A while ago Displaced Gamers, as part of their great Behind The Code series, did a video about how awful NES Strider’s sprite updating was. Arcade Strider was huge hit and outright masterpiece, a great arcade platformer released right before fighting games took over game rooms around the world, but NES Strider was a wretched thing, full of big ideas but with code woefully unable to live up to them. Imagine a puppy trying to do your taxes. It might put up an adorable effort, but it’s just not going to get the job done.
We linked to their last video examining its malformed construction. Well, Strider is the well of crap that keeps on gushing, and so Displaced Gamers has another video on the subject of the flaws in its programming, this time about its player physics. Walking into walls causes Strider Hiryu to shudder in place; jumping beneath a low ceiling causes him to bump his head repeatedly as his jump continues even though there’s no room to ascent; and his infamous “triangle” wall jump is so wonky that it literally requires a frame-perfect input to pull off, and not even the right frame. You have to jump the frame before you contact the wall!
Here is the new video, which explicates the entire cruddy system. It goes into exquisite/excruciating detail, including tracing the code and examining Hiryu’s X and Y coordinates on a frame-by-frame basis. It’s the kind of deep geekery that I just know you love/hate! Enjoy/despair!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Over on Newgrounds, Yespeace1 remade the opening to the classic 3D Lucasarts adventure game Grim Fandango in Blender. They adhered to nearly everything about the original, so don’t expect a tremendous amount of improvement, but when the first version was so great anyway that hardly matters. The Youtube version is linked below, since it’ll embed here cleanly.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The gaming world is abuzz about speedruns. Speedruns are what gaming since at least Sonic CD call “time attacks,” attempts to play a game while minimizing the completion time. The phrase is a somewhat awkward borrowing from Japanese, as are a number of other gaming terms, like “stage clear” or “level up,” that happened when their gaming culture began to seep out overseas with the popularity of Japanese consoles and games from the time of the NES and SNES. (I am not certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised that the earliest English use of “level up” was in a Final Fantasy game.)
But that’s a digression. Sorry, I tend to make them a lot. Let’s go back to time attacks. Another version of the idea is a score attack, a play of a game with the intent to get a high score. For a lot of the arcade era, score attacks were just how you played video games, and there didn’t need to be a special term for them.
The title screen of the subject of this post (keep reading, it takes me a few paragraphs to get there)
Score in games has become much less important over the years, but it still persists in places. Super Mario Bros. is a notable early game that still has score, but devalues it. If you find a repeatable extra life (like from using a turtle shell to defeat a lot of enemies), you can mint points, that is to say, earn scores that are arbitrarily high, by getting the life and all the points up to it on a level, dying on purpose, then repeating those actions on the next and successive lives.
It took a long time but that was the beginning of the death knell for the importance of score in games. It didn’t help that, while score is important in a way in Super Mario Bros., since it’s a frequent award and needed as a spacer before the game starts awarding extra lives, it’s used for nothing else. Super Mario games will grant extra lives at the drop of Mario’s ubiquitous hat, but they won’t give you any just for earning points.
One game that does earn you extra lives for scoring points, interestingly, is Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Not the first Sonic game, which takes more of a Super Mario approach, but both Sonic 2, and all the versions of Sonic 3, give you an extra life for every 50,000 points you earn. They also copy Mario’s gimmick of scoring more points if you can defeat enemies without landing from a jump, or destroying blocks. Although unlike Mario’s progression of something like 100, 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, it’s more like 100, 200, 500, then 1,000 a few times, then suddenly 10,000.
Both series are keen to give you all these points, but other than Sonic’s extra lives, they aren’t good for much. Super Mario Bros. 3 gives you a card-matching minigame for every 80,000 points you collect, and sometimes other rewards if you match score digits with each other. Sonic was content to have extra lives be the main reward for high scores, even if the rest of the game gives you plenty of extra lives anyway. More recent games seem to be phasing out even the notion of a life counter, which has given them rather a dearth of things to reward players with.
Well, my plea to gamedevs of the current age is to reconsider score! It’s not a bad measure of player skill, if you design it carefully! It’s easy, if you’re careless, to allow the player to create score loops, which make a mockery of scoreboards, but it gives players something to shoot for other than just game completion.
Score can make for an interesting alternative to plain old time attacks, since it lets the designer create alternative rewards for skillful play. That is why I find score attack romhacks to be interesting, especially when they provide a purpose for score beyond just an increasing number.
That number at the top of the screen is your score. It quickly counts down; don’t let it hit zero!
The focus of this post is a score attack mod for Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Even though it uses score to award extra lives, this hack rips that out, and instead makes the player’s score into a life meter of a sort. You start out with 5,000 points, but rapidly lose points. In addition to the normal kinds of in-level scoring, you get 50 points for every ring you collect, 1,000 for crossing a checkpoint (which otherwise don’t work) and 2,000 points for each extra life found in a level. When you get hit you lose some points, but can earn some of them back by collecting the rings that spill out. On the other hand, you don’t get the score awards you would normally get for finishing a level, so no 50,000-point time bonus if you can finish Emerald Hill Zone 1 in less than 30 seconds. The Special Stages have also been disabled, so those can’t be used to milk bonus points either. The score countdown stops when you don’t have control over Sonic, when you’re invincible, and when you each the end of a level (passing the goal sign or beating a boss).
