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Mezrabad

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  1. Mezrabad
    NBA Basketball (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    Wow, I've started and stopped writing this entry about five times. I'm just not sure what to say about this game. Like the era in which this game was born, I find it difficult to resist the temptation to compare it to the Atari Basketball title that proceeded it. As George Plimpton might've said, NBA basketball is clearly more sophisticated and lifelike than its Atari counterpart. There are three players on each team, instead of one, and you can pass the ball to your artificially intelligent team members. You can block shots, and you can choose to shoot either with a set shot or a jump shot. At first glance, when comparing the feature set of Intellivision's B-ball offering to Atari's, you'd think that Intellivision's game is the superior.
     
    In fact, I'm not going to argue that NBA Basketball isn't the superior version. However, I will say it was a lot easier to sit down and start having fun with Atari Basketball than it was with this title. Like all Intellivision sports titles, the manual is terrific, (and if you want to win, read that booklet! ) There are four speeds, "play ground", "high school", "college" and "pro". While the learning curve isn't what I would call "steep", it's still a little curvy so we started out in "play ground" mode to get our heads in the game.
     
    "Play ground" mode is pretty damn slow. So slow, in fact, that we started referring to the defending teams player as "zombies" because they put their arms up and sort of shamble around moaning "braaaiiinnss". Actually, we were the ones moaning as we made our way through an entire game on this setting. It felt long enough that by the time we finished the first game on "play ground", we were totally spent and had to go play Fallout 3 for a little while to get our second wind. During the second session (and what I had to promise to my son would be our last session) we cranked it up to "Pro". "Pro" is the speed at which one says "that's more like it!". However, like Hockey, if we hadn't put ourselves through the painful lessons of the "play ground" speeds we would have had a tougher time jumping in as pros.
     
    As an aside: Something I've noticed, which I should have noticed before, is that designers of sports videogames in this era made a conscious choice to have players run out to their positions on the field. This strictly theatrical decision creates an illusion very reminiscent of its real-life counter part. Players don't just appear in place ready for tip-off, they have to run there, while the crowd roars. While completely besides the point, it should be noted that the crowd in NBA Basketball roars with the exact same roar as used in every other Intellivision sports title that has a crowd thus far.
     
    Because team members have been added to this incarnation of basketball, passing is now implemented. For passing purposes, the control pad is a model of a basketball court. When your player has the ball, you can pass the ball to a spot on the court by pressing the corresponding location on your keypad's court. Your on-screen player throws the ball to the spot on the court you've chosen, not to another player. It's up to one of the other players on your team to anticipate the throw and get there when the ball does. Fortunately they are controlled by the computer, so often this works. When it doesn't, the other team will either intercept the pass or your ball will soar out of bounds. True to the presentation of basketball, if it goes out of bounds, the ball must then be thrown in by the opposing team to bring it back into play.
     
    Other offensive features are jump shot and set shot. The basic rule is, the closer you are to the net the better chance your shot will go in. There's even a nice diagram in the manual with the percentage zones. You have a much better chance of making a shot with a set shot, but it's also more likely to be blocked by a player on the other team. Any shot that makes it to the net, but not through it, will rebound with a resounding "boing" and the ball goes to the team that catches it.
     
    As for stealing: we weren't able to steal the ball from each other, but the artificial team members seamed to be able to steal it from us. Maybe we just sucked, but there it is. Oh, and we weren't able to foul each other, either, it just isn't a feature. Since they were able to put penalties in NHL Hockey, I'd been looking forward to fouls in NBA Basketball, but you can't have everything, right? (Where would you keep it?)
     
    The short story of how we feel about this game: It's a well done simulation of basketball and it's very interesting, but for pure fun we still prefer to play Atari's Basketball. This isn't exactly fair or objective, I'm sure if we were true sports game fans, we'd have loved this title for all the aspects of the real game it models. While we respected it, we just don't laugh as often while playing it as we do when playing Atari's version.
     
    Next we'll look at US Ski Team Skiing on the Intellivision.
    28705
  2. Mezrabad
    Sea Battle (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    Sea Battle is a console title that does much more than one would expect a console title to be able to do in 1980.
     
    Each player has a harbor and a limited number of naval units. The object of the game is to get your troop transport ship into your enemy's harbor by negotiating your fleets through the archipelago between the two harbors.
     
    Like Space Battle (Intellivision, 1980) this game has a strategy phase and a combat phase. The strategy phase is played out on an overview map of the island region. Each player builds up to four fleets at a time, each comprised of up to three ships--from a total of 13, and sends them on their way towards the enemy harbor. The game takes full advantage of the Intellivision controller's keypad. Instead of creating your fleets using an on-screen, easy-to-see-by-your-enemy interface, you create fleets by hitting the keypad icons of the ships you want in that particular fleet before deploying it into your harbor.
     
    When you or your enemy deploys a fleet, all that either of you can tell about if from the strategy phase view is how many ships are in it. When the fleet starts to move, your enemy may be given a slight clue as to the fleet's composition because a fleet may only move as fast as its slowest ship.
     
    Safety tip: it's up to you to remember what you put in each fleet. You do NOT want to think you're going into a combat with a submarine and a destroyer and not finding out until you get there that you deployed a mine sweeper and a troop transport! To help you with this, each of your fleets is a different color. It does help. Some.
     
    Controlling the ships in the strategy phase is interesting because you can only control one fleet at a time. Basically, you send a fleet sailing in a particular direction, and cycle around to each fleet providing course correction as needed. You don't have to worry about smashing into an island in this phase because your captains know to stop before hitting a landmass.
     
    There's an Exxon Valdez joke here somewhere, but I'll leave it up to the reader.
     
    Ship captains cannot avoid what they cannot see, and they cannot see mines. You can use a mine layer unit to put little floating magnets of death in spots which you know your enemy must pass through. However, sharp-eyed admirals may notice if a fleet seems to moving slower than normal through a narrow straight. This is the invitation for him to send sweepers in to clear things up before proceeding.
     
    When two opposing ships get close, all movement stops and the players get to make an interesting choice. If neither player decides to fight the enemy fleet, movement resumes and the fleets go on their merry way. If either player decides to engage, then combat phase is entered.
     
    Combat phase zooms the camera into the fight, kind of like Google Earth can zoom in on your old high school (hey, they made the parking lot bigger!). In this view, you and your enemy can see what each is up against, as each ship type has a unique icon. In combat mode, ship types have actual "stats" beyond just speed! The actual stats are in the manual, not on the screen, but you can look them up if you want (don't expect your enemy to wait while you do.) Weapon power, armor rating, momentum, firing ranges and damage all play a role in these combats. Most importantly in the combat phase a ship has a targeting reticule. Hold down the "aim" button and you can move the targeting "X" out from the ship you currently control. Try to move your ship into position (which moves the "X" too) so it can fire at another ship. So, you prepare to fire by aiming your "X" directly north, for example. Move your ship so the "X" moves over the enemy ship, or where you think the ship will be, and fire. You can't fire while holding down the aim button, so it's aim, move, fire when in range, rinse, lather, repeat. This is hard to do while your enemy is doing the same thing to you, but I imagine people using real ships in real navies feel the same way. Some ships sink after one hit, others can take a few, it depends on the weapons of the hitter and the resilience of that which is hit.
     
    Oh, and don't let one of your ships ram a landmass. In combat phase, landmasses ram back!
     
    Different ships have different ammo. The submarine or PT boat sends torpedos. Battleships and others fire salvos. Salvos require better aim, as salvos can pass over a ship and miss. Torpedoes aren't as finicky, they'll hit ship on the way to their "X" spot but as shot from the PT boats, their range is very short. Conversely, when shot from the submarine, torpedo range is very long--but you only get one sub. Like the strategy phase, you can only control one unit at a time, so while you're bravely maneuvering your speedy little PT boat into range, your enemy can be using the longer ranged guns on his battleship to take out your sitting duck of an aircraft carrier.
     
    Can't take the heat? Retreat! If you hit the retreat button you have to out-dance your opponent's ammo for another 15 seconds before returning to the strategy phase view again. Of course, if your enemy has a relatively fast fleet of ships, they can always catch up and re-engage.
     
    Overall, this game is brilliant. It is the type of game that would become more enjoyable the better you and your opponent get at it and the better you know each other's style of play. It's kind of like chess, except on an ocean, in real time and each piece is actually a fleet made up of smaller sub-pieces constructed of floating steel that can propel tons of metal several miles through the air to sink each other.
     
    EDIT: Since writing this originally, my son and I have gotten to play again. I was able to win a game quickly by sending all of my ships at once (leaving behind a mine layer) and overwhelming my son's defenses on our first game. However, my son is a quick learner. He found he did better with a single ship strategy. He mined his harbor entrance points and sent out one ship at a time to attack my incoming fleets. He was usually able to do a lot of damage to each of the ships in my fleet while only losing one ship himself. This was especially effective if he found my mine sweepers. He would take the sweeper out first (as it was never the ship with which I was primarily defending) and damage the other ships before I could kill his lone attacker. My survivors would continue on, only to sink to a watery grave when we hit his mine fields. He enjoyed it a little more during our second session of play, probably because he understood it better and winning did nothing but improve his enthusiasm.
     
    Next Entry: NBA Basketball. 27958
  3. Mezrabad
    NHL Hockey (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    Okay, I'm really behind in this blog thing. According to Wired, the blog is dead and now everyone is all a-Twitter. Personally, I can't imagine myself being limited to a certain number of characters, but I can certainly understand how a reader might want to limit themselves to such. I mean, there's a lot to read out there.
     
    Anyway, the latest game in the chronology was NHL Hockey for the Intellivision.
     
    Say anything you want about the controllers for this system and I'll probably agree with you. Not because I think you're necessarily right, but because I'm really lazy and don't feel like arguing. My general peeve comes with the fact that when using the controllers on the Intellly II, which is what I have, it that it is hard to know when I've actually depressed one of the side buttons. That's a really difficult drawback to work around in a not-as-slowly-paced sports title like hockey. That being said, once again, I think it's amazing how much information the makers of NHL Hockey manage to put in the manual and how many features they manage to implement in the actual game.
     
    For instance, what would a hockey game be without penalties? Knocking the crap out of your opponent and hoping to get away with it in hockey is as legitimate a tactic as pretending to get tripped by an opponent and hoping they get a card for it in soccer. NHL Hockey implements a penalty system by allowing you to swing your stick at any opponent. If they have the puck, that's alright--the ref's okay with that, but you can also swing your stick at an opponent who does not have the puck. This will knock his legs out from under him and you have a two out of three chance of getting away with it. If you don't get away with it, one of your players goes to the penalty box for an amount of "simulated" time. If you do get away with it, then hey, getting to knock someone on their butt is its own reward.
     
    I think that it is interesting to note that playfield vs. atmosphere space in games is changing. By playfield, I mean the actual space in which your action and game takes place. By atmosphere space, I mean the part of the game that is largely decorative and unaffected directly by anything you do as a player. Hockey, for instance, mostly takes place on the ice; you don't throw the puck in the air, so there isn't the need for air space like a basketball game might need. So, if you look at a screenshot of NHL Hockey... what? No, I don't have one, go find your own, sheesh... the ice only takes up the bottom half of the screen while the the top half contains scoring elements. Keeping score and track of penalty time is an important part of the game, yes, but half of it? I guess it's the price of this 3D-look for games (pioneered by Basketball for the Atari VCS) that make you feel like you're in the stands rather than in the eyes of a bird nailed to the ceiling directly over the ice.
     
    Something I don't know if I mentioned about most Intellivision games we've seen, is that there always seems to be at least four speeds to every game. If you turn the game on and activate the disk, for the most part, you get the fast version of whatever game you're playing. If you press "1" on the keypad you get the slowest version of the game; "2" and "3" get you faster versions. Hockey also implements this feature. The irony of this type of system for we modern gamers is that the slowest speed might be easy enough to play, but, invariably it is fairly dull. The faster speeds are much more interesting to play but require some time to master and the controllers are so awkward to use that "more interesting" doesn't help.
     
