The Flipside of Gaming
It’s 11 years old now but still as ringing and fun as when it was new. If you’ve never before encountered the video tale of the afterlife journey of the shirtless mayor of Metro City from Final Fight, here you go! If you have seen it before then why not have a second look?
The Ballad of Mike Haggar (Youtube, 9 minutes)
Watching a lot of speedruns, as I’ve said before, can give you a distorted view of what video game difficulty is actually like. Speedrunning has been a going hobby for well over a decade now. New strategies are worked out and evolve. If they’re good ones, they become a part of everyone’s runs and are further refined. If they’re not good ones they’re discarded. What I’m saying is, the state-of-the-art advances. It doesn’t recede. People keep getting better. TASes are even more optimized than that, and are at this point really a completely different process, more scripting and exploring program function than playing a game in the traditional manner.
There may come a time, eventually, where, confident that runs have been perfected, speedrun becomes less focused-upon. Then after a period, people may come back and try to match the records of old. Or, maybe people will just stop speedrunning games, at least from the NES and SNES era. Many of these games are deep, but they aren’t an inexhaustible resource.
When you watch a speedrun, even one that’s three or four years old, you aren’t watching the effort of one person, but of a chain of people stretching back. Runners watch each other’s attempts and try to improve upon them. There aren’t many secrets.
Watching speedrunners who have played these games hundreds of times may cause you to think that the games are somehow easy. One way some challenge can still be preserved is in attempting challenge runs, like completing a game blindfolded. Like Punch-Out. Finishing Punch-Out blindfolded. That’s something that people do, but it’s still pretty challenging.
And it’s generally considered that Super Punch-Out!! for the SNES is the hardest Punch-Out game to do blindfolded. I’d think that that would be NES Punch-Out, since Tyson at the end is very random and can knock Little Mac down in a single punch throughout the first half of the first round, but the commentators on this video say it’s SNES Punch-Out, and I believe them. In this race, both players take a defeat at one point! That’s not something you often see at GDQ.
If you know what you’re doing Super Punch-Out is a fairly short game. This whole run (a race between two people) takes about 22 minutes from start to end. One nice thing about this race is that it doesn’t become a case, common in speedrun races, where one player jumps into the lead and stays there the entire rest of the race. The lead changes a couple of times, and is up in the air until the last fight.
If you’ve never encountered Super Punch-Out!! before, you might be surprised by how much it differs from the much better-known NES game. NES is very much a game of pattern recognition and exploitation. The SNES version brings back the two arcade games’ power meter, adds a dizzy mechanic that can affect every opponent, and just has a lot more randomness. Not blindfolded it may be a little easier than the NES game, it doesn’t have any opponents like Mike Tyson. But it still has its challenges, as much personality as the 8-bit game, and further, doesn’t lean nearly as hard on ethnic stereotypes, and those are all good things!
I turned fifty in February. No one believes me when I tell them my age, and for that reason I’m not too loud about it in person-one can very easily get tired of hearing “no way” in response to an admission like that. I don’t quite know what to make of my generally-youthful appearance. I know that things like that don’t last forever, so I’m trying to enjoy it without too much trepidation.
Anyway, fifty years in 2023 is a neat match for the history of commercial computer gaming. I was an early reader, so in the back of my brain I still remember hearing about the introduction of the Atari VCS, a.k.a. the 2600, in 1978, when I was but five. But there is a game system older than me: the Magnavox Odyssey.
The Odyssey was such a strange beast, in several ways. The first commercial TV-based home gaming computer, it didn’t have true interchangeable game cartridges; all of its games were hard-wired into the console. All of its cartridges came with the unit, and inserting a cart simply completed a circuit that told the internal electronics which game to run. The games had extremely simple graphics, we’re talking pre-Pong-level. Games cleverly used screen overlays, with translucent elements, to provide playfields and tracks. The computer didn’t even count score on-screen; it relied on players to keep track of that themselves.
The Magnavox was visible and remembered, moreso than really obscure machines like the Fairchild Channel-F and the Bally Astrocade, enough that it inspired a much more powerful (but still pretty weak) successor with true software called the Odyssey 2, or, as the machine’s trade dress stylized it, the Odyssey2. It’s funny: I have never once in my whole life ever heard anyone call it the Odyssey Squared.
Stories from the time tell us that the Magnavox Odyssey was stymied in the marketplace through an expectation, they say created by its advertising, that one could only use the Odyssey on a Magnavox TV. That wasn’t true, one didn’t need a Magnavox TV to use the Odyssey, but since a major component of each game had to be physically affixed to the screen, and its location and size had to match up with what the game’s design expected them to be, one did have to have the right size of TV to play properly.
The Odyssey was actually a little bit more of a success than commonly represented, surviving its first Christmas season without being discontinued, and even inspiring the production of some cheaper cut-down versions that only played some of the original’s games.
