What's a game NO ONE likes?

[Airshack]

Surprised there has been no non-love for Hunt The Wumpus. How could a fairly basic computer game (and literally able to do in BASIC), become a full-fledged cartridge game?

This is probably why:

 

“ It has been cited as an early example of the survival horror genre, and was listed in 2012 on Time's All-Time 100 greatest video games list. The Wumpus monster has appeared in several forms in media since 1973,”

 

 

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[Airshack]

I feel like this thread has answered the original question pretty decisively: there definitely isn't a game that nobody likes. We've even heard nice things said about ZeroZap, MunchMobile and The Attack.

Nobody defends TI’s gutless non-action sports sim known simply as...Football. An obvious translation of some kind of stats based board game or teletype text game. On a system with great graphics and sound there’s no excuse for something this void of joy.

 

Zero player control over gameplay? It should be called Football Coach.

 

Every console from the 1970s had a better football game.

 

 

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[pixelpedant]

Nobody defends TI’s gutless non-action sports sim known simply as...Football. An obvious translation of some kind of stats based board game or teletype text game. On a system with great graphics and sound there’s no excuse for something this void of joy.

 

 

Good point. Haven't heard it defended. And certainly wouldn't venture to do so myself.

[iliketurtles]

I only have a Football cart for my collection! I absolutely loathe Football for the TI. I played it and shut off the system within ten SECONDS of gameplay.

[digdugnate]

Nobody defends TI’s gutless non-action sports sim known simply as...Football. An obvious translation of some kind of stats based board game or teletype text game. On a system with great graphics and sound there’s no excuse for something this void of joy.

 

Zero player control over gameplay? It should be called Football Coach.

 

Every console from the 1970s had a better football game.

 

 

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i agree with you, this game is pretty terrible. i remember as a kid being really disappointed that all you were doing was just punching in commands.

[InfernalKeith]

Is any TI sports game good?  Strike Three looks nice but seems borderline nonsensical as a game.  I don't think I've ever gotten past the title screen of Football or Indoor Soccer.

[+OLD CS1]

Strike Three is actually good, or so I always thought.  It reminds me of a popular baseball game on an 8-bit system, the name of which escapes me.

[1980gamer]

Quote

 

Pac Man is painful for me.  It is SO SLOW.  I managed to make a slower version

Conversely, Munch Man was just way to fast for me... Or the control/controller just sucked to bad to play this game.  SHIFT-838 was cool though...

 

I am like others, I am biased.  I only had a couple of carts from 82-83.  So, Parsec was AMAZING!  Compared to the Attack. 

Oh, and figuring out how to never overheat the laser on parsec...  Plus it looked pretty neat doing it.

 

How disappointed was I when I got Centipede and couldn't play it without joysticks..... :(

 

Anyway, the selloff expanded my collection and I had some new options.  Congo Bongo wasn't to bad, only 2 screens...

I think I got all of the atarisoft stuff.  But only put time into Moon Patrol. Tried so hard to like pole position. ( Maybe that was intellivison? )

Like the music in Demon Attack, but so repetitive.  I guess I don't actually like many of the games for the TI99/4A  LOL
  

[majestyx]

On 6/14/2019 at 11:06 PM, Airshack said:

I feel like this thread has answered the original question pretty decisively: there definitely isn't a game that nobody likes.  We've even heard nice things said about ZeroZap, MunchMobile and The Attack.  

Nobody defends TI’s gutless non-action sports sim known simply as...Football. An obvious translation of some kind of stats based board game or teletype text game. On a system with great graphics and sound there’s no excuse for something this void of joy.

Zero player control over gameplay? It should be called Football Coach.

Every console from the 1970s had a better football game.


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I'm biased towards stat-based sports games, as I like to simulate entire seasons. Out of the Park Baseball is my current favorite, while the Lance Haffner sports simulations of the past, as well as Earl Weaver Baseball were all games I played a lot back in the day. There are a few action oriented games that I like, such as Intellivision's NFL Football, John Elway's Quarterback, Leland's Super Baseball, even Taito's 10-Yard Fight. But this qualifies as neither. For all the talk in the manual about how realistic and statistic based it is, there's really not much to recommend this one.

[xabin]

On 6/14/2019 at 10:59 PM, Airshack said:

Surprised there has been no non-love for Hunt The Wumpus.  How could a fairly basic computer game (and literally able to do in BASIC), become a full-fledged cartridge game?

This is probably why:

“ It has been cited as an early example of the survival horror genre, and was listed in 2012 on Time's All-Time 100 greatest video games list. The Wumpus monster has appeared in several forms in media since 1973,”


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Now that's interesting, didn't know survival horror as a game concept went back that far.