    The goalies in this game were very difficult to get a puck past. First, my son and I played against each other and neither of us could score against the other. Then I played against his un-manned controller and I still couldn't score against the brick wall of a goalie. It took the combined might of my team, with one member in the penalty box, and his team to actually get the puck past my own goalie. The trick was to knock the goalie down and shoot him while he was down. I think we managed to do it by having one of my players hang on to the puck while my son knocked the goalie down. While the goalie sat on the ice, counting his teeth, I let my son steal the puck and shoot at the vacant goal. This was not easy to do. I don't even think we were playing on one of the faster modes.
     
    Eventually our game devolved into trying to get away with beating up each other's players and goalies. Can we blame this on the game or on our own appetites for violence? If we blame our appetites, must we not also blame society?
     
    I continue to have a really hard time slogging through the sports titles for the Intellivision. I'm just not into them. I also recently discovered that I should have started the year off with Space Invaders for the Atari VCS, because that was released sometime in January of 1980. See, that would've been a kick ass start to 1980, I mean, that would've given me some momentum. Oh well, it's not like this is a science. Here's to more chronogaming in 2009, for 1980.
     
    Next entry: I don't even know! Basketball? Didn't I already do that? Did I take my meds today? Damn I feel old.
  4. Mezrabad
    Word Fun (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    Hey, did anyone else notice the complete revamping of intellivisiongames.com? They've had the same site up for years and its always looked circa 1999-2001 design style, but now they've got something that looks like it's database driven. Well, good for them.
     
    I actually have a Word Fun cart, purchased in Tulsa, Oklahoma for $5 in 2006. It wasn't until I plugged it into my Intellivision II in August of 2008 that I found this sucker doesn't work with Intellivision II. For my purposes, I was suddenly happy I had purchased Intellivision Lives! for the Playstation 2. This marks the first Chronogaming title that I had to resort to playing on modern hardware!
     
    Word Fun is one of two education titles that used the Electric Company name. If you remember The Electric Company, you'll remember that it was the quirky, off-the-wall, directed-at-a-slightly-older-audience, half-sibling of Sesame Street. It only ran new episodes from 1971 to 1977 and thereafter was in reruns until going off the air in 1985. (according to Wikipedia) So, in an odd way, Word Fun and its companion cart, Math Fun were like the very, very last episodes of The Electric Company, and done entirely without Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman or Rita ("Heeey yoooou guyyyyys!") Moreno.
     
    Word Fun epitomizes a tradition of education games on home console systems: instead of having one, really good game that's fun and educational, it has multiple games that are educational.
     
    Word Fun is: Crosswords, Word Hunt and Word Rockets.
     
    Crosswords is an electronic Scrabble. Each player is given a rack of letters from which they assemble words. The object is to earn the most number of points while taking turns putting words in a grid so that they intersect with the words already placed. If you've played Scrabble or ever filled in a crossword puzzle you know what I'm talking about. The interesting feature of this is that you can't end your turn until your opponent approves the word! This encourages kids to come up with fake words and bullshit their opponent into believing they're legitimate. This is a valuable skill and I approve of it being cultivated. However, Crosswords is one of those games I like better in the real world as Scrabble. Also, Scrabble has those word trays that are handy to use as iPod Touch stands.
     
    Word Hunt puts each player in control of a monkey that they each send out to capture letters. A player uses the letters to build up to three words in a time-limited round. There's also the option of sabotage. A player lacking in ruth (ruthless) can send his monkey out to simply deprive the enemy of much needed letters.
     
    "Ha ha ha! You wish to spell the word 'fish'? Try doing it with out this 'h', you fool, as I deprive you of it to spell 'hate'!"
     
    There is even the option of tossing a letter away if you aren't going to use it yourself, but still wish to deprive your bitter, word-building, jungle rival!
     
    The longer your words, the better your score and, like the game Crosswords your opponent has final say on what constitutes a legitimate word. ("Hayt" is a real word, it's the name of Duncan Idaho's ghola in Dune Messiah! What do you mean you've never read it? You're already 10 years old!)
     
    Aside: Word Hunt seems to have the uncanny ability to actively anticipate and attempt to prevent the players from spelling naughty words. No matter how hard we tried we were unable to find the necessary letters to spell something offensive. This was disappointing and we don't know if it was a feature in the game or a failure of ourselves.
     
    Word Rockets was fun in a "this reminds me of playing Space Invaders in the arcade only without the sheilds, aliens or cannon" way. A word with a missing letter in it sails across the screen and you must fire at it with one of the letters available from your arsenal to complete it. F*g can become fog, or fig! This is about as much fun as it sounds but it is the only single player game on the cart, so it was the only one I was able to play without having to pay my son in gil. (yes, now he accepts imaginary, online currency as payment for playing old games with me.) Anyway, it added some much needed videogame action to the cart, and was probably what the average four or five years old of the era would've enjoyed most.
     
    Next time, we play NHL Hockey, continuing my slow but inevitable grind through the well documented sports titles of Intellivision's debut year. 25092
  5. Mezrabad
    Space Battle (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    This is a neat game, and I've never played anything like it (up till 1980).
     
    Okay, you've got this base at the center of your little universe from the perspective of your Radar screen. You defend it with three squadrons of three fighters each. Surrounding your base is the utter void of space through which your enemies approach. There's always five groups of these enemies...I don't know why, something to do with how they evolved...coming from the outer boundaries of your radar's scanning range and from any two-dimensional, XY-axis-type of direction.
     
    Each alien squadron seems to have from 8 to 14 or so craft in them. So, real quickly, you've got to figure out which squad will reach your station first, which ones are more important to take out first, how many of your squadrons do you commit to attacking what's coming in and what do you leave behind to defend the base? Well, since you've only got three squadrons and they are virtually identical in composition, the general procedure is to send two out (any two of the three) and leave one to hang out at the base.
     
    So you send out the two lucky ones, we'll call them White and Blue, because that's their color, unless you send out Gold instead. In this case we'll just let Gold stay behind and perhaps be anhiliated by the hordes that White and Blue can't stop. Moving on, let's say you send Blue out to attack an isolated alien squadron coming in fast and you send White to a clump of three squadrons leaving one lone alien squadron to continue in unintercepted. Let me tell you what happens when one of your squadrons meet up with the little white alien dots.
     
    If your Blue squadron hits a swarm of alien ships you'll be able to enter battle with them. This involves a change of screen-ery as your radar screen is replaced by a starfield and a targetting reticle. You move the reticle around to shoot the alien "saucer" ships. Your shots take time to get to the ships (there's a slight 3d perspective, a little like parts of Atari's Star Ship title) so when you shoot at the boogers you have to shoot where you think they will be by the time your shots get there. I think it's called "leading" your target, except that's a silly term because they're not exactly "following" your targetting reticle, right? As if to prove my point about our silly semantic habits, the saucers will often make a sudden looping maneuver just before the shot you just fired gets to them. I think this is called "evasive action", a term the etymology of which I am ignorant, so I can't bitch about it. Regardless, it's easy to miss. The trick is to not only "lead" the targets, but to also try to shoot where you think they might be if they were to suddenly loop. So, this activity ranges from easy to super hard depending on the skill rating you've chosen to play at (ranging from beginning to super advanced) and involves some interesting quirks.
     
    One Quirk is that when you destroy an alien ship, it explodes with triradial symmetry, the debris from this pretty explosion can take out other ships, which, in their time of passing, also spawn flaming wreckage that can destroy other ships who have their own debris sprays. This can create a nice little chain of events from your perspective, though you can imagine the pilots of those ships saying "crap, triradial symmetry sucks!" as they perish in space-flames.
     
    They fight back, too, (Quirk Two) shooting two white dots, which are harmless, that get bigger and turn red, which are deadly--though there's only ever one pair of dots you have to worry about at a time. These two dots seem easy to avoid but get embrassingly good at predicting where your reticle will be on the tougher settings. If these macro-pixels hit your targetting reticle, you've lost a fighter. Lose all three fighters and you've lost your squadron. What's left of the enemy continues towards your mother ship with a happy little skip in their step.
     
    In these battles, you have to destroy a certain number of ships, all of them, to be exact, but stay your hand, Killer, you may want to rethink that. While your Blue is in battle and you're moving around your reticle and making the ships explode into weird geometric terms, your other squadron, the White, may have reached their objective and are getting their probability-controlled buttocks handed to them. This is off-screen Real-Time action (Quirk--what are we up to? Three?)! The rest of the universe doesn't pause while you fight, (at least not on the harder skill settings), the aliens get closer to your mother ship and squadrons that meet in battle will fight whether you're there to control them or not. An off-screen battle will take out one of your pilots for every three of theirs. Sometimes, you have to let this happen, so maybe send your less-likely-to-be-attended squadron to one of the smaller swarms of aliens. If you wish, you can jump out of your Blue battle, knowing your three remaining pilots can, most likely, mop up the remaining aliens, so you can go to assist White with their problems. It's your choice and it's really cool, because it means there's more happening here than just freakish hand-eye coordination. You've got to keep the bigger picture in mind at all times.
     
    Anyway, if you're in battle and one of the alien swarms reaches your mother ship, you'll hear klaxons which will increase in their klaxoning until Galact-, er, your "mother ship" is destroyed. At this point, you'll realize, when you're dumped to the Radar screen and it's flashing red, that you're sucking vacuum and it's game over.
     
    Why the hell doesn't the Mother Ship have any guns on her? Stupid engineers.
     
    If you take out all of the aliens, then it's All Clear and you've won. Good luck seeing this moment on the Super Advanced setting.
     
    This is a smart game and on the harder settings you have to think smart to play it. For the record, I can reach the All Clear on the Advanced setting most of the time, but the Super Advanced says to me "Here's your Turtle Wax, thanks for playing, Loser!" and then spits on my vaccuum damaged corpse.
     
    Don't be fooled into thinking Space Battle is just about shooting ships.
     
    Next entry we'll do Golf or some other sporty, mundane, real-world reflection title. 22947
  6. Mezrabad
    True story of something that happened to me at the supermarket today!
     
    My six year-old daughter and I were at the local supermarket today and I noticed a twenty-something female. Cute either in spite of, or because of, her tattoos and peircings. We had to pass in front of her and I nodded and mumbled a civilized "please excuse us" (as we were briefly blocking her view of whatever it was she was shopping for) and continued on. Suddenly I heard her say "Hey! I LOVE your shirt!"
     
    I was wearing a 1up Mushroom shirt.
     
    She said she loved her Nintendo, and said she even had a tattoo on her lower back of a Nintendo controller. She then turned around, lifted her shirt and showed me her tattoo. Indeed, there it was, D-pad, select start, and the A-B buttons right there on her lower, lower back (or upper back-side?). I said "hey, that's really cool! (So's the tatoo!) In fact, I was just playing Super Mario Bros. today!" she said, "Cool" and I said, "Well, thanks and take care!" and my daughter and I proceeded to find tortillos.
     
    I'd hate to even venture a guess at how long it's been since a random cute chick flashed me her lower back tatoo. As a married-with-children kind-of guy, I'm afraid it just wouldn't have been appropriate for me to invite her over to play NES with my new PowerPak, but I had hoped to run into her again at check-out, just to tell her she totally made my day.
     
    Anyway, for some reason, I find myself wanting to buy more 1up Mushroom T-Shirts.
     
    My wife didn't seem to enjoy the story as much as I did the actual experience. After hearing it, she just smiled and shook her head saying "Michael, you are a simple, simple man." (Meaning, all it takes to cheer me up is a little bit of positive attention from a random cute girl, which is absolutely true.)
     
    Okay, Space Battle later this weekend...
  7. Mezrabad
    Tennis (Intellivsion, 1980)
     
    I know I said we were going to do Space Battle but with this being "Wimbledon Weekend" I figured this would be the best chance I'd have of getting my wife to play Intellivision's Tennis with me. She actually consented to join me for about 10 minutes! However, I think that because of the fact that she'd just seen one of the greatest, and longest tennis matches of all-time (Federer vs. Nadal) she just couldn't feel the thrill of our little pixel-fest.
     
    First off, a couple of things I've been noticing about the Intellivision's manuals for the first year of its release. ONE: every manual so far wants to remind you that these games are FOR COLOR TV VIEWING ONLY but that colors on your set may vary slightly from colors described in their little booklet...and TWO: The manuals are uniformly excellent. They acheive this by clearly explaining everything that's in the game.
     
