I made a list of everything on my Nintendo Switch account: <b><u><i>two hundred and seventy-one items</i></u></b></ironicfakehtmltag>. Some day I’ll give you the list, but not today. But I figured it’d be useful to people if I reported on some notable deals happening on the eShop from time to time. Nintendo doesn’t pay me to do this, and any links you use earn me nothing, it isn’t advertising. And only items that catch my eye, and survive the crushing wave of ennui these tasks produce, make it into this list.

Note 1: I round off most prices. I count every keypress dearly, and typing “.99” over and over again pours caustic soda on my remaining nerve endings.

Note 2: I use em-dashes in this. That is not proof I am some idiotic LLM, you adjective[entire] derisive noun[breadbin].

Note 3: A foundational requirement for being included in this list is it must be at least half off.

Note 4: No screenshots or covers this time. I’ve just been up all night tracking down Japanese words in the Super Famicom version of Shiren the Wanderer, my neurons are floating in a thick soup right now.

Ahem:

General

The Wonderful 101 Remastered ($18, 55% off) — One of the most beloved games for the Wii-U, and contains a superhero character called Wonder Toilet, I say approvingly.

Dokapon: Sword of Fury ($12.50, 50%) — new entry in the cult JRPG-styled board-and-party game series.

SteamWorld Heist II & Build Bundle ($18, 60% off) and SteamWorld Build & Dig Bundle ($14, 60% off)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed ($16, 60% off)

Save Me Mr Tako: Definitive Edition ($3, 80% off): A rerelease of another Switch game that, I hear, was sabotaged by its original publisher. A challenging-yet-cartoony pixel art platformer with Game Boy graphics about an octopus hero, with a more involved story than you might expect. It’s three bucks, what have you got to lose?

Capcom

Resident Evil 4 ($10, 50% off) — The entry on the site spells “Resident Evil” all in lowercase for some stupid marketing reason. It’s widely acknowledge that this port of a Gamecube title is a high-point in the series, and contains zero percent zombies by weight. A lot of Resident Evil games seem to be on sale right now in fact, along with the Monster Hunter series, but I’ll leave those for you to seek out if you want them.

Street Fighter 6 (Switch 2 version, $20, 50% off) — After a dalliance with SoulCalibur back on the Dreamcast, and a ridiculous amount of time spent training amiibo fighters in Smash Ultimate, I’ve largely stayed away from fighting games. Still, it’s nice to see a classic series survive.

Devil May Cry, Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (all individually $10, 50% off) — I never got into these, finding them a bit too preposterous, but I understand a lot of people like them, and hey, they’re here.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($10, 66% off) & Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($25, 50% off) — Why is Apollo Justice more expensive than Nick’s games? I don’t know, but it’s a good reason to get it now before its price shoots back up.

Atari

AKKA ARRH ($6, 70% off): To think AKKA ARRH finally saw commercial release decades after the old Atari passed on producing its prototype, and this version was developed by Jeff Minter himself. But how do you pronounce it? Like a pirate? ARRRRRH.

In fact, a lot of Atari games are on discount right now, including multiple titles in its Recharged series of updated arcade remakes. A few others: Head Over Heels ($2, 80% off), Asteroids Recharged ($3, 80% off), Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration ($18, 55% off), Atari Flashback Classics ($12, 70% off), Atari Mania ($6.24, 75% off) and Centipede Recharged ($3, 70% off), among many others.

SquareEnix

A lot of SquareEnix games are on sale at the moment. Collection of Mana ($16, 60% off) — Three games, Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy), the beloved Secret of Mana (SNES) and the heretofore unreleased-in-English Seiken Densetsu III, now christened Trials of Mana. Sadly Trials, unlike Secret, doesn’t support three human players, not even in its original version, but it does offer a lot of replay value with multiple scenarios to complete.

A while bunch of Final Fantasy games are currently on sale, too many to link them all. VII is $6.39 (60% off); IX is $8.39 (also 60% off). On the Enix side of the building, Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age ($20, 50% off) is interesting. There’s also four Kingdom Hearts games with typically silly names, like HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX ($16, 60% off), but be careful, many of them are cloud versions that won’t work without an internet connection. There’s also Octopath Traveler and its sequel (both $24, 60% off) and Romancing SaGa 2 ($7.50, 70% off), among others.

rodneylives

It makes the useful observation that the first programmable game system (that is, with interchangable cartridges that contained program code), the Fairchile Channel F, contained 2K of RAM to use as a framebuffer, a region of memory the system’s graphics controller referred to in building its display. Using a framebuffer simplifies video creation, but at the time RAM was very expensive.

The Atari VCS/2600, however, only has 128 bytes of on-board RAM. It doesn’t create a framebuffer, it doesn’t have enough memory. Instead the processor, a MOS 6507 (a variation of the 6502), works with the TIA graphics chip to build the signal in real-time. Effectively, the VCS has a one-dimensional display: it focuses on building the video signal by focusing on it one raster line at a time.

There’s a danger when talking about these things, of telling people something they already know. It’s been observed that some game facts that were once obscure are fairly well known among enthusiasts, like that Super Mario Bros. 2 was adapted from an earlier Japanese game called Doki Doki Panic. I feel like the unusual way the VCS constructed its graphics might be one of these things. I’m still fascinated by how it works though. I’ll probably end up bringing it up again someday.

rodneylives

Even the MAME people needed my help to correct a game-breaking bug in the Rampart driver, because no one on the project could play Rampart well enough to get to that level. I don’t say this out of pride, but rather of sorrow. Other than its creators, I am probably the person in the world who knows the most about it. For more info, I point you to our Rampart tag.

On the video, there are caveats. The first one is I didn’t exactly it, but instead, Youtube’s vaunted algorithm has filed to hide it from me, because it’s six years old yet my searches haven’t turned it up to me until now. Sometimes I wish Google would stop showing me things it thinks I’d like and instead for a change found something I’ve explicitly asked it for.

Second, it’s by a Japanese speaker, of the Japanese version of Rampart. That was a two-player maximum version with joysticks, and from watching it, I can tell you it’s much easier than US Rampart. The player gets more time to rebuild, levels are easier to pass, grunts are less aggressive, and the game doesn’t pour on the Flagships, the red ships, with anywhere near as much energy in the last two levels. They manage to finish the game in one credit, something I’ve never done on the US version, but I strongly suspect I could do it too on that version, and fairly easily.

Still, it’s someone other than me who has a complete game on Youtube, in however many credits. It’s played on arcade hardware too, which I haven’t been able to do since Rampart was at our local arcade, back when that place existed, around 1991 or 1992. Here is that play (57 minutes):

I really don’t want to detract from their game, bit I’m a bit disappointed. I’ve played Rampart, mostly in MAME but sometimes on the Gamecube version of Midway Arcade Treasures, and on one particular DragonCon I played the PS3 version (there’s something of a story there). Every time, I’ve had to fight against bad luck and the most diabolical impulses of designers john Salwitz and Dave Ralston. Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose, but, ever, only I care.

The search for other people who have finished the US version of arcade Rampart continues.

Late addition: I have more discoveries to offer on this matter, but I have to figure some things out first. To be continued….

rodneylives

I play these things to write about them, but I played for fun too, and that kind of business I don’t consider fun, and I don’t think you’d enjoy it either. Games are meant to be fun, not excruciating tests.

I won’t give you the name of the hack because it’s one of hundreds that are like that. I have nothing against its creator, artistically it didn’t look bad. It just was a pain to play.

So instead, have a 2017 interview on Atari Compendium, with long-time Atari Games programmer Michael Albaugh. It’s all text, but I’ve been meaning to ease up on the number of Youtube videos I link. Don’t worry, I’m still going to bring you tons of them, because for worse or even worse, there’s a lot of gaming content there, and Google certainly likes pointing me to it, may them and their “AI Summaries” boil in oil.

