Awhile ago I stumbled across this interesting youtube series on about how many video games use a "damsel in distress" plot device, and how few had strong female player characters.
Here is part I:
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Over the past few days I've also played the colecovision "Donkey Kong" certainly a strong and early entry in this theme. If you look at the flyer for the game the scenario is far more salacious than the graphics of the day were able to portray.
Why was this a pattern? I think it's a case of "those who hide under beds, look under beds," or to put it less pithily, the nature of one's actions towards others are determined by one's own past actions and beliefs. I believe most of the programmers behind video games were trying to design a game that expressed their own experience and attitude towards life, but the dominance of those beliefs in this developing part of popular culture displaced other voices in our culture. This appears to be a form of cultural imperialism.
I don't know why I'm obsessed with this movie. Maybe I empathize too much with the main character; he's driven insane by his rage, alcoholism and the fact that the hotel he has to take care of is haunted. It's almost like he was set up for moral failure given his disposition and weaknesses to the extent that his violent rampage is more something that grew out of those faults. I could be wrong, but the movie seems to say that this could happen to any of us, under the right condition; that there is a Jack Torrence inside all of us that we keep in check. He just gave in where we didn't. Maybe that is what is fascinating about the movie and why it survives multiple viewings.
Wikipedia: "Speaking about the theme of the film, Kubrick stated that "there's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly"".
I've read lots of stuff online and watched lots of videos analyzing the layout of the overlook hotel and other details of the movie. It is surprising to me that these analyses fail to communicate the simple truth behind Jack's mental breakdown.
In my programming (mis)adventures, I've become completely confused about how something like missile command was produced using two sprites, a "ball" and two missiles. Clearly magic has occurred or someone has been terribly clever. To be specific, I don't see how they did on top of the attacking missiles the explosions and the "cities." It's a great game. I just don't understand how they did it. It seems a lot of the hardware and software for 2600 was about doing something with almost nothing, given the expense of memory at the time it came out. Games like this are even more amazing given knowledge of these limitations.
See Wikipedia : "The Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) is the custom computer chip that is the heart of the Atari 2600 game console, generating the screen display, sound effects, and reading input controllers. Its design was widely affected by an attempt to reduce the amount of RAM needed to operate the display [since a]t the time the 2600 was being designed, RAM was extremely expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars per megabyte."
There's a lot more in the TIA article that's a good read but I can't paste the whole article its at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor
It was market changes in the cost of memory that made the colecovision possible. See http://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=colecovision
"Bromley’s team is charged to develop a new third-generation home videogame system, one that will set the standard in graphics quality, performance and expandability. Bromley himself had done preliminary work in designing and costing a system several years earlier, but the high cost of RAM kept an advanced console out of reach.
By 1981, however, RAM prices have dropped dramatically, so much so that the project is now within range of the target price-point set by Coleco. Bromley and Arnold Greenberg hash out the specs of the new system, giving it the placeholder moniker of ColecoVision until the marketing types can think up a better one. They never do, so the name sticks. The new system is based around an 8-bit 3.58 MHz Z80A CPU with 8K system RAM. Also on-board is the powerful Texas Instruments TMS9918A video controller chip, giving the system 16K of video RAM and allowing a screen resolution of 256×192. It has the capability to display 32 sprites on-screen at the same time, along with a 16 colour on-screen palette out of a total of 32. Three channel sound via the TI SN76489 sound generator chip is also thrown into the mix for good measure. The console’s cartridges are 32K, the most memory of any system currently on the market."
See also http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm
That colecovision article (http://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=colecovision) is good but when I skimmed it but it seems to say the 2600 is a lesser system. I was expecting as much the first time I played donkey kong or pac man on 2600 but I think they are great games that present their own challenges and I find they have a unique look to them that is very appealing.
