Set Side B

Introducing Simon Tatham’s Puzzles & Tips On Dominosa

I’ve brought up Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection here before. It was then, and still is now, one of the great wonders of the World Wide Web, a completely, utterly free, in both beer and libre, collection of randomly-generated puzzles of 40 different styles and counting, available for pretty much every platform. Not currently for Mac, because Simon’s Mac stopped working, but you’re free to compile it yourself if you can.

Let’s delineate the platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac (with the above caveat), Android, iOS, Java and even Javascript. You should be able to field one of those options, right? And which puzzles are provided? Black Box, Bridges, Cube, Dominosa, Fifteen, Filling, Flip, Flood, Galaxies, Guess (Mastermind without the trademarked name), Inertia, Keen, Light Up, Loopy, Magnets, Map, Mines(weeper), Mosaic, Net, Netslide, Palisade, Pattern (a.k.a. Nonograms, or Picross), Pearl, Pegs, Range, Rectangles, Same Game, Signpost, Singles, Sixteen, Slant, Solo (genericized Sokoban), Tents, Towers, Tracks, Twiddle, Undead, Unequal, Unruly and Untangle. Not only will the software generate an endless of stream of puzzles for you to solve, often with a user-selected difficulty, but some platforms will even print out books of these generated puzzles for you to solve, along with an answer key.

The puzzles I’ve boldfaced are what I call Nikoli-style puzzles. Nikoli is a popular Japanese puzzle magazine, the original home of Sudoku, and has a particular kind of logic puzzle that’s really satisfying to play. They usually have simple rules, but with profound implications, and with some thought you can deduce processes to help you solve them. Sudoku aficionados will immediately know what I’m talking about. The main subject of this post is about one of these Nikoli-style puzzles, Dominosa.

Nikoli specializes in human-created puzzles, and Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection creates its puzzles by computerized process. These kinds of puzzles really are better when set by hand. But that doesn’t mean the automatically-generated kind doesn’t have its place.

Also, Simon Tatham’s puzzles are completely free, don’t track you, and don’t have ads, making them a real rarity in this money-desperate age. If you need any proof that the app stores of Apple and Google are rigged against you, then consider that the Puzzles have been available on both their platforms for over a decade, but their discovery algorithms never seem to surface them. (Here’s some help in finding them: Google Play, Apple App Store.)

To give you idea of what kind of puzzles these are, and to get you on your way to solving one kind of them, here are my observations about Dominosa. The rest of this post is pretty long, so this is your chance to check out if you don’t want basic tips on how to solve it.

Dominosa presents you with a grid of numbers, usually from 0 to 6 (you can choose to solve larger puzzles). The numbers represent the values on a field of dominoes, but the edges between them have been removed, leaving only the numbers of pips that would be on their two sides. Your job is to place dominoes on the field, over the numbers, to reconstruct where they were originally. The puzzle is solved when every number is accounted for, filling the board with exactly one domino of each pair of values, with no contradictions.

I’ll present a series of images representing working out one of these puzzles at a basic level of difficulty. Not all of them are as simple as this.

A Dominosa puzzle, from the Android version of Simon Tatham’s Puzzles.

The way I solve these, I first look through for pairs of numbers. If you’re on a version of the Puzzles with keyboard support, you can press a number to highlight all of its values throughout the board. If you don’t have a keyboard, there will usually be number buttons onscreen that fill the same purpose. There may also be Undo/Redo buttons; if there aren’t, you can use Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-R for that.

I start out by looking for all the zeroes. Here they are:

In a double-six puzzle like this one, there will always be eight of each digit. What I’m hoping to find is exactly one isolated pair of one of the numbers. There’s only one domino with each pair, from 0-0 through to 6-6, so a single pair means that a domino must be there.

No luck with Double-Zero, so I keep going, checking each number in turn. (You can only have up to two digits highlighted at once; pressing a number again turns off its highlighting.)