Albaugh played the original commercial arcade game Computer Space in a Sears department store in 1974, soon after joined with Atari Inc. while Nolan Bushnell was still at the helm, and stuck with them through to 2000, just a few years before WMS shut them down. The first game he wrote code for was Pool Shark, a black-and-white machine released soon after Tank 8. His last (according to MobyGames) was Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, and support on San Francisco Rush: 2049! He worked on Atari Football, Marble Madness and Rampart. In games, there are very few careers longer than that, and I’m glad that he is telling his story.

I’d like especially to point out his concluding statement:

Cliche, but it went from a craft with small, tight groups, like a local theater company, to more like Hollywood, with giant teams and management structure that would make the Pentagon swoon.  And of course a real hit-driven, cautious agenda.  In short, no thanks.  There are still interesting things going in the demo scene, indie games, and interactive fiction, though.

Interview with Michael Albaugh (www.ataricompendium.com)

rodneylives

Guides take time, so in the meantime here’s an hour-long talk by Ed Logg on the creation of Gauntlet, from GDC 2012!

rodneylives

Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.

Yes! More Rampart! I’m still out of town at DragonCon so I’m repurposing an old strategy guide I wrote for Extended Play into a week of posts. Even I’m starting to get sick of Rampart by now, but please stick around. And if you’ve ever tried playing this infuriating game in the arcade, this might give you the advice you need to get through to levels you might not have thought possible! And this is even a fairly short post!

Level Strategies

Level One (“Recruit”)

Castles available: 6

It’s advised not to start on this level unless it’s your first game. You’ll not only miss out of 5,000 points by starting here, but it means the beginning of Level 2 will begin you with only two cannons instead of three, and you’ll face more ships.

This level is so easy that it barely rates mention. It has six castles, and only Gunships appear. Unless you’re purposely stalling, you’ll finish this map in two rounds. Even if you stall, the level auto-completes in three rounds, regardless of if you fire a single shot.

Another reason to avoid picking Beginner is that its selection is always the “J” map, which is one of the easier selections from the initial four boards. It’s better if you pick it later, when the opposition is harder, to balance out the difficulty.

Level Two (“Veteran”)

Castles available: 5

The Veteran level is randomly chosen from one of the other three basic maps, although it tends to be the “C” map most often. Ideally it won’t be the “Hat” map, it being the easiest, as you’ll want it to be your Level 4.

If you started on the board, the first round will always put you up against four ships, one of which may be a Lander. Later ships are frequently also Landers. As a result grunts may appear on this board, but even if some appear, so long as you focus on destroying enemy ships and don’t suffer major setbacks like losing your home castle, you’ll probably wipe out the attackers before they become a huge problem.

On a later round in this level you’ll probably encounter your first Red Ship. A Red Ship tends to get off two or three shots in a round, each producing flaming crater you must build around.

Level Three

Castles available: 5

You always get to pick this level yourself. I usually try to make it “C,” “J” or “Hat,” in that order. I usually avoid picking “N,” but it’s not really harder than “C,” so pick whatever is your preference.

Much of the fleet will be Landers here, so this is the first level where you must be diligent about thinning out their numbers. Especially try to take care of ships about to land; grunts are unwelcome visitors to deal with, and it’s best if they never show up at all. In the event of a landin, which is sometimes unavoidable, try to spare a few seconds to build a barrier to them, to wall them off from the rest of the board. If you can contain them in a small area around the landing, you can keep their numbers down that way and thus reduce the number of shots you must expend in cleaning them up. Don’t think you can just let them be! They will overwhelm you easily if you ignore them.

I try to pick a home castle that’s near another castle, so I can capture them both with one wall. If you can consistently get both each round, that’s three cannons each time. Use them to connect the space between the two castles, but try to keep that space as small as possible. Try to aim for the minimum-sized rectangle needed to save both of them, and then try to place all your cannons within that rectangle.

Level Four

Castles available: 4

Now the game starts to get serious. If you can get here on your first credit you’ve done very well, but your weak basic guns will become more and more of a liability for you. Dark ships start appearing on this level, and will continue to appear until the end of the game. They all take one extra hit to sink. That’s three hits for Gunships, four for Landers, and six for Red Ships.

Try to make Landers that have a chance of landing at a diagonal shore your top priority. If one makes it through, then at the start of the Building phase devote three seconds or so it blocking their progress with walls. If they get away from the shore and a significant number appear, then focus on surviving and shoot them with cannons during Battle. Red Ships start to be a significant threat here. Once all the potential landings are taken care of, try to pump six shots into a Red Ship.

Level Five (peninsula)

Castles available: 3

Regardless of how you got here, you have a choice between two new maps for this level, a diagonal peninsula going upper-right to lower-left, or one going from upper-left to lower-right. I call these the “slash” and “backslash” maps, respectively. I usually pick backslash, but both are about the same difficulty.

These maps have the property of having two seas, a small one at the top of the screen and a more typical larger one at the bottom. The small water region is both a blessing and a curse; the restricted movement makes it easier to destroy ships there, but landings are very likely unless you clear out the Landers arriving there. What is more, these maps are the only ones in the game that break the rule about landings only being possible on diagonal shores. Landers in the small sea are also counted as landed if they contact land at the very edge of the screen, even if there’s no diagonal shore nearby. This property doesn’t extend to screen-edge landings in the larger sea.

The worst thing about these levels is that the game takes off the limiter on the number of Red Ships that can be generated each round. Red Ships here are nearly as common as Double-Sailed ones! You’ll frequently see seven or more on-screen at a time. While you must remain vigilant to prevent and/or mitigate landings, you must also work towards reducing the number of Red Ships. The large number of flaming craters on these levels made adopting a “summer home” strategy imperative, where you switch off between castles when one gets too difficult, or even impossible, to save. It’s usually a good idea to try to capture two castles in the first round because of this; then you can station some or all of your cannons for that round at the other castle, so you’re not defenseless when you’re forced to turn to it for survival. From there, you can focus on getting cannons around the third castle for maximum safety.

This level is a strong test of your Rampart skills, and often is a barrier to progression until you’ve played many games. But it’s not invincible. On Easy difficulty, I’ve passed this level still on my first credit multiple times. The biggest thing you have to worry about is the high probability of impossible situations.

Consider: when any castle is adjacent to other objects, you must capture the whole collection as a set. Chains of objects like this increase the difficulty of getting the whole thing, and increases the odds of getting an impossible save. I’ve seen this happen after even the first round on a peninsula board, and I’ve seen it happen on all three castles on one of these maps at the same time.
The only substantive thing you can do, besides rotating between castles, is to shoot some of the dangerous walls yourself. Red Cannonballs don’t leave craters if the wall is already destroyed, but that takes time and often makes for a difficult repair.

So, what if you manage to clear this map? What happens next? The game scrolls the FINAL BATTLE banner, and you get a one-way ticket to:

Level Six (island)

Castles available: 2

It all comes down to this. This level is a special kind of hell, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it seems you can get away with sinking fewer ships here, and, because you’re surrounded on all sides, your shots often don’t have that far to travel to reach a ship. There are four prime landing areas, each in one corner of the map, so landings can only be delayed, not prevented. And you only get two castles. Enjoy!

When you start looking more closely at the map, some slight advantages become apparent. There’s a lake in the bottom-left of the board, which gets in the way, somewhat, of grunts approaching from the bottom. Both castles have a good amount of land around them, although there are so many Red Ships here that the “summer home” strategy is essential to survival.

The continue limit eases up a little bit here. If you were at the maximum of four continues upon starting Level Six, the game will grant you an extra continue when you get here. (You still have to pay your coins for it though.) And also, if you were at that final credit, the game will actually downgrade your cannons one step when you get here, so get used to expending two/three/five shots for Gunships/Landers/Red Ships again. If (ha ha, “if”) you do expend that last continue, you go back to only needing one/two/four shots to sink ships. (There is more information on the effects of continues on cannon power in the notes, later on.)