[pixelpedant]

Well, if there's one good thing to be said about the dearth of sports games for TI 99, it’s that the system mostly dodged the bullet which constitutes the largest category of shovelware nobody can be bothered with down the line, for most systems.  Particularly where simulationist sports games are concerned (i.e., putting aside Base Wars and Mutant League, for example).  Sure, there are exceptions.  But by and large “sports game from over 30 years ago” isn’t a category with a lot of pull.  Just as well TI didn't push for something equivalent to Sega's "Great [Sport]" line for Master System (whose self-characterisation ended up coming off as ironic rather than convincing).  Particularly given how well Indoor Soccer and Football panned out.

[+FarmerPotato]

3 hours ago, pixelpedant said:

Well, if there's one good thing to be said about the dearth of sports games for TI 99, it’s that the system mostly dodged the bullet which constitutes the largest category of shovelware nobody can be bothered with down the line, for most systems.  Particularly where simulationist sports games are concerned (i.e., putting aside Base Wars and Mutant League, for example).  Sure, there are exceptions.  But by and large “sports game from over 30 years ago” isn’t a category with a lot of pull.  Just as well TI didn't push for something equivalent to Sega's "Great [Sport]" line for Master System (whose self-characterisation ended up coming off as ironic rather than convincing).  Particularly given how well Indoor Soccer and Football panned out.

On the other hand, MBX Baseball was pretty good. Still not as much joy as Intellivision Baseball, the only great sports game on that system.

 

Atari 2600 Basketball was ok. That much could have been viable on the TI-99/4A.

 

For whats its worth, Indoor Soccer and Football were produced in the earliest days of the 99/4.

 

[+arcadeshopper]

the tennis game for the ti is pretty good tho..  football zzz   

[Airshack]

2 hours ago, FarmerPotato said:

On the other hand, MBX Baseball was pretty good. Still not as much joy as Intellivision Baseball, the only great sports game on that system.

 

Intellivision Baseball, Football, and Hockey were all IMHo fabulous. Baseball was the best of the lot. Intellivision later released single-player v AI versions of Baseball and Football. Significantly better than Odyssey2 and Atari VCS.

 

The Odyssey2 sports titles are in the middle between Atari and the Intellivision 1970s benchmark. 

Edited June 17, 2019 by Airshack

[Airshack]

2 hours ago, FarmerPotato said:

 

For whats its worth, Indoor Soccer and Football were produced in the earliest days of the 99/4.

 

True. Along with Wumpus being another early release. Football plays like it was probably a graphical front end added to the popular mainframe text-based football simulator also found on early 70s time-share systems. 

 

I’ll bet the early TI game programmers played variants of the early computer sports and adventure games in college. 

 

Fun Facts:

 

”During the 1960s, Dartmouth’s membership in the Ivy League revolved around its football team. In 1962, computing students under the tutelage of Kemeny and Kurtz named one of the college’s homegrown compilers the problematic acronym SCALP. The Kiewit Center brought the same rough-and-tumble masculine bonding into the teletype room again with sport- and war-oriented computer games, including at least three versions of computer football games (FTBALL, FOOTBALL, and GRIDIRON). In fact, Dartmouth distinguished itself from most other universities by actively encouraging student gaming and recreation on the network.”

 

TI Football is probably a port of these older style games.

 

Dartmouth is also where BASIC was invented in 1964.

 

”In the 1960s, Dartmouth College became ground zero for the coming explosion in American computing after college mathematics professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz developed a new programming language that was relatively easy to learn: Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC. Kemeny and Kurtz wanted to a create a novice-friendly computing entry point that would attract young talent for the college’s newly developed Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, a network of teletype terminals located across New England colleges and high schools that connected, via telephone lines, to a mainframe General Electric computer at Dartmouth.”

 

 

Edited June 17, 2019 by Airshack

[InfernalKeith]

I forgot about Tennis!  That one's actually fun.  Did that ever make it to a cart release?

[digdugnate]

4 hours ago, InfernalKeith said:

I forgot about Tennis!  That one's actually fun.  Did that ever make it to a cart release?

I'm pretty sure Micro-Tennis did though it's hard to find.

 

Another game I didn't see mentioned was the MBX Championship Baseball- if you have the MBX system it's a really good game imo.

 

That being said, someone smarter than me should get right on making us an aftermarket MBX! (this obviously said tongue-in-cheek)

[+save2600]

1 hour ago, digdugnate said:

I'm pretty sure Micro-Tennis did though it's hard to find.

 

Another game I didn't see mentioned was the MBX Championship Baseball- if you have the MBX system it's a really good game imo.

 

That being said, someone smarter than me should get right on making us an aftermarket MBX! (this obviously said tongue-in-cheek)

I'd be over the moon if someone with the capabilities would hack Championship Baseball to NOT require the MBX unit. There's a great game hiding among all that superfluous tech!  

[+arcadeshopper]

its on the multicart..and probably fr/fg99

 

champ baseball uses the voice req so good luck :)

 

[+save2600]

1 hour ago, arcadeshopper said:

its on the multicart..and probably fr/fg99

 

champ baseball uses the voice req so good luck

 

 

Just ditch the voice recognition and make selections available with your joystick. Easy stuff!  ?  ?

