Here is a talk by the creator of the brilliant 8-bit platforming game Jumpman (who isn’t Mario). That’s all the lead-in I have time to provide right now. And if you get the chance to try Jumpman, do it. There’s a version on Steam! (Note, the C64 version is preferable to the DOS version.)
The Man Behind Jumpman: Retro Gaming Revealed (Youtube, 58 minutes)
Have you ever played Defender? It’s amazingly difficult! It was described in Craig Kubey’s golden-era video game book The Winner’s Book of Video Games as like being locked in a closet with a swarm of killer bees, and the comparison is apt. It absolutely destroys inexperienced players, and the road to mastery is long. And yet, it can be mastered. People have flipped the score many times over, even if it’s difficult to see how.
This video (18 minutes) from Tim’s Tiny Arcade with Defender expert Joe Dearman explains some of the higher-level tactics of the game.
One thing it doesn’t explain, though, possibly because it’s a fairly basic piece of knowledge even if it’s not obvious at all, is the “International Date Line.” There is an invisible vertical line at a specific place in the game world where the internal coordinate system wraps around. When your ship is being chased by enemies, and you cross that line, pursuers suddenly drop their pursuit, because the x-coordinate comparison sends them all the way around the game world the other way. If you hang out around the IDL, you can immediately escape from chasing Swarmers and Mutants just by crossing it!
Greg’s Game Room on Youtube looked at 28 games with both NES and Commodore 64 versions. It’s not by any means all of them, but a good selection. Usually its the NES version that’s better, but there are some surprising upsets, especially if the game originated on a microcomputer platform.
The Commodore games that won out are Ballblazer, Castelian, Die Hard (but the C64 version’s really different), Ghostbusters, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Q*Bert and (surprisingly) Smash T.V. Decent C64 games that nevertheless lost are Blades of Steel, Commando, Donkey Kong, Mighty Bomb Jack and Super Mario Bros. (rated were both the similar Great Giana Sisters and the recent fanmade version of SMB that uses advanced scrolling tricks). Gyruss, Mario Bros. and Pac-Man were rated at a tie.
No image this time. There’s nothing to take a screenshot of! SjASMplus is, simply, a cross-platform assembler targeting the Z80 platform, the processor that runs many classic arcade games. (I refuse to say “powers,” that’s not what that word means!) If you have interest in writing new games for old arcade platforms, it’s something you’ll need.
It’s the holidays still, and I’m trying to unwind a bit. I’m failing, but at least the effort is there: the effort to reduce effort. Maybe someday.
From the linked page. Piranha is one of a whole category of Pac-Man bootlegs that try to obscure their origin.
I’m considering writing more on the subject of the male-gendered Pac, which I assume is a mere matter of social custom among the Pac-People since they have no genitalia or clothing. Pac-Man bootlegs, in particular, are bizarre and wonderful, even if they often aren’t very fun to play.
But Cam has a nice page devoted to Pac mutants. And these old Geocities-style pages need much more love these days, so for now I’ll link to them. Have a look!
A little remarked-upon aspect of these Pac-legs is how their character name is strictly determined by how many letters long it is, so that they can fit on this screen in the same amount of space that PAC-MAN did.
From a bootleg made by “SegaSA / Sonic.” Appears to have no relation to the Sega we know, or its spiny progeny. One of the few bootlegs that gives Pac-Man himself a nickname.From a bootleg made to work on Moon Alien hardware. These are the “alternate” official names for the ghosts. Are they direct translations of the Japanese ghost names? Those are remarkably ugly ghost colors: hence, this remark.These boring names are from “JPM bootleg,” I assume that is its maker.From NewPuc2, Set 2. The best bootleg names I’ve seen so far, by a wide margin, even if they have nothing to do with their colors or personalities. I can almost forgive the misspellings.
In 1987, programmers Robert Germino and David Todeshini wrote a weird and obscure Commodore 64 game called The Red Obelisk. It barely made a dent in the market, which is kind of a shame. It’s nearly entirely unique, which is a difficult thing to say of any game 36 years after its publication.
