rust-belt

I recently bought Madden 2005 for PS2. It's been many years since I played a Madden game & one of the things I always liked was being able to play a full season -- and only a full season. Does that feature still exist on Madden 2005? I've looked into the Franchise Mode some but that seems to be much more involved than what I'm looking for. Is Franchise Mode my only option if I want to play a season? Is there a "just one season" mode? Or do I/can I basically play a stripped down version of Franchise Mode that would be a defacto one season mode? I've tried looking up the answer on Google but found nothing. Thanks in advance for any tips/info/etc.

Blasts From the Past What today's game designers can learn from Space Invaders. By Clive Thompson slate.com Posted Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2003 The aliens are invading—again. Taito, the company that created Space Invaders back in 1978, announced that it would re-release its most famous arcade game next year. The first time around, Japanese fans jammed so many coins into the machines that they provoked a currency crisis in the yen. Now Taito figures the demand for Space Invaders, the Patient Zero of our digital-entertainment age, is back. When your local bar uncrates the arcade cabinet, it will be, quite literally, a blast from the past—one with missiles that go "beeyoo, beeyoo." In the past year, game companies everywhere have been dragging 20-year-old titles out of cryogenic storage. Drop by a RadioShack, and you can pick up an old Atari joystick that plays 10 classic games, or a Namco joystick that plays icons such as Pac-Man and Dig Dug. Meanwhile, Mattel has reproduced exact copies of its plastic handheld "electronic sports games"—so antediluvian that football players are just LED-style blips on a screen (you may have to play it in a dark closet, as kids did in the '70s). Just in time for the holidays, Midway put out Midway Arcade Treasures: 21 old-school games for PlayStation, Xbox, or GameCube. And if you buy the new 3-D game Prince of Persia? You can unlock a special room where you get to play ... the original Prince of Persia, a low-rez computer game from the late '80s. Why all this passion for ancient bits? You could dismiss this as nostalgia, GenX-ers pining for the simpler pleasures of their Cold War youth. But that doesn't really explain it, because half the people buying these games are teenagers at Urban Outfitters. No, these Jurassic games are popular for a more powerful reason: They're the canon of video games, and they prove that keeping it simple still works. Chunky, low-fi games like Pac-Man show us why so many of today's more advanced games can be so paradoxically dull. For the last decade, most game companies have been governed by one obsessive idea: that making games more lifelike—more three-dimensional and hyperreal—will make them more fun. But this hasn't worked. Even the crappiest game today has an elaborate 3-D world you can wander around and marvel at the superb rendering of shadows, the elaborate tattoos on the characters, or the lens flares when you look up at the virtual sun. But after you've finished admiring the scenery, the game itself is often incredibly tedious. You're just running around, solving obtuse puzzles, and listening to wretched pseudoacting by virtual characters. What's missing? Game-play. What today's game designers have forgotten is that a video game isn't about 3-D rendering. In fact, a video game isn't about "technology" at all. It's a game, and as game theorists such as Eric Zimmerman have argued, a good game is created by crafting a few simple rules that make your goals teasingly difficult to achieve. Basketball, rock-paper-scissors, and Counter-Strike: They're all nothing more than a set of well-crafted rules. Consider basketball, where if you stop running, you have to pass. It's an arbitrary rule, but it's part of what makes basketball challenging. If you could do whatever you wanted, it wouldn't be a game. Desperate to shove ever more eye candy at gamers, today's video-game companies constantly forget to put any play in their games. On the contrary, game designers spend hours creating "cut sequences," little dramatic segments where the player has to just sit there, helplessly watching a scene unfold, unable to participate in any way. "The designers have all got 'film envy.' They're just trying to emulate what they see in movies. But that doesn't create any play," Zimmerman once told me. Granted, this isn't a hard-and-fast rule. The truly great game designers—such as Warren Spector, who created the Deus Ex series, or Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto titles—produce addictive, dendrite-shredding play as well truly gorgeous worlds. High-end graphics don't inherently spoil a game designer. They're more like a potentially dangerous distraction, kind of the way superadvanced CGI so entranced George Lucas that he thought Jar-Jar Binks would be a cool idea. When I recently played the Midway Arcade Treasures collection, what intrigued me most were the commentary tracks by the games' creators, who moaned and complained about how hard it was to craft a game using those old 1970s microprocessors. The guys who wrote Pac-Man or Dig Dug couldn't hide behind cutting-edge graphics of exit wounds, so they actually had to focus on making the thing fun. No wonder everyone's turning back to retro hits like Space Invaders. "Compared to [today], we were working with bubble gum and rubber bands and hot glue," complains John Newcomer, who created Joust, easily one of the oddest games in recorded history. (As you may recall, it involved knights with lances mounted on flying ostriches.) "The memory of the game was 96K, which was just nothing. ... So the real challenge in designing games back then was, how do you do something interesting with some nice animation and how do you do it such a small package?" But those limitations forced the designers to be more innovative. Spin through that Midway disk and you remember just how hallucinogenically inspired that era was, cranking out demented titles like Paperboy or Marble Madness or Root Beer Tapper. And, OK, maybe Root Beer Tapper isn't the quite the must-play that it seemed like back in 1984, but least the designers were stretching for new ideas. Video games turn out to be just like sonnets and pop songs. Often it's restrictions, not freedoms, that inspire creativity. Clive Thompson writes about science and technology for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Details.