If you’re wondering how this worked out in practice, let’s take a look at Ski, one of the games that the Odyssey played. Here’s a page describing it, which links to its printed rules that came with the machine, and here’s video of two young people gamely trying it out:
Infamously, the patent that Magnavox owned on the Odyssey was used to terrorize the game industry for a while. According to an NPR obituary on Odyssey team leader Ralph Baer in 2014, Magnavox eventually garnered over $100 million on infringement lawsuits, far more than it ever earned in sales, up until the patent expired in the early 90s. Consider: a patent issued on a machine invented before I was born was used to attack game makers into the SNES era. And this wasn’t even a software patent, which I would hope everyone recognizes sucks by now: the Odyssey was a physical machine, and its patent was of the ordinary kind.
(Yeah, it’s 2023 and I’m still banging on about patents. I know there are legitimate uses for them. In some industries, unpatented inventions are ruthlessly copied by others. I’m not here to argue about them in general.)
To play Ski, the player uses the weird two-dial controller that came with the Odyssey, that worked kind of like the dials on an Etch-a-Sketch, to move a square on the screen. The square is the only visual element of the game: the whole rest of the screen is a black field. Over this, the player puts the Ski overlay, which depicts a simple course as a dashed line, winding around drawings of trees and mountains. The overlay is opaque except for the dashed line, so as the player moves the square with the controller, it lights up the line. The idea is to get the square from the start location to the end by one of several routes. The player is “penalized” for hitting obstacles only in the sense that they are left to apply their own penalties: participants are expected to be honest in this, maybe with the aid of a referee to do the time/score recording.
Magnavox developed a new version of Ski, called Ski Festival, that was planned to be released for a successor to the Odyssey, not the Odyssey 2 but a different successor that was cancelled. Little is known about it, other than an image in a sales brochure. People have zoomed in on the image and attempted to recreate the game from it. Video of this valiant attempt is here.
Both of the videos in this post come from the Odyssey Now project (Youtube) from the Vibrant Media Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, which seeks to preserve and provide information on this important console.
I had originally scheduled a post on this for a couple of weeks ago, but WordPress gained what I will euphemistically call a personality at that time, and the post developed a “critical error” whenever I tried to edit or view it. I kept pushing it back in the hopes of being able to figure out what was the trouble, but the trouble refused to be be figured out. So eventually I just remade the post.
Whether it’s intentional or not, if you ask Dall-E to depict a number of classic video game characters or elements, it’ll show itself to be surprisingly clueless. Here’s what I got from it:
From 2016 comes Pac-Pac, a Pac-Man style arcade game for an unusual platform: the Commodore Plus/4!
The Commodore 64 was famously intended to be a family computer that could also play games. The Plus/4 was intended as more of a business machine, without hardware sprites or the 64’s capable sound chip. It still had 64K of RAM though, and some productivity software included built-into the system in ROM. It could also output more colors than the C64, was clocked at a higher speed, and had a simpler design with fewer chips.
Still though, the lack of hardware sprites was a big limiter for games, which remained a driving factor for microcomputer adoption. Having no sprites, in Pac-Pac, the player’s surrogate character and the ghosts are both drawn on-screen in software, which consumes a lot of processor time. The game still runs at a decent rate though, and is fairly fun to play.
It’s best not to play Pac-Pac like Pac-Man. Despite a superficial resemblance it’s much the different game. The ghosts don’t have different personalities, and don’t coast confidently through the maze, but jitter about uncertainly, and randomly. This makes them generally easier to avoid, but it also means they’re prone to camping in the vicinity of uneaten dots. You’ll find you’ll have to lure them away from the last dots in the maze to get to them safely. You’re more likely to lose a Pac from daring their presence a little too closely.
Unlike Pac-Man there are no energizers, so there’s no way to attack the monsters yourself. On later boards the ghosts slowly get more aggressive, and they move faster. There’s also a timer to force you to go after dots. Eating randomly-appearing fruit replenishes the timer by a bit. There are also Question Mark items that appear in the maze, that can produce good or bad effects. They’re usually good though. The only ways to earn extra lives are by earning 5,000 hard-won points or, occasionally, from a Question Mark.
To play it you’ll probably need an emulator, such as the one from WinVICE. RetroArch can play it with its xplus4 core, which comes from the VICE project.
I am informed that the author of Pac-Pac, Skoro, passed away earlier this year. He made a plethora of work for the Plus/4, as shown by his page on Commodore Plus/4 World, from 2019 to all the way back in 1988. 31 years is a good long while, and I hope that the fruits of his labor will be enjoyed for decades to come.
Pac-Pac, from Commodore Plus/4 World
Playing the Super Mario Bros. theme live with a variety of instruments has been an internet video staple for a couple decades now. Here it is with accordion and a harp-like instrument called a bandura:
Thanks to Kevin Rothrock for finding this, and to Maks for finding it on Youtube!
Ultima Online is a wonder. World of Warcraft debuted in 2004; Ultima Online started in 1997. And it’s still going!
When it was new podcasts were not yet a thing! Podcasts arose from the fusion of periodic MP3 audio content and RSS feeds, in October 2000. Yet when UO was new there was an audio show called Battle Vortex that covered it. So we can’t call it an Ultima Online podcast, because those didn’t exist then, but it was a whole lot like one.