This level is an ordeal, but it can be finished surprisingly quickly. I’ve seen it cleared in three rounds, although that was after several continues (it had been a pretty great game up to that point). This level is the big obstacle to one-credit clears, I’ve managed to finish everything up to it on one credit only to bang my head against it repeatedly. Using save states, I’ve managed to finish it with a single continue, so it is possible to finish it relatively cheaply, but making do with such weak cannons is a real challenge.

rodneylives

Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.

Because I’m out of town for a few days, we’re continuing our week-long coverage of Atari Games’ brilliant, yet really hard classic arcade strategy game Rampart.

Each of Rampart’s phases has its own considerations, so let’s take them one at a time.

Battle Phase

Rampart’s most traditional mode is its Battle sequence, which plays a bit like Atari’s old hit Missile Command. For a limited amount of time, players use the trackball to move a crosshairs around the screen, and the Fire button launches a cannonball from one of their cannons aimed at that spot.
Cannonballs have a set speed that they travel as they move through the air; nearby shots go directly towards the destination, but distant targets travel in a high arc. Thus, more distant shots take much more time to reach their targets, due to the fact that they have to be angled upward.

The speed of your shots matters for two important reasons. First, in single-player mode, enemy ships don’t always sit still and let your projectiles sink them, but move around at different speeds, and sometimes even try to dodge your shots. One of the most annoying events in Rampart is when you launch a volley towards a ship, and it decides to pull anchor and float elsewhere just as your shots launch, wasting those precious missiles. Firing at close-up ships means you don’t have to lead your targets by nearly as much, and reduces the chance that a ship will just sail out from under your projectiles.

The other important thing is, each cannon can only have one shot in the air at a time. Firing at nearby targets means you can get more shots off during a Battle phase. The combination of the two, being more accurate when shooting moving targets and getting more shots off, means that, absent other issues, you should prioritize firing at ships near your guns.

You cannot entirely erase the chance that a ship will decide to start, or stop, moving after you launch shots towards it, but there is some finesse that can be applied. Ships always sail in a straight line in one of the eight cardinal/diagonal directions, and ships cannot move through other ships. If a moving ship runs into another one, it will stop. They cannot turn around while in motion, but must wait until their invisible captain picks a new direction, which could be immediately or never. They also stop if they reach the shoreline, which for a Lander could be very bad for you. Once in a while a moving ship will just stop for no reason. The only constant is, all ships stop moving at the very end of the Battle phase, once all cannonballs have landed.

The rules of cannonfire, the ones concerning shot speed and there only being one shot in play at a time per weapon, they also apply to the enemy ships. Nearby ships are able to launch more shots at closer walls than distant ones, another reason to prioritize shooting nearby ships. But this must be balanced against those times when you need to prevent a landing, or take out some Red Ships to make the Build phase more survivable.

The game continues no matter how many ships you sink in Battle, but to progress to the next level, and eventually win the game, it’s advantageous to sink ships. The exact qualification for finishing a level is unknown, but it seems to happen after you wipe out most of the ships on-screen.

There is a maximum of 16 ships that can be in play at any time. If that number is reached, but there are some weakened or Single-Sailed Ships on-screen, Rampart is known to remove some of them so stronger ships may enter the fray.

Building Phase

This is the meat of the game. While shooting ships eventually clears levels, you can’t do that without cannons, and cannons are awarded from skill at building. Also, if you fail to capture at least one castle in a round, you lose.

The way it works is, the game hands you an assortment of building pieces of various shapes, one at a time. The pieces you’re given first exist as just a flashing outline that you can maneuver freely over the land with the trackball or joystick. You can move it anywhere while you’re getting it into position, or rotate it clockwise with a press of the “Rotate” button. (If you start out your first building phase without using the button, the game’s voice will suddenly intone, “Use ROTATE for a better fit!” Rampart doesn’t have nearly as much digitized speech as Gauntlet, but it sure is memorable when it does speak.)

The difficult bit is, you cannot place pieces anywhere there is something per-existing. A piece cannot be placed if any part of it overlaps with another wall, the shore, a castle, a cannon, a crater, a grunt, or the edge of the screen. Everything visible beneath the piece’s outline must be the clean, green checkerboard of countryside.

You must place the current piece before you get the next one. Intermediate Rampart players ruefully observe that the game tends to hand out just the wrong piece they need at a given time. A lot of this is observation bias, you don’t tend to notice the times when the game hands you just the right piece, but it’s true that the pieces the game has to hand get larger and more complex as the game continues.

When a piece is plopped down it turns into wall. If the wall adjoins wall pieces already extant, they’ll join together pleasingly into a solid-looking structure. Your task is to connect wall pieces together like this until you have a complete loop all the way around and enclosing at least one castle. Usually you want this castle will be the one you start with, called your “Home Castle.” It’s worth extra points and cannons if you capture it, but any castle will allow you to survive.

There are two particular hassles in the Building phase that deserve special mention. The first are those grunts the Landers sometimes drop off if they reach the shore, and that have the power to move around during Building. They look like tiny tanks, or little battering rams.

Grunts move during Building, meaning they can actually block pieces just as you’re trying to place them. They not only move, but slowly multiply as they go, tending to form lines between the shore and your castles. Worst of all, grunts that make it to your castles have the power to destroy them during the following Battle phase, the only thing in the game that can harm a castle itself.

Grunts are so dangerous that landings must quickly be dealt with or else your game will soon be over. You can shoot them during the Battle phase, or you can surround the territory they’re on, destroying them instantly with a satisfying crunching noise.

One important thing to note about grunts is that they can’t be dropped off just anywhere. Landers (here circled) can only leave grunts on diagonal shorelines. Highlighted above are the landing sites on the “Hat” map. Guard them at all costs.

The other problem you must worry about during Building is craters, flaming pits in the very ground left when the red cannonballs launched by Red Ships strike your wall. A crater is an implacable obstacle; there is no way to remove a crater from the board other than time. Near the end of the game, depending on the randomized ship generation, you may end up with rounds where you must face six or more Red Ships at once, which is horrifying.

When a crater is formed, it’s a full-strength pit of fire. Every Battle phase, each crater diminishes a bit. They all do this in lockstep: all the craters formed in one round will advance to the next state at once.

How does the game decide how quickly to make craters disappear? It’s a function of how recently you’ve put in money and continued the game! If you’ve recently continued, then for a while the game makes craters disappear in two rounds instead of three.

Cannon Phase

The Cannon phase is much less tense than the others. You get ten seconds to place additional cannons for subsequent Battles. But placement of cannons is one of the most important decisions of all. In a sense, the reason you’re capturing castles, beyond mere survival, is to support your artillery.

For the first Cannon phase of the whole game, the game gives you three cannons to get you started. On the first Cannon phase after continuing, you get four, as part of the “and more firepower” the game promises. On the first round of other levels, you start with just two.

Beyond that, on each successive Cannon phase, you get two more cannons to place for having captured your home castle, and one more for each other castle. But this only happens if you have room to place them. When surrounding castles in the Building phase, you must not only survive, but try to leave extra room for placing cannons, that is, if you want more artillery.

The more cannons you have, the more shots you can get off in the Battle phase, and thus the more of a dent you can put into the enemy navy and/or other players’ walls. This, in turn, decreases the shots coming in towards your walls, lets you do something about Landers before they drop off Grunts, lets you shoot at Grunts directly, allows you to sink more Red Ships before they set your whole countryside ablaze, and ultimately depletes the opposing navy faster.

Lots of cannons mean lots of shots! Shots can stop landings, clear out Red Ships, and hasten the end of the level.

But cannons are also a big problem. Each cannon you place is a 2×2 square of ground that cannot be otherwise built upon, which restricts the shapes of pieces that can fit on the ground. Having lots of cannons progresses you through the level, but increases the area you have to surround to survive.
Practically, you must build at least some cannons directly adjacent to your castle, and other cannons adjacent to those, in a big sulfuric blob. Thus, to capture that castle, you’ll also have to capture all the cannons that adjoin it, a mass of guns that grows in size with each round. And in case you come up with the idea to build cannons away from castles to avoid this, you should know that cannons that aren’t “owned” during a battle phase sit idle, doing nothing.