    Notice that I said "everything that's in the game" and not "everything needed to play the game". These aren't documents to just get you up and running, these epistles could serve as design documents because their descriptions of a game's features are so detailed. It might be too much information for those who just want to start playing (*cough*VCS owners*cough*), but for those of us who like knowing what we're doing rather than risk getting frustrated with a game, they're great.
     
    Unfortunately for you, I really feel like talking about the manual first.
     
    The front cover reads like ad copy, and it probably served as such. On most of the Intellivision manuals I've seen so far (if not all) there's also an all-cap bold statement: HOW TO WIN. which basically says if you want to win, read the fine manual.
     
    Once inside the booklet there's a brief description of the object of the game (yes, even for well known games like Tennis) before going over the equipment setup; from checking the hook-ups for the Intellivision MASTER COMPONENT to inserting the Tennis overlays into the controllers.
     
    Getting into the game itself, the manual takes two pages to outline the actual rules for a "real world" game of Tennis. It explains the scoring system (for which I blame the French), the serving procedure and the boundaries. It even explains something called a "let" which is when the ball hits the net during a serve. My wife has watched Wimbledon for the last 18 years I've known her and I've never heard that term even once...probably because I usually have my headphones on and I'm at the computer, but that's another story.
     
    Anyway, the manual then gets into explaining the controller layout for another page before launching into a detailed explanation of gameplay execution. Pages 5 to 21 are all about what happens in the game and how the players control it. This is followed by an explanation for every sound effect, another review of the game rules, tips for winning and a Tennis glossary.
     
    If you've never played or seen a game of real world tennis in your life, you could read the Intellivision's manual for its Tennis cartridge and you'd be able to walk yourself through a complete game of tennis in the real world without sounding clueless. I'm not saying you wouldn't look completely clueless; learning what your body is supposed to do is different from knowing the specialized semiotic domain of a subject, of course.
     
    Across the board, from what I've seen, Intellivision presents the same quality manual for Tennis, Horse Racing, NFL Football, Auto Racing, Poker & Blackjack, Armor Battle and Major League Baseball. I speculate that the good Blue Sky Rangers knew they were writing for first-time videogame system owners, i.e. anyone that hadn't gone out and gotten an Atari yet, and they didn't want anyone to get frustrated for lack of clear instructions.
     
    About the actual game: it's two-player only! No single player version on this cart. Playing alone using both controllers is right out of the question and don't think I didn't try. So this is another game for which I had to recruit the long-suffering members of my family. As mentioned above, my wife (43) joined me for about 10 minutes, as did my daughter (6) for about three minutes and my son (10) for about 20. As interesting and well done as I thought the game was, they just couldn't share my enthusiasm.
     
    At the title screen, you have an opportunity to choose the speed of the game by pressing 1, 2, or 3 on the controller. 3 is Beginner, 2 is "Club", 1 is "Pro". Default (if you just hit the disc without pressing a number) is "Wimbledon". For the record, starting off with Beginner was painfully slow, while Wimbledon was just a tad too fast. We stuck with Pro and had a comfortable time learning, though not comfortable enough for anyone to stick around very long. Maybe I just smell...?
     
    The screen presents a sideways view of the court, Red player on the left, Blue player on the right. (Red vs. Blue again!) Red serves first. Red's player serves by selecting a serving area using their controller keypad (Inner, Center or Outer). This sets the server up in the proper position and gives them the ball (which appears in their hands). They hit one of their swing buttons to toss the ball in the air and a swing button again to hit it. The game gives you two options for your swing. Hard and Soft. The soft swing gives you a greater chance of hitting the ball so that it stays within the boundaries of the court, but at the same time this gives your opponent a gentle lob that's easy to return. The hard swing nails the ball, but if you don't time it correctly you'll fault by serving the ball out-of-bounds, or by missing the ball on your swing (whiff!). If your opponent sends you a lob and you return it with a hard swing, it gives you an opportunity for a SMASH. A SMASH has a nice satisfying feeling to it and causes the creepy, vaguely-minimized human faces in the crowd to cheer, but visually retain their stoic impassivity.
     
    For some reason, the faces in the crowd remind me of the 60's British TV series, "The Prisoner". Dark, deep eye sockets on every member of the cloned audience follow the ball's every move. I get chills just thinking about it. Now for the Intellivision...Nightmare Tennis!
     
    The game provides a shadow for the ball to allow you to track it more easily which, I would venture to guess, makes this a 3D game in the same way Atari's Basketball was. The shadow is a good indicator of where the ball is going to go as the ballistic path of the actual ball can be confusing given the lack of apparent screen-depth. (Does that make sense?) Anyway, the manual says to watch the shadow, so that's what I do.
     
    In addition to using a Hard or Soft swing, how you time your swing and where in your swing the racket actually hits the ball will determine towards what side of the court the ball will go when you return it. We didn't get good enough to actually do anything with this information, but it's good to know it's there for when we reach a "higher level" of play.
     
    In real tennis, the winner of a full match is determined by the first to win three out of five sets. The winner of a set is the player who wins at least six games first and win two games more than their opponent. The winner of a game is determined by the first to score at least four points and have at least two points more than their opponent. Intellivision's Tennis follows these scoring procedures and a full match can take a little while to play. I don't know how long this actually does take because both my son and my wife were anxious to do something else after the first set. I suppose if you wanted to simulate today's record setting 12-to-15-games-long sets in Wimbledon Gentlemen's Finals 2008, you could, but I wouldn't recommend it unless there's a big check and a heavy looking plate involved.
     
    Two things about controlling your Tennis player: First thing, the disc: You use the 16-point directional disc to move your player around the court. This is actually not unpleasant because your on-screen persona ALWAYS faces the net. Moving them with the disc just pushes them around the court and isn't at all frustrating. Either the designers used the disc better in this game than the others we've played or our thumbs are getting used to it.
     
    Second thing, the side buttons: What is frustrating is the buttons on the sides of these Intellivision II controllers, there just isn't any feedback or play in them to give you a clear indication of when you're actually activating it. It's not a deal-breaker but I look forward to being used to them...someday.
     
    Next entry I'll do Space Battle, which is for one OR two player, unless I decide to do something else. (22730)
  8. Mezrabad
    Horse Racing (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    For any of you that read this blog whenever I actually post something, you might be painfully aware that I neither enjoy gambling nor sports. I usually bitch and moan about most Blackjack carts I have to play and while I do my best to muster up enthusiasm for the sports titles, I'm sure it's obvious that my heart usually isn't in them. In fact, beyond an appreciation for graphics and/or feature set, I can barely tolerate sports and gambling titles. Also, with my limited appreciation for "board to video" ports of games, (i.e. Checkers, Backgammon) I'm sure you can grok why I might have a difficult time getting through 1980 on the Intellivision.
     
    Now, take the cart Horse Racing. You'd think, given that I'm not into sports and I'm not into gambling, that this title is sure to get an instant "meh" from me. Well, maybe you wouldn't think that, but if you did you'd be wrong.
     
    First off, Horse Racing is for one to six players. That's SIX. Now, the math folk among you may be asking yourselves, "Did he say 'SIX'? How in the square-root-of-effing-two could there be SIX players with only TWO controllers?"
     
    Well, let's go over the concepts first.
     
    When you turn on your Intellivision console with Horse Racing in the slot, you're really giving the computer the go-ahead to synthesize eight healthy horses. Each horse has its own secret, built-in set of intrinsics governing its speed, stamina and ability to run on certain surfaces. You have $750 and ten races to try to observe and figure out just what these horses can do. If you run out of cash in the process, your game is over. (Beatings with a pillowcase full of oranges is optional, though not recommended.)
     
    Each horse, by the way, is named a color: Pink, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet and White.
     
    For each race, four horses race on one of three different surfaces (Dry, Turf or Muddy) for eight different distances (three to ten furlongs). The instruction manual (another excellently written Intellivision manual, btw) suggests keeping track of the length and conditions for each race, the entries and the results -- including the winning time.
     
    So, every race, via the results, you're given a handfull of clues about how each horse performs. The better you get to know the horses, the more confident you may bet on them. This can result in wads and wads of well-earned imaginary cash.
     
    For instance, in the very first race, I watched Blue, Violet, Green and Orange race for three furlongs on Turf. The finish was V-O-G (Violet, Orange, Green) with Blue trailing. So, what does one glean from this? Well, over a short distance and on turf, we'll tentatively conclude that Violet can beat Orange, Green and Blue. This isn't really a lot to work with, but each race gives you the opportunity for making and/or supporting a hypothesis and this allows you to refine your betting.
     
    The second race put Orange, Green, Red and Violet against each other on eight furlongs of turf. I thought "Pfft, I know Violet should at least beat Orange and Green" so I bet on Violet, figuring my only worry would be Red. WRONG! Apparently, while Violet is faster than Orange over three furlongs on turf, Orange has more Stamina and can beat Blue in eight furlongs! The placing was Orange, Violet, Red and Green. Well, at least I can be pretty certain that Green is slower than both of them...
     
    So, using the characteristics of each race and the results, you start to put together composite sketch of each horse. It's very interesting and fun. When you get enough "horse sense" you can start placing Exacta bets. An Exacta bet is when you try to predict the placement of the two horses to come in first and second. Exactas pay 15 to 1, which is a good deal more than what you can get for merely picking what may have become an obvious winner.
     
    You might ask, "Well what fun is that? After a days at the races, you'll know how to rank the horses!" Well, that's where the beauty of randomly generated qualities comes in. After your day at the races, it's off to the metaphorical glue factory for the whole stable of them. Each time you start a set of races there's a new set of horses; same colors, different abilities.
     
    So, how can six people play? Well, each of you gets an account, numbered from one to six. Before each race, you pass around the controllers and everyone gets a chance to look at the offered race and to place their bets. You can let everybody just watch the races or two players at a time may choose to jockey a horse.
     
    For every race, the two horses that start closest to the guard rail (towards the top of the screen) are jockeyed by the computer. This means that the computer decides at what position on the track each unjockeyed horse runs, when to coax the horse to run faster and when to apply the whip to inspire a final, potentially crippling, burst of speed. The bottom two horses are optionally controlled by one player each. When I played by myself, I simply let the computer jockey all four ("hands-off" playing). With a group of people, it is possible for any two players to jockey one of the two, non-computer jockeyed horses. A jockey gets to coax and whip the horse as well as decide its positioning -- closer to the guard rail (towards the top) means it's traveling a smaller circle around the track and likely to wear out less quickly than if it were traveling on the outer track.
     
    However, there are drawbacks to people having the ability to jockey.
     
    If someone jockeys a horse that they haven't bet on to win, then it's too easy for the unethical jockey to apply the whip early, steer the horsey to the outside of the track and poor little Sunny Muffins hasn't got a chance of winning. In a nutshell, the controls allow "fixing". During my second time through by myself, if there were jockeyable horses that I hadn't bet on to win, I'd run those mounts into the dirt. This would allow the horse I bet on to have a better chance of winning. Aside from the potential of burning in Cheater's Hell, this has a practical downside. Say that you've been forcing Pink to lose for three races and then suddenly she shows up against horses you've also forced to lose. How, then, do you bet? By tampering with a horse, you lose the chance to gather information.
     
    So, while the chance to jockey is there, it's an extra variable I'd rather do without though I certainly understand the need for its inclusion. Most people would want to actually play videogames, not just watch them. That being said, Horse Racing, however, is indeed fun even if you're just watching the races to observe the equine behavior. If I can ever get six people together to play, I'll let you know how it goes.
     
    In a continuing attempt to procrastinate the other sports titles, I think we'll try Space Battle next entry. 22652
  9. Mezrabad
    NFL Football (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    NFL Football is one of those games that doesn't register on my radar longer than it would take to say, "Hey, those guys look they're really running--oh look, Space Invaders on the Atari!" I'm just not into sports, so if I sound less than enthusiastic about a well done sports title, remember, it's not the fault of the title.
     