Part of why it’s not remembered much today might be how unique it is. It’s mostly a game about alchemy, but not as much in an Opus Magnum kind of way. You’re given an object, kind of like a gemstone, found in an asteroid belt. You shock it with electricity, zap it with lasers, and shoot sound waves at it. All of this is depicted in an illustrated laboratory, with surprisingly atmospheric graphics and sounds. Doing these things may increase its value. You can sell it at any point to earn energy proportionate to its value, which you need to run your ship and guard against hazards, and points. Your real goal though is to create a Red Obelisk
An earlier work of theirs was Sentinel, of which there’s even less information online.
I played a bit of The Red Obelisk and uploaded a recording to Youtube. I don’t do too well. Here is that video (7 minutes):
Both The Sentinel and The Red Obelisk, and another game I think they made called Phaserdome, were included on a disk called Master Blaster put out by Keypunch Software. Keypunch wasn’t a great organization; there are tales of them taking freeware games, scrubbing them of information by which their creators might be identified, and then selling that on a disk. It was before the widespread adoption of the Internet, the World Wide Web was still three years away, so it was easier to get away with that sort thing than it is now.
Later on The Red Obelisk got picked up for an issue of Loadstar, and the veracity of its editors I vouch for completely. I haven’t yet checked their products for the other games. Sentinel is also on Loadstar. The documentation I retyped below suggests they have another game on Loadstar as well. Both The Red Obelisk and Sentinel are on the Internet Archive, but you can get legal and paid-for copies for $15 of the first 199 issues (Loadstar was amazingly long-lived) via LOADSTAR COMPLEAT, still sold by its long-time Managing Editor, my friend Fender Tucker. The Red Obelisk is on LS64 issue 58.
The game is fully described in its instructions, below, so I’ll just give you some of my own impressions. It’s interesting! It has to have something to it for it to have persisted in my memory for so long. I think the game is implemented in BASIC with some machine code routines to handle the real-time portions. This is a perfectly valid way to implement a game; I did it often myself back then. It’s pretty much the only way to get the smoothly-moving asteroids and slick sound effects the game has.
What I remember the most is the Object Mode, where you zap various objects on your workbench in the hopes of creating a hugely valuable Red Obelisk. Everything you do costs energy, and running out destroys your ship, so efficiency is a must. In order to succeed you must take notes as to how each object behaves. Basic directions are given in the instructions: get the Tolerance below 100 with electricity, and the Temperature above 500 with lasers. Is that all there is to these tools? It has been too long for me to remember, but I do remember finding a string of Red Obelisks at one point, so there must be some process to it. Experiment to see what you can find.
The other thing I remember is the noise that your ship makes when you collect an object. All of the sounds in The Red Obelisk are effective, but that noise found a home in my brain when I played it decades ago, and it has never left. I think it probably never will.
What follows are the instructions to the game as included on Loadstar 58, as written by Fender himself, with section headings and minor formatting added by me.
THE RED OBELISK
by Robert Germino and David Todeschini
One of the safest bests of the 21st Century is that treasures will be found in space in the form of small meteors. They may be grey and drab-looking on the outside but inside will be jewels and precious gems, just waiting for the mining engineers to extract them. But it won’t be easy.
If you are a veteran of the universe of STURGRAT (on LOADSTAR #54) you will have an idea of the complexity of 21st Century space mining.
Setting
In THE RED OBELISK you are in control of a mining company. You must gather some object from space and by using the powers of your factory, you can ‘sell’ them for the maximum profit. Your goal, as is any capitalist’s, is to garner as many shekels as you can.
Let me describe your ship first. It is a Sturgrat space mining/laboratory and short-range fighting vessel. It operates in three modes, the Object Mode, the Mining Mode and the Attack Mode. You begin in the Object Mode (which is the inside of your laboratory) where you get a readout of all the capabilities of the Sturgrat.
Object Mode
The most important thing to keep your eyes on is the POWR rating in the lower right of the screen. If this gets too low, you will lose your ship, and, as is shown right above the POWR display, you only have two, not counting the one you begin with.
But your power is running down so you can’t tarry too long making decisions. And believe me, there are a lot of them to make.
You begin with an object on the conversion table. Its type is shown on the left. The idea is to process this object and then convert it into SCORE and POWR. You have to get the tolerance down and the temperature up.
