a game that is much more fun to play with a friend, but playing with the computer is good practice. I have yet to beat the computer playing with the computer on Beginner and myself on Advanced. The difference between the two settings is that to catch a fish on Beginner, you just need to get the end of your line near the fish's mouth. To catch a fish on Advanced, your line has to practically be right under the fish's nose.
     
    (( Thankfully, a post on Atari Age forums has finally helped me to figure out which way the difficulty switches on the 7800 need to go to be (A)dvanced (to the right) or (B)egginner (to the left) I'm trying to remember to put the Spacetime Protective Barriers up (aka parenthesis) when talking about things "not yet of this time" ))
     
    Oh, something different about this game from games that have gone before it: the surface of the water, in addition to providing a sort of "depth perception" to the body of water, actually "shimmers" like the surface of a pond or lake. Well, "like the surface of a pond or lake" in the sense that it is always changing - horizontal lines of blue and light-blue seemed to randomly wax and wane on the surface. It's a nice effect and I'm at a loss to think of another game on the Atari where something was animated in this way simply to provide eye-candy. The surface design has nothing to do with the game play and merely provides an animated aesthetic. Come to think of it, the fishermen also seem to provide a flavor that also doesn't contribute directly to the game play. I wonder if this is the first home videogame to do that? I just can't think of others at the moment.
     
    Thank you for reading my ramblings! I might make a game play video of the one-player game to see if my paranoia about the shark is true or not... I swear that sucker gravitates to the left during the single player games. I immediately just played two or three more one-player games, me=hard vs. computer=easy. I lost every time. I don't think my losses are entirely shark-related but if I can blame a shark. I will. Yes, I believe in having irrational prejudice towards sharks.
     
    Oh, I got through the entire article without including any fishing-related puns. My cognitive therapy exercises must be working or maybe I just wasn't feeling all that abusive today. Please feel free to put any fish-puns you care to make in the comments. Yes, I'm giving you license to make really awful fish-puns. Oh, the horror! The horror!
     
    Next time... back to Atari with Pele's Soccer!
  20. Mezrabad
    PGA Golf (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    This is another game where many of the details of the real world sport are taken and compressed into an extremely realistic simulation. Now, I'm not able to say they've managed to simulate everything, but what they did consider in the design of PGA Golf and how they chose to display it, works pretty well for a golf videogame in 1980.
     
    The screen is dominated by an overhead view of the current hole. Conventional golf course elements are used: the fairway, the green, the hole (duh), bunkers, the rough, water hazards and trees. The screen is considered to be 580 yards wide and the each hole is layed out to fit within that area. So you base your choice of club and swing on your estimation of the distances you need to propel the ball down the path you've chosen to get through, around or over the hazards presented by the hole.
     
    You're given a bag of 9 clubs: a driver, 3 and 5 wood, 3, 5, 7 and 9 irons, a wedge and a putter. You may only use your driver on the first hole and only use the putter on the green, everything else you pick as the situation demands it. That is where the game is. There's a chart in the manual that explains the distances each club will send a ball based on the short, medium or long swing you choose. The driver can send the ball 260 yards with a long swing to a minimum of 234 yards with a short swing. Going down through the clubs is not a regular sequence of distance decrements, but there's no overlap. A 3 wood club swung long does not send the ball further than a driver swung short. So, sorting the clubs in terms of distance, you go from driver to 3 wood, 5 wood, 3 iron, 5 iron, 7 iron, 9 iron, wedge and putter, just as they are listed on your controller keypad and just how I listed them at the start of this paragraph. The distinction amongst clubs is not limited to distance, as height must also be taken into consideration. The shorter distancing clubs tend to send the ball into a higher arc, so if you have to clear one of the conveniently uniform 18.7 yards-tall trees, you would do well to check the manual to see which clubs will be most likely to get your ball over them. I guess my main point here is that there's more to consider than just how you aim. Your golf course is three dimensional. When you hit a ball high, from your bird's eye perspective it appears to get closer. If it doesn't go high enough over trees, then it hits them...annoyingly, just like real golf.
     
