Category: games

Metroid: Dread diary 3

Nintendo
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I’m exploring Artaria, I am starting to explore the new area that I opened up by lowering the water level in the room guarded by the EMMI-025M, when a section of the floor gives way, like a trap door opening, and before I know it I’m sliding downward.

Somehow, I stumbled into a new area, and before I knew it, I slid into a low corridor that lead to a chamber with a boss fight. I wasn’t expecting this and I feel off-balance and unprepared, but there’s no turning back. I have to fight.

I love this. So many video games prepare you for a boss fight by making it very obvious that there’s a difficult fight ahead. They practically put a billboard on the pathway to the boss’s arena that says “BOSS FIGHT AHEAD LAST CHANCE TO SAVE AND TOP OFF YOUR HEALTH AND POWER.” This time there’s none of that, and without warning I have to do battle, survive or die.

A robotic-looking metal eye occupies the room, and when I fall into the arena it wakes up, looks at me, and then moves upward to the top of the room. It’s on.

But it’s a bit of a letdown from there. Weak-looking lasers shoot at me lethargically every few seconds, and what looks like the rinkas from the original Metroid’s Mother Brain chamber emerge every few seconds as well and slowly float towards my location. Both are so easy to dodge by just stepping aside, there’s barely even a need to jump.

The eyeball is up at the top of the room, in the center, and I can aim upwards and blast away at it with my arm cannon. Regular shots don’t seem to affect it, but missiles and charge beams do. Dodging its fire is easy. I just walk right and left every so often when I need to get out of the way of one of the slow-moving attacks, and aim up and blast the eyeball when I’m under it. My current missile capacity is 21, and I shoot all of them. After a few shots, the armor plating on the eyeball blows off, and it’s exposed. A few of my shots miss, but mostly I hit it. The very last missile does it, it blows up, and I’m rewarded with the Omega Beam again.

I need to use the Omega Beam to blow open the only exit to the boss fight chamber. The EMMI-025M that has been stalking this general area is alerted to my presence, and is apparently drawn to the Omega power. I guess I have to fight it now. I’ve done this once before, how hard can it be?

EMMI-025M is at full strength, while the first one I had defeated was damaged when I encountered it. EMMI-01P was dispatched with an Omega charged blast to the face plate, but this time the attack doesn’t seem to phase EMMI-025M, and it keeps coming. I run and get more distance, then charge up my shot and hit it again. It still keeps coming.

Due to the imprecision of the Joycon thumbsticks, it’ not very easy to aim the Omega beam, and I’m not sure if I’m missing, barely, or if the EMMI just needs to take a few hits before I can defeat it and move on. I reason that since this one is in better condition, it would make sense if I need to blast it a few times, but I’ve run up against it a dozen times and on my best runs I’ve managed to hit it maybe 3 times, and it doesn’t seem to have taken noticeable damage.

My major criticism of the Switch hardware is that the joycon analog sticks are terrible, so I’m feeling handicapped by the hardware. I can Switch to docked mode and use a pro controller and maybe get a bit of advantage, but it’s frustrating not to be able to get the most out of the Switch by being able to use it as a handheld due to the poor control offered by the Joycon thumbsticks, when this hybrid console/handheld concept was the main selling point of the system.

So it seems that the way to do this fight is to keep your distance, charge up an Omega shot, and nail the EMMI in the face with it, then run, get more distance, and repeat. All you have to do is avoid screwing up and getting caught, and ideally not miss your shots when you take them. It doesn’t seem that hard, and if it weren’t for the imprecision of the joycons, I’d probably have done it on the first try.

After about a dozen or so attempts, I finally figure out what I’m doing wrong. The door to exit the boss room is actually a mini-tutorial for the way to fight the EMMI. I didn’t realize it at first. The door takes two types of Omega blast to open. First you have to hit it with a sustained burst of rapid fire, which blows off some kind of shielding. You can see the shielding heat up with an orange glow before it fails. After that, you hit it with the charged Omega shot that you used to take down the first EMMI you encountered. Because I thought I had learned from the first EMMI encounter, I didn’t realize that the game was trying to teach me a new mechanic with the Omega blaster. But apparently with an EMMI at full health, hitting it with the charged shot at first doesn’t do it; you have to hit them with a sustained blast of the rapid-fire Omega stream shot to blow off the face armor, then hit it in the face with an Omega charge shot.

After realizing this, it only takes me 2 or 3 tries, again, thanks to the crummy precision of the joycon analog sticks. But I do finally defeat this second EMMI, and it’s not really too difficult.