I have better luck with the 2s: there’s only one adjacent pair. So I click on the space between them to place a domino, as so:

In Nikoli-style puzzles, as you correctly fill out each little bit of the puzzle, it makes the rest of it slightly easier. When you make progress in solving it correctly, the puzzle seems almost to knit together, until the whole grid is complete.

It’s not just single pairs that are useful though. Sometimes you’ll find single triples, either in a straight line as here, or in an L-shape. So long as there aren’t any other adjacent digits of that value in the puzzle, then you know that one of the two possible pairs must be the correct one.

How is that useful? In the below case, there are borders between the digits that the two possible placements have in common. Since one or the other must be correct, the two domino edges that the possibilities share must be edges in the solution. We can mark edges in Dominosa with the right mouse button, or on mobile platforms with a long press:

Above I’ve placed the horizontal edges that the two possible Double-Three locations have in common.

Moving on. There’s a single pair of 4s, so I’ve marked that domino. And there’s an L-shaped arrangement of three 6s. It’s on the outside of the puzzle, so there’s really just one edge to place, like so:

I’ve also started on the second step of the puzzle, looking for non-identical domino pairs. This is where the ability to highlight two different numbers becomes useful.

Now we’re looking for each possible 0-1 combo. There’s three possibilities here, which isn’t helpful.

The process I use is to check for the dominoes with one zero: 0-1, 0-2, 0-3, 0-4, 0-5 and 0-6. After that, the remaining pairs beginning with 1: 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5 and 1-6. When I move to the next digit, there’s fewer to check, because we’ve already done some: 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, 2-6; then 3-4, 3-5 and 3-6; then 4-5, 4-6, and finally 5-6.

Of the 1-2 domino, there’s only two places where it could be, so I can place edges alongside them. Also, there are two 1-6 pairs. But because we’ve ruled out one of them, when we tried the Double-Sixes, there’s only one pair left that could possibly be the domino.

Ah. Now we have one of the best things we can find: a dead-end. A place with a cul-de-sac, where a domino has to go regardless of its digits. Every digit in the puzzle must connect in one direction, and the 3 to the right of the 4-4 has only one way to go, so that must be where the 3-1 goes. And because of the two edges nearby, the 1-2 also has a location where it has to go.

The great thing about these placements is, they weren’t narrowed down from the lack of other pairs of digits. Since the 3-1 has to go there regardless, all the other 1s by 3s on the board can’t be options, so we can place edges between those numbers.

We’re lucky again; each of these edges produces mandatory domino placements, in the same way!

These, in turn, allow us to place another domino, a 1-4, and to block an edge between another 1 & 4. It results in an unfilled region of the puzzle with only one entrance. Dominoes have exactly two ends, so any region containing an odd number of digits is impossible. This lets us place a useful edge, between a 5 and a 6, because if the edge were below the 6 instead, the region would have 11 digits in it.

Continuing with checking for pairs, there’s a triple, a 1-5-1 with no alternatives around them. Since each puzzle must have exactly one 1-5, it has to be one of these two places, so all the other 1-5s in the puzzle must have edges between them.

And that means a mandatory placement for the 1-0.

Hah, I neglected the mandatory 6-2 at the right side of the puzzle! But I did find a single remaining instance of a 2-4, which I filled in.

And then I noticed the 6-2:

We’ve done about half the puzzle now, but really we don’t have much left to do. The 6-2 we place means we can place edges between the 2 and 6 at the bottom of the puzzle, as so:

We can hurry through the rest of the puzzle. There’s a single triple of 3-4-3, so we can place an edge above its 4:

There’s a single 3-6:

That creates two dead-ends, a Double-3 and 0-4, and then a 4-3:

From here, most of the rest of it can be worked out with the same principles. When we get to small areas like this, often figuring out where to place one domino, or even edge, makes the rest of its region obvious. There’s a small region with a single path into it, so the fact that regions can only have an even number of digits comes into play again.

This puzzle is almost solved, so let’s just jump straight to the solution:

As noted before, most puzzles aren’t this easy. Often after you’ve been through all the possible pairs of digits, you still have a significant amount of puzzle left to do. Usually, if you look carefully at the puzzle, you can figure out placements that, if made, will result in contradictions to the rules of the puzzle. If you find one of those, you can then place an edge between its numbers.