    We played this months ago and it's taken me this long to get around to writing about it not because it's a bad game, it's just that I don't have anything intelligent to say about it.
     
    Neat features of the game:
     
    1. Scrolling football field. If I'm not mistaken we saw this feature first on the Bally Professional Arcade. Your TV is a window into a segment of the field, rather than the whole field itself. Like Auto Racing the scrolling feature lends the effect of feeling like you're part of a larger world and actually moving around in it rather than confined to a tiny rectangular world that just happens to be the same size as your TV screen.
     
    2. Cheering fans. Like Baseball, you've got a "crowd-track". You've also got other sound effects that add to the playing of the game including a ref whistle and a gunshot to signal the end of a quarter.
     
    3. Three time-outs per player. If you know how to strategically use a time-out, then you can do it in this game.
     
    4. Everything you'd expect in a game that said "football" on it. Passing, kicking, punting, safeties, touchbacks. They did a good job with this, the only thing missing is announcers.
     
    5. Excellent manual. The manual is a little over 20 pages long and that doesn't include the playbook for each player.
     
    6. Big playbook combinations. There are nine formations to choose from for each side (Offensive or Defensive), that just sets up where your players start. If you're offense, then you pick from two receivers and from nine passing zones. This is the sort of thing that blows my little non-football playing mind.
     
    ONE Drawback: The CONTROLLER. Yep, that's pretty much the trouble. Sure a keyboard controller with an analog disc looks great on paper, but try using it actively and the pain begins. Getting the controller to accept our plays is Madden-ing (heh, I made a pun) geting the players to run where we want is frustrating and painfull. Maybe we just need better controllers. (We're playing on an Intellivision II so I'm sure you can feel our pain.)
     
    Overall, I'd say the design and content of this game is enough to keep it on anyone (American) football fan's fond memory list if they are the type to miss football in the off season. If you like watching football with your dad and friends then this game is probably a good substitute during the long spring/summer months without NFL action. For people who like videogames, but are not fans of sports you will appreciate the manual and the feature set but, then again, you're probably too busy enjoying your VCS to care.
     
    Next entry: Hmm, it's been so dang long since I looked at my list, I've got no clue what I'm playing next! 22235
  10. Mezrabad
    Major League Baseball (Intellivision, 1980)
     
    Major League Baseball is the game I saw being played at every Sears I walked into when the Intellivision was being introduced. I'm not a fan of baseball, but to me this game will always represent the tantalizing first glimpse of the Intellivision's exciting potential. In fact, prior to acquiring an Intellivision for chronogaming, Baseball was the only game for the Intellivision I'd ever played on the original hardware. Upon further reflection I find myself a little annoyed at the one and only friend of mine who actually had an Intellivision but never invited me over to play it. (Though he did demonstrate his AD&D cartridge to me the one time I was there so I guess I should be grateful for that.)
     
    The screen layout, predictably, looks like a baseball field. At the start of the game all nine players on the home team come out onto the field from their dugout (left side for home, right side for visitor) and take their positions. The opponent's batter takes its place at the home plate. Using the disc, the player whose team is in the field can have the pitcher pitch a ball with different levels of speed and curve but with no "telekinetic" control over the ball while it is in flight. A batter can hit either a foul or a home run and the fielding team doesn't do much about it. Anything other than a foul or a home run, however, is treated as a grounder and that's when it gets fun. The Intellivision keypad is used to great effect here as each position on the field is represented on the overlay. If the ball gets hit into left field you activate the left outfielder by pressing the player on your keypad and then you move them to the ball using Disc controller. When they've gotten the ball, you press the field position to which they should throw the ball and try to tag the running player out. In fact, you can even commit an error. If you decide to throw the ball to first base but in the middle of the throw decide to activate the second baseman, you'll deactivate the first baseman and the ball will land on the ground. This allows the runner to take advantage of your mistake and stretch the hit out into a double or triple. This mechanic adds a flexibility to the gameplay lacking in the other baseball titles we've seen. For instance, some previous games have determined how far the runner gets (single, double or triple) depending on where the ball is hit. In fact, unless my memory is rotten (and it could be) I don't think any other game offers the freedom of throwing the ball to whatever position the player feels like nor do any allow the runner's player to make any decisions going around the bases, which I'll get to next.
     
    On the running side of the game, the player at bat has complete freedom over the lead runner and can have them run in either direction (towards the next base or back to the most recent one touched) whenever they feel it's to their advantage. When the pitcher is getting ready to pitch, it's possible for the runner to take a nice lead towards the next base in an attempt to steal. To counter this, the pitcher can throw to the baseman to try to tag the runner out. In addition to base stealing this play mechanic allows for a form of emergent gameplay which I think baseball players call "monkey in the middle". Specifically, this is when a runner gets caught stealing a base and the basemen throw the ball back and forth to trap the oscillating runner between them. It isn't behavior that's "programmed" into the game, but because of the simple gameplay mechanics and the design choice of leaving it up to the players the situation can emerge just like it does in a meatspace game of baseball.
     
    I might be wrong, but the sound effects sound either like digitized samples or very masterful programming of the sound chip. The first time I heard the "YER OUT!" I thought it sounded like an umpire growling the actual words. The cheers and whistles of the crowd also sound pretty good. I wonder if any game has the crowd cheer louder for the home team? It would make sense, wouldn't it, I mean it stands to reason there will be more fans of the home team in the stands...but I digress.
     
    The one drawback to this cart is that it is only for two players with no solo play option but this can be a plus as it encourages people to play videogames together. The bright side of this meant I had to recruit my son (now 10, he's been chronogaming with me since he was seven) to play Baseball with me. This sort of situation is always a treat for me but depends on the game whether or not it's a treat for him. He picked it up quickly enough but was lamenting that we had to play for Nine. Whole. Innings...actually it was only eight and a half. After it was over he was very happy to get back to playing Oblivion. I did get a big kick out of seeing him seemingly embrace the stealing bases tactic, though towards the end I think he was doing it to end the game faster.
     
    I should mention something about Major League Baseball being an Intellivision game which utilizes the practice of licensing trademarks from professional sport leagues. We'll see it again for every early Intellivision sports title I can think of, including Backgammon. Does anyone know if this strategy paid off for the system? It does nothing for me personally, but does anyone out there in, um, chronoblogosphere remember how they felt about licensed sports titles on the INTV back in the day? Was it more exciting to play Major League Baseball than it would have been to merely play Baseball?
     
    Next time we'll play Football, though I should call it NFL Football to get you NFL fans out there excited.

    19937


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

    Note Bene: There will be a YouTube video supplementing portions of this entry so check again later for the link or just check out my YouTube page at: Chronogamer's YouTube Page where it will eventually appear.
     
    Intellivision was test-marketed in California in 1979 and sold to the rest of the United States in 1980. Rather than going by the copyright date given on the title screen of Blackjack (1978) to determine the appropriate chronological order of this game, I decided to go with the earliest year I would have been able to play it, which would have been 1980, had I been fortunate enough to own an Intellivision at the time. See this isn't a nostalgic thing for me, it's a "do it now because I didn't then."
     
    Oh, just a quick economic factoid. Intellivision's initial retail price was $300 (okay, it was actually $299, but I try not to think in those types of prices). $300 in 1980 US dollars is $803.29 in 2006 dollars. This means that the same food, clothing and shelter you could buy in 1980 for $300 would cost $803.29 in 2006. In the past 28 years while the cost of a new home videogame console has gone up a bit, the cost of other things has gone up even more, making the opportunity cost of a new console actually less than it was in 1980. I think I need to bring that up to my wife the next time I get a hankering for an Xbox 360.
     
    So, another Blackjack? When Mattel said, "Hey, let's put Blackjack in the box with the system!" what were they thinking? There were already at least three other carts that played blackjack in circulation (two for the VCS and one for the Odyssey^2 not to mention a few others); what did Mattel think they could do better than what other systems had already done with a game involving little more than testing to see if a one sum is closer to 21 than another?
     
    Well, there's a major component to this game that sets it apart from all Blackjacks/Pokers before it: your computer controlled dealer has a human face! Never before have we stared at a home videogame and had a computer generated face staring back at us. Taking a census of facial features we can count two each of eyes, ears and eyebrows as well as one each of a nose and mouth - it's even got a moustache and goatee. If I had to pick someone, I'd say it looks a lot like Bruce Campbell, but maybe that's just me.
     

    Quick aside: can we talk about the tie for a second? Is that a bolo tie? How often does one see the official neckwear of Arizona (since 1971) and, later, New Mexico (since 1987), in a videogame? Feel free to actually answer that question if you know. If that isn't a bolo tie than what exactly should it be called? Thanks in advance. Okay, back to the entry.
     
    In addition to having a face (and the tie), the dealer actually deals the cards to each player, sending the cards spinning down the playfield to rest in the appropriate spots rather then them simply "popping" in when they are dealt. You can see this in action whenever I get my video up to YouTube.
     
    All that would be cool enough, but instead of being satisfied with providing a face and the animation of cards being dealt, this cart goes one step further by giving the dealer a simple approximation of human emotions. Most of the time, the dealer wears the "poker"-face one would expect from a professional card dealer.

    However, under certain circumstances, this dealer's composure will crack a bit, making him seem all the more human but not in that creepy Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within kind of way.
     
    His Blackjack behavior is quite simple. If you go bust he'll smile cheesily about it. If he goes bust, he'll give you the angry face. His poker behavior is more complex. For five card draw poker he'll only give the smile when he's confident in his hand and raising the stakes.

     
    For the five and seven card stud poker he'll still smile when raising the stakes, but when you've got a hand that looks good and are not betting, he'll get really frustrated because all he can do is call your non-bet.

     
    In addition to all the cool graphical touches and emoting by the dealer, there are four card games to play: Blackjack, 5-card stud, 7-card stud and 5-card draw. The mechanic for viewing the cards in the poker games is simple, just ask your co-player to look away and press the directional disc to reveal your cards. You may choose a new game at the end of a hand, play the same game or you can let the dealer choose what to play. You carry your wallet balance from hand to hand regardless of what you choose to play. If you go bankrupt, then your controller becomes inoperative and it's game over while your playing partner gets to continue until they go bankrupt.
     
    Overall if you want to play Blackjack and/or Poker on a TV this cart is a good way to do it. If you don't already own an Atari or an Odyssey^2, Las Vegas Blackjack & Poker this is (meaning: "was") a fair argument for getting an Intellivision (Moms & Dads in 1980 understood Blackjack and Poker, just like Moms & Dads understand Wii Bowling today). It's not as addictive as say, the Poker Solitaire game on the Casino cart for the VCS, but it can still be pretty addictive . . . and I don't normally like videogames based on card games.
     
    Next Entry will be Auto Racing for the Intellivision. 18461
  13. Mezrabad
    My son and I took the trip to Houston yesterday and had a blast.
     
    We got to see some rare cabs, (PONG, Q-berts Qubes) and I got to play a few arcade games I thought I'd never get to play on the "original hardware" (Major Havoc, Quantum). I took a ton of pictures, but my camera memory card is being used by my son today in a school science experiment so I won't be able to make an album until later.
     
    We entered the Parent-Child tournament which was to be on a Gilligan's Island pinball machine, one person controlling each flipper. In the middle of the second pair of participant's game the ball got stuck on the playfield so tournament play was moved to a Xenon machine.
     
    Xenon was the second pinball machine I'd ever seen, back in the day, that used spampled digitized sound for some of its effects (the frist I ever saw to do so was Black Knight). The funny thing about using Xenon in a Parent-child tournament is that the sampled effects sound very similar to a woman experiencing, let's say, "intense" pleasure. I didn't have a problem with my 10 year-old being exposed to the "content" but I did think it was pretty funny.
     
    The most fun we had during our visit was playing some very non-pinball, non-video games. There was a Foosball Table and a Hockey game (www.icegame.com). we had a great time playing each of those, probably because we could face each other.
     
    Together we also got to play Smash TV together which was a lot of fun. We tried to play some Atari game called Killer Robots from Space (or something, I'll have to check) but one of the player's controllers was broken. There was a wicked-cool multi-vector arcade machine, but we weren't able to get two player simultaneous on Armor Attack, nor could we get it to boot-up Rip-off, which would have also been cool.
     