My reward for defeating this EMMI is a new ability called Spider Magnet. This allows me to climb special walls and ceilings. I’ve seen a few areas with these surfaces already. The ability makes sense to get from the EMMI, because it has the ability to climb walls, but it ability to do this isn’t limited to only special surfaces.

Of course, now that the EMMI is no more, my Omega cannon has run out of power again, and reverted back to the normal cannon. This feels a bit artificial, especially now that it’s happened twice. Why the Omega power and the EMMI’s life force should be linked with one another isn’t explained, and doesn’t make sense, other than as an artificial rule for the game to force you to be able to deal with the EMMI only when the game wants you to be ready to do it. Realistically, it should be possible to exhaust the Omega energy without killing the EMMI, resulting in the game soft-locking you into having to die in order to start over. And as well, it should be possible to kill an EMMI with some energy remaining in the Omega gun. The designers could have easily made it so this left-over Omega energy would never be enough to kill the next EMMI that you encounter, and doing so would have given you a bit of false hope, or an ability to deal a tiny bit of bonus pre-damage to the next EMMI encountered, which would be a nice way to reward the player for making an efficient kill on the previous encounter.

While I’m on the topic, I don’t understand why I can’t disable an EMMI by taking out its arms and legs, or at least slow it down. The knees, elbows, and hip and shoulder joints look like they should all be vulnerable to damage, and it would be cool to have another way to deal with them, and render them less of a threat on their way to being permanently deactivated.

Anyhow, I now have a new ability that I can use to explore Artaria. I make my way back, trying to ascend upward toward the surface of the planet, which is after all my mission objective. I find it difficult to move in a direction that feels like progress though. The most of the direct pathways out of the area are still the one-ways — ramps that I can’t climb up, and low-height corridors that I can’t slide into because the entrance on my side is not on ground level, and there’s no mechanic to enter the slide from a wall climb or fall, until I find the morph ball ability.

I do find some magnetic walls and get into some new areas that I couldn’t get to previously, and find a missile upgrade or two. My capacity is now up to 29.

But I’m still trying to find a way out of the immediate area, and go upward, trying to reach the surface, and I’m having a hard time. I need to study the map more and try to read the markers so I now which routes I can really make use of, and which are locked to me because of one-ways and abilities that I don’t have yet. And this is not easy.

One thing I find frustrating is that whenever I switch back to the map, it resets the zoom level to its default, and I have to repeatedly zoom back to the detail level I need in order to see the immediate area I’m in, and trace my path. I hope some future quality of life update addresses this, because it sure gets annoying when you are lost and need to examine the map every few seconds.

I also would like it if you could plot way points on the map and then the in side scrolling action view, you’d get a HUD display indicating the path you’ve plotted out from the map. That would be super handy and help you to avoid wrong turns. Obviously this should only be available where you have already explored or downloaded the map data from a kiosk. If I had this capability I’d be able to spend much less time switching back and forth between map and action views, and get on with making progress.

It’s possible to explore and find the way out, of course, I just need to take time and figure it out.

But right now it feels like a good stopping point. So I find my way to a save point and log my progress.

Metroid: Dread diary 2

Nintendo
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I got stuck in the area around where I encountered the 2nd EMMI. According to the game’s built-in progress log, this one is called EMMI-025M, for what it’s worth. The first one was called EMMI-01P. I don’t know what the names mean.

I have found an Energy Tank, and a few missile containers, but I can’t get to them. The map has a lot of areas that are cleverly designed to allow one-way transit only in places, creating bottlenecks and flows that force me to follow a route. At each of these spots, I’m forced to decide to commit and go through the one-way or backtrack or take another route. There’s a few places in this area where I encounter the one-way on the wrong side of it, so I can’t proceed through, and there I see the power-up item. And so far, I can’t figure out the right way around.

The only other thing left to do in this area seems to be to play cat and mouse with the EMMI-025M. I enter its patrol area, and mostly I’m preoccupied with avoiding the thing, hoping to not get detected and chased. This keeps me from searching the room thoroughly. I find that if I keep ahead of EMMI-025M, and keep moving, I can avoid it detecting me, but this doesn’t seem to gain me anything.

I take a few laps of the EMMI-025M’s patrol zone, wondering what I’m supposed to do, when I notice in one spot there’s some water, and the ground platforms I’ve been walking across appear to be floating on pontoons. Over to the left, I notice what appears to be a pressure plate. These blend in with the regular background pretty well, and it takes a trained eye to be able to spot them, but I’ve found a few places where they are more obvious — usually they’re save points or weapon or life energy refill points, and they generally have very obvious kiosks and machinery around them to help you spot them. This one doesn’t so much have that, so I must have ran past it a good fifty times before I noticed it.