These two values are shown on the left, TOLR and TEMP. You hold down the E key (for the electrodes) for a short period of time and notice that when you let up the TOLR has gone down. Get it down below 100. Press L (for the lasers) the same way to get the TEMP above 500. Since your POWR is going down all of the time, it pays to do these two things quickly and efficiently. They MUST be done for each object.
In the bottom left hand corner is the value of the object (VALU). As a true capitalist, you will want this figure as high as possible before you convert it into cash (SCORE).
You can increase the value of the object by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. Press U and then push the joystick forward and listen to the pitch of the sound. Press the firebutton and the VALU will increase by a certain amount. If you want to increase the VALU faster, push forward on the stick, the pitch will increase and so will the amount the VALU increases when you press the firebutton.
You can get too greedy with VALU. If you’ve increased it too high, the object will be destroyed and will disappear from the screen.
A good Sturgrat miner will write down the TYPE of object and try to discern the maximum VALU an object of that type can attain WITHOUT destroying itself at conversion. Write this figure down, too.
If you convert at too low a VALU, you will only get the VALU, but if you convert it at just below the ‘peak’ VALU of an object, it’ll be transformed into the incredibly valuable RED OBELISK, which, in more ways than one, is the name of the game. It’s up to you to determine each object’s ‘peak’ value.
You cannot do much more in the Ultrasonics mode. Press U to toggle out of it (if you are in it) and then you are ready for conversion. You do this by pressing RETURN. You’ll either (a) convert it for the present VALU, (b) create a RED OBELISK (which pays off handsomely) or (c) find yourself looking at a dreaded FALSE OBELISK. If you see one of these, you have to act quickly and destroy it by firing Caps at it (the F key) or by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. If a FALSE OBELISK is left to itself it will destroy your current ship and its cargo.
Mining Mode
Which brings up the question: Where do objects come from?
You have to space-mine them. Press the SPACE bar to go from the Object Mode to the Mining Mode. You’ll see your Sturgrat drifting through a meteor field. Use the joystick to maneuver around the meteors trying to capture the small, shining object that is floating slowly across the screen. The object must be captured DIRECTLY in the Sturgrat’s scoop. Even a small bit off-line will cause your ship damage.
You have a tractor beam which you can enable with the firebutton. It will draw the gleaming object up the screen where the action is less hectic.
As a matter of fact, the top of the screen is a safe place where you can scoop up hydrogen molecules with your tractor beam and slowly boost your POWR if you are running low.
You can gather up to nine objects at a time or you can gather just one and head back to convert it. To go back to the Object Mode, press RETURN.
Attack Mode
You begin your stint as space-miner with 3 ships and 3 Caps, but as your POWR gets higher (above 1500 megajoules) your Sturgrat becomes more attractive to marauding space-hijackers. When you least expect it you will be attacked.
The message says that you have lost the object on the conversion table and that the marauder wants to know if you surrender or not. If you surrender, you won’t lose your ship but you’ll have to continue with what you have. If you answer N to the surrender prompt you go to the Attack Mode.
This is the arcade portion of your mission. Move the joystick so that the cross-hairs are on the middle of the attacking ship and press the firebutton to fire. Keep an eye on your POWR level. If you are in danger of losing your ship you can weaken or destroy the marauder with a Giga-Gem by pressing the G key.
Giga-Gems can destroy any cargo that the attacker may have, so you should use them only as a last resort. When you have bludgeoned the attacker into submission he’ll ask if he can trade his cargo for his life. If you feel in a benevolent mood (or in a greedy one) you’ll probably do better accepting his offer and letting him limp off into space.
If you choose to destroy the enemy, you may be able to salvage some of his Caps. If you let him live you may get CRGO (objects), Krystals or Giga-Gems. Base your decision on what you need most.
The Krystals (KRYS) cam be converted in the Object Mode by pressing K. A Krystal is mainly a bonus score you get for defeating a marauder and being kind enough to let him slither off alive.
That’s about it. It will take a little practice with the controls of your Sturgrat but soon you will be grabbing objects and converting them like crazy hoping to find a level for each TYPE of object that will give you a RED OBELISK. As your POWR rating goes up you will have to fight off space-raiders more. Try to get the highest score so that you can head back to Earth a rich man.