[8_is_enuff]

7 hours ago, digdugnate said:

That being said, someone smarter than me should get right on making us an aftermarket MBX! (this obviously said tongue-in-cheek)

 

That's a great idea.  If I was smart enough (and I'm not), I'd probably try to use an off the shelf USB microphone thru the TIPI for input.

 

As it is, I have no idea where to even start.

[matthew180]

Controversial topic for sure.  I hope you are not expecting any kind of consensus.

 

For me, I like a lot of TI games, but I also hate them all.  I like them from the nostalgic perspective since many were the first text adventure (Pirate Adventure) I ever played, the first RPG (computer or otherwise (Tunnels of Doom)) that I ever played, and a lot of unique titles that were at least enjoyable for a while.  But, seeing what Konami had done with the same VDP, as well as some other systems like the ColecoVision, TI completely failed to utilize the hardware.  It seems their idea of making software was to put engineers on the task (really bad idea).  Almost everything on the 99/4A pales to what it could have been, and trying to enjoy the same games now it just not possible for me.  I remember some fondly, but I don't enjoy them today.  Sorry if that seems harsh.

 

Some favorites from BITD:

 

Tombstone City.  I liked it, but it is very shallow.  Everything about it could have been so much better.  Reading the postmortem article with the author was depressing.  I do like music though, even to this day.

 

Chisholm Trail.  A unique and interesting game, I played it for quite a while.  I liked seeing what the next set of monsters would look like.  It seemed like an updated Tombstone City.  Shallow game play though.

 

Adventure.  I really liked the text adventures, but I replayed some in the past few years and realize how tedious they were.  Fun the first time, so I will remember them as they were.

 

Tunnels of Doom.  I probably played this the most.  I really liked it BITD, but when I tried to replay it a few years ago, the mechanics of the game were just to tedious, and the amount to total randomness gets frustrating.  The interface is clunky too, and just gets in the way.

 

MunchMan.  Unique enough take on PacMan to hold its own, and my attention, at least for a while.

 

Hunt the Wumpus.  I liked the game, it was totally unique and a nice puzzle that you could take at your own pace.  Figuring out where the Wumpus is seems a lot like Mine Sweeper to me.  However, some of the difficulty settings were ridiculous and could never be played other than by pure luck or chance.

 

Parsec.  I liked it back then, but it put too much effort into the scrolling effect that the rest of the game really suffers for it.  When I see games that Scramble that Rasmus did on the same hardware, Gradius on the CV, Knightmare on the MSX1...  Parsec could have been much more.

 

A-Maze-Ing.  I like mazes.  While somewhat shallow, it was good enough to make the list, and it was one of the few games my sister would play with me.

 

Extended BASIC.  While not a game, it might as well have been one for me.  I learned to program on the 99/4A and XB was a huge part of that.  I spent more time writing my own programs and typing in games from magazines than I did playing commercial games, or anything else.

 

Editor Assembler.  The most challenging adventure I ever undertook on my 99/4A, and the most rewarding.  I still play this one to this day, and I can use the skills I learned in my day job and apply them to other games like x86, Z80, RiskV, C, etc.

 

I didn't have too many other cartridges, none really worth mentioning anyway.  My commercial software experience on the 99/4A was very limited.

[InfernalKeith]

Interesting take, Matthew, and I'd say you're not wrong.  Once I started collecting games on other systems (specifically the Vic 20) the differences in programmer mindset became obvious.  Some of those Vic games are flat-out ugly, the graphics are hideous and the sound is worse, but at least some of them are just intuitively great games that hold up today even without the filter of nostalgia.  Matrix/Gridrunner is exciting even in 2019.  Speed has a little to do with it, but it seems like there's just some indefinable quality that makes the game playable and compelling, more so than most TI action offerings.

 

That's why I gravitate toward the turn-based strategy games, the Not Polyoptics titles and such.  For me, despite their own weaknesses, they have more staying power and are more unique and interesting.  I'm not sure if anyone but me and Walid share that view, though. 

[jrhodes]

If anything in the 4a world deserves to be forgotten and burned with fire, it has to be M.B.'s Yahtzee. Really, i have seen better dice games on the TI written in plain basic.

All the designers of Yahtzee would have to have done is, wrote a random number generating routine, and wrap some graphics around it all.

How this sold as good as it did in cartridge format is a mystery to me.

Maybe its just my years of tinkering with old Basic machines and knowing that the numbers are pseudorandom not true-random, but i literally can not force myself to play a computerized dice game anymore.

Edited June 18, 2019 by jrhodes

[InfernalKeith]

Huh.  I actually play TI Yahtzee a lot!  I throw it on in emulation while I'm doing mindless work emails or something, and play it the way some people do the one-touch phone games as a distraction.  I enjoy it, but I definitely think the AI could be a little better.  I can't see it being buried-in-a-pit level terrible, though.