The game has included instruction screens, which is a nice touch even if not strictly necessary with romhacks.
There are no lives really; if your character dies, you restart the level with the score you had when it began, mine 5,000 points. That takes care of score loops, since you don’t carry over any points you earned before dying. That makes the game a bit hard for casual play, a frequent issue with romhacks, but an interesting challenge for Sonic 2 experts.
You can customize the game to your liking with a variety of cool options!
The hack is playable under a number of rules, and with either Sonic, Tails or Knuckles, with each character’s signature moves and abilities. The drop dash from Sonic Mania is even enabled by default. And SRAM support has been hacked in, in order to save your best scores.
It’s an interesting modification to the game to support a different style of playing. If you enjoy the classic Sonic games, you might want to give it a shot!
Quick intro this time, because I don’t really know much about the Atari ST, but there’s a huge trove of public domain software for it from the archives of Page 6, as well as magazine archives!
This is a big one. Youtube channel Atari Archives usually makes videos that average around 16 minutes in length, with the occasional entry that goes up to twenty or, once in a while, even thirty minutes. Their entry on Atari VCS/2600 Pac-Man, the infamous title that many claim destroyed the video game market in the US in 1983, goes for 38 minutes. (Their side episode on the Bally Astrocade is 48 minutes long, but it covers the history of an entire platform.)
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.
I’m surprised these folks are still around! The Intellivision was an ancient property even by the time the Blue Sky Rangers were founded, and their site is still up, even now in this blasted dystopian year of 2023.
They’ve been making collections and remakes of, and retro consoles containing, the old Intellivision games since 1997, and once in a while they make a new package to keep the memory of the old games alive. My own shelf has the Gamecube version of Intellivision Lives on it.
You might find it edifying to visit their site. That is my hope. My dream? Look and see.
More low-effort posts about game things spotted at Atlanta’s pop culture mega-convention.
A Cosmic Smash cabinet!
That recent arcade port of NES obscurity Mr. Gimmick!
A 2007 arcade version of Rhythm Heaven, completely in Japanese! This was perhaps the coolest game at the convention.
Sadly blurry in this shot, but: Space Invaders! Without the color overlay though. The monitor didn’t work for like two entire days, too.
Twilight Zone pinball, this picture being of the time I nearly completed the door but lost my last ball before collecting that hated Question Mark! (Don’t worry though, the next day I came back and did it, and played Lost In The Zone. I left with the #2 score on the machine–although oddly, it seems someone else who plays these games also has my initials? JWH? Their Terminator 2 machine’s scoreboard is full of JWH but I’ve never played it!)
The games were brought this year by Save Point, who mostly provided Japanese games and some pinballs, and Joystick Gamebar, which provided a good number or retro arcade machines and more pinball, including that Twilight Zone.
Two of the people who helped bring us the games from Joystick Gamebar this year, Winston (left) and Brian (right)
I’ve got hundreds of pictures that I’ve yet to sift through. More tomorrow!
I love BASIC! I don’t make a secret of it. It was the product, even before DOS, that launched Microsoft. It was invented to be the language to bring programming to the masses, and, for a short time, it fulfilled that function. (These days, if you want to learn coding, I suggest Python. Not only is it a lot more capable and modern, but you can actually get a job writing it.)
Used to be if you had a new computer you wanted families to buy, you had to have a version of BASIC to ship with it. The Apple II had two, one written by Steve Wozniak himself. Right off the top of my head, computer systems with BASIC, go! Altair, Apple II, Commodore Pet, Vic-20, 64, 128, Plus-4, 16, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80, MS-DOS, Windows (Visual BASIC carried the torch for many years), and, most improbably, the Atari VCS/2600, in its BASIC Programming cartridge, an effectively useless cart for its stated purpose that’s nonetheless an excellent hack. The machine has 128 bytes of RAM, but it can still run BASIC, by jove.
The Famicom has a version of BASIC too, coming in at the end of the language’s heyday. Over on the Peertube instance diode.zone, user RE:Enthused did a two-part introduction to it that may be of interested to people who still think in terms of FOR/NEXT loops.
Let’s look at Family Basic on the Famicom, Part 1 (8 minutes) and Part 2 (17 minutes).
Snail Maze, a really simple game (image from article)
It’s not really that deep a game, just a simple timed maze race, but it’s something, in case you got tired of Hang-On and Astro Warrior. Mike (no last name given), the maintainer of the blog Leaded Solder, decided to take that game and make a cartridge for it, so it can be played on any Master System, not just the early units that had it built-in. It’s a story of electronics work and 3D printing, of ColecoVision cartridge simultarity, roadblocks overcome, and ultimate victory. Here’s some appropriate music to listen to while reading it.
When we talk about the old days in computers, there’s easily several eras we could be talking about. There are people who consider the Wii/PS3 era to be the Ancient Times, for after all they were both released in 2006, 17 years ago. They’re almost old enough to drive!