    Speaking of aim, per usual, I played this game on its original platform, but I also decided to try the Playstation 2 Intellivision Lives! version. It's important and interesting to note that the original Intellivision game had 16 different directions in which you could aim your shot; the PS2 version only has eight, even though you use one of the analog thumbsticks to address the ball. I would think an analog thumbstick to have at least as many directions as the original Intellivision disc controller, but I guess I'd be wrong.
     
    Of course, if you're hitting a little round ball, it won't always go straight. PGA Golf simulates the hook/straight/slice dynamics of a golf ball when you choose the direction of the trajectory deviation by pressing the swing button again at a certain point in the swing. If you choose not to choose, the game will randomly choose for you, and it won't take your feelings into consideration.
     
    Sidenote: it's important to note that "hook" is a specific term indicating a curve to the left, while "slice" means a curve to the right. If you mis-use these terms on a real golf course, the other golfers will probably laugh at you. The upside to this is that it gives you a justification for making fun of their stupid looking pants, which you wanted to do anyway.
     
    The rest of the game plays as you would expect: sand traps are best avoided, water swallows your ball and the crowd cheers if you shoot under par. Which brings me to a non-videogame related point...
     
    I've often heard people use the expression "under par" to convey disappointment in another's performance. For example "your last entry was under par" or "your videogame commentary is sub-par"...no really, I'm pretty sure I've heard people use it that way when they were trying to say "your writing is crap". If you think something isn't as good as it should be, and you are so into golf that you wish to borrow its jargon, then you need to say, "that last entry was over par" or "your metaphors exceed par!"
     
    Also un-videogame related: according to Wikipedia, the below-par nomenclature in golf is all named after flying creatures. One below par is a birdie, two below par is an eagle, three an albatross, four a condor (requiring a hole-in-one on a par 5), five below par is called an ostrich and six below par (which is a hole-in-one on a par 7) is a pterodactyl. Apparently, pterodactyls have only happened 3 times in the history of the golf world and only on a par 7 hole at a golf course in Japan.
     
    In PGA Golf, on any given hole I usually scored an eight, regardless of par. This is known as a "dogball". I'm not certain if it is named after a dog because of the fact that dogs don't fly, or if it is simply named after something a dog often licks.
     
    There are only nine holes and they seemed to be the same set of holes each time I played. At first I thought this was a limitation. Then I realized that if everyone plays the standard course, it's easier to compare scores. This allows for individuals to exclaim ownership over one another and is why many people play sports to begin with.
     
    Well, that's it for Golf. Not sure what I'll play next. I was trying to get Word Fun to work on an Intellivision II until I found out that Word Fun doesn't even work on an Intellivision II. Ever. Maybe I'll just use the trifurcated version as portrayed on the Intellivision Lives! disc. However, I loathe the thought of depriving myself of eight directions, even for a game that would probably not use them anyway. 24088
  21. Mezrabad
    Wow, I coined an historical term!

    Dr. Sparkle, thank you for giving me credit in this ^_^

    http://www.retronauts.com/?p=1119

    I like how they refer to it as burning out. Really, I still want to do this, RL just sort of burned its way in.

    Nelio! Yeah, a thing happened and I deleted my YouTube thing. I'll have to bring it back eventually.

    I still have all my stuff and going through the pain of moving it to a new place.

    Oh, and I do flinch every time they say "chrongaming".

    Anyway, hope everything is going well here. See y'all again soon, but you've heard that before.
  22. Mezrabad
    37362


    Stellar Track (Atari VCS, 1980)
     
    The genetic precursor to Stellar Track is a main frame computer game called Star Trek, based on the franchise of the same name. You can read all about the history of the Star Trek Game at Wikipedia. It isn't that I'm too lazy to just paraphrase the entry, (though I am), but I'm more or less trying to keep this about the particular game rather than it's history.
     
    When you start a game of Stellar Track you're given a mission screen. Here is an example:

     
    A good beginner's game is recommended in the manual to be between 25-35 Aliens with as many Stardates as you can get. In my experience, those sized games are the most fun.
     