    The most interesting thing there was a Homebrew Starfighter cab. I've got some pictures and some video of it. The concept is very cool, but I think the controls need to be tweeked a little, as I was unable to control it at all. Then again, since it is supposedly a recruiting tool, maybe it's meant to weed out feeble gamers like myself.
     
    Anyway, I'll post pictures and movies a little later.
  14. Mezrabad
    Bally Pin (Bally Professional Arcade, 1979)
     
    Off the top of my head, I'd have to say Bally Pin is the most fun we've had on the Bally Professional Arcade yet, and it's possibly the most addictive fun we've had with a videogame in our chronology thus far.
     
    Like the various videogame portings of Baseball, Black Jack or Hangman represent attempts to mix the older school leisures of sports, cards and puzzle games into the new past-time on the block, so too, does the attempt to forcibly integrate Pinball with its younger sibling, the Videogame. Ports of Baseball, Black Jack or Hangman may not always hit their mark in the fun zone, but their technical accuracy usually isn't very far off. Pinball, on the other hand, seems to have evaded capture.
     
    Looking at some of the previous translations of Pinball into the videogame realm, we find Atari Video Pinball (dedicated console, 1977), APF's Pinball (APF M1000, 1978), Fairchild's Video Pinball (Channel F, 1978) and Thunderball (Odyssey^2, 1979). The Atari Video Pinball console (un-chronogamed as of yet, sorry) and APF's Pinball each have their little pluses and big minuses, the minuses having to do with their failed attempts to simulate flippers. Channel F's Video Pinball isn't even pinball, it's a Breakout clone; mention it not. Thunderball for the Odyssey^2 is just too fast for me to appreciate, though, it at least makes an attempt to get the flippers right.
     
    As I've said before, I am not a person who plays pinball in the real world. Other than a few games of Eight Ball at a bowling alley back in 1979, I've since, more or less intentionally, limited my exposure due to a lack of interest.
     
    Bally Pin makes Pinball interesting to me again. Rather than feeling like each flipper is merely a gate keeper designed to prevent the ball from leaving play, the flippers on Bally Pin are implemented in such a way that they can be used to actually direct the ball to an intended destination. This adds greatly to the feeling that one is playing a game rather than passively participating in a pachinko session. There's still a luck factor, but for the first time it feels like skill and intent have something to do with a high score.
     

     
    Bally Pin comes with two pinball playfields: Red and Yellow. Yellow seems like the easier field, but that's just my opinion. Each field has traditional pinball elements in them: targets, drop targets, bumpers and spinners. The targets light the bumpers. Hit all the targets during one ball and you increase your score multiplier. The targets and lit bumpers reset at the beginning of each ball, so, to lose your ball is to lose your target progress. Unlike the targets, the drop targets stay hit between balls. Eventually, if you drop them all by hitting them, you'll get a score multiplier. Only after clearing all of the drop targets do they reset. The spinner doesn't seem to do anything. We thought it would rotate the bumper lights, or reset some of the drop targets, but we haven't yet observed such behavior.
     
    The flippers and the plunger are the only devices the player manipulates to directly affect the course of the ball. Regrettably, there is no "nudge" simulator, though players should feel free to contort themselves in an attempt to do so, as it amuses the other players. Before ball launch, the plunger moves up and down in its slot. For a "low force" introduction of the ball, you activate the plunger at the top of its oscillation, for a high force ball injection you activate the plunger at the low point in its oscillation. I know we will again see this player-reflex technique of allowing a player to choose the amount of force to be applied in a particular context in the future, but I can't recall seeing it before. This may be an innovation unless I'm forgetting something in one of the golf games. There are four flippers. Two left flippers and two right. The controls for activating these flippers are so awesome that I'm going to give them their own paragraph!
     
    If you're not familiar with the Bally Professional Arcade controller then you should be told that they are thought of as "pistol grip" controllers; they are actually shaped how I imagine the handle of a Colt .45 is shaped. The fire button is in the spot where the trigger of a gun would be and one activates it with very much the same finger motion one would use to fire a gun. The joystick portion extends slightly up from the grip and doubles as an 8-way joystick/paddle combination. Not only can one move the joystick in eight directions, one may also twist the knob like a paddle. So, how is a controller such as this used to play Bally Pin? Well, to be quite honest, a controller isn't used at all, instead we use two! Each controller's trigger acts as a flipper button! It is quite effective as a control mechanism for pinball.
     
    Of course, Bally Pin is more than its controllers. The ball and flipper movement is smooth, the ball speed is manageable, the playfield goals are readily apparent (take out the targets). Instead of merely trying to keep the ball in play, the player can increase their scoring capacity by clearing the drop targets or by lighting all the bumpers with their targets to achieve a 2x or 3x score multiplier. It's very engaging and very addictive. My entire family participated in a four-player game last night, and I didn't even have to coax or beg them to play again. Really! They simply wanted to, even in spite of the brand new Wii sitting in the next room!
     
    So, we didn't merely "like" Bally Pin, we heartily enjoyed it. I'd name it something like "game of the decade" but that might imply that I liked it more than Superman which I also like a lot, but for different reasons. Unlike many of the games we've played, Bally Pin is something the whole family wants to play again. I just asked if anyone wants to play this afternoon and my son, daughter and wife each said "yes" with enthusiasm!
     
    So, there we have it. The 1970s are over, in the sense that after 1979 no more years have the words "nineteen" and "seventy" in their pronunciation. Thus ends the first phase of Chronogamer. I hope to start the next phase, 1980-1984, soon. I'll post a list of everything I think I need to be playing in 1980 when I'm ready to get started in the next phase.
     
    Thanks for everyone's kind words of encouragement during this exercise in drooling self-delusion. With the exception of parenting and marriage, Chronogaming--researching, acquiring, playing and writing about these games--has probably represented the most focused attention I've ever given a single project in my entire life. I can't think of anything I've ever started that's lasted more than two continuous years while still "getting done"! This doesn't say much for me as a project manager, I guess, but it certainly says, um, something.
     
    I won't be updating this blog for a little while, but feel free to drop by www.chronogaming.com as I try to convert this blog into a less siteware dependent format. (ie, should a site stop providing blogspace, I'll still have a place to put all of this.)
     
    Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope to see people at CGE. 12700
     
    EDIT: added "to me again" when I say Bally Pin makes pinball interesting. I did think Eight Ball was interesting for all the reasons I like Bally Pin, just not as interesting as videogames were to me back in 1979 (when I wanted an Atari soooo badly, but didn't have one yet). Playing Bally Pin has made me re-understand Pinball's appeal.
  15. Mezrabad
    Black Jack/Acey Deucey/Poker (Bally Professional Arcade, 1979)
     
    Death and Taxes.
     
    And Blackjack.
     
    With the exception of the Magnavox Odyssey, Black Jack has appeared on every cart-based, home videogame system released in the United States thus far (up to 1979). It is surpassed in its occurances only by versions of Baseball which also appeared on the Magnavox Odyssey while a version of Black Jack did not.
     

    I'm probably covering old ground here, but when confronted with so many different Black Jacks I have to wonder: Why is Black Jack such a game which companies think they have to produce, when a deck of cards will do just fine? Why do they think consumers will be willing to spend $20 on a game cart? The only thing I can come up with is that, it's Black Jack on your television!! ... which must be reason enough. Since the Black Jack carts for most systems are readily available in the second-hand markets of the future, it seems safe to say that they sell fairly well. However, it's hard to recreate any anticipation for Black Jack videogames in my modern brain, though I'm doing my best to think as though I'm "living in the moment."
     
    Black Jack allows up to 4 players. Las Vegas rules apply with a few exceptions. For instance, spliting a pair can't occur in games with more than two players due to limited screen real estate. Unlike games for many of the other systems, which have used two, three and even four decks of cards, Bally Black Jack only uses one deck which it shuffles whenever it needs to but always before a hand. That's something I never seem to remember to do when I'm dealing Black Jack; guess I'll never deal Vegas.
     
    Betting in Black Jack, as well as the other two games, is handled by the knob and the joystick. Keeping the stick straight lets you rotate the knob through the numbers in the 10s column of your bet. Pushing the stick forward gives you the 100s column. Pulling the stick back lets you pick a number in the 1000s column. It's a clever use of the Bally's unique controller and I'm glad they chose it over their keyboard.
     
    Black Jack is Black Jack. Nothing more, nothing less. The presentation is nice, in fact, the cards are probably the nicest we've seen so far, even nudging the APF MP1000 out of the top spot for Black Jack graphics. However, it's still Black Jack and only worth a few yawns unless you're a big fan.
     
    In my opinion, Acey-Deucy is much more interesting than Black Jack, but only with three or four players. Initially, I was expecting a completely different game, but I'm glad I was wrong. It isn't the Backgammon variation I had expected, as is the Acey-Deucey on the Channel F's Backgammon cart, instead, this is a variation of the card game known as "In Between".
     

    Each player gets a pair of cards and has to bet against the pot for their next card to fall between the cards in their hand. In the screenshot above, you can see that Player2 is screwed, Player1 has a slim chance and Player3 should bet as high as he can. Of course, he can only bet against what is in the pot already ($10 of which was his ante), so the most he can win would be a "net" of $20. The players ante up $10 each every hand, so the pot increases steadily even if nobody bets. Having a "good pair" doesn't mean you're going to win big cash unless there's already big cash in the pot. For it to get "interesting" players need to bet a little bit each round, even on pairs that are less likely to win. As the pot grows, the pressure is felt to take larger risks and try to win the pot before one of the other players does. The pot sort of adds an "arc" to game play. You're not just concerned with an individual hand, you're concerned with how large the pot is growing and how well your opponents are doing. It is kind of like Poker, just less complex and without bluffing.
     
    Speaking of Poker, this cart also has Poker for two to four players (no computer player, just a computer dealer). "Five card draw, all see-um" would be how I'd describe this Poker variation. A player sets the bet at a certain level and the other player can "see" it or "raise" it, by setting their bets at the appropriate amounts. There are three rounds of betting, which is quite sufficient as everyone is able to see each other's cards. The winner of the hand collects all of the bets from the other players but there's no explicit "pot" in the middle of the playfield like there was in Acey-Deucey. The betting does have some psychology to it, but there's no bluffing, per se. One may attempt to goad another player into folding by simply pointing out their visible-to-all hand sucks and that it is unlikely to improve. To fold, one just simply decides not to raise their bet to the amount the others have raised theirs.
     

    The screenshot above is an example of a player who has folded and turned her cards over. Nice card backs, eh?
     
    The game uses an interesting mechanism to allow players to exchange their cards, and is shown in the movie, linked below.
     
    Bally Poker Draw Movie (4 MB)
     
    See the upwards scrolling card moving left to right? When that card moving through the yellow center is over or under a card which a player would like to exchange, they pull their trigger and that card is replaced. I thought it was a neat method to allow simultaneous drawing.
     
    Over all, Bally's Black Jack / Acey Deucey / Poker is a nice package. Any offering that supports up to four players gets points in my book. There's nothing about which I would choose to complain, other than the obvious, and that's the fact that a deck of cards would be cheaper and can be configured to play an even larger selection of games.
     
    The last game of the 1970s will be Bally Pin.
    12450
  16. Mezrabad
    Star Battle (Bally Pro Arcade, 1979)
     
    Two years ago, back in 1977, a little movie called Star Wars was released. People who made videogames noticed this and immediately began coming up with videogame scenarios from it. One of the first games inspired by Star Wars for a home videogame console is Star Battle for the Bally Professional Arcade.
     
    I don't know if I'm just tired or if my second week of being caffeine-free is just lowering my IQ even further, but I'm at a loss to adequately describe this game. So, I've made a little quicktime movie of it . . .
     
    Here. (ugh another dead link. this is entirely my fault.)
     
    The movie should give you the basic idea of the playfield's simulated 3-d effect, but, because I only have two hands and one of them was holding the camera, I'm afraid it doesn't show you any of the actual game play. You're essentially playing in a simplified representation of the Death Star's equatorial "trench" from the last action sequence of Star Wars. There's no exhaust port in this version, however, and the entire game is about the dogfight between you and the other fighter. Both fighters bear a distinct, non-coincidental resemblance to ships from the movie. One is obviously the silhouette of a Tie Fighter and the other is the simplified rear view of an X-wing.
     