A “summer home” is a secondary castle you turn to in order to survive, usually with cannons attached, when your home castle is too difficult to recover.

You must have cannons to survive through each level, to punch back against the enemy, to take care of threats and eventually to advance towards finishing it, but having them makes later Building phases harder. Once a cannon is placed, it cannot be removed except by losing and continuing the game. And not having any cannons is a counter to using the “summer home” strategy for every round: while you can often abandon your home castle and its armaments in favor of a small unadorned dwelling out in the sticks, unless you’ve built cannons there on previous rounds, you’ll have, at most, one gun to thwart landings. A lot of games have ended due to this.

One subtle aspect to Rampart strategy is the cannon firing order. Cannons fire in the order in which they were placed. Any uncaptured cannons, and also cannons with shots in the air, are ignored in the queue. The difference in lead time between a cannon near the shore, and one way back at the screen edge, is significant, and can result in a lot of missed shots. To thwart this, it helps to try to build cannons in one mass, instead of spread out, and to try to build in more centralized locations, but truthfully it’s difficult to consciously make use of this strategy during a game.

This is a danger spot, a location where, if a single Red Cannonball hits, it renders the whole castle and its cannons impossible to capture.

One thing that players cannot afford to ignore is the danger of building cannons too close to the water or the edge of the screen. This is a huge concern. Building cannons close to hard barriers like those greatly reduces the number of pieces that will fit between the gun and the obstacle, and increases the chance that a red cannonball will hit in a such a place as to create an impossible rescue. To the game’s credit, Red Ships do not appear to target these locations intentionally, but neither do they avoid them, so It’s important to try to leave at least two spaces between cannons and any hard barriers, and more if you can. Especially look out for one-space diagonal separation, because it isn’t as obviously dangerous as horizontal or vertical. The more free space around your installations, the easier it’ll be to build walls there later, and the better off you’ll be.

So what if you decide you have enough cannons and don’t want to place some or all this round, do you have to sit and wait out the clock? Why, no: if you make five consecutive illegal cannon placements in a row, the game will take that as a signal that you’re done placing them and end the Cannon phase immediately.

That’s three parts so far! Yes, there’s more to say about this diabolical game, but we’ll take a break for a couple of days, for other posts. See you soon!

rodneylives

Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.

We continue our lengthy, obsessive coverage of Atari Games’ brilliant, but really difficult, arcade strategy game Rampart.

Overview

Rampart is really two separate but related games, the single-player game and multiplayer. Both are excellent. Even so, this article mostly concerns itself with single-player, but towards the end I will have a few things to say about its multiplayer mode.

Before we begin, you should know that Rampart is a highly abstract game, and as such it might not be easy to see how it all fits together from a text description. I have uploaded several complete playthroughs of the game to YouTube, the first such on that site of the arcade version. You might watch a bit of one of them, it should make it pretty obvious how the game works.

The Board

In both single-player and multiplayer, after selecting a home castle and placing initial cannons, the game repeats a sequence of rounds, each consisting of a Battle phase, Building phase and Cannon phase. In the Battle phase, players shoot at ships or the other players’ walls, while those ships or enemy cannons fire back at their own walls. In the Building phase, players place a variety of shaped pieces in an attempt to fix their wall and/or construct walls around at least one of the castles on their land within a time limit. Then in the Cannon phase, players get a number of new cannons to place within the territory they captured in the Building phase, adding to the number of shots they can get off in Battle.

Select Home Castle, then
Cannons -> Battle -> Building -> repeat

This cycle continues until the player wins or loses. Losing happens when a player fails to capture a castle in time in Building. Winning happens, in single-player, when the game decides the ships don’t have a reasonable chance of defeating the player, and advances to the next level, out of six in total. In multiplayer, it happens when all the other players have lost and don’t continue, or for a set number of battles. If the fight goes the full distance, the winner is the surviving player with the highest score.

A defeated player can put more money in the machine to continue the game “with more firepower.” This is allowed four times in single-player, so up to five credits in all, and losing after that results in a solid Game Over. The dynamics of continuing in Rampart are really more complex than this, and I’ll explain those later, but for the time being, you should know “with more firepower” signifies several important changes that are not all clear during play.
In multiplayer, losing players can choose to continue individually twice. That can make for a decently long game if all the players choose to buy all their continues. But eventually, the game will declare a round to be the “Final Battle,” after which no continues will be offered to losing players, and the game ends regardless. The number of rounds a game is allowed to go is operator-adjustable, and continued games usually add a few battles to the overall length.
There also exists one semi-secret game variation. If just two players play Rampart, and at least one of them is joining in again after a completed game, there is a map selection screen that offers the chance to play a composite game mode, featuring both two players and ships! In this, the ships belong to one or the other side, and are color-coded based on who they belong to. They function like extra cannons, generally firing where the player aims their cursor, but are more autonomous. This mode is an interesting variation, and is fairly obscure. Could there be other such secrets hidden in Rampart’s code?

Basics

For now, we’re most concerned with figuring out and defeating the very difficult single-player game. The basic play of both games is similar, but there is a lot of difference between attacking ships or walls, and the structure of single-player is quite different, so it’s worth treating each mode separately.
When you put a coin in and press Start, this appears:

This ornate lobby screen is accompanied by booming drums and realistic, although synthesized, trumpets and fifes. With the volume turned up (as all Rampart machines should rightfully have) the effect is startling and bound to attract some attention. The purpose of this screen is to give other players the opportunity to join the game, for unlike the Gauntlet-style, “join any time” play model Atari pioneered and most arcade games used, once underway a game of Rampart cannot be entered by others. Players can only leave a game, by failing and not continuing.

An interesting thing about Rampart is that, after a game concludes, it always returns to the lobby screen and adds the player’s score to a total across all their games in the session. This encourages players to play repeated games, to see their overall score climb higher and higher. I’ve seen the total go up to over 900,000 points, which takes around 18 full-length games. I know of no reason to go for a high total score other than vanity, but if someone else has information on this I’d certainly like to know!

Your Domain

Assuming a single-player game, the screen clears and shows an overview screen of an island. There are four possible maps that can be selected for play here. At the start of the game, two areas along the shore are boxed, one marked “RECRUIT,” the other “VETERAN +5000 points.” Most of Atari Games’ arcade releases had such a selection, for it was a major part of their house style to offer a basic and an advanced difficulty, with a score bonus for starting harder. With Rampart, this choice is mostly an illusion. All choosing Recruit does is start you off with a very easy first board (the Recruit map is always the “J” map), which usually takes two rounds to finish.

Each level pits the player against a larger and more dangerous enemy navy.

At first, only weak Single-Sailed Ships attack, which go down with two hits from basic cannonry. Here, I call these Gunships.

With level two comes Double-Sailed Ships, a.k.a. Landers, which take three hits, and if they manage to get close to a diagonal shoreline, they drop off a swarm of evil little Grunts.

Grunts are a huge danger! They are the only enemy that has the power to move around during the Building phase. I’ll have more to say about them later, but for now just know that a grunt beachhead, left unopposed, has more credit-ending power than anything else in the game.

Starting with level three, Red Ships join the battle. Although few in number at first, these take five shots to sink, and their red cannonballs leave fiery craters where they land. Craters block piece placement and persist for multiple rounds. Usually a Red Ship can get off two or three shots each Battle, and they add up.

Levels four through six feature the same kinds of ships, but they’re darker in color, which in game terms means they take one additional hit before sinking. Dark Gunships take three hits, Dark Landers require four hits, and Dark Red Ships only go down after six cannonballs have struck them.

Every time you complete a level, you’re returned to the island screen to pick a new map to play. After the first level, three remaining unplayed options are offered. If you chose a Recruit game you’ll eventually have to face all these boards, but if you picked Veteran and started on level two, you end up skipping one of them, an opportunity to avoid a disliked map.