    You exist in a galaxy consisting of a 6x6 grid of quadrants. Amongst the 36 quadrants are the number of aliens you're hunting as well as your two starbases. When you start the game, you don't know where anything is. Here's what your Galaxy Map looks like at the beginning of the game. You can see that it tells you you're located at Quadrant 3,2 (third quadrant from the left, second from the top).

     
    At the moment the only thing you know is that you're in a Red Quadrant which tells you you've got alien ships near by. If you perform a Short Range Scan, you can see them.

    (That example is taken from a different playthrough, so don't let that quad coordinate confuse you.) Yes, you're the ship that looks a little like the Enterprise, and your enemies look a little like Klingon starships.
     
    If you found yourself in a green quadrant, you could be more relaxed and take a Long Range Scan to see what occupies the quadrants immediately adjacent to the one you're in. Here is an example of what the galaxy map looks like after I've scanned it from two locations: 3,2 and 3, 5.

    You can see that in the quadrants surrounding my scans, there are numbers. A "20" means there are two alien ships and zero star bases in that quadrant.
     
    Later on, from this next scan, you can see that I've found a Starbase, shown by the indicator "01" at quadrant, 6,5.

     
    The strategic part of this game is being aware that you have a limited amount of Stardates to spend, and knowing that every time you warp from one quadrant to the next, you're burning up a stardate. For instance, warp to a location three quadrants away and you're burning up three stardates. The game demands that you balance searching for aliens with slaughtering them. You also have to consider repair trips to your starbases as well.
     
    Coupled with the strategic aspects of this game are the tactical aspects. When you do warp into a quadrant with enemies in it, you have two ways of taking them out. Weapon 1: Photons can only be fired in a straight shot down a row, column or a diagonal in a quadrant, but are guaranteed to hit and obliterate target in their path. Weapon 2: Phasors are a sort of radial destruction beam that dissipates as they spread like ripples on a pond. They are guaranteed to hit the enemy ships in the quadrant but damage decreases with distance. You choose the direction to fire the Photons, but their main disadvantage is that you may need to scan the quadrant before firing, leaving yourself vulnerable to attack. You choose the power level of the Phasors, the advantage here is that you know you're going to hit whatever is in the quadrant, but you don't know necessarily how much damage you're going to inflict. If it isn't enough, then expect return fire.
     
    Here is an example of a quadrant with no enemies and a starbase in it.

    The gray background is indicative of a starbase's presence. To dock at a starbase, just warp on top of it. So, why dock at a starbase?
     
    Well, you use up energy as you travel from quadrant to quadrant (100 units per quadrant), you use it up warping from sector to sector within a quadrant (10 per sector), you lose energy when you are "hit" by the enemy, and you use it up firing phasors (up to 999 units in a single shot, though that's overkill). So, one good reason to visit starbase is for fuel. However, in addition to losing energy when hit by enemies, your various ship functions can be damaged. You can lose your Short Range Scan, your Long Range Scan, your Photon Launcher and/or your Phasors! I have found an effective combat tactic to be warping into the center of a quadrant, and firing off a good sized phasor blast before even scanning the quadrant. This will usually take out two or three of the aliens in the quad. If I waste time doing a short range scan just to see where they are, then they all get a chance to try to damage me after that scan.
     
    This is a game I wish I had discovered back in the day. I'd seen Star Trek on a home computer or two (probably a TRS-80, but I wouldn't swear to it) and was very curious about this type of game. Now that I've found it, while I don't think I will choose to spend a lot of time playing it beyond what I have for this article, I can say that were I to have had this back in the day, it would have been a huge time sponge. Each time you start a new game, depending on where you are in the galaxy, and depending on how many aliens and stardates, you have to plan your strategy differently. There are difficulty switches which control the effectiveness of your shields and your phasors, but I've been keeping them on Novice. Here is what I'm used to seeing when I finish a game.

    Which means I suck. However, I find it hard to believe that if I wiped out 60 out of 61 aliens and ran out of time, that we'd still need to surrender to them, but the game needs to have boundaries I guess.
     
    I have gotten as high a rank as Commodore.