There’s a couple more tricks I know of, but they start getting harder to explain easily here. I’m by no means an expert: I’m sure that experienced Dominosa solvers know tricks I have yet to figure out. I also don’t want to explain too much about how to solve these puzzles, as I got a lot of entertainment in figuring out my solving process, and I’d hate to deny that to you. Most of the processes I’ve mentioned so far are pretty obvious implications of the rules. Revealing the less obvious tricks feels a bit like a spoiler.

One great advantage you have in solving Nikoli-style puzzles on a computer is the Undo feature. Like doing Sudoku by hand, if you reach a point where tricks fail you and solving algorithms leave you stranded, you can progress by making assertions, basically guesses, then working them through until you reach a contradiction. There’s a whole strategy to this: you want to make a single binary, this-or-that guess, and to pick an unlikely guess, one that will prove itself incorrect quickly. Then you can erase the marks you made following your guess, and then mark its opposite.

On a computer, you can undo until the point where you made the guess, with Ctrl-Z. On paper, you’d not only have to remember all the marks you’d made since the guess, but you’d have to erase them all, which makes a huge mess. If you undo too far, you can press Ctrl-R to redo the removed moves. It’s really a tremendous aid!

Give Dominosa a try, and see what you can deduce. If you want to try some of the other Nikoli-style puzzles, that feel similar but have a different process, I recommend Loopy, Slant and Bridges.

rodneylives

Grouping Ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man

Ms. Pac-Man. Currently on the outs with Pac-Man rights-owner Bandai-Namco because its origins weren’t with them, and its developer GCC licensed the rights to another party than them, which has given us such travesties as “Pac-Mom.” Which is a shame, because in general Ms. Pac-Man is a better game than Pac-Man. Its four mazes don’t have the nuance that Pac-Man’s does (there’s no one-way routes, for instance), it doesn’t have scatter periods to give the player a breather during each board, and after board #7 its fruit, and the score award for chasing it down, is random, taking an important measure of skill and just throwing it up in the air and shrugging.

But it does have multiple mazes. And its Red and Pink ghosts behave randomly for the first bit of each board (here’s a prior post about that), eliminating the major design flaw of Pac-Man: its vulnerability to patterns. Pac-Man is certainly not the only game to lack substantive randomness, but the nature of its maze-based play is that it’s relatively easy to perform them. So long as you hold in the direction you need to go at least five frames before you reach an intersection, you can be sure that you’re performing a pattern perfectly, making Pac-Man into an endurance game more than anything. Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have that problem.

But that doesn’t mean that Ms. Pac-Man can’t be mastered, and the basis of that is through a technique called grouping. Grouping can be done in Pac-Man too, but if you know some good patterns it isn’t necessary. But in Ms. Pac-Man it’s a key skill, both to make sure you eat as many ghosts as possible in the early and mid boards, and for general survival, for a bunch of ghosts in one lump is much easier to avoid than a scattered mess of four separate ghosts.

David Manning’s introductory video on grouping ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man (20m) is ten years old, but it’s still an invaluable aid for players seeking to master that game.

The basic idea is to understand the ways to move in the maze so that pursuing ghosts take slightly different routes to reach you, so that leading ghosts are delayed just a bit, or trailing ghosts approach you slightly faster.

This time I’m going to leave the explanation to the video, but it’s interesting to think about, and to see if you can apply this information yourself.

rodneylives

Someone Other Than Me Talks About Rampart

It’s true! Thanetian Gaming on Youtube has an 18-minute video about Atari Games’ neglected classic Rampart. Remember back in September when I posted a strategy guide that no one asked for over four days? Judging by his video he could stand to read it, but no matter, I’ll accept anyone talking about my favorite arcade game in a positive light!

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On Gatekeeper Info, Tim Walz and Crazy Taxi

(EDIT: I’m reminded that AOC is a representative, not a Senator. Which is like, lol, if you care about facts or something. Still I’ve corrected it.)

