Category: games

It’s Zelda Day

Nintendo
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Tears of the Kingdom officially releases

It’s May 12, Zelda Day. The official release date for the latest Legend of Zelda title from Nintendo, Tears of the Kingdom. The long awaited sequel to Breath of the Wild.

BOTW Retrospective

I enjoyed Breath of the Wild, and was amazed by its mechanics, but by no means was Breath of the Wild a perfect game.

Recounting the flaws and shortcomings of Breath of the Wild is difficult, given the vastness of the game.

BOTW: The Good

  • Vast, incredibly gorgeous world
  • Diverse landscapes and climates
  • Adaptive procedurally mixed OST soundtrack
  • Game physics systems are extremely well integrated with each other
  • Lots to do. Everywhere you go, there’s something to do, look at, or discover.

BOTW: The Bad

  • Unintentionally existential purposelessness. Everything resetting every Blood Moon makes nearly everything you do in game seem pointless.
  • Weapon breaking system is too unrefined, with weapon durability being too weak to seem realistic. Weapons break all too frequently, and losing a favorite weapon kind of sucks, especially with the very rare or unique weapons which still have only a limited lifespan.
  • Too much sameness. Despite the huge world packed with a huge variety of climates, immense exploration and puzzle solving opportunities and other types of challenges, after a while they all sort of begin to feel too similar and repetitive.
  • Temple challenges are too brief/simple, and offer little replay value. They also offer little in the way of reward, since most items are temporary due to the weapon breaking system.
  • No dungeons a la traditional Zelda games, to offer deeper, more satisfying challenge. This is a frequent complaint, but actually there are numerous areas of the game that feel dungeonlike, but aren’t obviously dungeons per se: the four Divine Beasts, which are perhaps the closest thing to a Zelda Dungeon, but aren’t really very large, the Labyrinths found in several places on the world map, the Yiga Clan hideout, Hyrule Castle, which is very satisfying, and, with a very honorable mention to the Eventide Island challenge, which although not technically a “dungeon” in the traditional sense, has that aspect of being self-contained, and provides an excellent and novel challenge…
  • Enemy variety. The enemy roster is good, but small (albeit with many variations of each major type), with many of the classic Hyrule denizens missing: No Darknuts, Like Likes, Peahats, Tektites, Pols Voice, Gibdos, Goriya, Dodongo, Gleeok, etc., etc. BOTW took a “less is more” approach, focusing on making fewer enemy types excellent, rather than trying to include everyone’s favorites from all the previous Zelda titles. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the lack of variety does contribute to the sense of sameness and repetitive nature due to the vast size of the world.
  • Combat system, while innovative and more advanced than previous games, is rife with exploitable bugs that turn it into a mockery in the hands of a player. Even a low skilled player can spam bombs and exploit the terrain to turn combat into a snorefest. Advanced players can chain together bullet time and combo attacks to make even the toughest enemies trivial.
  • Enemy AI is too dumb, never learns, always falls for the same tricks.
  • Lack of urgency. The mainline quest seems secondary, almost an afterthought, while an ADHD Link constantly diverges from his Mission to perform endless trivial side quests, almost all of which have no actual impact on the world or serve to further the mission. If you forget what you’re supposed to do or get lost, there’s little in game to put you back on track.
  • Final boss is a letdown. If you get to Calamity Ganon after playing through the full game, you’re going to be so overpowered that it’s a piece of cake… but you can walk right up to him without playing any of the game if you want a real challenge. So wouldn’t it have made sense that if you take so much time to build up your power, Ganon would have also gathered his strength and become more challenging as well?

Although my “bad” list is longer, the strengths of the “good” list far outweigh the bad things. Breath of the Wild is a great game. I’m not in any way saying that BOTW sucks. But I’m pointing out that the game was not without its flaws.

I love to just hang out and chill in the beautiful landscapes of Hyrule and gaze at the amazing views. For being on a world saving mission where there is supposedly immanent peril in the form of The Calamity, the game feels completely non-urgent and relaxing, apart from the occasional random wandering monster spawn events.