     
    I think I've played about a dozen games now, and I've only won once . The highest rank achievable is Admiral and it's based on your use of resources in addition to actually defeating the aliens. Okay, truth be told, I'll probably continue to play until I see an Admiral ranking. So far, I prefer the recommended "beginner" games, with between 25-35 aliens and 35-40+ stardates. The games with less aliens also give less startdates. Since the aliens can appear in quadrants in groups of 1, 2 and 3, with less aliens it's possible to find your targets spread out over the galaxy and hard to reach with the amount of star dates you're given. When you get many aliens and many stardates, you may have plenty of time to track them all down, but it can be a long and tedious process.
     
    I've found screenshots of this game on the webanets, but they'd been taken with an emulator which grabs just a single frame. Due to the programming technique used to display the text in this game, the only decent screenshot is a good ol' fashioned picture of the TV. Here are some of the remaining screenshots.
     
    When you warp into an occupied quadrant, it's good to do so with phasors firing.

     
    This is what you want to see after you've fired some phasors blindly.

    By the way, it looks like I've just killed an alien but still have a full compliment of photons and energy. The status displayed here is the status displayed prior to me firing any phasors. To see my current status, I'd have to use the Status command again. The Commands are selected all via moving the joystick left or right and pressing a button to make your selection. It seems awkward at first, but one gets used to it quickly. Programming in warp coordinates also quickly becomes second nature, though I won't get into that here. I do recommend you play this game with the instructions!
     
    The background is green - the quadrant is clean!

     
    This is not an action game by any stretch of the imagination. It is a "thinking" game, and it is a chance to play a game formerly limited to big computers on your itty bitty Atari VCS. While there's little chance of interesting my son in Stellar Track (as long as we've got Spore sitting on our Mac), it has certainly kept me engaged the last few evenings. heheh, 'engaged', that's, like, a warp pun...
     
    Next entry: Steeplechase. Yeah it's another Sears game, why the heck not?
  23. Mezrabad
    Maze Craze: A Game of Cops and Robbers (Atari VCS, 1980)
     
    Someone in the 70s realized that there was fun to be found by using a computer to generate random mazes with a simple algorithm and allowing people to race through it. The first maze game that I can remember appearing on a home console was for the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (VES) and was cart #10 Maze, Cat and Mouse (1977). I don't know if this is the last "maze game" or not because I can't see into the future. (If I could, I'd have warned people about 80s hair.)
     
    This maze game decides to have a theme, and that theme is not merely "racing your buddy through a maze". Instead, it's a complex, textured and many-layered game which can be fraught with societal implications even to this day. It's not a game of cat and mouse! It's a game of Cops and Robbers! Which is totally different because if a mouse fights back, the cat is still gonna win. If a robber fights back, the outcome can be less certain. So, I could totally wax on that, but let's talk about the game instead.
     
    The cart contains 16 game variations with each variation further able to be varied by setting increasing parts or the entire maze "invisible". More on the invisibility aspect later. Players each have their little "cops" on screen, starting at the same point on the left side of the maze. The goal is to get through the maze to the exit all the way over on the right side of the maze. Yes, this sounds just like the other "maze" games so far, but wait...there's more!*
     
    *the phrase "but wait...there's more!" is over-used and a bit hokey and the creator of this blog would like to apologize profusely for its use.
     
    The game variations let you put "Robbers" in the maze. Two, three or five, depending on your selection. The Robbers start at the other end of the maze and randomly run through it. If you're playing the A difficulty game, your Cop moves just as fast as the Robbers. If you're on the B difficulty game, they move faster than the robbers. Players must maneuver through the maze, racing towards the exit, while avoiding the Robbers. This involves a lot of backtracking while trying to dodge the Robbers. How do you dodge the Robbers in what is essentially a single lane maze? You have to hope they take a turn down a blind alley giving you a chance to sneak by. I'm not going to lie, this is fun and depending on your emotional investment in the game, it can be intense (in a fun way).
     
    I will say that it's much more fun to play all of these with a partner but it's not necessary. You can easily play all of the games with just you leaving your Cop partner sitting alone at the starting spot. The 16 games the following variants with the number of Robbers or, in some instances, the visibility of the maze.
     