We don’t post about politics much here. This is entirely not because it might drive people away, but it is because much of the rest of the internet is full of it, and we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, and the terrible consequences if the wrong person (you know who he is) wins in the US in just a week. Anyway, many of our readers aren’t even in the US, and to all of you, I say, I envy you.

But a weird bit of news came out involving Kamala Harris’* VP** candidate Tim Walz that both edges into our lane and is an excuse to talk about something I’ve long been wanting to remark upon, about Sega’s classic arcade racing-game-but-not Crazy Taxi.

(* For non US-people: Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President in 2024. **”VP” stands for Vice President, a largely ceremonial role, but should something happen to the President, the Vice President becomes the new President.)

I’ve played a lot of Crazy Taxi. I played a lot of Crazy Taxi 2 as well. I had a Dreamcast, for the brief period it existed, and they were unquestionably great games for that system, with amazing (if Youtube-unfriendly) soundtracks. Well as it turns out Tim Walz has great taste in games, because back then he had a Dreamcast too, and he had Crazy Taxi for it. And he streamed a few minutes of it, with terrific Democratic*** House Representative**** Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

(***”Democratic” refers to the Democratic Party, the US’s left-ish party that currently serves as our feeble bulwark against the hooting forces of awfulness that beset our entire world. ****”House Representative” means a member of the House of Repesentatives, one of the US’s two Legislative Houses. That concludes the US civics portion of our post.)

Most of the stream was taken up with playing Madden, which isn’t in one of our more favored categories, but the five minutes of Crazy Taxi were posted to Walz’s Youtube channel:

I am conflicted about this video. Walz is one of the most personable people ever to be nominated for high office, a genuinely friendly individual. But he isn’t a great Crazy Taxi player. And it might be because he doesn’t know how to do a maneuver called a “Crazy Dash.”

(Let me say now: I don’t even appreciate making jokes that sound like “he’s bad at gaemz lol im voting for other guy,” the stakes are way too high for me to be able to laugh at that. Just, keep it in your hat/purse/gender neutral container, please.)

But this reminded me of something I’ve thought about for a long time, and was driven (heh) home to me over DragonCon this year. There was a Crazy Taxi machine there, at stand-up model, I think with a slightly flaky gas pedal, that made it unreliable to perform Crazy Dashes.

A Crazy Dash is simple to perform once you know how. From a halt, with the gear shift in Reverse, in quick succession shift to Drive and slam the gas pedal. If the timing is right, your car will lurch forward with a burst of speed. And if you do this while driving, shifting to Reverse with foot off the gas, then shifting to Drive and flooring it with the same timing as a Dash, it’s called a “Limiter Cut,” and you get an even greater burst of speed!

Crazy Dashes and Limiter Cuts are essential to even slightly good games of Crazy Taxi, which is why the sit down version of the game puts instructions for how to do them on the control panel, why the Dreamcast version’s manual explains precisely how to do them, and why at least one of the squares in the “Crazy Box” challenge mode is all about teaching you how to perform them. It’s what I’ve come to think of as gatekeeper knowledge: it guards the way to good scores and long games. If you don’t know it, you’re doomed to fail.

Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. Even on the Dreamcast, it’s just a direct port of the arcade version with added modes. Arcade games want your money, and they don’t want to give you very long games in exchange for it, so the next player can step up and put in their doomed quarters as well. But the catch is, if good players can’t have decently-playing games, then people won’t play. I heard it said that the average target game length was 90 seconds, and average means a substantial number of games will come in under that mark.

Yet, I can play Crazy Taxi for substantially longer than 90 seconds. I can go for 30 minutes. And it’s thanks in part to the Crazy Dash and the Limiter Cut, essential knowledge for the reckless cabbies of Faux San Francisco.

Because of the DragonCon Crazy Taxi machine’s flaky gas pedal, I didn’t have any 30 minute games there. But I did manage to make the scoreboard, barely, at 20th place, with a score of just over $5,000, getting (by the inflated metrics of its scoring system) a Class S license. Thing is, I must have watched a dozen other people play the game at DragonCon this year (the arcades there are always super packed), and none of them came close even to my meager score. Because none of them knew how to do a Crazy Dash. It was a stand-up cabinet, which didn’t have that sticker explaining how to do one.