The “C” Map

The “Hat” Map

The “J” Map

The “N” Map

The maps are not even in difficulty. Generally, easier maps have castles with land around them on all sides, and more straight horizontal or vertical coastline, giving Landers fewer places to land. My opinion is that the “Hat” map is the easiest, followed by the “J” map, then the “C” and “Lowercase N” maps. A good strategy is to try to get one of the harder two maps out of the way as first selection, so you can later play the J and Hat maps to offset the harshness of the third and fourth levels, but sometimes the Veteran selection level ends up being the Hat, and you’ll have to play them in a different order.

The “Slash” Map

The “Backslash” Map

Level five is selected from one of two unique maps, both peninsulas with water on both sides. Both are difficult, although I think the “Backslash” board is a little easier. As you progress, each level starts you out with fewer castles to capture. By this point you’re only getting three castles, and you’ll probably have to use all of them to survive.

The final, “Island” Map

The last level is an island to itself, with a lake on it and only two castles! Here, ships attack from both sides of the screen. This level is a trial; although you have to sink fewer ships here to win, it’s difficult to prevent landings and grunts from overwhelming you, and the craters from Red Ships can easily give you an inescapable situation unless you mitigate them.

If you finish the last level, you get special ending music, and an illustration that few arcade goers have seen, before being returned to the High Score and Lobby screens. It may seem anti-climatic, but final victory and safe shores are their own reward.

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Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.

The next week is going to be pretty busy for me, so I’m reusing a long long piece I originally wrote for the short-lived fanzine I made, Extended Play. It’s been seen before, but only by a very small audience.

Rampart has been an obsession to me since it came out around 1990. I still think it’s one of the finest arcade games ever made, actually one of the best video games period. People tend to describe it as either an early version of Tower Defense, or Missile Command meets Tetris, but neither description is very good. Simply, there had never been a game like Rampart before, and despite some attempts to clone it, there’s never been a game like it since, either.

We’re all as obsessed with weird old arcade games as I am, right? Right?? Most (but not all) of the next week of posts will all be about this wonderful, but extremely difficult, game, one of the best from Atari Games at their heights. Please bear with me, and please, try to understand why I’ve been so into this unique game for so long.

In the late 80s Atari Games was recovering from 1983’s Great Game Crash, which decimated the US arcade industry and resulted in a great dying out of companies. Atari Games, newly split away from the consumer electronics company that would make the Atari ST, weathered it better than most, primarily through developing ingenious kinds of games the likes of which were seen nowhere else.

This period, 1984-1990, is the age that began with Marble Madness and the System 1 hardware, followed by hits like Paperboy, 720 Degrees, Gauntlet, Toobin’, Cyberball and others. It lasted roughly to the release of Street Fighter II, which sparked the fighting game craze and made arcades inhospitable to most other genres for a while. At the tail end of this period came Rampart, designed by John Salwitz and Dave Ralston, who also created three of the games in the foregoing list.

It’s a bit obscure now, but it was quite a hit for Atari at the time. For home systems Rampart received no less than thirteen distinct ports, plus a few notable emulations. It got very good reviews from Nintendo Power (SNES version) and Videogames & Computer Entertainment (arcade). More recently, it was released emulated with network play for free for the PlayStation 3. And yet, still, no one talks about Rampart anymore.

That is a weird thing about what I call Atari Games’ “Silver Age,” that time after the classic arcade boom of the late 70s/early 80s but before the rise of one-on-one fighting games, its games, while still fun and surprisingly ingenious, and widely ported, don’t have the star power, other than a couple of things like Gauntlet, that Japanese releases from the same time have garnered.

Part of the reason may be trademark-related. The name Atari still carries considerable nostalgic weight, but another company, the one formerly known as Infogrammes, bought the trademark and the classic Fuji logo, and still releases games under it. They own the rights to everything before Marble Madness. Games after that were owned by Midway for a while, but Midway then, in a crushing indignity, renamed them Midway Games West, before closing them outright in 2005, getting out of arcades altogether. Many of its assets were sold to Warner Bros. Entertainment, who presumably now owns the rights to Atari’s post-Marble Madness catalog.

I’ve written before that, at their peak, I think Atari Games was more ingenious and original than Nintendo themselves. They made some stinkers, sure (few remember Thunderjaws, or their arcade take on Tim Burton’s Batman movie) but their best games were, and still are, amazing. I think that Rampart, while little talked about now, is at the top of the gilded heap.

Rampart is great, but it’s difficult. For a game I’ve been obsessed with since its release in arcades in 1989, I can only complete it on default settings about a third of the time, and usually only after expending all the continues the game allows. This was common for Atari Games games, who tended to make arcade machines that mocked the idea of one credit runs, but even among those, Rampart is hard. You are not going to master this one overnight.

I view my purpose here usually to be a secondary source. That is, I prefer to summarize, encapsulate, explain and preserve information available elsewhere. But the thing about Rampart is, there is very little of this information to find. For a game that was popular at the time of its release and with so many ports, googling it will not turn up much to aid you. As far as I know, and I’ve searched for it many times throughout the years, Rampart has never had a good, comprehensive strategy guide written for it.

It is because of this, favored reader, that I have decided that this shall be that guide. Since most of it is self-discovered, I have no one to blame for errors but myself. I have made some efforts to make sure it’s correct, but, well, sometimes even well-considered assumptions turn out to be false. I’ve done what I can.

(More tomorrow!)

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Which is why I find the creation of The MAD Computer Program interesting. Published on issue 258 in BASIC for four of the microcomputer platforms of the time, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Commodore 64 and IBM PC, it was obviously MAD’s bid to maintain technically relevant to that brief moment in computing history. Setting aside whether it’s actually funny or not (it’s not), it means that MAD’s editors must have decided that home computers were common enough that they could waste some of their precious print pages on catering to their owners. Anyone without one of those computers would find them to be four pages of wasted content.

The four programs have a lead-in that reads in a set of data (using READ commands to get vector coordinates from DATA statements, of course). The lead-in part is different for each platform, but the lines with the DATA statements are the same, and so are only printed once in the magazine. That’s also the least interesting part of the ordeal of entering type-in programs: tables of raw data, numbers without context, sequences of values that will put your monkey brain to sleep, yet will surely cause your code to fail catastrophically if entered incorrectly. There’s 140 lines of them to enter here, plus some more if you’re using a C64. As my eyes brush over them, childhood trauma from entering type-ins from computer magazines cause them to water involuntarily. I miss the age of magazine-supplied type-in programs, but not that part of it.

What do you get when you spend a grueling half-hour typing in two pages of numbers written by a group who describes themselves as a gang of idiots? Something genuine useful like Compute’s Speedscript word processor? A unique and interesting two-player game like Basketball Sam & Ed or Laser Chess? The author of the text of the piece is coy about what the result will be, but encourages readers to send a printout to the MAD offices. I wonder how many did? Probably not too many; a thread on the AtariAge forums implies that there’s an error in the listing that causes the program to crash about two-thirds the way into its run. One participant remembers that MAD published a correction a few issues later, but if they actually did I can’t say.

If someone does get it to work, what then? If you’re familiar with MAD you might can already guess what the result, a picture drawn in hi-res on your screen, will be, but to save you the effort of setting up an emulator and entering over a thousand numbers one at a time, here’s a Youtube video of the program in action:

The video links to the blog post on Meatfigher.net that I learned about the program from. Meatfighter’s a pretty cool little blog and it’s worth rummaging through their archives! atariprojects.org offers an emulator disk image with the program already entered for you. dougx.net offers a version of the program written in Javascript that renders its output in your browser window. Without the (relatively) low resolution of the ancient computers that ran the original programs I feel the result loses something, but at least you don’t have to type it in yourself.

The MAD Computer Program (meatfighter.net)
Video of output from the MAD Computer Program (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

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As reported in a post at the excellent Video Game History Foundation, a copy of the unreleased Atari port of the Colecovision Tarzan game has been found, bought from a former Coleco employee. It used an unusual bankswitching scheme, but has been hacked to use a more common system, and both versions of the ROM are available from the Internet Archive. Both are 16K, very large for an Atari game, but microscopic by the standards of data today.