As for the trip back to Earth, that’s another game, but one I’m sure Bobby and David will be creating soon. Sturgrat rules! Long may it run.
DISK FILES THIS PROGRAM USES: RED BOOT, RED BOOT 2, RED OBELISK, SPR1, T.RED BOOT
If it’s generally entertaining, I try to save game-related animations and cartoons for Sundays, but this is probably interesting more for how it illustrates how the Pac-Man propery is changing. Yes, it’s another excuse to rant a bit about how Pac-Man’s lore is changing under Namco’s direction, like in the Baby Pac-Man post!
I recognize that Bally/Midway’s taking the lead on Pac-Man promotion and lore amounted to a bit of cultural chauvinism. In the early 80s, U.S. licensors of Japanese arcade games would outright put their own copyright notices on games. When I was a kid and Pac-Man fever was running at 104 degrees (Fahrenheit), I knew that Bally/Midway was a thing that existed, but nothing at all about Namco. They filled that widespread ignorance of the game’s origins with their own lore, starting with Ms. Pac-Man, and it’s surprising that now, long after their deal was dissolved and Midway games division consumer games division shut down, that their lore survived for so long.
Tengen’s first release of Pac-Man for NES, with Hanna-Barbera cartoon character designs. Image scavenged from an Ebay listing.
A lot of that has to do with the enduring popularity of Ms. Pac-Man. Other Bally contributions like Jr. Pac-Man haven’t proven nearly so enduring. Another part of the U.S. Pac-Man lore, that has ended up exerting a strong, almost unhealthy, influence over their property has been the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show, yes the one almost no one remembers except for its weird Christmas special, from 1982. That thing got two seasons, alongside likewise forgotten (and less durable) properties Richie Rich and The Little Rascals. H-B’s version of the characters continues to pop up randomly in different places, like the cover art for the original version of Tengen’s release of Pac-Man for NES.
The Hanna-Barbera cartoon was a strong influence over the art design and music of Pac-Land, which means among other things that that weird cartoon is now echoed in Smash Bros. Ultimate. Shh! No one tell Warner Bros!
Okay, time to spiral on down to the point of this post. A “pop-up store,” it seems, is a “retail concept” that involves setting up a small store for a limited period of time, often with a strong theme or a focus on a single brand. Kind of like a micro-sized version of Spirit Halloween.
Namco experimented with a Pac-Man-themed pop-up store in Japan in 2016. They called it “Pac-Store,” and they came up with its own idiosyncratic take on the Pac-Man lore for it, and made a series of short web cartoons to promote it. They’re still on Youtube, but they’re collected into one video by The Pac-Man Archive. That’s what is embedded below. Even though it’s mostly in Japanese you should watch a few minutes of it, if just to see how Namco has retconned the history of the hungry yellow sphere.
Like gag me with a spoon, it’s Pac-Marie! I love the Pac-gloves on this style of character.
From Ghostly Adventures: Pac-Man and friends who I don’t even care enough about to learn their names. UGH. That’s a lot of detail spent on the idea of Pac-shoes. Image from Gamespot.
Pac-Man has two assistants, but they’re not Ms. Pac-Man or Baby or Jr. They don’t even have “Pac-Mom,” Namco’s more-recent recreation of Ms. Pac that isn’t burdened by AtGames’ licensing with Ms. Pac-Man creator GCC. Instead, Pac is backed by “Pac-Marie” and “Pac-Little.” Keep in mind that the horrible “Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures” TV show was released around 2013, and its characters got unfortunately crammed into at least one iteration of Pac-Man Museum (the one I have on Steam). It’s interesting that they didn’t use those for Pac-Store. Maybe Namco was already coming to realize that Ghostly Adventures was destined for purgatory.
I actually don’t hate Pac-Marie, she’s got a fun design, and it’s not like Pac-People have much to distinguish them anyway. She’s still a hell of a lot more appealing than anything from Ghostly Adventures.