I consider the “modern era” of gaming to have begun with the Dreamcast/Playstation 2/Gamecube era, for in my view that was when, with skilled art design and coding, and modest requirements, one could reasonably generate a realistic scene. Take a look at Crazy Taxi and Soulcalibur on the Dreamcast, both have graphics that seem a little simple now but easily hold up, while the Nintendo 64/Playstation generation has to cut too many corners with their 3D graphics generally.
You can from there go back through the generations: the 16-bit era, the NES/SMS era, then the Atari VCS/Intellivision/Odyssey2/Colecovision era. There’s also the era of home microcomputers, Apple IIs, Commodore 64s and Atari 8-bits, among others, a time that really has no comparison before or since.
But even that wasn’t the beginning of computer gaming. Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atari and the gleaming manufacturers, there was an age undreamed of, when shining timeshare systems lay spread across the world like Big Blue mantles beneath the stars. That was when computing may well have not even meant using a monitor, but instead entering data through a kind of typewriter, with your text appearing on paper, and the machine’s output would also appear on that paper. While that was a time where computing was still new and expensive, and people rented time on big mainframe machines with, at the time, ludicrous resources. The IBM System/370 Model 145 had 500 whole kilobytes of memory, and 255 megabytes of disk space. Such a machine would be partitioned out to many users, who each had accounts on it, and would be served by the processor concurrently. And they liked it!
Two covers for BASIC Computer Games, the common later “Microcomputer Edition” and an earlier one.
And before even teletype machines, there were punchcard systems, and the oscilloscope screen on which Tennis For Two was played, but for this post that’s going back a little too far.
This was the time in which David Ahl’s book, BASIC Computer Games*, appeared on store shelves. It was first published in 1973. When I was younger I had a copy of it, given to me by a relative, but it was already a relic by then. I once spotted it on a store shelf, gamely offered for sale despite it being probably around 1991 at the time, a good lifespan in a genre of book nowadays considered disposable. Remember, Pong debuted at Al Capp’s Bar in 1972**. There was a thriving culture of computer gaming even before the first commercial video games were sold.
(* Note 1: While it’s often forgotten now, BASIC is properly written with capital letters. It’s an acronym that stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. That’s not as tortured as, say, “GNU’s Not Unix.”)
(** Note 2: Pong wasn’t the first commercial video game. That was likely the Odyssey, or Nutting Associates’ Computer Space. I don’t want to get into it here. This comment is here largely to satisfy my own obsessive/compulsiveness.)
Super Star Trek. The text of the book indicates that versions of the Star Trek text game existed since “the late sixties.” Remember, the show aired in the late sixties. People were playing Star Trek on computers while Star Trek was airing on television in first broadcast.
BASIC Computer Games, and its sequels More BASIC Computer Games and Big Computer Games, record, as program listings, a couple hundred old computer games and other entertainments much as they existed at the time, which makes it an incredibly important book for software preservation and computer historians, I’d think anyway. It has listings for a version of the “Star Trek” text game that was popular at the time, and that even once inspired a vectorscan arcade game from Sega, as well as a good number of other amusements.
I say game design doesn’t go obsolete, but it’s true that current expectations of what computer programs should do, let alone games, are not met well by the programs in the books. Still, they can be fun to interact with, for a while at least, and a project exists on Github to update all of the programs to a variety of current (I refuse to say modern) programming languages.
You can also obtain the software in .bas files compatible with Vintage BASIC, a reimplementation of classic Microsoft BASIC for current OSes including Windows, Mac and Linux.
Spare Change is an odd little Apple II game from 1983, where the player tries to thwart mischievous creatures who escaped from an arcade game, who are trying to steal quarters from the machines. One of Broderbund’s earlier hits, although it never gained the recognition of Lode Runner.
Such a charming little game
Do you not only understand this, but enjoy reading it? Then this should be very interesting to you.
Spare Change, in addition to its various little features like animated intermissions and customizable difficulty, also had a pretty strong copy protection scheme. These schemes served to prevent casual copying at the time (although cracks of all the popular titles inevitably started making the rounds on BBSes), but also serve to work against software preservation. Spare Change is 40 years old now, and disks fail frequently. There is an available crack, but it’s said to be missing an important feature: it fails to save their high scores to disk.
4am is the famed preserver of classic Apple II software, performed by dint of figuring out their protection and removing it as unobtrusively as possible. His account on Twitter (I refuse to call it X, I don’t even like saying Xbox) made for great reading for people of a technical mind. He isn’t on Twitter any more for, I dunno, some reason, but he still posts his cracks, and his explanations for how they work, to the Internet Archive, under the 4am tag.
All this is to say his crack of Spare Change makes for entertaining reading to one of the right mindset. One of you may have it, so here it is.
The Atari brand has been in so many hands, and been used for so many things (including, most recently, NFTs and hotels) that making sense of it all is maddening. Christ Trotter on the atomicpoet Pleroma instance made a fairly lengthy series of posts laying it all out that, to my eyes, is accurate. He may actually know more about their history than I do, although pride makes me loathe to admit it!
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.