The Colecovision version of Tarzan was a late release, and had unusually good animation for its time, and repetitive, yet atmospheric, music. Here’s a Youtube link of the first loop of that version of the game (5 1/2 minutes):

I tried a little of the 2600 version, and I couldn’t make out how to get further than a few screens in. That single button control scheme is a real hassle! Here that is (four minutes 1/2). Dig that opening theme song! Don’t dig that gameplay music, though. It didn’t sound as bad when I played it, I think it was an issue with the recording.

The article has a run that gets further into it (7 minutes):

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Moviecart’s actually been around, judging by the date on that video demonstration, for at least three years now, but is currently accepting preorders for $25. The video only uses half the screen, and has glitches and distracting horizontal and vertical lines running through it, but at they say, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Or in this case, that the dog can display roughly arbitrary video and sound, two things the Atari usually finds it impossible to pull off.

How is it done? With custom hardware, certainly, but even granting that there’s only so much that can be done with the VCS/2600’s display chip, the restrictive funnel through which the cart’s video must be squeezed.

After that, getting all that data to the screen is done through presenting it to the VCS/2600’s address space at the absolute limit of the system’s ability to use it. The real work is done by a processor on the Moviecart’s board, which handles reading a specially-encoded video file on a Micro SD card and doing all of the work in getting it ready for the screen, so the VCS’s 6507 processor has to do as little as possible itself.

Moviecart, from lodefmode (github)

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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).

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MobyGames has long been a useful resource for game research and images, but was recently bought by Atari, which is not the same as the old Atari, although as time passes that distinction becomes slowly less relevant? The company calling itself Activision has slightly more continuity with the Activision that was founded by ex-Atari developers to sell VCS/2600 games, but very little of it remains I’m sure, and they passed through a phase where they had renamed themselves Mediagenic, which worked out badly. The CEO that pulled Activision out of their nosedive, as it turns out, is Bobby Kotlick. There’s a name that’s been in the news lately and on which I will not comment at this time!

So, it seems inescapable that Atari is behind this move by MobyGames, to try to get the site to pay for itself. I honestly don’t think there’s much of a market for these features unless they make the site downright painful to use for free users, and how many people are willing to pay for full MobyGames access? When people (myself included!) contributed to MobyGames all those years, did they know they were merely building up Value for later Purchase? Will this turn into yet another Gracenote situation? Does anyone now remember what Gracenote did?

Well, this is speculation on my part. Nothing necessarily means MobyGames will soon be ruined. But it is a pattern that’s happened many times before, so let us keep our eyes open. At the very least, it seems like a ripe opportunity for someone to create a new game cataloging site. Me? No no, it can’t be me, I’m sorry, my brain is too full of things, and I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side….

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The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

It used to be that the internet was full of thousands of tiny sites. Many of them might only have gotten a few visits a year, if that, but they were there, quietly and earnestly providing a resource for people who might be looking for it.

One of these sites was ionpool.net, which used to host a listing of classic gaming information. Here it is from its last archived version on the Wayback Machine from December 29, 2020. There’s a lot of links there, and the nature of the Wayback is, unless I check every one of those links, I can’t be sure if any of them will work. The few I’ve tried do, which is something at least.

There’s a lot of interesting documents there, presented in the classic List Of Tiny Links format. There’s far more there than I can summarize in a simple throwaway daily blog post like this one, but I particular point out to KLAX In Three Lessons, a series of Usenet posts written by Lyle Rains of Atari Games himself. In fact, those posts are so interesting that I might call them out in a later post….

Back to ionpool.net. The thing that saddens me is that the site still exists, but instead of providing the information that it helpfully offered back in 2013, now it’s just a black page with a graphic reading “END OF LINE.” This:

I can understand that even the slight resources necessary to preserve a website can, over time, become onerous. But I’d think it would be an equivalent cost to host an image like that, instead of leaving the old content up indefinitely. It was largely text files anyway.

Ah well. There is still the Wayback Machine, after all, slow and incomplete as it might be and difficult to sort through like it is. I can’t help but think that we should have more alternatives, though. The Internet Archive is not forever either.

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One foundational aspect of what we choose to highlight, though, are the extremely technical things, and wow, in that regard today’s link delivers. The brilliant Youtube channel Retro Game Mechanics Explained, which appears here semi-frequently, did a video on the Atari VCS/2600 game Yars’ Revenge that has to be seen to be believed, if not always quite understood.

It’s been random floating game knowledge for a while that the “Neutral Zone” area in Yars’, a flashing and coruscating band of lights that serves as something of a safe zone for the player’s bug, was the direct result of reading the game’s own code out of memory translated and displayed on screen. After all, machine language opcodes are just data, and the VCS has such a hugely limited address space that any reuse of that data is helpful.

RGME went through the graphics displayed on-screen and tried to see how much of the game’s code could be pieced together using it. The answer was, a fair bit, but not all. The process is really the most interesting part about it. Here it is:

Of particular note, the top comment on the video (because it got pinned there by RGME) is from Yars’ Revenge creator Howard Scott Warshaw himself!

In passing, let me just comment for a moment on what a weird phenomenon Yars’ Revenge is? It’s the best-selling original (non-port or license) piece of software for the old Atari. It’s such a weird artifact. It’s not a traditional style of game design. It’s got atmosphere, and strangely evocative sound. And it has that odd easter egg that can just outright end your game if you’re not careful. It really feels like an object of its time, that couldn’t have both come about and be as popular as it was in any other age. It didn’t inspire many imitators. But, it did come about, and it was popular, and I’m glad that’s true.

I watch this video and I wonder that it seems targeted so directly at me personally, that I wonder if anyone else might enjoy it at all. But then I look at its view count and see it’s approaching 200 thousand in around two weeks, so someone else out there must like it too. So: please watch the video, if you care about bits and bytes, opcodes and operands, and Exclusive-Ors. Or want to learn about those things. If neither is true for you, I’m sure there’ll be something more to your tastes tomorrow.

Reverse Engineering Game Code from the Neutral Zone in Yar’s Revenge (Youtube, 41 minutes)

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It’s weird to think now about the time frame of Atari arcade games. 1972 saw Pong; 1979 was Asteroids, signalling a new direction for Atari in arcades; 1984 was Marble Madness, their first post-crash hit; then, 1991 was Street Fighter II and the start of the fighting game craze, forcing Atari to change direction yet again. They would have some hits from there (like Primal Rage and Area 51), but nothing with real cultural staying power until the era of Gauntlet Legends and San Francisco Rush.

Escape Etc. I don’t think did badly, but it wasn’t a huge hit. You can kind of get an idea of the popularity of one of Atari’s arcade games by how many ports it got. APB, for example, Dave Theurer’s last game at Atari, only got Lynx and European home computer ports, while Rampart (John Salwitz and Dave Ralston’s last game, if we’re noting such things) got a ton of ports to lots of platforms. Escape Etc. didn’t even get a Lynx port, although one had been planned.

This isn’t an Arcade Mermaid post, just another link to a Youtube video review. It’s done in an old style, without a lot of flash, but there’s good things about that too, and the information is both interesting and thorough.

More information on Escape Etc. can be found in this post from Vintage Arcade Gal. It’s text!

The History of Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters – Arcade documentary (Youtube, 27 minutes)

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Page 6: Atari ST software collection – magazine archives

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The video’s states a thing that I have long suspected: Atari 2600 Pac-Man did not itself destroy the game console industry. I also don’t think the other prime suspect, Atari E.T., did it.

If you pressed me, I’d think that both may have been contributing factors, but only as part of a larger trend: stores shelves were inundated with a flood of games at the time, as lots of companies jumped heedlessly into the software market. The opportunity created by Activision, which was famously founded by Atari programmers upset by how they were treated there, which established in court that it was legal for competitors to make their own software for a company’s system, was soon taken advantage of by dozens of other outfits. For every Activision and Imagic, however, there were a bevy of Apollos and Froggos, whose mostly terrible games, in that pre-Internet era, looked about as good to a typical buyer.