    Robbers - This is a race to the end of the maze, but Robbers come after you from the right side and will "take you out of the game" if you know what I'm sayin'. It's interesting because your little Cop doesn't disappear, it just becomes inert and doesn't move. We like to play that the dead Cop isn't really dead (yet) but yelling out to his buddy, "You gotta make it out, Louie! You gotta tell my family I died heroic and stuff...". (To keep things simple we pretended both Cops were named Louie.)
     
    Blockade - There's a variant that does let you play a cool trick on your opponent. By pressing the button you can drop an illusory wall to make it look like the bit of the maze you just passed through is actually a dead end. Yes, your opponent can just pass through this pretend wall, but it's a cool trick and if they weren't paying attention to you, they can fall for it.
     
    Capture - Another variant has the Cops doing what cops do in a game of cops and robbers, they can catch the robbers. Your goal is to get to each of the robbers and touch them before your opponent does. First to get all of them wins.
     
    There's no reason to not enjoy this game for a little while if you've ever felt some degree of satisfaction after getting through a maze. I fully intend to make an actual game play video of some of the more dramatic moments and linking y'all to it. I just didn't want to put off writing a new entry while I was still feeling the urge to write an entry.
     
    I wanted to talk about the "invisible" maze options. In most of the variants, if you choose to activate the invisibility option, the "invisible" parts of the maze will not be invisible. You will see your partner and the Robbers making their way along the invisible parts, and if you have a good head for mazes you can use their mistakes to your advantage. It's also possible to have an "auto peek" game or a player peek game. This allows you to see the invisible part of the maze for a brief moment. The problem is that your opponent will also see it.
     
    (( Martin Brundle-Fly would have been good at this. ))*
     

     
    (( Yes, by including that gif I AM admitting that I know things about the distant year of 1989, but I couldn't resist. ))
     
    (( From now on, if I decide to type something "out of character" for whatever year I'm currently deluding myself into believing I'm in, I'll put those anachronistic comments in double parenthesis. ))
     
    Scouts - Also in "invisible maze" you can sometimes have "Scouts". Scouts are your friends who run ahead of you briefly and show you how the maze runs. It's still invisible, but it probably keeps you from breaking your joystick slamming your Cop into an invisible wall because the Scouts give you some idea of where you can go.
     
    There, a quick and dirty entry. I'm likely going to add to it with a gameplay video as well as a discussion of a maze generating algorithm.
     
    EDIT
     
    Still no gameplay video my attention span might not last long enough to do one. I went ahead and did a cringe-worthy pair of videos talking about the maze generating algorithm that I can only hypothesize is used in Maze Craze. I'm a little annoyed at both Quicktime (which seems to want to crop any clip you add to the end of another, instead of just fitting it into the frame... if anyone knows a setting I'm missing, please let me know.) and YouTube, which also seems to decide to crop things. Well, I shouldn't be surprised that there is a learning curve and that freestuff has its limitations.
     
    The links to these videos are:
     
    Part 1: http://youtu.be/WJBIxAHV28k (EDIT: I'm pretty sure neither of these work anymore.)
    Part 2: http://youtu.be/XdoPmLaxf8A
    As always, constructive and sincere criticism is welcome, particularly with regard to any facts that just blatantly seem to make up on the fly.
     
    My next entry should be Activision's Boxing.
  24. Mezrabad

    Back from Japan

    By Mezrabad,

    Is there such thing as an obsessive compulsive disorder that procrastinates?
     
    Okay, so I've been busy. Since I had my moment of discouraged truth a few years ago, I've managed to keep my job, my kids have continued to survive and I've been to Japan.
     
    Let me try to express my feelings about Japan with a very intense understatement.
     
    Japan is cool.
     
    I know... it makes some of you uncomfortable when I get all gushy and emotional about stuff, so I'll just leave it at that and link to pictures.
     
    http://www.flickr.co...s/michael2japan (Edit: I have no idea where my flicker account went. Maybe I deleted it? No idea. Blurrrrrr.)
     