I stand on it for a few seconds, triggering it, and the water drains and the floating floor segments drop, exposing a low passage that I can squeeze through if I use my slide.

This must be the way forward, so I take the new path. It leads me to a new area within Artaria, and I explore a bit, encountering some random weak enemies. I find a missle container, and then my first Energy Tank that I can collect. It’s not the same one that I found earlier but couldn’t get to. But this one, I can get easily, and so I do. This doubles my life energy and gives me a little more confidence. Although, so far there hasn’t been a whole lot of combat, and what there has been has either been very easy, or with the EMMIs that I can do nothing against and have to run from. So life energy doesn’t seem to be all that necessary, yet. I’m sure at some point it will become vital.

Continuing to explore, I work my way through the complex, and eventually discover a chamber with a familiar-looking statue that appears to be offering a ball-shaped item to me. I take it, and it turns out to be the Charge Beam power-up. So now if I press and hold the cannon button, I can charge up a more powerful attack, and also this charged-up beam will enable me to open certain doors that I couldn’t open previously. There’s a few of them right in this immediate area, and I go around and try to explore more.

I find another chamber, what appears to be some kind of control room, and activate it. This changes the flow of magma, which is apparently in use as some kind of power source for this area. During my exploration I had encountered a few doors that led to areas that were glowing red hot and did damage to me, and I had to retreat back to the normal-temperature area. Activating this thing doesn’t seem to have cooled down those areas any, so I’m not sure entirely what I just accomplished.

But there’s a new bit of story revealed, and ADAM tells me that my mystery assailant may have been a Chozo warrior, and that this area appears to have been a settlement of their species. Apparently they may have been responsible for reprogramming the EMMI and turning them against me. ADAM again re-iterates that I’m currently powerless to confront the EMMI and will have to be very careful, avoid them, and flee if I encounter them, and that my primary objective is to return to the surface of the planet and rendezvous with my ship.

I’ve made a bit of progress, but now I’m not sure where to go next. I guess returning to the areas I’ve been and seeing where I can go now that I’ve gotten the Charge Beam.

Atari announces new manufacturing of 2600 cartridges

Atari
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Today, Atari launched a new website, AtariXP.com. And with it, pre-orders for newly manufactured Atari 2600 cartridges, with a promise of more to come.

It looks like Atari is looking to tap into the long, long tail of the original VCS system. So far, they are offering three titles: Aquaventure, Saboteur, and Yars’ Return, in standard ($49.95) and collectors ($149.95) editions.

The about page on the new website says that they intend to release games in the following categories:

  • Games that were completed but never received an official release, or were only released in very limited quantities. 
  • Games for which physical media has become extremely rare, and therefore hard to find. 
  • A wide variety of classic games that would benefit from small improvements to graphic rendering on modern devices and the smoothness and accuracy of controls. These games will be carefully ‘reconditioned’ and then re-released. 

It will be interesting to see what these improvements might be for the “reconditioned” games. One wonders whether they might also plan to release unfinished prototypes, similarly finalized. We might then get to see a SwordQuest: Air World.

It will be interesting as well to see how well these sell. The homebrew scene has been pricing games at around $25-35 for cartridge and manual, and some more premium titles have been priced north of $40, but whether gamers are willing to go to $50 and beyond for new manufactured Atari cartridges is an open question. The pricing on the collector editions seems beyond what most enthusiasts are willing to pay, but I see this as actually a good thing, since it will keep the collectors variants rare enough to be actually worth collecting, and may be enough to keep speculators out of the market entirely.

Of course, if Atari is releasing new cartridges for the 40+ year old console, it would only be fitting for them to manufacture new consoles to play them on as well, and new joystick and paddle controllers as well. Given the age of the newest manufactured Atari 2600 consoles is now nearly 30 years old, it would be nice if enthusiasts for the old system had the option to buy new hardware that can play the old games.

Obviously, we’ve had a steady diet of Flashback systems for many years, but a console with a cartridge slot would be much better.

A re-specced Atari 2600 that outputs HDMI and has an SD card reader slot in addition to the old-school cartridge slot, and USB ports in addition to the DB9 controller ports would be really appealing. In fact, that’s almost exactly what I had hoped for when Atari first announced their plans for the AtariBox back in 2017.

Of course, with Atari’s track record over the past few years… decades, really, I can’t say I’m quite on board with this yet. It is, after all, a pre-order launch, and with a thin catalog of just 3 titles. Aquaventure has never been officially released before, but the prototype ROM has been available through emulator for many years. Yars’ Return was featured on one of AtGames’ Flashback consoles years ago. And Saboteur was renown Atari designer-programmer Howard Scott Warshaw’s final Atari game, never officially released. These titles definitely have appeal to fans of the classic system, and assuming that Atari can deliver on pre-orders, and follow up with additional releases with equal or greater appeal, this could bode well for Atari fans. While Atari still isn’t actually offering anything new that hasn’t been seen before, being packaged on actual cartridges as an official release is at least something. The “reconditioned” games might be really interesting.

