Category: retro

Food Fight Frenzy

I am frankly amazed that this is happening, that the company now calling itself Atari seems to be on a streak of good, or at least interesting, decisions, but in addition to releasing Atari 50 and buying Digital Eclipse, they’re making updated versions of classic Atari (and Stern) arcade games, and an upcoming release of theirs is a personal favorite of mine: Food Fight!

It isn’t even their only recent sequel to it they’ve made; another would be the also-upcoming FPS Food Fight: Culinary Combat for the (current) VCS. But that seems to be an inspired-by game with cartoony 3D graphics; this looks much closer to the arcade original, and made by people with a deep love for it.

I don’t know what’s inspired their warming up this particular old property, but Food Fight was a fine game that was sabotaged mostly by the classic US arcade crash. Charley Chuck is a kid out to eat a giant ice cream cone before it melts, but out to stop him are four chefs. Scattered through each level though are piles of food that can be thrown, by either Charley or the chefs.

Like the cone that’s Charley’s goal, the original Food Fight drips with character. There are so many clever touches, especially for a game from 1983. Charley’s large eyes look in the direction he moves; the analog joystick registers many more directions than the standard digital 8-way joysticks in common use at the time. The named chefs have different personalities, along similar lines as Pac-Man’s ghosts. Each kind of food has different properties when thrown. Charley smiles when things are going well, and bears a more neutral expression when they aren’t. Charley can bring along one piece of food from a previous level. If a particularly clever move is pulled off, the game will call for an instant replay. The level select screen lists a flavor for each ice cream cone, with higher levels having dual flavors.

This is how Food Fight played in arcades (7 minutes):

The new game supports up to four players around a cocktail table form factor, in a last-kid-standing scenario. Instead of just flinging food at the chefs, the other players are also viable targets.

The original Food Fight was one of the last arcade projects of early independent game developer GCC, who designed games for other companies to publish. They also made Ms. Pac-Man and Quantum, and they also designed the Atari 7800 console and many of the arcade ports that were made for it.

Here’s is Arcade Heroes’ post on Food Fight Frenzy. Arcade Heroes also did a nine minute video talking about the game’s creation, and the changing climate at Atari that resulted in its creation being greenlit, and that shows off the gameplay, which looks very faithful to the original!

People who want to hear quite a bit more about this upcoming release can watch/listen to episode 140 of the Youtube/podcast series Indie Arcade Wave (36 minutes).

1 Credit Clear of Tower of Druaga, With Explanations

This one I find rather fascinating. There may be no arcade game ever made as purposely frustrating to play as Namco’s Japanese-only game The Tower of Druaga.

Hero Gilgamesh (often shortened to “Gil”) must pass through 60 maze levels, collecting a key from each then passing through the door to the next, while defeating enemies that get in his way, in order to rescue his love Ki from the villainous Druaga.

BUT almost all the levels have a secret trick to perform. If this trick is accomplished, then a chest will appear that, if collected, will grant Gil a special ability. Some of these abilities are helpful. Some, in fact, are necessary, and if they aren’t collected then on some future level Gil will be unable to advance! The tricks are explained nowhere in the game: it just expects you to know them, if not discovered personally then learned through word of mouth. (This was like a decade before most people had access to the internet.)

What is more, nothing in the game explains what the treasures are or what they do, or what you’ll find on each level if you do know the trick. And a few of the treasures are actually harmful! It means that, to win, you have to rely on a host of hidden information, obtained by both your own observation and from what you’ve heard from others. Which requires a ton of quarters to get, which suited manufacturer Namco just fine. Unfortunately (or, maybe, fortunately?), the game crash prevented Namco from trying its luck with this game in Western territories.

As a result, The Tower of Druaga is a game that’s probably experienced watching someone else play, rather than playing yourself. That’s what this video is, Youtube user sylvie playing through the whole game, not just advancing through, but explaining how it’s done along the way. It’s an hour and three minutes long:

U Can Beat Video Games Covers Final Fantasy IV

I’ve posted about the great Youtube walkthrough channel U Can Beat Video Games several times in the past, so I try not to report on every video they do. And lately, as they’ve been tackling bigger projects that take a lot more time to finish, there haven’t been as many to post about.

But now they’ve completed their four-part series, each at three-plus hours, on one of the most iconic JRPGs from the era, Final Fantasy IV, which of course got released in Western markets as Final Fantasy II. It goes over everything in the game, every secret, every step of the story, a lot of cool tricks and strategies, and more.