Due to the vast size of the game and its endless patience for the player to complete it at their leisure, these encounters rapidly become rote and routine, with no real variety or challenge once you learn how the combat system works and how to exploit it so that enemies present no threat whatsoever. And even before you get to that point, you can always run away from enemies and easily evade pursuit, so there’s never really any sense of danger. Only a sense of having to do a mildly annoying chore, or perhaps a mild sense of amusement, like what a bored cat must feel when they manage to find a mouse that can briefly occupy their sadistic attention for a time.

Looking forward to TOTK

I expect more of the same from Tears of the Kingdom, with more features and more polish, and hopefully a lot of these minor complaints about what wasn’t perfect with BOTW addressed.

I’m picking up my copy later today, and looking forward to diving in to the new adventure, blogging my progress, and posting my thoughts.

Atari’s Mr. Run and Jump looks like a step in the right direction

Atari
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One of the frequent criticisms I’ve offered of the company calling itself Atari these days is that they should have focused on developing new games rather than trying to launch a console. I’ve always wished them success, but have been skeptical about their strategy, and their execution on the AtariBox project left a lot to be desired.

That said, I am fair-minded, and will say when Atari does something right.

And it looks like they may have something, with their newest game, Mr. Run and Jump.

It’s a super mario style platformer, done in Atari’s “reloaded” style neon colored wireframe vector graphics. At first glance it does admittedly look a bit derivative of Mario, and a Mario clone isn’t likely to win over a lot of gamers. On the other hand Nintendo’s formula with Mario platformers has been tried and true for going on 40 years now, and Atari has been floundering for most of the past 40 years, so imitating Nintendo is hardly the worst approach they could arguably take with their game design.

The thing with Mario games is that while they’re always quality, they do rely on a bunch of traditions and conventions that are pretty established, and deviating from them can be problematic. So to truly break free of these conventions, it is a good idea to start over with new worldbuilding and introduce new characters, so that the “rules” are not in conflict with previously established “canon” that will offend purists, or just not be what people were expecting, and thus be rejected when there’s actually nothing wrong with taking a new approach. So maybe Atari can do something interesting and innovative with platformers with a new property like Mr. Run and Jump.

Does Mr. Run and Jump accomplish that? That remains to be seen. It’s difficult to do better at a run and jump platforming game than Nintendo has already done. On the other hand, if you’re going to imitate something, you might as well try to imitate the best there is.

Bottom line: it looks cool, and I’d give it a try.

Design ideas for competitive Wordle

Game Design, games
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Wordle, the guess a 5 letter word in 6 tries game, is a really good game. Any good game deserves a competition.

I thought about how to design a proper competitive Wordle, and wanted to share my ideas with the world so that people could use them to organize Wordle tournaments. I have no connection to the creators of Wordle or the New York Times; these are just my ideas that I am offering as an add-on to enhance the existing Wordle experience. I offer them freely for anyone to use or modify to suit, under the Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 license.

Csanyk’s Competitive Wordle Rules

Version 1.0, Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 license.

Level Playing Field

  1. Consistency is Fairness. All participants will play the same list of solution words, presented in the same order. All players will either play in hard mode (where any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses) or normal mode.
  2. No cheating. Players may not have advance knowledge of the solutions at any time, and may not consult a dictionary.
  3. Players may not receive outside help to come up with the solution, in any form.
  4. Players may use scratch paper if they desire, but the sheets must be blank before the start of the competition.

Timekeeping

  1. To keep tournaments from running indefinitely, a finite time bank will be used.
  2. Each player will have their own time bank which they will be allowed to use during the period in which the competition is ongoing. Eg, the overall competition might be slated for a specific date and time window of, say, 2 hours, with each player granted a time bank of 1 hour to play their games, to be used within that 2 hour window, affording them up to an hour of break time, if they wish to use it, however they wish to use it.
  3. The amount of time given can be determined arbitrarily by the organizing body, but a suggested length of 1 hour or less would be reasonable for most tournaments. For larger tournaments, more time may be needed, or more rounds of competition, each with their own time bank. For ultra brief or high speed play, time banks of 5 or 10 minutes might be appropriate.
  4. For precise timekeeping, the clock start and stop can be coded into the Wordle program itself, but if such a feature is not present in the software being used, time may be kept externally, using a stopwatch or pauseable countdown timer.
  5. The timebank clock starts when the player submits their first guess for the current puzzle, and stops when they solve the puzzle.
  6. The player can take breaks between puzzles as often and as long as they wish, subject to any other rules governing breaks which may limit their number or duration or how often.
  7. There are no timeouts once a puzzle has been started.
  8. Players will play successive rounds of Wordle until they either fail to solve a round, or run out of time in their personal time bank.