Update

There have been numerous embarrassing errors with Atari’s announcement.

Images on the AtariXP website were mixed up, creating confusion as to what was included in the standard cartridge package vs. the collector’s edition.

Originally, the AtariXP website had attributed all three of the games announced to Howard Scott Warshaw. Warshaw clarified yesterday that the only game he had anything to do with of these three is Saboteur. Saboteur was his fourth and final project when he worked for Atari, and was never officially released. It was also re-skinned to be an A-Team licensed tie-in to the hit 80’s TV show.

Washaw did not work on Aquaventure in any capacity, and while he did create Yars’ Revenge, he had nothing to do with Yars’ Return, which is a romhack of Yars’ Revenge, created by Curt Vendel, and was first released commercially on the Atari Flashback 2 console, way back in 2005.

Warshaw also mentioned that he is currently working on his own sequel to Yars’ Revenge, and it’s unclear whether he has the legal rights to the IP to entitle him to do so, or if not, how he intends to work with the rights holder to do it. Normally, in the homebrew scene creators are often flying under the radar, technically in violation of IP rights to trademarks and copyrights, but often the rights holders ignore these projects, or tolerate them. In some cases, though, there have been takedowns — Nintendo being particularly vigilant about protecting its IP.

In this case, Warshaw has a strong connection to the IP in question, as he was the original creator of Yars’ Revenge, but the IP remains owned by Atari. Presumably, Atari would relish an opportunity to publish a legitimate sequel by the originator of the property, but whether there is any agreement or intention to work together on this project is unclear.

Metroid Dread diary 1

Nintendo
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Posting on a 30-day delay to avoid spoilers for those who care.

The mail brought me Metroid Dread yesterday (10/14/2021).

I couldn’t rightly believe it. I found a copy in new condition on ebay for $49.99, which is $10 off retail. For a brand new release of Nintendo’s #3 A-list franchise. I expected some kind of scam, but it arrived quickly and is a real, legit copy of the game as far as I can tell. It’s not a collector’s edition or whatever, but I don’t believe in that stuff.

I played it for an hour or two and it is very good. So far I’m just figuring out the controls and what to do.

SPOILER WARNING (such as it is)

The game starts out with a lot of exposition and cutscenes. I learn that the Metroid species is extinct, and the X-parasite organism is thought to be mostly extinct, but then we learn that one has been spotted.

The metroids were created by a race of aliens called the Chozo as a bio-weapon. They drain the life energy from targets, and Samus helped wipe them out in earlier chapters of the Metroid series.
Metroids are the only known predator of the X-parasite organism. X-parasites are bio-mimic, and can merge with hosts, sample their DNA, and copy them. In a previous Metroid, Samus was infected with the X-parasite, and had to defeat one that had all the powers of Samus’s fully powered armor suit.

Samus had previously been augmented with Metroid DNA, I guess in the game Super Metroid when the last surviving Metroid sacrifices its life by replenishing Samus during the final boss battle against the Mother Brain. This was what enabled Samus to survive being infected by the X-parasite.

That’s all preface to the current adventure.

You’re going to some planet called Z-something… ZDR. I had to look it up. There’s a mission there, it’s risky, and the bounty promised for success isn’t worth the risk (according to the cutscene).

As you’re going in for a landing on the planet, suddenly the narrative cuts to you waking up on the ground on the planet ZDR. You relive an encounter with a large alien robot, who we find out are called EMMIs. Your weapons are ineffective and it kicks your ass. You contact your ship via radio and it tells you that you need to get back to the surface of the planet, and that most of your powers and abilities are offline so you’re weak and survival is a priority.

So far I’ve explored the starting area a bit. There’s a lot of places I can’t figure out how to get to. I don’t have a morph ball ability so I can’t get into low passages, but they give you a slide. The slide works for low passages if you’re on the same level as them, but there are a lot of low passages that are off the ground, and in traditional Metroid games you’d morph into your ball mode and lay a bomb, and let it boost you up into the passage and roll in, but in this game you don’t get the ability to do that yet, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to — presumably I will have to backtrack and get into them at a later time.

So far the non-EMMI enemies seem like pushovers. They’re just sort of there, to give the game world a sense of being inhabited. They’re not hostile unless you get really close to them, and you can pretty much ignore them or shoot them at your leisure.