As for why the price of memory dropped around 1981, it looks like at least part of it was increased supply of memory chips. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/30/business/mostek-rides-high-on-computer-chip.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar "A flood of new manufacturing capacity, primarily from Japanese chip makers, hit the market just as demand for RAM's dried up during the recession. That drove prices of 16K chips from $4.60 apiece in 1980 to $1.65 in 1981, Mr. Mason said"
I looked at the batari source code for a very simple game, and was a sequence in the code to allow you to have a crosshair fire at a blue circle, and it used sprite collision to tell if you were aiming at the circle or not. I couldn't get it to consistently score a hit even when the crosshair was visually on the target, and I didn't know how to make it work better. So that's why I'm going to focus on learning the language now instead of experimenting with code. Although I think I might have conceptually figured out a way to do it; based on the coordinates, but it would be hard to implement. The code used x/y coordinates to tell where the sprites were on the screen. You could say if the xy coordinates of the crosshair were within an arbitrarily defined range of the targets x/y coordinates, && (Boolean and) f (fire button) = 1 then you have a hit. But it would be difficult to figure out the ranges and avoid false hits and failure to hit when you were over the target.
I did some work with sprites and colors, I'm unsatisfied with the target sprite. It's too small and looks nothing like a plane. Next I think is a better target algorithm but that sprite has to get better. Maybe I have to look at more example code?
This happens to be my favorite colecovision game right now basically you fly a plane through an obstacle course and its really difficult to control the plane and shoot all the weird (bouncing balls? Plus sign thingies) that threaten to crash into your plane. Here is a hint. When you get to the last chamber, there's three balls bouncing from openings into the chamber, and one ball inside the chamber bouncing around. Take out the ball on the western side of the chamber, so you have a straight shot to the goal (marked "end"). Then keep shooting and hope you take out the ball inside the chamber before it crashes into you. My score on this game tonight is 52890 (difficulty level 1).
Oh and you can dodge the killer drops of (green water? what is that?) by pulling up and flying straight up for a little bit.
I have a colecovision; it doesn't have its original motherboard, that was ruined due to it being in a dusty and humid basement, but the case is original. I have a few games for it, some from my original collection, some which I acquired later, I don't know for sure for some of them which is which. I was concerned about graphics glitches so tonight after a brief Atari session (grand prix, attempted barnstorming (the cartridge didn't work for some reason), yar's revenge (need to read the instructions since I had no idea what was going on) and Mr Do (charming and fun 2600 port of the universal classic), I disconnected the em1 for the first time in awhile and tried a few colecovision games, burgertime (the game I got graphic glitches on a few weeks ago, but now it ran fine and I got to level four (I'm stuck on that level)), looping (a charming aerial obstacle course), and of course Donkey Kong, in my opinion the best colecovision game because of the graphics and the gameplay but that's just my opinion.
So we have colecovision and we have atari 2600. In my previous experience, I thought colecovision was better, now I just think they're different and there's good games and bad games for both systems. And some of the atari games that have limited graphics and gameplay because of the system's birth in a high memory cost era and where its main competition was the channel f are charming, playable and fun precisely because they're from that era of gaming and it's very special that these systems and cartridges (except for barnstorming for some reason lol) are still around and playable in 2014.
Taking a break from learning Batari tonight and taking advantage of the television not being in use. I decided to work on one game tonight and that is Missile Command. Here are my scores tonight:
Game 1:7240
Game 2:11010
Game 3:9055
Game 4:8075
Game 5:11355
Game 6:19085
I realized later I forgot to record how I set my difficulty settings so these scores are a total waste. I'll have to remember to record that next time. i need to learn what the difficulty switches are and how they work.
I've been working for about a week and a half on learning to code games for the Atari 2600. I've come up with 19 game ideas and installed batari basic. Now I feel my next step should be to learn batari, before I try anything else in terms of coding. I was able to comment some code that I got the source code off atariage but I think the best method is learn the language, before I try to write anything; I wouldn't attempt to write in French, without first learning French.
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