Scoring

  1. Players score points each round, based on how many guesses were needed to solve the Wordle.
  2. A solved puzzle will score base value of 100 points. The exact number used for the Base Points is somewhat arbitrary, and doesn’t matter a whole lot. The Base Points value will be modified by multipliers, as follows:
    1. 1/6 Solve: * 1. Solving in 1 is pure luck, and shouldn’t be rewarded with a special bonus.
    2. 2/6 Solve: * 4. Solving in 2 guesses involves skill as well as some luck (to get enough clues from the first guess) so should count for more.
    3. 3/6 Solve: * 2. Solving in 3 guesses isn’t easy, so deserves a bonus.
    4. 4/6 Solve: * 1. Solving in 4 guesses is par.
    5. 5/6 Solve: * 0.5. Solving in 5 guesses is good, but just isn’t as impressive.
    6. 6/6: * 0.25. Solving in 6 guesses deserves points, just the least number of them.
    7. X/6: * 0. No points awarded if you fail to solve.
  3. The above scoring system rewards fast play, in terms of guesses used, but also rewards cautious play, since solving each puzzle unlocks future scoring opportunities without limit other than that imposed by the time bank.
  4. Players can score more points per round if they solve in fewer guesses, but they can score more points overall if they play many rounds. But players can play the most rounds if they don’t take risky strategies that are more likely to solve early but increase the risk of busting, and they can play more rounds if they solve each round quickly.

Time Bonuses

  1. Optionally, solving each Wordle may afford opportunity to gain bonus time. This is a double reward, since solving in fewer guesses typically consumes less time already. To prevent limitless time, the structure will need to be carefully considered, and calibrated to the speed of the players. It’s forseeable that future players could become faster than we can imagine at solving puzzles, so to avoid infinite play, this will need to be adjusted.
  2. Suggested values for timebank bonuses are a starting point only, and are subject to revision.
    • 1/6: + 30 seconds
    • 2/6: + 20 seconds
    • 3/6: + 10 seconds
    • 4/6: + 0 seconds
    • 5/6: + 0 seconds
    • X/6: Timebank * 0; player is busted, their remaining timebank is zero per the normal rules.
  3. Typically the bonus possible in a single round should not afford a player more bonus time than it typically takes to play a single round; it should therefore only extend the player’s time bank to allow for multiple additional rounds of possible play if they accrue bonus time over several rounds of play.

Micro Points

  1. Micro points are an optional way to increase nuance with the scoring system. This is intended to help avoid ties.
  2. Micro points scored as follows:
  3. Grey letter (Each letter used in a guess but is not found in the solution: 1 point.)
  4. Yellow letter (Letter found in word, but used in the wrong position: 2 points.)
  5. Green letter (Letter found in word, used in the correct position: 5 points.)
  6. Micro points are tallied over successive plays in the round, so if the same letter is used in multiple positions as a Yellow, each unique position in the word that the letter is used counts for score. But if the yellow letter is played in the same position in multiple guesses, only the first time that letter appeared Yellow in that position scores points. For example, if the solution contains the letter T in the 2nd position, and the player guesses a word that uses T in the 1st position and in the 3rd position, in both guesses the T will score 2 points. But if the player played a word with the letter T in the 1st position in two guesses, only the first guess that yields the clue that T is in the word, but not in the 1st position should count for points, and any subsequent guesses using T in the 1st position will not score additional points.
  7. Likewise, only the first time the green letter is discovered for each position counts for points. Thus if the solution is YEAST, and the player guesses: 1. STATE; 2.STEAK; 3. MEATS; 4. BEAST; 5. FEAST; 6. LEAST, and fails to solve, the micro point scored for the round would be:
    2+2+5+2+0 = 11
    0+0+2+2+1 = 5
    1+5+5+0+2 = 12
    1+0+0+5+5 = 11
    1+0+0+0+0 = 1
    1+0+0+0+0 = 1
    = 41 micro points.
    The micro points then are divided by 10 and added to the regular points, so in this case the 4.1 micro points would add 4.1 points to the player’s tournament score.
  8. On an X/6 solve or unsolved round where the player ran out of time but still had remaining guesses, we can optionally score the “micro points” to reward whatever progress the player made in their final round, or we can simply award 0 points for the round since it was not solved.
  9. Micro points are normally scored for every round played. This could aid in making tie situations more unlikely, while de-emphasizing the final round’s micro points.