I encountered a damaged EMMI, and ran from it, got to a room where they gave me a temporary weapons boost, and introduced a charge and aim mechanic which you use to defeat it.

Some more exploration, and now I’m in an area where I’m trying to sneak around, avoiding another prowling EMMI. If it’s in the same room as me, it’ll patrol and pick up my trail, and when it gets close it’ll initiate pursuit, and all I can do is run.

It’s not too hard to keep ahead of it, but it does keep you hopping. This aspect of the game feels like a Schwarzeneggar vs. Predator kind of thing, where you don’t have any weapons that can deal with the threat, and all you can do is run and hide. You feel hunted, powerless, vulnerable. If you escape the room where the EMMI is, you can breath easy because it won’t pursue out of its area.

So now I’m kindof stuck exploring this area looking for the way to proceed.

There are some spots in the level that I’ve found where there are destroyable blocks that you can shoot, and sometimes these open up new areas, but about as often they open up areas that (apparently? I’m not sure?) you can’t go through yet. Or maybe I can but I just don’t know how.
Things I know how to do:

  • switch to missiles and fire them
  • aim around me
  • jump
  • wall jump
  • ledge hang
  • slide

That’s about it. There’s a screen in the pause menu that tells you what abilities you have, but it doesn’t tell me what I can have but haven’t found yet, so I’m not sure what’s in store for me yet.
The game mentioned that because of my Metroid DNA infusion, I’m vulnerable to cold (in the original Metroid, Metroids could only be hurt after first being frozen by the ice beam, so it makes sense), and there are areas in the game that are cold and I will take damage if I’m not equipped to deal with that. But I haven’t found any cold zones yet.

I have found some underwater areas though. You move a bit differently underwater — you can’t wall jump, your jump height is reduced, and you’re not buoyant. There’s some puzzles where you have to blow away walls to change water flow or water levels in order to proceed. I bet at some point there will be a power-up that gives you your mobility back underwater.

I’ve found a few save points, and a weapon recharge and life energy recharge station. Mostly you don’t need them, because the enemies are easy and drop a lot of missiles and life. But it’s good to get introduced to them so you know they exist and what they look like.

There’s plenty of areas on the map that I’ve explored so far where I can see that there’s more in some direction, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to get there yet. There’s sloped floors that you can’t get any traction on and you always slide down them. You can’t even jump up them.
So until I can figure out how to proceed, I’m stuck. I like figuring out these puzzles on my own, so I’m looking forward to working it out for myself. Probably I’ll spend 10 or 20 hours looping around and around missing something that I ignored a clue about during one of the cutscenes, and eventually I’ll discover it.

I feel like I probably could have already discovered it, but the time pressure imposed on me by having to run from the EMMI when I’m in its area is making it harder to explore that particular area, and that is probably the key to this part of the game.

Also I’m still really awkward/unfamiliar with the fine controls.

Atari “recharged” will it be warmed over or hot?

Atari, Console Gaming
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Atari just announced some actual new game titles this week. Well, “new” in the sense that they are “recharged” versions of classic Atari games: Breakout, Centipede, Black Widow, and Missile Command. That’s sort of new, right?

We’ve seen Breakout demoed for a while, but these others I haven’t heard about previously. They all feature vector-like wireframe graphics in neon colors that evoke vectorscan CRT graphics, much like the classic hit Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. I like the aesthetic.

It’s nice to have something interesting coming out of Atari after years of underwhelming-to-disappointing announcements regarding the VCS console project. It’s really good to finally see something new offered, this is what I would have wanted to see a lot sooner.

Curiously, these Recharged titles are not VCS exclusives — they are all available on Steam, the Epic Games store, Switch, XBox Series X/S, and Playstation 4+5. While I think this approach makes the most business sense — you want to put games in all markets to sell the most copies and maximize revenue, it seemingly undermines the “true believer” customers who invested in the VCS crowdfunding, only to find that they could have just bought the games on any other platform. I’m unclear but it may be that they will be available on the VCS sooner, but even if that’s the case, getting the games a few weeks earlier on a relatively expensive, less powerful hardware platform still doesn’t sell the VCS to me very strongly.

I’m most interested in the Black Widow: Recharged game, as this is the least well known classic Atari title out of the four, and therefore has the most potential to offer as a reboot.

I’ve been pretty critical of Atari for the past few years as the disappointments with the delays and inadequacies of the VCS have mounted, so it’s really nice to finally see something happening that looks like it might actually be cool.

Weirdly, although I’ve seen announcements from various videogame news sites about these titles, Atari’s own website looks like it’s only pushing Centipede: Recharged at the moment. Where’s the other games? Are they holding back so they can focus on each one at a time? Or is the Atari Recharged site just that hard to navigate?