    NO, I don't even pretend that I can take pictures. These are blurry and the composition on most of them is carp. (That was a typo, but some how I think it relates to Japan, so I'm leaving it.)
     
    I also haven't gotten around to posting the pictures from Kyoto, which I imagine contain some photographs of shrines.
     
    I WILL say that I think it's actually more expensive to be an Otaku in Japan than it is to get everything translated/dubbed/licensed and released in the US. Maybe it's the exchange rate... but I went into Super Potato and everything seemed really expensive. I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the cost of rent in Tokyo and the fact that... well.. I haven't played the "how much should I pay for this" game in a while. I ended up getting two Wii games. (Essentially Fatal Frame 4 and 5, for 4900 and 3900 yen, respectively.) and for the PS2 a Taiko Drum Master game (for 955 yen) and an Evangelion game for 105 yen. The Evangelion game promises to be absolutely awful. I can't imagine a game selling for the US equiv of $1.33 at a Books Off (used book chain) being any good at all... and that alone was reason enough to buy it. That, and Evangelion seems as ubiquitous as Totoro in Japan. Not quite as ubiquitous as AKB48, and nothing can touch the widespread plague that is Hello Kitty, but when one comes across Asuka selling eye drops, you know they're still doing pretty well.
     
    (Actually I hella-like Hello Kitty)
     
    Okay, Chronogamer will live again. I am very slowly going through and trying to fix the formatting on stuff. Nelio has gone through and fixed a lot of Prev | Next links in his comments, bless his heart, which is making it a lot easier to fix.
     
    I also have a new computer cave that I'm fixing up for maximum Chronogaming anal-retentiveness. The advantages of this room is that I can lock the door to keep my kids from trying to escape when I need them to play two-player only games with me.
     
    Um... I'm going to say don't hold your breath. I mean probably a lot of you don't even remember this blog, it's been three or four years since I've actually done anything with it. And I've had several false restarts. Hell, this could even be yet another one! But it's always nice to come back and read through the blogs a bit and start to want to type/babble again.
     
    Okay, anyway. Uh, blog summary: Japan = Fun. Bought games there.Things are expensive. Japanese girls are sexy, huh, wut? Came back. Recovered from jet lag. Want to chronogame again.
     
    Don't confuse me with chronogamers.com - they aren't me. Not that they aren't worth a peek, and more organized and better writers and play more games than I do. They're just not me.


  25. Mezrabad
    Steeplechase (Atari VCS, 1980)
     
    Before I get into the game, I want to get into the term "Steeplechase".
     
    For me "Steeplechase" has always stood for the name of an amusement pier in Atlantic City (though there was one in Coney Island, too, I never saw it). I can't say my family and I went "down the shore" a lot when I was growing up near Philadelphia in the late 70's, early 80's, but the few times I went I remember two of the Atlantic City piers, Steeplechase Pier and Steel Pier. For a 516kb image of Steeplechase Pier, click here. The linked picture is quite a bit before our time, but in some twisted symbolic way that only quality writers can pull off, Steeplechase Pier and the amusement piers like it are a cultural grandparent to our beloved pastime of video games so I don't feel entirely off-topic to bring it up here.
     
    If you go to that linked picture you can see people on "holiday" in 1910. 99.99% of the souls in that picture are undoubtedly worm food by now, (with the possible exception of the children on the lower right corner). However, to most of them Steeplechase Pier and Steel Pier were highlights of their holiday. 30 years later, the children and teens going to those places with their families would likely have the same sense of nostalgia so many of us retain from going to arcades in our growing up periods. Hmm, what was my point... oh yeah. In the 2070s, the pictures we have of our Arcades from the 70s and 80s will somehow look as grainy and as dated as this does to us now. Time and populations are really weird that way.
     
    Okay, I admit it, I didn't have a point, but that's a cool picture of Steeplechase Pier and I wanted to share.
     
    Anyway, the word "Steeplechase" was associated to that pier for me, and somewhere along the way, I learned it also has something to do with horses jumping over hurdles in a race. I was surprised to learn that Steeplechase originally refers to racing from the church steeple of one town to the church steeple of the next town, jumping over whatever got in the way -- ditches, fences, walls, hedges, creeks, etc. Steeplechase for the Atari VCS is more about the horse-hurdles variant.
     