    The movement mechanic is a little confusing. The controller allows a player to steer their craft horizontally, and lets them accelerate/decelerate when the knob is pushed forwards or pulled backwards, respectively. By slowing down, a player positions their craft at the bottom of the screen and "closer" (bigger) to the viewpoint of the game's camera. By speeding up, the craft moves to the top of the screen and "farther away" (smaller) from player's perspective. The object of the game is for a player to move their craft to a position, either behind or ahead of the opponent so that they can shoot them down. The challenge is that when the opponent speeds up, it not only pushes his craft to the higher, "ahead" position, it also puts the other player's craft in the lower, "behind" position, whether they want it there or not. (assume "vice versa")
     
    In other words, when you choose to slow down or speed up, you're doing so relative to your opponent's speed, as you both jockey for a good shot while continuously traveling down the trench all the time with the effective illusion of traveling at a high speed.
     
    Now, when I say "effective illusion" I mean, "most effective to date". I can't think of anything that we've played so far that has been as successful in achieving the feeling of forward motion. Night Driver in the arcades did a pretty good job of it, and Datsun 280Zzzap, also on the Bally Pro Arcade, managed to achieve the effect somewhat, but Star Battle does it the best so far, in my opinion. The shots the players fire follow the orientation of the trench, giving the appearance of going into or coming out of a location further down the trench rather than merely traversing the screen straight up/down or left/right. When combined with the scaling of the craft as they move ahead or fall behind, it makes for a nice, quick-feeling, two-player, pseudo 3-d game.
     
    There's also a single player version, so you can practice the pretend killing of your imperial/rebel scum friend when they're not there. The tactics aren't very deep, and mostly involve trying to quickly aim and fire while trying to feint your position intention. Despite their lack of depth, playing these tactics well can lead to some pretty satisfying kills, especially when your opponent does exactly what you expected them to do. There's only time for a quick "Ha!" before they reappear on the screen and start gunning for you again, but it can be a satisfying "Ha!"
     
    Like many games on the Bally, the players get to customize what constitutes a winning score -- anything from 1 to 99. We usually played to 10. It's not a big deal, but being able to set the length of the game is a very nice touch that I don't think the 2600 or the Odyssey^2 offers.
     
    As always, the Bally's sound doesn't disappoint. Each player has a distinct sound for their shots, the explosion of a ship is a good rumble (at least on my TV) and there's a special deflection sound on the rare instance of shots colliding and canceling each other out.
     
    Overall, I give the game a . There's not much to it, but the presentation is well done and Star Battle is the only game to date that offers you the chance to pilot an X-wing or a Tie-fighter.
     
    Oh, and by the way, during our play session for this entry, we went back and played the built-in game, Checkmate, a few times. It just never gets old for us!
     
    Only two games left in the 197xs! Next we'll do Black Jack / Acey Deucy / Poker. 11,810
  17. Mezrabad
    Amazing Maze / Tic-Tac-Toe (Bally Professional Arcade, 1979)
     
    I know many of you are very anxious to hear just how the Bally performed in Tic-Tac-Toe against the Fairchild Channel F's built-in Tic-Tac-Toe AI, but before I get to that, I have a solution regarding the heating problems some of us have been experiencing with the Bally Pro Arcade.
     

     
    Bally vs. Fairchild: Tic-Tac-Toe
     
    In order to get a statistically significant sample we figured we should pit the machines against each other for at least 29 games, but we decided to field 500 just to be sure. The Chronogaming Stadium was configured to facilitate this event and volunteers were scheduled in four-hour shifts to monitor and conduct the various matches. Unfortunately, before the opening ceremonies had commenced, one of the volunteers broke free of their restraints (obviously due to an underdosage in medication) and managed to release the remaining officiators before escaping from the Chrongaming campus. The ones who didn't escape were rendered useless, or perhaps I should say rended useless by the dogs. So, it ain't happening.
     
    We did manage a screen shot from the Jumbotron, however.
     

     
    Really, it's just Tic-Tac-Toe without the chicken.
     
    For the graph theory crowd, Amazing Maze offers a Prim and proper diversion. For this home version of its 1976 arcade cabinet, The Amazing Maze Game, Bally upgrades the three-year-old game to color, gives it a graphical "castle" setting, and allows for three different difficulty levels, the standard "easy, medium and hard" flavors.
     

     
    Below is a little movie of the computer making its way through a "hard" level maze. Frankly, it's a larger download than it's worth, but I'm not using the bandwidth for anything at the moment.
     
    Amazing Maze Movie (Dead link removed. Sorry.)
     
    So, what we're seeing here is what appears to be a computer player which already knows how to get through the maze, and it's just taking its time so that a slower, more organic player may have a chance against it. It might be a little more exciting if the computer went down a possible dead-end once or twice but moved a little faster. As it is, a human player need only get about halfway through the maze before zipping through the path they just saw the computer take from the beginning. Much more satisfying is to play against a fellow biological unit, or to pit two young human siblings against each other until they've had all the fun I could stand.
     
    Here's another possible waste of a download. This is a shot of the Bally "thinking" while it's generating a maze.
     
    Maze being generated. (Dead link removed. Sorry again.)
     
    Now, is that just "lava lamp" noise, to let the user know the Bally is doing something or is that the Bally using video memory as a scratch pad for whatever minimal spanning tree algorithm it uses? Assuming that's what it uses. Dunno.
     
    As a game, Amazing Maze is fun enough, but it doesn't have near the number of variations on a Maze game that the Fairchild Channel F Maze cartridge has. As a "fun" rating, I'll give it a "meh" -- it's not a bad Maze cart, it just isn't great either. At the moment, I'd prefer the Fairchild's rendition of the genre.
     
    Next cart is also for Bally's machine, either Astro Battle or Space Invaders, I just can't decide. 10700
  18. Mezrabad
    Computer Intro (Odyssey^2, 1979)
     
    The Odyssey^2 has one thing that no other videogame console, before or since, ever had: a full-sized, built-in keyboard.
     
    Another exclusive for the Odyssey^2 is Computer Intro; a cart that, along with its manual, teaches its user the fundamentals of assembler and machine language programming. Say what you want about the Odyssey^2's games, sound, graphics or exclaimation-point-driven-advertising, but Computer Intro deserves nothing but respect. We're not just talking about a well-written manual, this is a programming environment that lets the user enter and run their own programs with up to 100 lines of code!
     
    In 1979, find me anything (hardware + software) in the same price range that even comes close to doing that. By the way, don't just get the cart and try to "wing it". The 102-page manual is essential to use this cartridge properly, not only for the wealth of information and tutorials in its text, but for the illustrative gatefolds that serve as handy references for the user while learning to program. In addition to providing a mini-course in assembly language programming the manual also puts things into perspective, claiming:
     
    That's exactly what it does. There's no hyperbole to be found in this manual, no techno-babble (like "on-screen electronic sensors") that one may find in other Odyssey^2 manuals. This is straight, informative useful information. If you, like me, are someone who wishes they had learned how to program at an early age, but didn't have access to a computer until it was comparatively too late, let me add to your wishful thinking by recommending you take a look at Computer Intro's manual here from Ozyr's awesome Odyssey^2 archive. (Print it out, it's easier to read without the background.)
     
    After getting an idea of what the manual is teaching you, you'll wish you'd had an Odyssey^2 instead of an Atari -- whoa, let's not go that far! How about this: you'll wish you'd had an Atari and an Odyssey^2, with Computer Intro, back in 1979.
     
    In the interest of avoiding a long and boring "compare and contrast" to Atari's Basic Programming, let me just summarize by saying Odyssey^2's Computer Intro is better than Atari's Basic Programming. When I say "better than," I'm saying something very similar, in spirit, to "kicks the ass of," "wipes the floor with," or "is not fit to tie the shoestrings of." I just want to be sure that you understand what I'm trying to imply here.
     
    If willing to take the time to read the manual and input the programs, I can't imagine anyone not benefitting from Computer Intro.
     
    Next entry, we'll enter into the homestretch for the 197x's, with the 1979 line-up for the Bally Professional Arcade.
    9835

  19. Mezrabad
    Rather than a lengthy compare/contrast of Computer Intro and Basic Programming, like I had intended, I decided to look at each individually. Initially, my first attempts to write about the two displayed a tendancy to bash Atari's offering for merely being unlike Odyssey^2's offering. I decided it didn't make for a fair comparison, nor was it very fun to write, so, I'm doing it this way instead.
     
    Basic Programming (Atari VCS, 1979)
     
    Machine Gun KittyKats was the name of the game I was going to write using Basic Programming for the Atari VCS. My friend, George, had come up with the idea when I told him about the Basic Programming cart one could get for the Atari VCS. We envisioned two "combat-sized" cats, running around a "combat-like" playfield, shooting at each other using missiles and sound effects like those found in the air-combat portion of the Combat cartridge. We didn't consider these aspirations to be too ambitious.
     
    When I finally got a copy of Basic Programming (Xmas of '82?) and I got to "play" with it, I was crushed. There would be no Machine Gun KittyKats using this cart. The $60 I seem to remember my parents having spent for this cart was completely wasted. The program and manual seemed to contain a lot of information, but it was obvious to me that all the information couldn't change the fact that I couldn't make a game with this cart. The included keyboard controllers were also pretty much useless as I didn't own any other carts that used them. Back in the day, Basic Programming was a cart I put in once or twice, only to feel disappointment and even betrayal.
     
    Of course, I was missing the whole point. Neither a game nor a programming tool, Basic Programming was an attempt by Atari to live up to the literal name of its console: the Atari Video Computer System. Atari wanted people to think they could learn to program using what most perceived to be a television toy. However, learning to program with this cart is like what learning to play the game of Chess would be on a seven-by-seven square board; one could learn to understand the concepts of Chess, but not be able to actually play the game until access to a full-sized board was acquired. Basic Programming might have taught a really bright and motivated person the barest basics of programming, which they probably already knew, but the rest of us just got pissed-off because we quickly discovered we weren't going to be making much of anything with it.
     
    Now, let's focus more on the positives, shall we?
     
    One of the cool things about the cart is the way it uses the keyboard controllers. Two keyboard controllers, when locked together, make a handy, 24-key keyboard. Basic Programming turns that 24-key keyboard into an 80-or-so-key keyboard by implementing a mode-switching cursor. Change the color of the cursor on-screen and you change the layout of the keyboard. The keyboard overlays are a nice way to keep track of these different layouts. By labeling each key with its color-coded functions, it isn't hard to get around in the interface. The different layouts also save people from having to type in every character by implementing a keyword token system. Instead of having to type out the word "print" one need only change the cursor to the appropriate color and hit the key for "print". This couldn't have been a "resource cheap" feature to implement, but not knowing much about the Atari innards, I'll leave it at that.
     
    The system provides all the concepts of a program; variables, branching, a grid system for barely-minimal graphics, music functionality, collision detection and even a memory stack. As a programming "environment", surprisingly, it utilizes a "windowing" system allowing a user to open and close the display of different data sections. If you want to see the status of your variables while running your program, you can do so. If you want only the graphics display to cover the screen, you can do that too. In fact, I would describe this aspect of the system as "slightly prophetic" and maybe even "ahead of its time".
     
    With the memories I had of this cartridge as a teen, I thought I would have some rather acerbic commentary to make about Basic Programming. After learning a little bit more about the limitations of the VCS and after messing around with this cart again, I'm much more impressed. That being said, however, overall, I would criticize it as only being interesting to the people who already know something about programming in the first place! For a true novice, I do not see this cartridge as being beneficial.
     
    If the intent of Basic Programming is to be cool, I think it succeeds. If its intent is to teach or to inspire a beginner to learn, I think that 90% of the time, it would fail.
     
    Next entry, I'll do Computer Intro for the Odyssey^2.
    9612

  20. Mezrabad
    Backgammon (Atari VCS, 1979)
     
    Two games in a row from which I expected very little and yet found so much!
     