Tournament ranking and winners

  1. At the end of the tournament, players points are tallied over all rounds of play, and then ranked in descending order. The player with the more points holds a higher rank in the standings.

Xanthiom: an Atari 2600 demake, homage to Metroid

Atari, reviews
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A day ago, a video of an Atari 2600 homebrew for a Metroid de-make was posted on Reddit. I’m used to seeing these types of post and then losing track of the project as nothing happens for months or years. But this developer, MathanGames is working very quickly, it looks like in Batari Basic, and has already released a ROM.

The first two releases had a vertical jitter bug that gave the game a feeling like you were playing in a world prone to frequent earthquakes, which made jumping gaps somewhat dicey, but the 3rd build seems to have eliminated this defect, and is more playable. To hopefully avoid copyright/trademark infringement problems from the notoriously litigious Nintendo, the project has been renamed Xanthiom.

The game is not really attempting to port Metroid, exactly, but there’s a many familiar features: missiles,energy tanks, jump boots, wave beam, varia suit all make appearances. But there’s no morph ball, no bombs, no vertical shooting, no ice beam, and no screw attack. The starting world feels like Brinstar, and is joined by elevator pad to an area that seems to be Norfair, but the map layout is different, so it’s only very loosely based on Metroid, more homage than port.

Still, you’ll find doors to shoot, red doors require a missile, of course. A few of the enemies from Metroid also appear: Zoomers, Rippers, Rio,, and Skree. Even the mini-bosses, Ridley and Kraid, even a fake Ridley.. or is that a Space Pirate? Sadly, no Mother Brain, no Metroids (unless I haven’t found them yet.)

There’s no musical score, but there are sound effects for shooting and getting hit.

Controls are pretty awkward; it feels like the jump mechanics could use some polish. And some of enemies don’t collide with the backgrounds, so pass right through walls.

I love it. I’m hoping that the developer continues with this project, adding more to it, because what’s here already shows a great deal of promise, and I love playing NES de-makes on Atari 2600.

Altogether, this has a feel similar to Princess Rescue, but I think it feels better. Not terribly challenging, unless you count the rather awkward jumping, but you’ll enjoy playing through it in 20 or 30 minutes.

(more…)

40 years ago: How to Win at Video Games (Consumer Guide, 1983 edition)

Arcade
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The year was 1982-83 when I was in 3rd grade. Video games were very popular. ’83 would become known as the Year of the Crash for home gaming, but we didn’t know it yet.

Anywhere you went out in public, you were likely to see an arcade cabinet or two. At gas stations and convenience stores, at the checkout of the grocery store, at bowling alleys and at the local recreation center, and especially at dedicated arcades like Aladdin’s Castle or Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Space Invaders. Asteroids. Scramble. Donkey Kong. Pac-Man. Galaga. Dig Dug. Defender. Missile Command. Pole Position. Berzerk. Joust. Frogger. Popeye. Q*Bert. Qix. Time Pilot. Zookeeper. Legends. It was a golden age.

At 8 years old, I was now tall enough to reach the controls and see the screen. We had an Atari 2600 hooked up to the TV at home, and a growing collection that was about to explode when the Crash put games in bargain bins for pennies on the dollar.

And I occasionally had quarters and enough time to insert coin into a cabinet and get my ass handed to me in under a minute. Arcade games were beautiful — with vibrant, bright colors, booming sound, and evocative, illuminated marquee cabinet art. But they were damn difficult compared to the games we had at home. Arcade games were tough.

Sometime during that year, one of my classmates brought this book to school:

How to Win at Video Games by the editors of Consumer Guide

I was blown away by the photos of the arade graphics. So colorful. So detailed.