I understand some people use this as background for doing other things, or as their adult replacement for Saturday morning cartoons (look them up). In any case, it makes for a lot of viewing, so block off a fair amount of time for this.

Here are the direct links and embeds:

Part 1: Beginning to Cecil’s promotion to Paladin (3h44m)

Part 2: To Dr. Lugae in the Tower of Bab-Il (4h8m)

Part 3: The Underworld and up to the Bahamut optional fight on the Moon (4h17m)

And finally:

Part 4: The remainder of the game, and the ending (3h38m)

If you think this is huge, it’s only going to get huge-r when they reach Final Fantasy VI (er, III)!

Sundry Sunday: Duelin’ Firemen Trailer

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

If you haven’t seen it before (it made a trip around the blogs and such back in 2001), you really aren’t prepared for Duelin’ Firemen. The version that people saw then was really low quality though; a few years back, as part of a documentary about its making that seems like it never really got off the ground, a somewhat better quality version appeared on Youtube. It is, um, really something.

Duelin’ Firemen was a cancelled FMV game, probably a music game, for the 3DO console. Right off the bat it shows you it means business: not one but two planes, one of them in fact the space shuttle Columbia, the other Air Force One, collide with the top of the Sears Tower. The trailer was made in 1996 so you can’t blame it for being inappropriate due to either of those things. You might still consider it inappropriate due to other things, but it’s not too much offensive, unless you consider its childish innuendo or gleeful appraisal of a city in flames offensive. It might just be waiting for a massive citywide conflagration to hit the media for people to tsk at it for that. Which, well, would probably be fair.

Let me not keep you waiting any longer! Here is Duelin’ Firemen, the video game intro trailer that got submitted to freaking Sundance in 1996. You won’t be the same person afterward that you were before. Because we’re all changed by our experiences, be they great or small. But it really is an experience. 7 1/2 minutes’ worth of one:

Recognizable people in it, behind all the poorly composited flames, include blacksploitation star Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore, DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Dr. Timothy Leary, Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius, Steve Albini, David Yow, and no doubt others I’m leaving out or don’t myself recognize. I’ve never been great with pop culture figures, or music figures either. But you don’t have to know who any of them are to enjoy it, probably with the aid of the mind-altering substance of your choice.

If you want to find out more, there’s this promotional interview (4 1/2 minutes) from around the time, and other clips on the documentary’s Youtube page. Or you could leave yourself blissfully unaware. That’s fine too.

And hey! The website duelinfiremen.com has recently been revived, and promises an upcoming interactive comic!

DUELIN’ FIREMEN!

Hardcore Gaming 101 Covers Snake’s Revenge

Hardcore Gaming 101 is one of the most important game history sites on the internet, and site creator Kurt Kalata writes on a wide variety of games for consoles and computers alike. Recently they’ve been on a Metal Gear kick, and that means covering the black sheep of the series, Snake’s Revenge.

Snake’s Revenge is the forgotten Metal Gear game, an NES sequel made without Hideo Kojima input, to the NES port of Metal Gear that he also had nothing to do with. It has a reputation for being terrible, but that’s really unmerited. As Kurt Kalata notes, while it has its flaws, is ignored by later Metal Gear games, and it has a story based on the manual scenario for Metal Gear written by Konami’s crazy American writing staff*, it’s technically proficient and has good music.

Yep, it’s the Metal Gear with side-view segments.

You can, and should read it for yourself, here.

* The American manual for NES Life Force says that the evil planet-eating monster Zelos was the proud progeny of “Ma and Pa Deltoid.” In the description of Dracula’s Heart in the manual for Castlevania II, it warns: “Careful! The heart attacks.” These were not means isolated occurrences from Konami’s US staff.

Sharopolis Looks Into NES Technical Feats

Youtuber Sharopolis has a 20-minute video up examining several specific NES games and how some unexpected tricks were pulled off in each: Rescue: The Embassy Mission, Crash and the Boys Street Challenge, Castlevania III and Jurassic Park. I love learning about how developers overcame hardware limitations, and if you’re reading this, I’d wager there’s a good chance you do too!

Completing Arcade Dragon’s Lair

Dragon’s Lair was the original laserdisc arcade game, and a big hit at the time. It immediately caused a large part of the ailing arcade sector to swing around to doing laserdisc games, a trend that will seem very familiar to people who have been following NFTs, overwhelming the market and ultimately further contributing to the downfall of the golden era of U.S. arcades instead of saving it. Dragon’s Lair, and its sequel Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp and spinoff Space Ace, were by many accounts among the best of the era, with excellent cel-drawn animation provided by the studio of former Disney animator Don Bluth.