Atari homebrew legend Nukey Shay, 54, killed in tragic accident

Atari
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Kurt Howe, known as Nukey Shay in the Atari homebrew developer scene, died last year at age 54, as a result of a tragic accident on Feb 5, 2020, when he was hit by a car while crossing the street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His loss came as a shock to the Atari Age community as it was discovered over a year later, announced by Albert Yarusso today.

Nukey was a 20 year Atari Age forum contributor, very active in the homebrew and romhacking scene, and a 6502 ASM guru who helped numerous developers with their projects. One of the most knowledgeable active Atari 2600 programmers on the planet, his death mirrors that of Nintendo’s Gunpei Yokoi, a major contributor to Metroid, Kid Icarus, and the original Game Boy handheld, who died in 1997 at age 56 under similar circumstances.

My own Superman romhacks were only possible because Nukey decompiled the ROM and annotated the source code, and shared his work with the world, which made it easy for me to re-arrange the map to create alternative Metropolises. Nukey’s contributions are far too numerous to list succinctly, but his loss is deeply felt by all in the Atari homebrew community.

Mega Man’s box art

games
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The box art for the North American release of the original Mega Man is notorious. Behold its glory:

So bad, it’s good.

Much has been written about it over the years, but not by me, so I wanted to go on the record for enthusiastically loving this artwork. And not in any kind of ironic or sarcastic way, either.

The story goes that when Capcom was getting ready to release Mega Man in the North America market, the American side of the company didn’t want to go with Capcom’s Japanese style artwork, which had a cartoony, cute, kid-friendly anime look to it.

“Ew, anime. How can we sell it to American children?!”

Now, there’s really nothing at all wrong with the Japanese artwork, and as it turns out, American kids love Japanese cartoons. Even if the art style looks like it would appeal more to very young children, I’m not sure that it would have turned off older children. But, looking to appeal to 12-16 year old American boys, Capcom USA probably wanted something with more muscle and scowl.

The story goes, Capcom US rushed a replacement, giving the artist assigned to do the work like a day to turn it around, and the artist had never seen the actual game, and only had a vague idea of what it was about. But none of that excuses the apparent lack of artistic skill displayed by the guy who whipped out the colored pencils and drew this proportionless, perspective-free monstrosity.

The people at Capcom must have a good sense of humor about the whole thing, because over the years they’ve embraced “bad box art Mega Man” and paid homage to it numerous times. And that’s exactly the right attitude to have about it. Today, it’s remembered and talked about far more than the cover art for any other game.

I didn’t hear about Mega Man until after Mega Man 2 came out, in 1988. But Mega Man 2 almost didn’t happen. The original didn’t sell very well in the States (I wonder why?) and the sequel only got produced because the developers believed in it so much that they snuck it into their spare time, working on it when they could, without formal approval from their bosses.

Mega Man 2 is one of the best games ever released on the NES, and was an absolute blockbuster when it came out. I read the full-length review in Nintendo Power magazine, and immediately knew that this was a game to buy. It was definitely my favorite game after I played through it. It was incredible: great music, huge graphics, challenging and fun.

Being a sequel, I also sought out the original. I found a copy at my local Toys R Us a few weeks later, and bought it. I looked at the box art, and thought it looked awful, but I didn’t let that dissuade me from paying for it, because I knew how awesome MM2 was. I didn’t expect it to be quite as good, but if it was only half as good as Mega Man 2, it would still be worth the money. Spoiler: it was.

I didn’t understand why Capcom would have chose this art, this art style. It didn’t make good business sense — I’m sure the poor cover art must have hurt sales. It looked like a crude piece of fan art drawn by a small child. And that’s what I actually thought it was, for a long time. But how could there be fan art for something brand new that hadn’t been seen by any fans yet? Could it have been a reissue done as some sort of contest for the fans?

Maybe it was just one of the guys who worked on the game had a young kid who drew it as a picture of what daddy does at work all day. And daddy was so proud of what his little boy had done, he couldn’t not put it on the cover.

I didn’t find out the true story until many years later. But over time, I grew to love the terrible box art. To me, it signified Capcom’s confidence in what was inside the box, that they were willing to use such a bad drawing for the cover art. Like Princess Leia said to Han Solo: “You came in that thing? You’re even braver than I thought!”

“Nice. Come on. We’re gonna go fight Guts Man.”

Unlike so many other video game companies that dressed up their low-quality on-screen graphics with a fanciful, professionally done painting, here was Capcom saying, in essence: “Look, we don’t care what you think about the cover. This game will blow your socks off, and tear you a new one. We put 100% of our budget into the game, and had fuckall left over for the box art — deal with it. You’ll thank us as soon as you plug it in and hit the power button.”