Thanks eldunko -- I'll bet that's it. Basically sounds like a very large Nintendo as you need to have cartridges/games for it.

I may have an opportunity to purchase what has been described as a "1986 Showcase Nintendo Play Choice 10 Arcade Video" machine (i.e. arcade coin-op). Does anyone have any info about this particular machine such as the games on it? To me, it sounds like a cabinet with 10 games to choose from but that's just a guess. I tried to do some Internet research to no avail. Thanks in advance for any info.

Riddle of the Sphinx (if I remember correctly).

i've been playing video games - off & on - for almost my entire life & am old enough to have played Pong when it was a new thing. at some point, most of them simply became too complicated & time-consuming -- not to mention expensive. i'm sure that if I invested the time, i could figure them out & have a great time playing them. however, i *don't* have the time but still need my "fix". that's where atari comes in. it's easy & cheap which suits me well.

i'll be the first to say that i'm not "someguy". i collect to play and/or when the game is cheap & i don't have it. in other words, you don't have to worry about me endlessly traveling thru NE ohio sucking all the carts out of the thrift stores before you get there. i spend enough $$$ on other stuff w/out making atari a new way to spend money (he says as he prepares to *finally* buy a 5200).............

voch -- that's funny. i live about 2 blocks from big fun but didn't know they carry atari stuff (other than the t-shirts). i'll have to check it out. i've been to the inside flea market in green twice but have only ever seen the most common of common atari games. lots of other video game stuff, as you said, but little atari. raijin -- you're a nut (in a good way). that's a lot of info to have re: northeast ohio places. i've been to a couple of the bigger thrift places in y-town but never found anything. i'll have to check again when i'm down that way. at this point, i'm more than willing to pay $3-4/each at a store for games i don't have (and really want) instead of combing fleas, thrifts, etc. i figure the extra money paid is worth it in time saved.

voch -- store #2 is called fun city. i think you might be thinking of collector's warehouse on ridge. i haven't been there for a few years & don't even know if they have video game stuff. fun city is just south of collector's warehouse - maybe like a 1/2 mile or so - right next to a small theater that shows second-run stuff. i noticed they had a sign out front for buying atari, etc so i stopped in. i bought robot tank & seaquest for $2.49 each there. (robot tank looks like it might be my next addiction). they had some games i don't ever see such as tapper ($20), space shuttle, etc. a decent mix of commons & more rare games at various prices. personally, i like video game connection better. lots more selection with generally better prices. also has lots of intellivision, etc. the owner sets up at the memphis ave flea market but never with atari stuff. he told me no one appreciates it at the flea market & everyone there just wants newer stuff. i also ran into someone at the flea who said he has a store just off I-90 at the east 185th exit. i think it's (music) cd's, video games, etc but i haven't gone there yet. anyhow, that's all i know of right now -- but it's not like i'm always hunting.

voch -- if you're in the cleveland area you should try 2 stores that sell atari stuff (among other video game stuff) that i recently discovered. one is video game connection on memphis ave near fulton on the near west side. i forget the name of the other one but it's on ridge road in parma. i just discovered store #1 a few weeks ago & store #2 this past weekend. the prices & selection at both places vary. there is one younger guy who sells atari, etc out at jamie's on saturdays & the memphis ave flea market on sunday. kind of pricey on some stuff though (i.e. $15 for frogger).