Plus, I think there was an element of the bursting of a fad at that time. The success of the Atari 2600 was possibly unsustainable. Even the widely ridiculed VCS port of Pac-Man sold over seven million copies, a sales record that wouldn’t be matched until the middle of the NES’s life.

For more information on the game, and its many other contemporary ports, I refer you to the video.

Atari Archives: Episode 66, Pac-Man (38 minutes)

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The whole thread is useful, but here’s the first post on it, presented as screenshot because WordPress doesn’t yet support embedding that kind of thing directly. I don’t know why it’s so blurry, that seems to be WordPress again.

Chris Trotter’s Capsule History of Atari (atomicpoet.org, a Pleroma instance)

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There are three current ways to play M.U.L.E. One is Planet M.U.L.E., an official port sponsored by Ozark Softscape, which is several years old, and I was certain I had posted here about before. It’s a proper update with new graphics and a lot of character. A thing about M.U.L.E. is that the original versions were intricately designed in a lot of ways, not just in game rules but the little details. The way the phase ending noise speeds up, the exact difficulty of catching a Wampus, the speeds with which players walk through terrain, the many details of auctions, even the time it takes to outfit a mule and leave/enter town, it’s all finely calculated. You can tell that Dani cared deeply about the game, and it’s a polished as any game I’ve ever seen, and that’s the old 8-bit computer versions. Planet M.U.L.E. isn’t as polished, but it’s still very nice, and you can tell its makers thought hard about it. It offers both local and online play.

Sadly, Planet M.U.L.E. seems to be on life support. While games can still be played, and the automated best player posts still go up on its blog, it’s not gotten an update in years, and it’s even possible they’ve lost the source code.

One legacy of Planet M.U.L.E. is a wonderful Youtube video they made that explains the game and how to play. It’s a great introduction:

M.U.L.E. Returns was a mobile port. It has a website, that’s still around, but apparently none of those versions are available. It’s got a page for a Steam version, but it’s not available despite the original game being released in 2013. The site claims it may come back some day, but it cannot be purchased currently.

Then there’s the new roboanimal on the block, M.U.L.E. Online, which is on itch.io for a very reasonable $5. It has the blessing of Ozark Softscape, and is a near match for the Atari 800 version. You won’t get any improved graphics or sound here, but you will get a game that copies the original very closely, which is perfectly fine in my opinion. It offers local single and multiplayer, as well as internet-based online play. They also promote a board game version of M.U.L.E, which I’ve long wanted to try!

Or there’s emulation. Back in college I played M.U.L.E. with roommates via an Atari 800 emulator burnt to a Dreamcast disk, a great way to play if you have the system, controllers and means to construct the disk because the Dreamcast has four controller ports. (M.U.L.E. is by far at its best when you have four people playing.) The Commdore 64 and IBM PC versions were also made by Dani and the others at Ozark Softscape. The C64 port is close to the Atari 8-bit version. I don’t know about the DOS PC version. I can say that the NES version made by Mindscape is a terrible version, while sadly possibly the most-played because of the great popularity of the NES. If you tried that version and wondered what the fuss is about, you should seek out the Atari 8-bit version and play it before writing off the game entirely.

World Of Mule is a fansite dedicated to M.U.L.E. in all its forms. For its 40th anniversary, they’ve published a long retrospective on the game, its history and the new versions. (That’s where the above image comes from.) It’s a fitting tribute to one of the most influential computer games ever made.

Long ago, on primordial wiki-like site everything2.com, I personally wrote a long examination and play guide to M.U.L.E. While my writing style back then was pretty crazy, I think the information holds up. If you have an interest, you may want to take a look.

Planet Mule ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)

M.U.L.E. Returns (versions currently unavailable)

M.U.L.E. Online (itch.io, Windows, Mac and Linux, $5)

World of M.U.L.E. (carpeludum.com)

M.U.L.E. The Board Game (boardgamegeek item page)

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Edit the Frog is back, with a new romhack! And this one’s really amazing.

We’ve mentioned before Vitor Vilela’s hacks that retro a SA-1 (“Super Accelerator”) into SNES games that suffered from slowdown. So far he’s done it with five games: Super Mario World, Gradius III (which really needed it), Contra III: The Alien Wars and Super R-Type. The fifth is the most amazing so far: Race Drivin’.

When the original Hard Drivin’ came to arcades it was pretty incredible, the first 3D racing game that didn’t use scanline tricks to display its track, that rendered it using an actual polygonal 3D engine. It used special custom hardware to make its track and physics possible. Race Drivin’ was less revolutionary, but only because the ground had been broken for it.

It was exactly the worst kind of game to be ported to the Super Nintendo’s infamously underpowered hardware, a 16-bit variant of the venerable 6502 running at about 3.5 mHz, just a bit over twice the speed of the NES. Even from the start, the SNES used in-card accelerators and co-processors to help complex games run: even though launch title Pilotwings made heavy use of the SNES’s “mode 7” graphics to display the game world, it still needed a DSP chip to help it with calculation.

https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Root/tree/master/Race-DrivinRace Drivin’ doesn’t use any accelerator, despite being one of the games most sorely in need of one. Asking a SNES to perform up to the custom mathbox chips in the arcade game was ludicrous, and so SNES Race Drivin’ is looked down upon by many, and probably unjustly: the coding is perfectly all right, it was just asking too much of the system.

Even with a SA-1 you’d think that Race Drivin’ on SNES couldn’t measure up, but Vitor’s hack does quite a respectable job! The SA-1 is essentially a second of the same kind of chip that runs the SNES, with a number of extra features bundled in. It also has some faster memory included on-die, and runs at triple the frame rate. Imagine if this had come out at the time: the SNES game is less than two years older than the arcade version! An SA-1-powered version that matched the arcade so closely back then would have astounded. I see that in a few places on the Super Stunt Track, it drops to 12 FPS instead of the 30 it holds at elsewhere, but it’s still damn slick.

Here is one of Vitor’s side-by-side comparison videos, demonstrating the old version (on the left) and the upgraded hack (on the right):

SA-1 Root: Race Drivin’ (github)

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Those who have been following us for the (gosh) nearly one year we’ve been in operation will have picked up on the fact that we love classic Atari. Especially we love classic Atari prototypes. In my humble opinion, Atari treated the output of their stable of brilliant creators with almost a dismissive attitude.

Developers would make a game completely from scratch, spend months working on every aspect of it, handtooling the assembly code, sometimes for hardware platforms that were created specifically to run it, devote their lives for a time to this project, test it in-house, get reactions, modify it, get it running, get approval to make cabinets and put it out on location test, then have all that work get destroyed. Oh well! Back to the drawing board. That’s what happened to AKKA ARRH.

The only record of all of that effort might end up being those few prototype cabinets put out on test and in the hands of the original developers, and the files in the Atari archives, which were pretty much left out to rot when the company was shut down, and would have been lost to us except for a few people who searched their dumpsters looking to preserve them.

Because of the value of those tiny number of cabinets, collectors guard them zealously, which puts them at cross purposes with the people trying to release the files and get them working in MAME. Two such stories lately have been the prototype for Marble Madness II, which we talked about last year, and AKKA ARRH. (Which, I think, is still one of the best game names I’ve ever heard. It’s fun to say!)

AKKA ARRH’s history is a long story. Long lost except for a few cabinets, somehow, we’re still not sure how, the code got dumped and leaked on the internet. However it happened, that event seems to have uncorked the bubble, with rights-holder Atari (not the same company as the old Atari) commissioning a full remake from Llamasoft and Jeff Minter, the creator of Tempest 2000 and probably the person best keeping alive the spirit of classic arcade gaming.

Minter’s remake of AKKA ARRH is now on Steam. It’s kinda pricey at $19.99, but it looks g r e a t, as you should be able to tell from the trailer below. An emulation of the original arcade game is also in the Atari 50th Anniversary Celebration package from Digital Eclipse, available on Steam and lots of other platforms, which costs more but also gets you many more games, and documentaries and flyers and lots of other plat*.