That’s what I mean by gatekeeper information: it’s literally One Weird Trick to stellar Crazy Taxi scores and game times. Once you know how to do it your journey isn’t over, in fact I think that’s where the game starts to get really interesting, and my highest scores on the easiest difficulty are nearly $70K. But if you don’t know how to at least do a Crazy Dash, you will never get a good game of Crazy Taxi, you just have no chance. You’ll just waste too much time accelerating from a stop, and you’ll have to stop frequently to let off customers and pick up new ones. Its just how it’s designed.

There, this is a slightly more respectable score. It’s from my Youtube playthrough!

What amazes me is that Crazy Taxi was a hit, it did very well in arcades and on Dreamcast, and yet still most players never learn this information. And in a way, and understand that I’m uncomfortable with this conclusion, that’s for the best? Like how a crane game set to reflex towards a target winning percentage will be more likely not to drop a piece of plush if a lot of players have recently lost, so too are all those players losing quickly at CT allowing the designers to guard half-hour games behind a simple maneuver that, still, few players will ever bother learning. The alternative is to make the trick harder, or even not to have one, dooming everyone, the casual and the dedicated, to those pitiful 90-second games. That’s capitalism for you.

Which shows, I guess, that the illusion of being able to do better is more important to arcade game success than reality? I don’t know, I’m uncomfortable talking about illusions in a post that started out mentioning politics. But hey, Tim Walz! If you read this and want some Crazy Taxi tips, reach out! And good luck in November, please help Kamala Harris to send That Other Person as far away from public office as possible.

Once you start thinking of it in terms of gatekeeper knowledge, you start seeing it everywhere. One-hit kill action games are full of it, since the first time you encounter any enemy, it’s likely to behave in some way that will kill you. The best action games will try to have an enemy demonstrate unexpected behavior at least once before it’s likely to be fatal. And any time a game kills your character out of basic unfairness, like from a sudden unavoidable death trap, that’s gatekeeper info.

UFO 50, for all its greatness, does this a lot. The very first game in the collection, Barbuta, has an instant death laughably close to the start. Some of its games feel like a sequence of deaths you have to experience, each at least once, before you’re allowed to win. But it’s far from unique in this, and in presenting itself as the history of a fictional 80s developer, it could be argued that it’s mirroring the development of game design at the time.

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Balatro University’s Beginner’s Guide to Extremely High Scores

It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:

The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.

Irrelevant note in passing: the Youtube ID for this video contains four consecutive lowercase ‘u’s.

High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.531³⁰, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.

So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.

With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!

The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.

It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.

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Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 4: Level Strategy

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: Rampart, Part 3: The Phases

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.

Keep Landers away from diagonal shorelines, or you’ll have a bad time!

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.

Caused by too many craters left by Red Ships, this situation cannot be survived. Can you see why?

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: Rampart, Part 2: Overview

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.

rodneylives

Arcade Mermaid: Rampart, Part 1: Introduction

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!)

rodneylives

Mission: Impossible for CP/M

Set Side B’s mission statement is to cover three categories of gaming: retro, which let’s be honest is most of what we do; indie, often the province of blogmate Josh Bycer; and niche, which is usually what all the Nintendo stuff gets filed under.

Well, you don’t get much more niche than the category of CP/M gaming. CP/M, or “Control Program for Microcomputers,” is an ancient OS for 8-bit Z80 computers that recently turned 50. Half a century old! While CP/M was very popular in its era and had a lot of software made for it, much of it is obscure and hard to find now, and in histories of home computing tends to get largely overshadowed by Apple and Commodore. It’s a huge vanished scene, but it can be thought of as the DOS before DOS: the OS that would become PC-DOS, then later MS-DOS, was made as a recreation of CP/M’s API for the 8086 family of processors.