    With two pairs of paddles up to four people can compete in two different race types with three levels of difficulty for each. The first three games are regularly spaced hurdles with beginning, medium and hard difficulty. The last three games are irregularly spaced hurdles, also with beginning, medium and hard difficulty. If you are playing with three other people, I can't see that it makes much of a difference which difficulty level you play, but if it's just you and one other person, the remaining horses are controlled by the computer, and then it does matter, because the computer is tough to beat.
     
    So, what's the game anyway? Okay, four horses each with their own lane race across the side-scrolling screen from left to right and jump over the hurdles approaching them from the right when the trigger button on the paddle controller is pressed at just the right time to have the horse jump over the obstacle. (Yeah, it's a run-on sentence. Just deal with it.) If the player presses the button too soon, or too late, the horsey graphic performs a grimace-inducing, knee-bending stumble-slide which slows your horse down.
     
    The "paddle" part of the paddle controller is used to control how long the horse spends in the air when jumping over the hurdles. The hurdles are of different widths: narrow, not-so-narrow, and friggin' wide. The paddle controller moves a height bar on the right side of each horse's lane. If you're a starting player, you just set that bar as high as it will go, and if you time every jump just right, you know that you'll clear even the friggin' wide hurdles. However, the horses don't actually progress towards the right side of the screen while jumping. The more time the horse spends in the air, the further they will fall behind the other horses. In a beginner-level game, the player can get away with just jumping with the bar set high. A more nuanced style of play involves setting the bar to match the length of jump needed, this allows the horse to spend less time in the air for the narrow and not-so-narrow jumps. This increased attention to not only timing your jumps but also your jump efficiency is a necessity to getting even close to beating the game-controlled horses of games 2,3 and 5,6.
     
    Here is a YouTube video I found that shows a full game of Steeplechase (being played on an emulator, but hey, I'll take it) (Edit: there's no link anymore. Discovering this in 2021.)
     
    This game is not what I would consider an attention grabber. Nothing explodes, nothing moves very quickly, and yet, you'll find yourself frantically trying to keep up with the jumping and the height bar as you spend a lot of time looking at the other horses' collective rear. Steeplechase is an easy game to understand, but I do not consider it a simple game to play. Putting the height bar on the opposite side of the screen actually made it a little tough to pay attention to the height of the bar and the timing of the jump. Also, the thrill of successfully jumping a barrier is not as positively rewarded as the punishment and negative impact of watching a horse crumble to its knees after failing a jump. After a few races and seeing her horse hit the ground again and again, my daughter was ready to turn in her saddle and frankly, so was I.
     
    Sadly, I was unable to muster the enthusiasm from my other two family members to give it a shot, nor was the daughter interested in playing again, even if I could get the others to play. Lesson here: if you have a four player game, get everyone to play it with you first, otherwise, it may be hard to get them all to play after they hear the grumbling of the first guinea pig.
     
    Kudos belong to Steeplechase for creating game-controlled opponents with simple but effective A.I. In the easiest games, the competing horses are clumsier and their jumps aren't as well timed. For the medium level, their jumps are well timed, but they might not be jumping efficiently. For the hardest level, if you're not playing perfectly you will be eating their dust/mud/turf.
     
    Next time we play... Circus Atari!
     
    As a sort of PS: The manual for Steeplechase reminds me that while consoles like the Intellivision and Odyssey^2 were pushing "serious" fun, by calling their games simulations, games for the Atari at this time were all about having fun. There's a lot of space in the manual spent on describing the attributes of each of the four horses involved in the race. While none of the horses seemed to have any intrinsic differences that I could detect, it's an interesting contrast. Intellivision manuals went out of their way to describe in detail every last feature of a game, down to describing the sound effects. The manual writers for Steeplechase had no problem including "flavor" material to make a customer reading the manual chuckle a bit. While such marketing-driven humor rarely ages well, it's still interesting to see.
    41917
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