Battle Vortex had been gone from the internet for awhile, but now the whole show, 156 episodes, has been uploaded to the Internet Archive! It is a priceless snapshot of the early days of MMORPGs, and it’s heartening to see it housed someplace that will preserve it.
Battle Vortex (Internet Archive)
Yahtzee is Ben Croshaw, the guy who has been making The Escapist’s Zero Punctuation for going on 16 years now. He’s the last vestive of the version of The Escapist before they went in on Gamergate, which it seems like he managed to weather by staying in his lane. While his videos aren’t the pass-around fodder that they used to, it’s kind of comforting sometimes that he’s still around, offering his highly opinionated and profane takes on video game-related things.
Croshaw’s videos cover a very mainstream-populist, triple-A beat that does not often intersect with ours, and frankly often puts me at odds with his opinions. But once in a while he covers a topic that sort of intersects with one of our remits or Retro, Indie or Niche. That’s what we present here today: three times in recent memory that he covered something we generally care about.
Metroid Prime Remastered (generally dismissive)
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope (unexpectedly positive)
Sonic Frontiers (says there’s a couple of good ideas that it then ruined)
St1ka is an interesting Youtuber from Portugal who often covers the Brazilian gaming beats. I should link to him more often when he does videos on his standard beat, as the gaming scenes outside of the US, Europe and Japan don’t get nearly as much exposure as they should.
This time though he is looking at retro gaming with a more general focus, pointing out interesting titles from decades past. They’re not making nearly as many 8-bit titles as they used to, so finding a cool old game you’ve never tried is almost as good as if they were making them now!
The games covered are:
INCREDIBLE 8-BIT Hidden Gems You Never Played (Youtube, 41 minutes)
If blogging is ever going to come back from its loss to social media, it’s going to have to be from going more social itself. By that I mean links between blogs, making it easier to surface sites to others. Not only directly, but by helping to raise each other’s Google rank, although I think time has shown that Google is a fickle friend to people producing material for the Web, any site prominence you gain can easily be wiped away the next time they change their algorithm. Bigsites naturally get traffic just from being established, and other sites try to become big by gaming their placement with hyper artificial SEO techniques. Meanwhile us littlesites have to succeed largely by being interesting and direct views, as well as what traffic we can gather through followers through RSS, social media, Patreon and other sources. And there’s no reason not to help each other out. We’re not in competition between us. Any cross link, wherever, strengthens us all.
Here’s one from me. Retro365 has a vast collection of gaming media from the earlier days of home computing, and has been going for about three years now. They’ve got lots of demonstrated software on their Youtube channel. If you have an interest in learning about, or just seeing this stuff, they’ve got plenty for you.
Here’s a few choice items from their channel. There’s the classic CGA DOS game Paratrooper (the player doesn’t last long, only a minute):
Dungeon! for Apple II, published by TSR themselves in 1982 (32 minutes):
Oil’s Well for the Atari 400 and 800, a variant of the arcade game Anteater (8 minutes):
And a complete playthrough of comedy adventure game classic Sam & Max Hit the Road for PC (an hour and 47 minutes):
Retro365 blog, and on Youtube.
We’re still searching for old game info sites that are still up in 2023. Another couple of use are Video Game Maps, last updated in 2007 but still available, and Revned’s Video Game Maps, which saw its last edit in 2016, but is mirrored on Github.
For the past 20 years it’s felt like any game information you could ever hope to find is out there on the World Wide Web, somewhere, but as both the people who grew up playing these games grow old, and the drive and motivation to start and maintain websites has diminished with the popularity of social media, this is increasingly no longer the case. Sometimes you can find vanished websites on the Wayback Machine, but it’s a lot harder to find things there, Wayback often misses images, their web archives are often incomplete, and server-side scripts are broken by archiving so dynamic content is usually dead, the page contents locked in the state it was at when the time of archival.
VGM: Maps and Strategies! and Revned’s Video Game Maps
I’ve banged this drum a lot lately it feels like, but I have to reemphasize that the internet is not forever, and as Ryan North has told us lately, even the most popular website in the world is one missed bill from disappearing, probably forever. As this happens more and more often, big and well-funded content hosts like Fandom and Github persist, while smaller, independent information sources tend to fall away, which results in a rich-get-richer feedback loop. Independent sources of accurate information are so important, no matter the subject. It is difficult to fault anyone unwilling to keep content up and updated for a large portion of their lives, but whenever it happens, I appreciate it.
So I’ve been trying to celebrate the best, most long-lived websites out there, and NES Maps, and its sister site SNES Maps, qualifies, going back to around 2006. That’s 17 years! And it’s still there, quietly providing maps of just about any NES game you might want to find information on.
It’s not perfect. Their labeled maps of Castlevania III, I discovered just now, are incomplete, cutting off after Block 5, promising that more is coming soon for who knows how many years. But most other games have complete maps, including a number of Japanese-only title. It’s truly a great resource, and I hope they can figure out a way to keep it going for the long term.