If you think MS-DOS software looks primitive then CP/M will appear to you like the freaking Stone Age. MS-DOS had early adapters like CGA and EGA for graphics, but CP/M had none of those. The point of CP/M was that it ran on a plethora of systems, from manufacturers like Kaypro and Osbourne. Many big microcomputers from the age, like the Commodore 64, TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit line, had add-on cartridges with Z80 processors in them so they could take advantage of the huge CP/M software library. Since the point of CP/M, as would be for MS-DOS later, then Windows after that, was cross-compatibility, it had to run on all those systems. But it didn’t have the IBM PC’s standardized graphics hardware, so little, if any, CP/M software took advantage of special graphics functionality. It’s all terminal gaming.

A beneficiary of the limited prospects for games on the CP/M was Infocom, which released a number of their early titles, including the Zork trilogy, on CP/M, which wouldn’t be held back by the lack of graphics. But other games were made. Many of these titles were reviewed by the ultra-niche blog TechTinkering, which has a Youtube channel, which uploaded video of a lot of CP/M software, including Mission: Impossible.

Mission: Impossible, by Richard Altman, is one of the category of terminal games, which are often played by printing information on the game state to the screen, then asking the player to enter options from a numbered list. In addition to only rarely having real-time play, because there are no visual or aural components to engage the senses, a lot of the weight has to be borne by the gameplay, which often means it’s pretty difficult. It’s of the class of games that can be found in David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games books, games like Star Trek, Lemonade Stand and Hammurabi.

Mission: Impossible is a fairly complex game that I don’t yet fully understand. Here, watch TechTinkering’s 19-minute video on it.

Mission: Impossible (TechTinkering)

rodneylives

M.U.L.E. Turns 40

Dani Bunten’s classic economic simulation M.U.L.E. is one of the all-time greats, still fairly obscure even among people who know and talk about video and computer games, but hugely influential. Wikipedia tells us that Shigeru Miyamoto considers it an influence on the Pikmin games (although other than in theme I really don’t see it).

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)

rodneylives

U Can Beat Video Games: Dragon Warrior III

I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time! U Can Beat Video Games has finally covered the best NES Dragon Warrior, the third game in the series. It was Dragon Quest III in Japan, due to some trademark issue with TSR I think. IV isn’t bad, and has fun characters, but there aren’t as many variant strategies in it, and in the last chapter you don’t get to control the actions of most of your party members. DWIII always gives you full control of your characters, plus it lets you create characters with names and classes of your choosing, meaning, like the first Final Fantasy, you can make completely custom parties and play the game in many different ways. It was the game that spawned the urban legend that the Japanese government requested that Enix release Dragon Quest games on weekends, because so many people ditched work to stand in line to buy it. (I don’t know if it’s true, but the story has often been passed around.)

It’s also the first Dragon Quest/Warrior game that allows for class changing, which resets a character to Level 1 (similar to an human AD&D character who dual-classed), but only halves their stats, and lets them keep all the spells they learned. Since they’re Level 1 again, they gain levels very rapidly for a while, allowing them to quickly surpass their previous heights. It’s kind of an early version of the “prestige” mode of clicker games, where you reset all your progress in exchange for faster progress afterward!

It also has a cool story that eventually connects with the first two games, and has a good variety of activity, including growing a town from scratch like 25 years before Breath of the Wild and betting on monster fights! It’s also got all the challenge of the early Dragon Quest games, with later monsters who can cast instant death spells on everyone in your party at once, as well as doing other horrible things to them.

Because Dragon Warrior III doesn’t pull its punches against the player, the various tricks that the narrator does to use the engine’s bugs against it feel like playing fair, and yet, even with full knowledge of the game and multiple player leveling and cash gaining strategies he still has problems once in a while. It’s a really tough game!

This may end up being U Can Beat Video Games’ magnum opus, at least of the NES era, it’s a really long game that takes three videos, of almost 12 hours total length, to cover in its entirety! Here they are:

EPISODE ONE: Creating Your Party Through to Getting the Ship (3 hours, 59 minutes)