Now that I have properly introduced the concept to those who might not have known, I can now introduce this video (14 minutes), put together by the Youtube channel Broken Arcade, which demonstrates how to complete Dragon’s Lair. It’s not a perfect playthrough, but it is done on one credit, and while it plays the player explains what movements he’s doing on the joystick and button, along with notes on timing and tips for getting each scene right. The directions and button presses needed to finish each scene (which are presented randomly in the game) are also listed in the description to the video.

Even if you’ve never heard of Dragon’s Lair before, it’s worth it to watch the lush animation! Here it is embedded:

The Blog at perfectpacman.com

The URL makes it seem like it’s going to be entirely devoted to that specific classic arcade game, but lately it’s concerned itself with two other topics, both pretty interesting. Here’s a link to the site, for ease of access.

Most of the posts by weight recently have concerned the lawsuit by Billy Mitchell to force Twin Galaxies to retain his scores in Donkey Kong, which as the evidence mounts up against him, much of it recounted on the blog, became increasingly unlikely to prevail. According to the blog, there are several major discrepancies in the footage he provided of his scores, that made it evident that they were produced in MAME, which for various reasons disqualifies them for the category he was aiming for. That evidence is recounted on this subpage, but among the most telling is that Donkey Kong’s software draws its levels in a way that interacts with the CRT redraw to produce, on arcade hardware, a couple of frames where the boards are incompletely drawn in a distinctive way, that is not evident in Mitchell’s tapes.

Comparison from perfectpacman.com showing the screen drawn in a way distinctive to MAME, but not to the arcade hardware.

By this point Mitchell’s name seems to be mud in classic gaming circles, so presumably coverage of this topic is nearing its end on their blog. That’s probably for the best, as their other major beat is covering gaming challenges that Twin Galaxies offers bounties on, like escaping Midgar in FFVII without using Materia, or getting as many Gold Skulltulas as a player can in Ocarina of Time without taking damage. That’s the kind of gaming geekery we can get behind!

Behind the Code: Why Does Nintendo’s Tetris Crash At Extremely High Levels?

Displaced Gamers’ excellent Being The Code series on Youtube looks into what causes Nintendo’s NES Tetris to crash at really really high levels, over level 150. In the process, it goes through how that game displays and adds scores together. Have a look (22 minutes)!

Homebrew Atari 7800 Arcade Ports

Just a quick post today, last year user PacManPlus made available free downloads of some of their Atari 7800 remakes of arcade games. For people who aren’t in the scene this might be of limited interest, but these games were formerly sold commercially on AtariAge’s website and not generally available for free. Atari 7800 emulation is, of course, easily available in RetroArch, but this page on the EmuGen Wiki lists some standalone emulators.

One of the included games is a game that is very rarely ported, Baby Pac-Man, because it contains a significant pinball component. The pinball physics in the remake are uncommonly good! The Youtube account The Atari Network reviewed it with gameplay video so you can see for yourself:

Baby Pac-Man isn’t the only game in the collection, but its especially notable. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the others yet, but there’s some interesting titles in there.

The remakes were originally sold commercially on cartridges, but they were recently delisted and removed from sale, so PacManPlus was kind enough to make them available for anyone to download and play. I for one appreciate his kind generosity!

PacManPlus’ Atari 7800 Arcade Ports (atariage.com)

How Speedrunners Get N64 Control Sticks

The Nintendo 64 broke ground for Nintendo in many ways, but arguably the worst part of that was the controller.

I’m not one of the people who complains about not understanding the controller or how to hold it. That part’s pretty easy to understand: you hold it one way, with the central prong in your left hand and the right handle in your right, for games that use the control stick like Super Mario 64; you hold it with one handle in each hand for games that instead use the Control Pad. It makes sense that Nintendo still wanted to feature the Pad prominently since it was one of the defining characteristics of the NES and SNES era.

The Control Pad is durable and easy to use, even if it does result in bruised thumbs when pressed with force, as can happen in challenging games. What’s not so durable is the N64’s signature control device: the Analog Stick. A special design that didn’t see much update after the Nintendo 64, because of the “white dust of death,” a mysterious fine powder that emerges from the inner workings of the stick after heavy use. Along with the powder always came degraded control performance: the stick would lose some of its tight feel, wobbling when shaken, and would no longer recognize the full extend of its range. All official N64 control sticks would succumb to the dreaded dust with time.