There were other books published about video games in this same period, but none of them had the production values of Consumer Guide. Most of them were in black and white and had few illustrations, and frequently the illustrations were actually drawings rather than screen captures or photos. Photography of CRT monitors was difficult, laborious, and expensive at this time, and printing at good enough quality for screen shots to be legible was expensive. Consumer Guide really stood out in giving this publication an outstanding treatment.

It was endlessly enjoyable to read. Each game was given a 4 page spread which briefly explained the game’s basics, and then went in depth to provide strategies for advanced play.

How much would it have retailed for back then? It must have cost a lot to publish, with its high quality printing in full bleed, full color. Consumer Guide showed the games so much respect by going high end. Justice done. I imagine today it would have run about $10. Back then, maybe $3-4? $6? I carefully peeled the price sticker off of my copy after I got it home, so it wouldn’t ruin the cover.

I don’t remember how, but I managed to get a copy of my own. I think maybe they had it at one of the scholastic book sales that they had at my school’s library, or something. Possibly it may have been on a magazine rack at the Waldenbooks at the local mall. Its format was like a glossy magazine, but the cardstock cover made it feel like it was meant to be a more permanent tome, to be held onto.

However I managed to find it, I bought a copy and immersed myself. I wanted to memorize it cover to cover. The patterns of to allow perfect play of Pac Man and Dig Dug were a bit much for me to memorize, but I still loved learning that there was some kind of order to the way the games presented their levels, that this order had a pattern, and that knowing the pattern could give you an edge to play better and get a higher score.

I also loved reading about the glitches in some of the games, like the trick in Galaga that causes the bugs to stop firing, or glitches in Robotron: 2084 that could be triggered by a skilled player with specific knowledge of them.

I spent hours and hours studying this guide, even for some of the games that I never saw in an arcade, such as Sinistar, which I only ever saw on a new TV game show, Starcade. I only saw a Sinistar cabinet in person many years later, at CLE PIN, just a few years ago.

Although short at only 96 pages, How to Win at Video Games was an encyclopedic guide to some of the best arcade games of 1982-3. I wish that they had done more of these books, in the same style, covering more of the classic pre-’84 arcade games.

Those games were so hard, if you didn’t know what you were doing you’d be out a quarter in under a minute. And a book like this only gave you evened odds to last a bit longer, and if you practiced, you could get the high score.

Today it’s a time capsule and a treasure. I still have my copy on a bookshelf, and it’s in remarkably good condition considering how much I read it. I really cared about keeping it in good condition. It bears the wisdom of the ancients.

This was like a precursor to 1987’s The Official Nintendo Players Guide, a black book that was the Holy Bible for the NES before Nintendo Power existed a few months later. A much thicker volume, it covered what at the time must have been the full library of games that were available at the time, or close to it.

Pre-Nintendo Power magazine, this was it: The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide.

And for a time, in the 1990s, it became customary for popular games to receive their own strategy guides, dedicated to a single game, going far more in depth, to give readers all the secrets.

Today, books like these have been largely (if not entirely) supplanted by the web, with sites like GameFAQs, Fandom, and others, usually fan-made, sometimes official. The web is a better medium for this content, for many reasons. But I do miss these books. Not that books are completely absent, but mostly it seems these days that books being published about video games tend to be more focused on the industry history, or take a more academic interest in appreciating their design, and putting them into a cultural context, than they are at providing tips and strategy. We are rather fortunate to have so much material available to us today.

Strike Zone Bowling 2nd beta

Atari, Console Gaming
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The guys developing Strike Zone Bowling accepted some of my feedback and released a 2nd Beta recently. I just played it, and these are minor improvements but polish is everything once you have the core game defined, and these definitely improve the game.

They fixed the arrows on the lane, so that they are drawn like a real bowling lane.

Corrected lane arrows for a more authentic experience.

They also added a scaling effect so that the ball shrinks slightly as it moves down the alley, adding to the faux 3D effect. I guess you’d call this a 2D perspective game, rather than a 3D game?

The visually shrinking ball really adds to the feeling of depth.

Anyway, I had only the tiniest part in these improvements, but I DID suggest them and they DID implement them, and that makes me feel fantastic. It’s already a gift that these homebrew developers are giving the Atari community new games to play 45 years on after the 2600 was new. These tiny little changes are almost like a personalized gift to me. Thanks to easmith and kevinmos3 for their excellent work on this game.