Pretty dry today, a tale on the blog Retro365 about the creation of Apple Galaxian, early action gaming hit for the Apple II, and how it helped establish classic computer publisher Brøderbund, who’d licensed it from the Japanese company Star Craft. It was sold in Ziploc bags, and was an immediate hit.
Here’s what Apple Galaxian looked like in action:
Brøderbund would go on to release many more wonderful programs for home computers, eventually publishing Lode Runner and Myst. Star Craft was still in operation in Japan until 1995. Anyway, please follow the link, it’ll help make up for me having to enter the crossed-o in Brøderbund’s name so many times!
Over on Mastodon, Dan Fixes Coin-Ops has been documenting an epic quest: the repair of a Baby Pac-Man machine.
It’s one of the non-Namco Pac-Man spinoffs that Bally/Midway released in the wake of the original’s extremely high popularity. I’d like to remind readers that while Namco has been the sole beneficiary of Pac-Man’s heights lately, the original game, at first called Puck-Man in Japan, was not popular there. The spin-offs, console ports, handheld games, trading cards, stickers, clothing, cartoon show, Christmas special, breakfast cereal and unnumbered other items, that was all Bally/Midway’s doing. Toru Iwatani created and designed it, his team made it into a game and cabinet, Namco released it in Japan to middling success, and from there Bally/Midway got behind it and turned it into one of the most gigantic video game hits there’s ever been, a machine that at one point had one hundred thousand units.
Now, I’m not going to deny that their effort led to some erasure of knowledge of Namco’s existence at the time. All those Pac-Man machines and spin-offs mentioned “Bally Midway Mfg. Co.,” with nary a mention of Namco. But it’s undeniable now that erasure is happening in the other direction: a search over the History page on official Pac-Man website has no mention of Bally at all, even though the page acknowledges that the game was “a major hit in the United States.”
Some of that success leaked back to Japan and fueled some Namco-made sequels: Super Pac-Man, Pac N Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Arrangement and eventually Pac-Man Battle Royale and Pac-Man Championship Edition, and more recently things like World’s Largest Pac-Man and Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompionship.
Bally/Midway made their own sequels. One of those, Ms. Pac-Man (created by GCC), came to eclipse the original in popularity, but in addition to their licensing of Super Pac-Man and Pac N Pal they made Jr. Pac-Man (also from GCC), as well as Professor Pac-Man and this game here. The one Dan Fixes Coin-Ops repaired. Baby Pac-Man.
Baby Pac-Man is a game that only could be made by Bally, because it’s a video game/pinball hybrid.
Bally, together with the company that would buy them, Williams, is arguably the greatest pinball maker there’s ever been. Up until around 2000 (a heartbreaking year) they made wonderful machines like The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack From Mars, Star Trek: The Next Generation and quite a few others. In 1982 though pinball was in a slump while video games had reign over arcades. The decision to make a game that connected one of the greatest arcade games of all with pinball must have seemed obvious. (It wasn’t their only attempt to capitalize on their golden license with a pinball table, witness Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man, which I’m informed was released eight months before Baby Pac-Man.)
The combination of an arcade video game and pinball makes for a unique experience. It also makes for a game which breaks down even more often than your standard arcade game, as the thread notes: there’s three computers in the thing, and it’s subject to all the typical arcade game problems, all the typical pinball problems, and special problems with the portions of the machine that connect the two halves together.
The thread begins memorably:
In case y’all were tired of hearing about popular Fediverse people making bad decisions, just thought I’d let y’all know I bought a 1980’s hybrid pinball/videogame tonight
Like this isn’t for a client, I’m not working on it to earn. This game COST money. This is my game now, I paid for it and it lives in my house. I’m not gonna get to give anybody a bill.
This is such a perversion of the natural order of things. I’ll probably route it one day, but for now this is an arcade machine that I SPEND money on!
It’s taken me a little while to get it into the house and have a chat with the mate who sold it to me and let the littleun have a go and put her to bed and fix a couple things and have a go myself so I’ve not been catching up on my notifications, I saw some questions so I’ll do a little thread on it over the next couple of days
I cannot stress enough that you should not buy one of these things
Folk who like 80’s pinball want stuff like this or Haunted House and you shouldn’t buy a Haunted House either
These are games for pinball techs or people with money to hire pinball techs or very close friends of pinball techs
Except Baby Pac-Man needs you to be friends with an arcade tech too.