Capcom realized that, ideally, your box art-to-game-graphics ratio should be the inverse of this.

The video games I played filled me with enthusiasm and excitement, and it inspired me to want to design games of my own. And since I had very little idea of how a computer program worked at the time, most of my game ideas were conceptual drawings with captions explaining what was going on and how it was all supposed to work. I appreciated the box art from Mega Man, in part perhaps because it gave me hope that I could do it too.

Capcom seemed to be telling me: “You have passion and an idea? That’s all you need! Make it happen!”

A life lesson, to be sure.

Appreciating Phoenix on Atari 2600

Atari
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Phoenix, Atari 2600, 1982

Phoenix was a hit arcade game in 1980-81 before being ported to the Atari 2600 the following year. A vertical fixed shooter in the tradition of Space Invaders, Phoenix was an evolution of the Space Invaders concept, which added a number of innovations: enemy variety, swooping enemies, regenerating enemies, shields, and a mothership boss — one of the first boss battles in video gaming.

The game consists of five waves, which repeat in a cycle. In the first four stages, you face waves of bird-like enemy space aliens. The first two waves consist of smaller enemies who bear some resemblance to their Space Invaders forebearers, in that they march across the screen in a tight, grid-like formation. But these enemies will break out of their formation and swoop down low to dive bomb the player, and then fly back up again.

The second wave features a larger number of enemies, and for some reason the player is afforded rapid fire on this stage only. On all other stages, you have to press the fire button every time you want to shoot, but on the 2nd wave alone, you can hold the fire button down and it will fire automatically.

Wave 3

The next two waves, three and four, feature larger bird-like enemies, which can be killed by scoring a direct hit on their body. An off-center hit will clip one of their wings, which will regenerate after a few seconds if the body isn’t quickly finished off first. These larger bird aliens fly from side to side, not in formation, and change altitude occasionally, and swoop low to touch the ground. It seems that touching the ground is what triggers their regenerative powers, but in addition to that, as they get this low they also pose a threat to the player, who will be destroyed if they collide. In the arcade, these regenerating enemies start out as eggs, which hatch and grow before your eyes to become full-grown birds, but on the Atari 2600 port this is simplified, and the egg phase of their life cycle is omitted.

Wave 5: The Phoenix Mothership. Videogaming’s first boss fight?

The fifth wave is the mothership: a huge, saucer-like ship that fills most of the screen. The boss is destroyed by shooting its commander, who sits in the center near the top of the ship. The bottom of the ship must be chipped away first, to expose the pilot’s cockpit. The rim of the saucer rotates, creating a revolving barrier that must be shot through. This takes time, during which the saucer slowly descends, dropping bombs all the while. As the mothership sinks lower, the reaction time afforded to the player to dodge these shots diminishes, making it increasingly difficult to stay alive. Judicious use of the shield and rapid fire button mashing is the way to survive.

My favored technique to defeat the mothership is to activate shields the moment the wave begins, and fire as rapidly as possible to blow through the shielding in front of the pilot, then as soon as the shield drops, I swing over to the left edge of the ship, where the shielding is thin, and blast away at the rotating rim. The body of the mothership tapers upward toward the outer edge of the ship, giving you a few more pixels of breathing room to react to incoming fire, which is very important. By being at the edge of the ship, you can always escape to safety by dodging left, completely out from under the ship’s breadth, and thus out of its reach. After shooting away the rotating rim, I wait for a clear moment when the mothership isn’t dropping many bombs, and then move back to the center, hit the shields again, and blast away until one of my shots manages to hit the pilot and destroy the ship.

In the arcade, the mothership was also protected by a fleet of escort birds, of the type from the first two stages, but on the Atari 2600 there wasn’t enough computing power to handle all that action, so they are left out, and you face the mothership one-on-one.

Then the cycle begins anew, much like the legend of the mythological phoenix going through death and rebirth.

Phoenix featured three distinct background tracks. Not full songs, these are just simple loops. The first two stages use an electronic wail or warble which somehow evokes bird-ness. The second two stages employ a loop with a swooping pitch from high to low, which evokes and reinforces the swooping motion of the diving birds. The mothership music is a more robotic, mechanical beeping that evokes classic sci-fi movie soundtracks of what space sounds like — beeping, echoing, un-melodious.