Berzerk: Bad Box Cover Art

Atari, design
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This is the cover artwork for the Atari 2600 video game, Berzerk.

When I was a kid, I never understood this image.

The illustration shows the human protagonist blasting a robot, caught in mid-explosion.

I could not recognize the robot’s anatomy, due to the way it’s clipped by the frame of the image, and the weird low angle and rear point of view.

To my eye, it looked like I was looking at the head of some insect-like robot, with its mandible coming apart, showering electronic sparks and fire, and the large round feature looking to me like huge compound bug eyes.

It’s actually the robot’s arm, and that thing that looks like a visor coming out over the nose between the two eyes is just some kind of weird mechanical shoulder joint.

I don’t know why they chose this particular image for the cover art, but I always regarded it as poorly chosen — visually confusing, and not very effective as a composition.

Maybe if they had framed the image a bit less close-up, so you could see the whole robot, and have more of an idea of what it was, it could have worked. Not having the robot’s head in frame, really messes with your perception of the image, and the ambiguous shoulder joint that looks enough like a head that it can confuse you into not seeing the image correctly, is a bad choice for the cover.

It’s still not as bad as the cover for Mega Man. Although, I actually like the cover art for Mega Man, and I think Mega Man had a better composition, albeit poorer rendering.

My Perfect Console podcast interviews Phil Fish (Fez)

games, Indie Gaming
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Becoming successful as an unknown indie game developer is insanely difficult. It is nearly impossible. The amount of dedication and sacrifice required to even have a chance at getting established in the world of game design, and having a financially successful game, is so great that it can break a young, healthy person’s mental and physical health.

I have some inkling of this from my own experiences with attempting to create games. It’s certainly possible for just about anyone who wants to to create small, simple games as a hobby, and if this is what you aspire to, it can be rewarding. But the degree of effort required, and difficulty between doing game development at this level, and becoming a successful professional indie developer is probably more than you could imagine.

I got a little bit of validation about that from listening to this interview with Phil Fish, creator of Fez and one of the featured “stars” of Indie Game: The Movie.

Fish is remembered for creating the incredibly well-received Fez, and then canceling the planned sequel in dramatic fashion, and deleting his social media accounts, and exiting from the public eye. In the My Perfect Console interview, he talks about what he went through and what led him to make that decision, how he feels about that looking back, and what he’s been up to since then.

When I watched Indie Game: The Movie, the impression I had of Fish was that he was under tremendous stress, high strung, and prone to letting his emotions get the better of him, and also very intelligent and highly skilled.

In this interview, he talks about how what he went through to create Fez isn’t repeatable, and not something he would recommend to other aspiring game designers.

I could see that, watching the film 10 years ago, it didn’t surprise me to hear Fish confirm that my reading at the time of what was going on was essentially correct, but it felt good. It’s also good to hear Fish in the interview, sounding more relaxed, less intense, wiser for his experience, and opening up about what the experience was like, with the benefit of hindsight. Fish was pretty tight-lipped when it came to details on what he’s been up to, so it remains to be seen whether he’ll be working on any new games. But whatever he’s doing with himself, it’s good to know that he’s in a better place mentally and emotionally these days.

Remembering Kool-Aid Man (Atari 2600)

Atari, Console Gaming
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Kool-Aid Man was one of those games that was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Atari 2600. Released in 1983, the year of the Crash. As an 8 year old kid, the Crash didn’t mean much to me, other than that games got insanely cheap that year, as a glut of unwanted video games were liquidated by retailers for pennies on the dollar.

The Koo-Aid Man video game was initially a special offer only game. To get a copy, you had to send in proof-of-purchases for Kool-Aid, and wait several weeks for the cartridge to arrive by mail. I don’t remember how many points you had to send in, but we drank a ton of kool-aid in my house, and one day our copy arrived.

125 points? That doesn’t seem like all that much.

I found this scanned image of a print ad from some comic book on the web, and it says you could send in either 125 Kool-Aid Proof of Purchase points, or 30 points + $10. I think each packet of Kool Aid drink mix powder was worth a single point, and mixed like a gallon of Kool Aid. So it really was a TON of Kool Aid we had to drink to earn this game.