He finally got it working after three months of work, and what a journey it is. He did it for love of the game: while Baby Pac-Man is dissed in some circles it’s a genuinely interesting game. But to like it, you have to abandon the relatively lenient expectations of classic arcade video games. Pinball is inherently unfair, and that unfairness oozes out and coats even the video portion of Baby Pac: the ghosts don’t waste time in coming after you, and you start with no Energizers: you have to earn them in the pinball portion, which for the most part you can only visit once per life/board. You can return to the video portion temporarily though by locking the ball in a scoop.
Here is the full thread (to date) in Masto Reader, which is a Mastodon version of Threadreader. It takes maybe half a minute to collect the posts and present them though, so to read the whole saga you’ll have to be a little patient.
An interesting video about Baby Pac-Man (although with some bad sound) District 82 Pinball’s here (12 minutes), which covers the tech and gameplay:
Long long before the Switch, Wii-U, Wii, 2DS, 3DS, Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, SNES, Super Famicom, Gameboy, NES or Famicom, there were Nintendo’s Color TV Game 6 and 15.
Nintendo’s second console – the Color TV Game 6, released a week earlier, was the first (Image from Nicole Express)
These were what are now called dedicated game consoles, that can only play games that are built into it. It used to be that these were the only kinds of consoles there were. They’ve made something of a comeback recently, for this is essentially what units like the NES Mini and Atari Flashback are.
The Color TV Game 6 and Color TV Game 15 use the same system-on-a-chip design. As sometimes happened back then, the 6 is electrically capable of playing all the games the 15 can, but doesn’t make the 15’s extra game’s selectable.
The paddles don’t use potentiometers, like nearly every other paddle controller does. They’re switches, meaning no analog control. When your paddle moves up or down, it’s always at a constant speed, making the included Pong-style games play much than on practically every other system.
All of Nintendo’s game consoles have used a three letter designation. The Switch’s is HAC. The Wii was RVL (Revolution), the DS was NTR (Nitro), the Gamecube was DOL (Dolphin) and the Famicom was HVC. This system may have originated way back here with the Color TV Game: it’s code was CTG.
In this video from four years ago, top-level Galaga player Jordan Dorrington gives us advice for how to get far into the venerable arcade classic.
Some of the tips given:
On the first level, enemies never shoot as they enter. Shoot as many of the bugs as you can as they enter the screen.
Boss Galagas never try to capture your ship if there’s only one remaining.
On the first two Challenging Stages, if a double ship is positioned exactly in the center of the screen, you can stay there to shoot the bugs fairly easily and get an easy Perfect.
Starting from Stage 4, some extra will be among the ones that will swoop around entering formation, and will leave the attacking ranks to rush you.
After the first three stages, the game settles into a pattern of four stages. The first three stages of each set have distinct patterns, followed by a Challenging Stage.
The first stage in each set of four has the bugs entering in two mirrored processions from the sides of the screen. The second stage has them entering from one side in double rows. On the third stage they enter from the side in one long string.
Galaga kill screens are difficulty dependent. There’s a game-ending screen on difficulty levels (or “ranks”) A and C. The other difficulty levels loop and continue indefinitely
Basic strategy for cleaning up the remaining bugs is to start at one edge of the screen, and as they fly down at your ship, to move towards the other side a tiny bit at a time, to avoid the shots coming at you, and shooting to eliminate as many of the bugs as you can in the process.
If you survive a long time on a single wave, there’s a well-documented bug in the code that causes the enemies to shoot less and less, and eventually cease firing completely. In casual play that’s great, but Twin Galaxies rules are that you cannot take advantage of this bug intentionally.
If you get really good at Galaga, it’s best to play as Player 2, as the first player’s score rolls over after six digits, but the second player’s score records seven digits.
The game’s difficulty stops increasing at Stage 31.
If you’re playing on a difficulty without a kill screen, after Stage 255 you’ll progress to Stage 0. It throws many players off in that the bugs travel at the slowest speed, but their shots are extremely rapid.
The hardest part of the game is recovering from losing a double ship. The game is much harder in single ship play.