During the console’s life the source of the powder wasn’t common knowledge. It turns out it’s the result of the control stick grinding against its housing and actually rubbing itself in a fine dust. The looseness came from the powder getting into the tight confines of the stick’s mechanism, and from the pivot chamber getting looser as it was ground away by the joystick.

Some games were notorious for decreasing a controller’s working life. The Mario Party series was infamous for demanding rapid spins of the control stick, that could produce the dreaded dust and wobble after surprisingly few games. But with use, it seemed that all the official joysticks would succumb to it eventually. Third-party sticks, such as the then-ubiquitious MadCatz sticks, didn’t suffer from the problem, but their control sticks weren’t as sensitive, and required a smidge more force to push. For demanding play, the official sticks are a must.

This has resulted in a big problem. Since all the Nintendo-made N64 sticks degrade eventually with use, and Nintendo isn’t making them any more, speedrunners playing on original hardware have few options for playing games the way they were intended by their designers. Some jealously hoard pristine sticks, which have become expensive, while others work to make replacements.

Retromeister on Youtube has made a 24-minute video explaining the problem, and the lengths to which runners have resorted to keep themselves playing. And this, following, is that very thing:

GifCities

GeoCities has been gone for fifteen years now, about as long as it was alive, and it’s still sorely missed. It was shut down by Yahoo, which seems to exist purely to kill good things during downturns. (See also: Yahoo Directory.) It’s just a “brand” now; the company formerly known as that changed its name to “Altaba,” and then itself died.

GeoCities was a place where anyone could make a static website, for free (although with frames and ads). This isn’t the place to recount the full story, but at the time it had kind of a reputation. Since anyone could make a site there, and having a site was a big thing in those heady early World Wide Web days, a lot of people did make them. It was their first site in a lot of cases; in many cases, it was their only site. And before social media and Google’s decay, you could even reasonably expect to find GeoCities sites, if they were good.

So a lot of web newbies made sites, and they perpetrated all kinds of design atrocities in the process. Back then we rolled our eyes and held our noses, but now that time is remembered with fondness.

There are multiple places where you can go back and explore old GeoCities sites, although with varying degrees of stability. Try checking Restorativland or Oocities. Or the Internet Archive’s GeoCities collection.

One of the most egregious of the many sins made by GeoCities users was the overuse of animated GIFs. GIFs themselves are their own throwback to the early era, and actually predate the World Wide Web. The image format was created at Compuserve in 1987, while the first web browser was released on Christmas Day, 1990. Now Compuserve is long gone, although their website, amazingly, is still up, offering an early 2000’s style web portal experience, and while it’s likely no one human is curating its links, some one, or thing, is still updating its copyright date.

I seem to be discursing a lot today, but I am actually closing in on today’s true subject, just with a flight plan best described as a wide, lazy spiral. Here we go. GIFs, that relic of ancient Compuserve, once the subject of an infamous software patent owned by even older pre-web tech company Unisys that threatened to strike the format from the internet, is the only thing of Compuserve that really thrives today.

There are other animation file formats. There’s MP4 and its progeny, of course. Google has a version of webp that has animation, but people don’t trust Google so much anymore. GIFs are also limited: it’s an indexed graphics format that maxes out at 256 colors. But there are many ways to make them, all the major browsers support them, many social media sites support them, and they doesn’t have Google’s sterile, chlorine-like stink about them, so they survive. Improbably, awesomely, people still make, use and view GIFs today.

Google Meetup(?)’s message input bar with GIF button
Discord’s message input bar with GIF button

Google Meetup, or whatever the hell they call it now, has an interface for searching for GIFs to use, and Discord does too. There’s a site, the slightly-incorrectly named GIPHY, that hosts them and lets you search for them. Arguably GIFs are more popular than ever. But the acknowledged Golden (well, maybe Tarnished Bronze) Age of GIFs was the Geocitiene Era.

Well, now the Internet Archive has an amusingly-styled site, GifCities, where you can search through an archives of the GeoCities site collection.

Comic Sans! A spinning rendered dollar sign! Party like it’s 200X!

It doesn’t seem to have a lot to go by when doing its text search? My “Nethack” search only turned up two GIFs, both found from the term’s inclusion in their origin URLs. These are them:

I don’t get that eye one, but the second one’s kind of snazzy, if not really that useful. Still-someone worked to construct each of them, and I like that their work is commemorated, and even available for others to use today. Most of the Old Web, by weight, is lost now, so let’s cherish what remains.