People will tell you this game sucked, but I liked it. The game was fun, if simple game. The premise of the game is that there’s this swimming pool full of water, that you, Kool-Aid Man, have to protect from these creatures called Thirsties. Thirsties are… well, they’re thirsty, and they want to drink up all the water in the swimming pool. If that happens, the swimming pool won’t be fun anymore, and everyone’s day will be ruined. But you’re Kool-Aid Man, your job is to quench people’s thirst. So you can save the day by quenching the Thirsties’ thirst, thereby saving the swimming pool for the swimmers. Now, if only someone could fix that huge hole in the wall…

The people saying this game sucks might have been speaking literally.

The game consists in rounds lasting 60 seconds, and if you can clear all the Thirsties in the level before this time elapses, you’ll get bonus points for the remaining time, and then start a new level with higher difficulty provided by the Thirsties moving faster than before.

You spend most of your time dodging moving Thirsties. When a Thirsty drinks it stops to extend a long straw to the water in the pool. This is when it is vulnerable. Hitting Thirsties when they are drinking eliminates the Thirsty, and gives you some points. Colliding with a free-roaming Thirsty, or into one of the edges of the screen, will cause you to bounce out of control, giving the Thirsties time to drink more pool water.

You can buy yourself a few seconds of invincibility by grabbing ingredients of Kool-Aid: Water, Sugar, and Kool-Aid Mix. Grabbing these changes you into a bigger pitcher of Kool-Aid and makes you invulnerable while a tune plays, and also adds some water back to the pool. Mercifully, you can still knock out a drinking Thirsty if you careen into it while out of control, and if you luck into a power-up it renders you invulnerable, instantly returning control back to you. The fire button does nothing in this game, which is a rare thing.

If you play the game enough, you may notice that the Thirsties behavior is not random — the Thirsties always stop to drink at the same time, in the same order. By learning the pattern, you can gain an advantage over the game and get a better score, which makes the game somehow both more and less re-playable. More because learning the pattern could lead to developing strategies to get through the level while losing less of the water, less because if the game is always the same every time you play it, that can get boring. I only noticed this when I went back to re-play the game to write this review, when I was a kid it seemed like each new game was random, and I never caught on to the pattern.

Unlike most Atari 2600 games, Kool-Aid Man starts a new game immediately upon turning the console on. To give you a second or two to get ready, there’s a sweet intro screen, which features a full-screen animation of Kool-Aid Man crashing through a wall around a typical suburban backyard. The invincibility tune plays, and then the game starts without any delay.

Check out that cinematic cutscene! Oh yeah!

It seemed to me that the game programmers were a little sloppy by making the game work like this. It always made me anxious to know that I had to start playing the game immediately upon turning on the console.

When the game ends, the screen background goes dark, and you lose control over Kool-Aid Man, and the score stops increasing. But the Thirsties continue to fly around, and every time they crash into Kool-Aid Man, he’s sent careening around, bonking off of the walls and other Thirsties, forever.

Even in death, the power-ups make you invincible.

And while it was funny to watch the defeated Kool-Aid Man bouncing around forever, the noise from this going on non-stop was pretty annoying, and tended to make you want to turn the game off as soon as your game was over unless you were going to immediately start a new game.

Overall, the game was a good test of skill and reflexes, had tight controls, decent balance, and a tough challenge curve. On the other hand, it got old fast, because there was nothing new after the first screen, the game immediately presented everything it had to offer.

Strike Zone Bowling homebrew for Atari 2600 beta is amazing

Atari
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Playing the Atari 2600 as much as I did as a kid, I never thought that its graphical capabilities were amazing. I could see arcade games from 19879-82, and tell that the Atari 2600 wasn’t capable of the same graphics, even if I didn’t really know why. It just seemed to make sense that a bigger machine that probably cost a lot more and only did one thing would be capable of doing it better than a smaller, less expensive machine that didn’t take up as much space and could do seemingly anything.

Comparing arcade ports to the 2600, we knew to expect that the graphics wouldn’t be as good, but usually the gameplay was just as good, if not better. It seemed like the difficulty was tuned to be a little bit more fun, a little less punishing, on the home console. And that made sense, too. In the arcade, the business model was to suck quarters out of pockets as quickly as possible, and that meant high difficulty, while at home they wanted you to enjoy playing the game for extended periods, so that you would want to seek out more games to buy.