Seeing that little TM symbol after the logo is oddly heartening. It’s so nice to see this game given a full release, even if only digitally. It’s been a long journey. Welcome home, AKKA ARRH.

* Lately I’ve been chafing against the limits of language. Please excuse my made-up words, I’m kind of sick of having to turn to the same old synonyms, once again, at the moment. You should know what I mean by context here.

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And just look at all the effort that must have gone into this commercial! This isn’t just people sitting in front of a TV raving about a game, these actors are wearing costumes and running from puppet creatures on an actual set! And this may well be the first human actor to ever portray Luigi in front of a camera (he may look like Mario with his color scheme, but his hat says Luigi, and he’s calling Mario for help). It even calls back to the theme song of Car 54 Where Are You. It’s a shame that the game couldn’t possibly have moved enough units to justify this production.

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The podcast Arcade Attack interviews former Atari designer and programmer Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone! His introduction identifies him as the creator of the first FPS. Is he? I do not know for sure, but it seems awfully plausible. I think it’s a little distasteful identifying him by his connection to a genre that, when he created Battlezone in 1980, wouldn’t even exist for a decade yet. Rotberg’s accomplishment feels more profound than that, but Battlezone is definitely foundational!

Arcade Attack: Ed Rotberg interview (an hour 16 minutes)

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Computer issues kept me from filing last week’s report. That is the reason. It is not true that I got so drunk at a Globmas Party that my chemical composition was 50% alcohol. Don’t listen to those rumors! Let us begin.

Dwarf Fortress’ Steam Edition is still the toast of the gaming blogoglobe! A recent update lets you use the original version’s ASCII graphics instead of the high-falutin’ new pixel art skin. So proclaimeth Ian Boudreau at PCGamesN!

It’s funny. Corbin Davenport writes an article at How-To Geek titled Atari’s New Gaming Console Isn’t Dead Yet. But it’s URL is: https://www.howtogeek.com/855757/ataris-new-gaming-console-is-dead/ Don’t you love how URL slugs can reveal a piece’s working title? The article itself is more about how it’s mostly dead, so someone call Miracle Max.

Gavin Lane at NintendoLife discusses the upcoming shutdown of the 3DS and WiiU eShops. You haven’t been able to add funds for a while through the stores, although you could still add them using the Switch’s shop then use that money to buy there. The piece mentions that Nintendo has been almost anxious to close the shops, due to poor sales of the WiiU. You’ll still be able to download purchased software… for a while.

Also at NintendoLife, Liam Doolan interviews a couple of people at Wayforward about River City Girls 2! It turns out that planning began almost immediately after RCG1 wrapped up.

Tom Ivan. Video Games Chronicle. Microsoft and Activision have filed responses to the FTC complaint about their merger being anti-competitive. Creatures of my species are capable of merging together into one blobby whole, which is admittedly quite fun on a boring Saturday night, but none of us are corporations that control massive segments of the console gaming market!

Related, Jezz Corden of Windows Central reports that Microsoft is claiming that Sony’s influence will prevent four specific games from ever reaching the Xbox console platform: Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy 16 (shouldn’t that be XVI?), Silent Hill 2 Remake, and Bloodborne.

And finally, at The Ringer, M.D. Rodrigues writes a long piece about the legacy of the Sega Genesis Ecco the Dolphin games.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Scott Stein at CNet (they’re still around) says his favorite gadget of the year was the Playdate.

Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer says that Tarn and Zach Adams, have become millionaires from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress. Earth blogger John Harris, a.k.a. rodneylives, says they’ve communicated with Tarn several times, including a couple of interviews at Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), and that this could not have happened to nicer people. The article notes that, despite the windfall, they’re being cautious with the money. Steam DF was made specifically because the brothers need healthcare, and whatever long tail DF has is pretty much it, since they aren’t making a sequel or expansion pack.

At Inverse, Mo Mozuch describes the accomplishments of Carol Shaw, creator of Activision’s Atari VCS hit River Raid, one of the first vertically-scrolling shooters, and early woman pioneer in gamedev.

Rock Paper Shotgun’s C.J. Wheeler tells of a situation where the developer and publisher of The Outbound Ghost are feuding, which resulted in the game being temporarily pulled from Steam. Lead dev Conrad Grindheim has accused publisher Digerati of unethical practices, and Digerati claims to have been “blindsided” by the accusations.

Anthony Wood at IGN has a piece noting that, while Sonic Frontiers certainly has vocal detractors, that hasn’t stopped it from selling 2.5 million copies!

There is a great article on PC Gamer from Corwin Hayward about controversy with a certain extremely rare mount in World of Warcraft that, due to a couple of bugs, became extremely unrare among a small base of players for a short while. It’s a primer about the way the game’s loot system has been perceived and exploited for over a decade, and how it finally resulted in the relaxing of a whole category of ultrarare mounts. The article is long but very rewarding!

NPG’s Megan Lim speaks with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on 50 years of Pong. Bushnell’s always been a bit of a huckster figure, but I’m glad he’s still kicking and talking with folk.

Scott McCree at Nintendo Life has a review of River City Girls 2 from favorite developer Wayforward! His premise is that it’s great, but ultimately not really differentiated from the original that much?

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Hello blobs! Welcome again to our recognizable brand of snarky response to gaming media which I am given to understand has not been seen anywhere else over the past 30 years of the internet! I’m so original! Let’s get started….

Well it looks like Atari had the same idea we did regarding putting some of its neglected prototypes out there! Not only has their classic-era unproduced game AKKA ARRH (it’s fun to say!) playable in the Atari 50th Anniversary collection, but W. Shanklin at Engadget tells us it’s getting a remake! One quib with the article though, it says it didn’t get made because it was too hard, but playing it in the Anniversary collection I got rather a few waves in, on my first try? They got Jeff Minter on board for the remake, so you know it’ll be A. great, B. trippy, and C. have cheeky ungulates in there somewhere!

Keith Stuart at the Guardian visited Play Leisure, a UK company that refurbishes and resells classic arcade machines! It’s always nice when we here at Set Side B can link to a Real Publication, something that gets pressed in ink onto paper, that may have a shelf life, and not be purchased by Ziff-Davis and then rapidly shut down.

At PC Gamer, Ted Litchfield mentions surprise at learning that Bungie’s first three FPSes have been available free on the internet for over a decade. I am sure that the free availability of the Marathon games is something that was once generally known about. You remember Marathon, right? Back when Bungie only produced games for Macs? It HAPPENED, honest!

PC Gamer additional item! Joshua Wolens mentions that the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress hit its two-month sales goal in 24 hours! It couldn’t have happened to a nicer elaborate dwarf death simulator! Let’s spin the Wheel of Mortality, it could come up Goblins, Vampires, Forgotten Beasts, Were-Things, Demons, Fluid Physics, or Dwarf Psychosis!

Zoey Handley at Destructoid sparks a dozen internet flamewars with their article listing the 5 best N64 games! Guess what you think they’ll be. My guesses are Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Star Fox 64 and, oh, Mario Party. The answers: Majora and Star Fox, but then they chose Ogre Battle 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and F-Zero X. Which, yes they’re good, but over Ocarina? (Well honestly I think Ocarina of Time is a little overrated, but it’s usually a safe bet? Oh well, to the next item.)

Truly, there is no demographic out there more vulnerable to the marketing wiles of the sexy poster babe than middle-aged male business owners, and the arcade industry has long known this. Rare Historical Photos has a collection of arcade flyers, 90% of which feature variations of the scantly-clad promo lady. Konami’s U.S. division in particular made a lot of use out of them. Those ladies look like they do all their shopping at Girls’s Costume Warehouse.

And Sorrel Ker-Jung at Destructoid reminds us that we don’t have to care about the “Game Awards.” They don’t even have a catchy name like the Oscars, Emmys or Tonys. I wouldn’t even trust them to come up with a good name, because it’d probably be something hamfisted and too-obvious, like the “Miyamoto,” or the “Wright.” Bah!

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