    Backgammon on the Atari VCS is one of the best videogame versions of the 5,000 year old board game that I've seen to date. The APF version worked well enough, but typing in the moves via their keypad was painful. Atari's solution is so appropriate that I'm tempted to call it elegant. The paddles are the perfect controller for this game. Press the button to roll the dice, turn the paddle to select your pieces and where they land. The only improvement I'd like to have seen is maybe a noise to indicate you've rolled a piece over a point while you were moving it, as it may have made it easier to count as you move your piece. The way it is, silent and smooth, allowed my son to keep overshooting where he wanted to move because he'd lose count going over the bar or losing count. Obviously, more experience with the game eliminates such a problem but I could tell it was frustrating for him (and me) to keep hearing the "buzz" of an illegal move when we'd thought we'd counted correctly.
     
    Other than that small complaint, I've got no complaints.
     
    In addition to the elegantly functional interface, the screen is colorful and the red and white pieces are both easy to distinguish from the board and each other. I'm no Backgammon player, so I wasn't shocked when the AI beat me on the easy level, but the AI did seem to have a consistent strategy, and wasn't just rolling and moving like the AI for the APF's Backgammon seemed to be.
     
    Atari's version includes a "doubling cube" which is a way of making the game a little more interesting if there's a wager at stake. A doubling cube is like a dice, except it has a 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 on the sides. The player that "owns" the cube can choose to offer to double the wager, if they think they are going to win. If the other player disagrees with their opponent's assessment of the game, believing they have the advantage, then they can accept the doubling, and take ownership of the cube. However, if they decline, then they are admitting they will probably lose and the game ends, and the wager remains at multiple amount shown on the cube (i.e. 8 times the original wager). Wikipedia explains it so much better; go there if you still don't get it. The doubling cube is a nice feature and players of the board game will be glad to see it.
     
    The orientation of the backgammon board was vertical. This is different from how most of the players of the board game would see the board, but I think it worked well for the same reason I'd prefer videogames of Chess and Checkers to be oriented horizontally instead of vertically. It comes down to offering both players and equal footing on the perspective from which they view their pieces. When one plays Chess, one is used to seeing their pieces closer to themselves, moving away towards the enemy, who approaches. In a videogame version of chess, putting a single player on the bottom of the screen-moving up, while the computer opponent's pieces start at the top and move down makes sense. However, add a second, flesh/blood player to the mix, and that player has to play the game "upside down". It would be fairer if player one could move pieces from left to right and the other player from right to left. Yes, it's different from how it is usually played, but both players have to deal with the difference.
     
    In Atari's Backgammon, orienting the board vertically accomplishes the same thing. Player one is used to looking across the board at their opponent so a horizontally oriented board would work, but only for a single player game. In a two player game, orienting the board vertically forces both players to play the game "quarter-turned".
     
    Yeah, I've probably thought way too much about this, but I really did like how they chose to present this game.
     
    So, Happy Face for Backgammon! If you like the game of Backgammon, this is a good version to play with another person. I'm so not qualified to talk about the AI, but that seemed solid enough as well.
     
    Next entry we'll look at Video Chess.
  21. Mezrabad
    Sorry about the last entry, it was a bit depressing, but it proved to me why I don't choose to approach this hobby for the sake of nostalgia. The only thing I miss about being young is having acres and acres of free-time. Time I wish I'd spent more of either learning or playing videogames. As a grown-up, what's cool about this hobby is having a 30 year backlog of relatively inexpensive games to sift through along with having slightly better time-management skills.
     
    Football (Atari VCS, 1979)
     
    I'm just curious about why we even call this sport "football" when the players use their hands so often.
     
    Let me start by saying that I try to approach every cart with an attitude of gratitude. I'm grateful (to no higher power in particular) that not only do I have access to pretty much anything ever released for the 2600, but I am actually able to find some time to play, even as I'm into the thick of my last two weeks of higher education.
     
    That being said, I should also point out that while I may try to approach with gratitude, I often fail. This often leads to ill-tempered entries, (VCS Slot Machine, APF Blackjack) that may (VCS Slot Machine) or may not (APF Blackjack) do the featured game justice.
     
    I expected such an injustice to occur with Atari's Football for the VCS. I was wrong. In fact, my lowered expectations probably contributed to our enjoyment, though these same low expectations also caused me to procrastinate getting around to playing the damn thing!
     
    VCS Football gives you three defensive/offensive linemen, a quarter/defensive back, five offensive/defensive plays to choose from and control of your ball carrier (quarterback or receiver) or linemen (when you play defense). When the quarterback throws the ball, games 1 and 2 also give you control of the side to side motion of the ball, making it possible to maneuver it around the opposition. Game 3 gives you no control over the players with the exception of when the quarterback passes the ball; the other players do whatever the play chosen for them dictates.
     
    One of the frustrating aspects of the game is lack of control of the defensive back once the ball has been successfully passed. Most of the time, if my son or I are able to complete a pass, we are able to take it to the touchdown. I think it would have been a good idea to transfer the defense's control of the linemen to the defensive back once the pass is made, to give the defense a chance to try to tackle the carrier.
     
    EDIT: Well, apparently it was a good idea! So good that Atari had implemented it! Apparently one can take control of the defensive back by holding their button down! So . . . I guess I have no complaints! Thanks to maibock for pointing this out! If we gave out prizes here at Chronogamer industries, you'd get one. Probably a copy of VCS Football. This is another lesson in learning to print out the manual and have it next to us while playing.
     
    EDIT Again: My son and I just played another game of Atari Football and being able to control the d-back made a big difference. We had a great time again! I'd never have believed I'd ever enjoy playing a videogame of Football, but this is proof that I can. Yes, I'm shocked.
     
    This is not a pretty game. It is blinky and fairly ugly, especially compared to previously released football games, such as those released for the Bally Pro Arcade or the Odyssey^2 consoles. Despite the ugly, blinky players, the game offers a full football field, a timer, scoring, down indicators, play indicators and a ball possession indicator. I can't recall how that compares with the other versions, but I can't come up with anything else that would be absolutely necessary.
     
    EDIT: While I'm editing, I should include something supercat pointed out that I neglected to mention. Atari Football has an on screen 1st-down line! I don't believe any other football "port" to date (1979) has this feature!
     
    Each game is 5:00 minutes long, which was short enough for me to enjoy one game enough that I wanted to play one more.
     
    Be wary that trying too hard to control the players could lead to a damaged joystick! The player-sprites respond well enough, but never move as quickly as one would like, possibly due to the scale of the field (the field looks small, the players look big, it wouldn't work to have them zipping around it). Most people's reaction to this is to push the joystick harder. If you play this game with anyone who is enthusiastic about videogames or football, you should let them use one of your Genesis controllers instead of an Atari joystick, just in case.
     
    Not that we know what the hell a Genesis controller is back here in 1979, we just break a lot of joysticks.
     
    Despite the graphics, despite the sluggish players, there's a Football game on this cart. Despite or even because of a complete lack of appreciation for the sport of American Football on my part, we enjoyed each of the games we played for the purpose of this entry.
     
    Next entry we'll take a quick look at Backgammon.
    8735
  22. Mezrabad
    Canyon Bomber/Sea Bomber (Atari VCS, 1979)
     
    Crater Digger? Pit Maker?
     
    This game hearkens back to a simpler time, when all the human mind could handle was one button.
     
    Picture a canyon extending from mid screen to the bottom in depth and stretching from one side of the screen to the other in width. Now, fill it to the brim with multi-colored blocks, each layer of blocks having its own color, like Breakout only going down. Or, better yet, view a screenshot taken directly from Atari Age's entry for the cart.
     

     
    Now take some of the flying vehicles from Combat or Air-Sea Battle and have a yellow vehicle fly over this canyon from one direction while a red vehicle flies over from the other. Press the button on your controller to make your bi-plane/bomber/helicopter drop a bomb. The bomb falls through the blocks like a bath toy sinks through bubble bath foam. Drop as many of these bombs as you can, one at a time, before your aircraft flies off the other side. You have no control over your aircraft. It just flies steadily across.
     
    This sequence repeats with different aircraft and different flight speeds until there are no more blocks to hit (which will re-fill the canyon), or until both players accumulate six misses. High score wins. A miss is constituted by failing to release a bomb during a flyover, or releasing a bomb that hits no blocks. A variation of the game is to drop bombs until a player reaches 1000 points or more and misses aren't counted.
     
    A variation of the skill level is "bomb recall". On difficulty "A", once you drop a bomb, you can't drop another until it hits. On difficulty "B", if you drop a bomb that looks like it isn't going to hit anything, you may "recall" it by firing another. The bomb's downward velocity is consistent with gravity, but how long they fall depends upon the speed of the plane they fall from and how close they are to the edge of the canyon. Later in the level, your ability to aim becomes a factor as the targets available become fewer.
     
    The A.I. for the one-player versions of Canyon Bomber is, as the manual describes it, "steady". Dropping a bomb as often as possible is all it does. The funny thing about this is that this A.un-I. initially scored higher than me because I was trying to take careful aim from the beginning of the game. This just wastes time. The key to scoring better than the AI is to bomb the hell out of the canyon in the beginning, when it's impossible to miss blocks, then start being careful and selective when the pickings get slim. It becomes just a matter of hitting at least one block each flyover until your enemy runs out of misses or until your score is higher than theirs. The deeper down a block is, the more points it is worth, so that's what you're aiming for.
     
    Please be aware: while I may be giving you an obvious strategy for playing the game, this does not mean I am recommending that you play it. This bomb-dropper just isn't much fun. Bright colors. Dull gameplay. It may be a good game to play with very young children or very old adults, but even they will grow tired of it quickly and begin whining and wetting themselves in an attempt to get ejected from the living room.
     
    I've tried playing it solo. Meh. I've tried getting my kids to play it with me and with each other. There's just not much call for it in these parts. My son played it for about two minutes before asking if we could play Atari's Bowling again. (We did, and we had fun.)
     
    FYI: Atari had a Canyon Bomber machine in the arcades back in 1977. The display was black and white, featuring blimps and bi-planes to act as your bomb vehicles. The canyon had more of a rocky appearance to it, and the targets were little white circles with numbers on them. The numbers, of course, represented points you earned when you destroyed them. It's available in MAME.
     
    There is somewhat of a saving grace on this cart, though, and that's in the second-fiddle game, Sea Bomber. Sea Bomber is a little like the arcade game Depthcharge. Using your button you drop the bomb. Using your paddle you set the depth at which you'd like your bomb to explode. The bomb vehicles are the same as from Canyon Bomber, but the bombing field this time is a sea-scape, starting off at light blue and darkening as you reach the bottom. Watercraft traverse the screen at different depths and you need to annihilate as many as you can. The deeper they are, the higher they score. Witness the screenshot, also from Atari Age's entry for the Canyon Bomber cart.
     

     
    Your shots fall straight down, as if through water. You must take into account your target's speed, depth and direction, the direction and speed of your aircraft, and the speed your shot sinks. If you wait too long to plan a shot, your plane may have taken you beyond dropping range for your chosen prey. From flyover to flyover, the only consistent factor is the speed at which your bomb falls while the speed of the aircraft and watercraft changes from flyover to flyover. Madly bombing and hoping for luck will not serve you well.
     
    If you've got this cart and you've been disappointed with Canyon Bomber, Sea Bomber makes up for it a little.
     
    FYI: Depthcharge is also available in MAME, though there may be other games more similar to Sea Bomber; I just haven't seen them yet.
     
    Hmm, next 1979 game? I honestly don't know . . . it's a surprise! Well, not really, I just don't know what it will be yet.8135
  23. Mezrabad
    Bowling (Atari VCS, 1979)
     
    I was in a bowling league when I was in middle school. My team won the league championship two years in a row. I don't remember my average, but when I was 13 years old, my high score was 191. I don't think that's a great high score, (though I've never beaten it since ), and I'm certain my average wasn't very impressive, but it disturbs me to suddenly realize that I may actually be more qualified to talk about videogames based on bowling than videogames based on any other real world activity.
     
    Damn, that's one crappy realization nobody should have to start their day with. Enough about me, let's talk about Bowling!
     