The shield adds a dimension of strategy to the gameplay. Using the shield involves a set of trade-offs. In exchange for temporary invulnerability, you cannot move. Further, the shield lasts a fixed amount of time, about 1.5 seconds, and thereafter cannot be used again until it recharges. There’s always a certain amount of luck involved with using the shield — because you’re immobile while it is up, and cannot control when it goes down, the timing of enemy fire can put one of their missiles right in front of you just as the shield goes down, without no time to move out of the way. Thus, while shields can bail you out of a jam, it can sometimes result in a mere delay of the inevitable. In addition to protecting you from the enemy’s shots, your shield will destroy enemies if they touch it, making it an essential offensive weapon for close engagements. When the enemies are very low, it’s too dangerous to take them on without the shield, as their shots cannot be dodged, and they can also crash into you. Thus, despite its slight drawbacks, learning how to use the shield effectively will help you to avoid deaths and last longer into the game.

Legacy

Phoenix is still as good as it ever was, but I don’t think it has aged as well as some of its contemporaries in the shooter genre. It’s primary drawbacks being that it gets pretty repetitive, and that this is accompanied by very little increase in difficulty after you’ve run through it the first cycle. There’s a nearly imperceptible increase in enemy aggression, but it isn’t much more than the initial cycle, and doesn’t seem to increase beyond that. The game awards a single bonus life, at 5000 points, otherwise this game would be easy to play indefinitely. Back in the day, my best scores on this game were around 135,000. While the game is generally pretty easy, accidental deaths are still tough to avoid completely.

It’s worthwhile to point to as an example of the evolutionary path shooters took, and was a noteworthy step forward in the emerging genre of fixed shooters.

Thematically, I liked Phoenix quite a bit. The theme ties in with the phoenix of legend, with its cycle of death and rebirth, giving the game a mythic quality that most video games seldom aspired to have. This gave the game an intangible quality that made it seem like more to me than perhaps it really was. I think this shows the power of narrative, and how even just a tiny bit of storytelling underlying the basic gameplay can enhance the player’s perception and reception of a game.

Google Doodle celebrating the 2020-1 Olympic Games is one for the ages

games
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One of the best Google Doodles I’ve enjoyed in the whole of recorded history was released recently in honor of the 2020 Olympic games in Japan, which were postponed 1 year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The doodle is an HTML5 game that feels distinctly nintendo-esque. You play as Lucky Cat, who visits Champion Island to play in games and do good deeds for the island’s inhabitants, who are all anthropomorphic animals. The game pays direct homage to the sort of fetch quest and minigames found in action/adventure/RPG games for the GameBoy, with a distinct Zelda/Link’s Awakening feel to much of it, perhaps mixed with a bit of pokemon. Of course, the entire thing celebrates many aspects of Japanese culture, both traditional and modern.

The graphics are in a 16-bit SNES style and the cut scenes are done in an anime style. Overall the minigames are not super challenging, but are fun and enjoyable as light entertainment, although the mountain climbing gave me some trouble due to the time limit to complete the courses.

I played through the entire thing and thoroughly enjoyed it.

100%!

“Retro” gaming

games, Uncategorized
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I like video games, old and new. But I had more time to play video games when I was younger, and so I like the games that I spent the most time with the best, because they are most familiar to me. So I mostly like old games.

I also like new games that evoke the feeling of playing the old games that I liked.

There’s a lot of talk about “retro gaming” in the gamer communities I follow, and a recurring topic of conversation is to ask what the definition of “retro” is.

Usually people have some guideline, like “anything older than 10 (or 20, or some other arbitrary cutoff age) years old is retro”. Or sometimes they’ll refer to retro as anything that ran on an 8-bit or 16-bit processor. Then there’s a bit of discussion about console generations, about the transition from EEPROM cartridges to optical media, CD-ROM to DVD-ROM, and then the more recent transition away from optical media to solid state and digital download. People attempt to draw circles around the different features in order to define some set of characteristics that define retro.

I believe that these discussions are misguided.

Retro isn’t a thing that something becomes when it gets sufficiently old.

Rather, retro is when someone, in the present, does something in an outdated or obsolete way, creating something in the style of something that is now old.

Atari was state of the art. NES was state of the art. SNES was state of the art. N64 was state of the art. Sony Playstation was state of the art. The Wii was state of the art. Even if it wasn’t using cutting edge technology — Nintendo has a history of using less expensive, less impressive hardware than Sony/Microsoft, but is nonetheless state of the art in its current generation.

A game programmed to run natively on the Switch, but that looks and feels like a NES game, like Shovel Knight, is retro. The original Super Mario Bros. will never be retro — it is old, not retro. Super Mario 35, Nintendo’s 35th anniversary celebration that re-imagines the original SMB, is retro. An indie game written in for PCs that evokes the look and feel of a game that could have been implemented on the hardware of a generation or two ago, is retro.

Retro is something new made to resemble or evoke something old.