    We've seen an interpretation of the great sport of bowling on four previous systems. (RCA Studio II, Fairchild Channel F, APF MP1000 and Odyssey^2) On each of those systems the ball would oscillate just in front of what traditionally would be the foul line. The player would have to time their release of the ball as it was moving back and forth. Atari decided on a less abstracted approach which allows the player to position a figure on screen that actually animates and rolls the ball. In an interview with Digital Press at CGE 2005, Larry Kaplan described this figure as the first multi-colored sprite in home videogames. I question the accuracy of this, as the Bally Professional Arcade appeared to feature multi-colored sprites in its built-in game, Gunfight, released in 1978. I'm no programmer and perhaps the term "sprite" is more refined than I thought it was, so your mileage may vary.
     
    Regardless of the little multi-colored bowler being a "first" for Atari, Bowling for the Atari VCS is the best version of the game that we've seen so far. The ability to position the release of your ball is welcome, as is the graphical improvement of controlling a human figure which looks like it's rolling its ball. No scoring simplification is used; if you get a spare, your frame is totaled with the pins you knock down with your next ball, as it should be. The presentation of the scoring is good enough. Similar to the Fairchild version, you're only shown whether you spare, strike or leave a frame open while your total is displayed above it all. An additional touch occurs after rolling a strike or a spare, the player is given a little "way to go!" in the form of a palette flash for the bowler sprite and a celebratory audio cue
     
    All of the above, while fine and dandy, are not what make Atari's version of Bowling the best I've seen so far. What does it for me is the simulation and visual presentation of the pin action; when the ball hits a pin, the resulting trajectory of the pin is displayed! I'm pretty certain other versions have simulated pin interaction, for instance, Fairchild's Bowling allowed me to pick up a split, but Atari's version is the first to provide visual cues for what's going on. Instead of the pins going from a "standing" state to a "knocked down" or simply a "no longer there" state, Atari's pins "slide off" the alley in a number of directions; towards the gutter, diagonally towards the back or straight back, depending on the angle of the ball. It definitely adds to the experience and helps the player decide how to curve the next ball.
     
    I forgot to mention the curves! A standout feature of most of Atari's offerings is the variations of play on each cart and bowling has three variations to it in addition to allowing one- or two-player games. One variant allows the players to control the curve of the thrown ball, a gift I'm positive some bowlers think they have. If you've ever seen someone twist their body and wave their arms to try to redirect their rolled ball, then you know what I mean. Another variant allows the player to control when the ball begins to curve but after the curving starts, the player can do nothing. The last and most simple variation is straight shot only; line it up, throw and watch it go. (no lofting, please)
     
    The only drawback to Atari Bowling on the VCS, and this is only a slight drawback, is that it supports a maximum of two players. I only mention it because Odyssey^2's bowling supported four. If I were to start having weekly chronogaming parties, I think I'd actually choose the Odyssey^2 version for the ability to support four players.
     
    Also, and I'm not saying this is necessarily a drawback: I was unable to produce a 7-10 split. I tried hitting the center pin dead on, which is what produces the 7-10 in real life, but I couldn't get this evil split to show itself. Maybe, the game is better off! In my book, the 7-10 split is the Kobayashi Maru of bowling, so I didn't exactly "yearn" for it. It might've been excluded for gameplay improvement, but it seems doing so would "water down" the simulation. I don't know it isn't there for certain, I just know I was unable to produce such a split.
     
    Oh, so the only reason I give Bowling merely a and not a is that I'd rather hit a real bowling alley with my kids. In fact, I think I need to do that soon.
     
    Next entry . . . Canyon Bomber! 7995
  24. Mezrabad
    Superman (Atari VCS, 1979)
     
    "He turns all of his injuries into strengths, that which does not kill him makes him stronger, he is superman." -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
     
    This isn't really a review, but rather, a highly academic look at the social implications of the Atari VCS game, Superman. Really, if you haven't played it, you'll be completely lost and I recommend you go back to your little emulator or your actual console, if you even have one, and go playexperience this game. What follows, is an extremely erudite discussion of the material and it presumes some familiarity with the selection on the part of the reader. So, go do your homework!
     
    C'mon, any writing that starts out with a Nietzsche quote has to be as pretentious as hell, doesn't it? Okay, let me set a more appropriate tone with a different quote:
     
    "I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away." - Jack Handy [Deep Thoughts]
     
    That quote doesn't really represent my feelings about the game, but it sets a better tone.
     
    Rather than "review" Superman, I'm going to talk about why it's a special game -- not as special as other games to come, but pretty darn special regardless.
     
    To pre-summarize:
     
    1. It has an identifiable character
    2. It has a story
    3. Multi-screen world
    4. Movie Coincidence
     
    #1 - It's the first home videogame having a protagonist with an identity that existed outside the videogame in which it appears.
     
    Videogames have been offering people the chance to pretend to be something else for about six years (speaking from 1979). One may play games which allow them to be airplane pilots, sky divers, race car drivers, players of professional sports, spaceship pilots, helicopter rescue pilots, generals, submarine commanders, tank commanders . . . the list goes on and on. Since 1972 we've played dozens of different games that either gave us control of a generic vehicle or object with a specific function (flying, shooting, deflecting) or a generic person in a specific occupation (see previous list).
     
    Superman was the first time a videogame player could control, and thus, essentially, become a specific identifiable character. Not just any character; a superhero! Not just any superhero; Superman!
     
    We get to fly, have super-strength and use x-ray vision the way Superman would use them and certainly not the way we'd all probably like to use them. Particularly the x-ray vision.
     
    Forget about any complaints one might have about the gameplay, about the flickering graphics or about the slightly confusing city layout. We're talking about the chance to be Superman in a videogame! The value of this can only be slightly overstated, but not by much.
     
    #2 - It's the first home videogame with a story, simple though it may be. (No, Breakout's "story" doesn't count.)
     
    The bridge has been destroyed! Lex Luther and his gang are getting away! I must reassemble the bridge and catch the bad guys! Damn helicopter, stop taking my bridge pieces (*grab*shake-shake-shake-shake-shake*)! Beware the Kryptonite Satellites! Beep-beep-beep-BONG! Crap I've lost my powers! Lois!...Lois?
     
    Drama, comedy and romance, right there amongst the blocky, blinky sprites.
     
    Seriously, well, no, but let me say that Superman is practically literature compared to any home videogame before it. Truth! Justice! Restoration of superpowers (i.e. "potency") through overtly sexual behavior! The American Way! It's all that and a bag of Pop Rocks.
     
    #3 - First multi-screen virtual world in a home videogame.
     
    This is the first game where you have to know your way around more than one screen and understand how each screen connects to the others. I tried to draw a map of this world recently but in the middle of doing so I remembered my old adage: "There's USUALLY a bigger geek."
     
    Indulge me my tangent.
     
    It's important to realize, that somewhere out there in the world there's most likely someone who has already done something similar to what you're thinking of doing and posted it on the introntronet. Now, I'm not saying this happens 100% of the time, but when most of us come up with an idea based on popular culture (i.e. something that millions of others have also seen), the probability is close to 1.000 that someone else has done something similar before we even thought of it, and in some cases they've gone an extra mile or so beyond what we'd have been willing to do.
     
    For example: Chronogaming. Could I really be the first nutjob to say "hey, I'm going to sit down and play every single home videogame ever released; I'm going to do it in chronological order AND I'm going to write about it in a blog!" ?
     
    Okay, maybe I am. Bad example.
     
    Anyway, as I started to draw my map of the world of Superman, I realized that surely someone had already done so and had probably done a much better job than I was planning to do. Of course, I was right.
     
    Maurice Molyneaux's Supermap of Superman <--Warning! Spoiler!
     
    So, as you can see, Superman's world is not limited to one screen. This world is a mosaic, if you will, of multiple screens; a dense tapestry of images woven into the cartridge to become a "real" imagined place that we can navigate in our minds! Um, yeah, that sounded really "gay" (to use an expression from the era EDIT 2021: ouch, I swear I'm not a homophobe, we really said that expression a lot back in the day. Very cringe. Sorry   End Edit)) but I'm one of those writers that hates to edit because I'd rather spend a lifetime wincing at what I've written. (and boy I did wince now in 2021)
     
    #4 - First home videogame with an apparent connection to a movie.
     
    Superman: The Movie was released on my birthday in 1978 (I turned 11, that day). Superman: The Cartridge came out somewhen in 1979. Was it a licensed tie-in to the movie? Well, not this time. Was it pretty good timing on Atari's part? Yah, you betcha.
     
    Have I left anything out? Probably, but I've blathered on enough. I'm almost done.
     
    Superman for the Atari VCS is the melding of two popular youth pastimes -- comic books and videogames -- for the first time. More importantly, it represents the germ of the start of storytelling using the home videogame medium.
     
    Was the game fun? Well, this isn't really a review, this is more of a commentary on what Superman represented as an edifice in the cultural landscape of Videogames (um, yeah), but I will say that it was fun for me. I won't do anything so pedestrian as to actually rate it. Oh, okay, I've given it a cool smiley. Happy now?
     
    Personally, I think it's a great game and probably one of my Top 10 favorite Atari VCS games if I were a person to make such a list. I am sad to say that my son didn't really get into it as much as I had hoped he would. However, I was astonished by how quickly he picked up on the whole world map pattern, the subway system shortcuts and how to effectively use the x-ray vision to avoid Krypton Satellites and to find criminals, the bridge pieces and Lois. Smart boy, mine.
     
    I'm not sure what we'll play next. We'll try something a little more mundane, Bowling, perhaps? 7752
  25. Mezrabad
    Sky Diver (Atari VCS, 1979) aka Dare Diver
     
    "If at first you don't succeed, forget sky diving."
     
    One or two players each control a sky diver. Each sky diver starts in a plane going across the top of the screen from opposite directions. Your objective is to get your diver out of the plane and safely landed on a narrow-ish landing pad at the bottom of the screen. There's a wind sock indicating the direction (right or left) and speed (zero, slow, medium or fast) of the wind. Using that information, you carefully time your diver's jump from the plane. Once in free fall you have about a second to open your chute. The longer you wait to open your chute, the higher your score will be for the jump, provided you land on the target landing pad (with your chute open).
     
    Each game consists of a series of nine jumps. You lose four points for any failed jump (ie, when your diver becomes a little smear in the dirt.) and you can earn between 1 and 11 for a successful jump. If you land safely but not on your platform you earn zero points. There are five different two player games, though it's also possible to practice with only one player. Games 1 and 2 use stationary target pads with wind; the pads are smaller in game 2. Games 3 and 4 are moving pads with no wind; pads are smaller in game 4. Game 5 is a race to a single target; first player down safely gets points, the other player gets nothing.
     
    Sky Diver is a simple game that can be a fun diversion for about 10 to 15 minutes about once a week. Your play time may vary but this game never gets old to us. I'd compare it to the future games found in Wario Ware but I haven't actually played them so it wouldn't be a fair comparison. Basically, each round only lasts about three or four seconds between the planes beginning their flight across the top of the screen to the safe or otherwise landing of your parachutist. The action in-between requires you to think quickly (where's my platform? is the wind blowing? how hard? what direction?). While your diver is falling you have to carefully time the opening of your chute, not just to aim for the maximum amount of points, but to also consider how hard the wind is blowing because it influences your chute once it's open. You can control the left-right motion of your faller after opening the chute, but you'll be fighting the wind if you didn't plan your jump appropriately. In non-wind games, you've got to worry about the moving platform. It's a little trickier, but not impossible.
     
    What we enjoy about this game is that if you fail to open your chute you are rewarded with a nice "splat" sound and your diver makes a little pixel puddle in the dirt. It's funny enough for a chuckle and then you're back in the plane, ready to try again. I don't think either of us have ever scored a "perfect jump" of 11 points, but every other week or so we give it our best shot. So, while this isn't a game we can play for hours and it isn't a game we could play every day, it is a game that we enjoy the hell out of it whenever we do play it.
     
    BONUS!
    reader participation riddle (answer in comments)
    Q: When their parachute fails to open, what's the last thing to go through a sky diver's mind?
     
    Next entry we'll do another thrill seeker sim: Human Cannonball. 7210
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