Some arcade ports were more disappointing than others, and that was usually due to ROM space limitations preventing full featured ports. It might be a missing level, or it might be some other compromise, something they had to leave out because they couldn’t fit everything in. Sometimes it was limitations imposed by the single-button joystick being unable to replicate all the control options on the arcade cabinet.

A game like Strike Zone Bowling, a work-in-progress homebrew game for the Atari 2600, would have blown our young minds back then. It’s still fantastic now. Look at these screen captures:

I love this shifty-eyed shoe rental guy. With the mustache and red hat, he kindof reminds me of someone…
The main action happens on this screen, which gives a convincingly realistic representation of a real bowling alley.
Celebration screen animations for strikes and spares take the game to a new level.
You can even select your bowler’s gender.
After the game, depending on your score, you can hang out by the restrooms, the snack bar, pool hall, or video arcade.
When you get “in the zone” it becomes easier to hit strikes and get a higher score.
Anybody got a quarter?

The developer of this game has brilliantly worked within the 2600’s limitations. If you know how the 2600 draws graphics, it’s easy to see that. The 2600 does not have a screen buffer, so it draws its graphics to the display in real-time. That is, while the electron beam of the television is traversing the screen to excite the phosphors of the cathode ray tube, the Atari 2600 is sending data out the video cable to generate the signal the TV turns into a picture, generating it just in time. Sprite objects, stored in the ROM data on the cartridge as 1-bit bitmaps, are drawn one horizontal row at a time, and between each row the programmer can do clever things like change the drawing color, change the scale, mirror the image, and draw duplicates. The hardware can only draw two sprites to the screen, but if the programmer wants, they can reposition those sprites during draw time, and change the bitmap data used to draw them, to create the effect of more than two sprites. The hardware also supports the ability to draw two additional “missile” objects and a “ball” — but with even more limitations. And finally, the hardware can support drawing background graphics, meaning a background color plus a playfield. The playfield graphics are lower-resolution than the sprites for Player 1 and Player 2. And that’s it.

These limitations make the Atari much better at drawing graphics that are composed of vertically stacked rows of horizontal data.

You’ve come a long way, baby

We had a commercially-released Bowling game for the 2600 — it was called Bowling. And it was, if you can believe it, good.

Fun to play, decently challenging, especially if you were trying to score above 200, the 1978 Bowling game was perfectly acceptable, and well within expectations for what a video game was at the time. And 45 years later, Strike Zone Bowling absolutely blows it away.

If you look at the screen of Bowling, we can see that the developer was working “against the grain” when it came to drawing the screen. The player, ball, and pin graphics are all in the same horizontal row, and this necessitates use of the available hardware sprites on each row. It seems that the playfield graphics aren’t used here, and that the sprites are used to draw the scores for each player, the on-screen bowler, and and the bowling ball, while the pins and gutters might be drawn using the “missile” or “ball” graphics — to know for sure, we’d need to decompile the ROM and read the assembly code.

The designer of Bowling made the decision that because bowling alley lanes are long and narrow, using the longer horizontal axis of the TV screen’s 4:3 display made the most sense.

This new Strike Zone Bowling takes a more sophisticated approach, and presents the game from the bowler’s POV, or rather from behind the back of the bowler, looking down the lane. Use of perspective and foreshortening enables the full length of the alley to be compressed visually to fit in the screen. By doing this, the programmer is able to use row-by-row color changes to give an enhanced illusion of depth, creating a 3D-like effect. This also has the benefit of having fewer objects to draw at each horizontal row, meaning that the hardware sprites, missiles, and balls, can all be used together to create composite images that are composed of more colors than would otherwise be possible.

The game is also a lot larger, 32KB of ROM as opposed to the 2KB of the 1978 Bowling. This additional space is used to create a more full experience of going to a bowling alley, renting shoes, celebrating strikes and spares, and chilling out after the game by the pool table or at an arcade game. This gives the game more narrative elements and almost a story as opposed to simply simulating the game of bowling, it aims to simulate the total experience of going to a bowling alley.

As amazing as this beta is, it could be even better. The bowler is always right-handed, but it seems like it could be fairly simple to add left-handed bowlers by mirroring the graphics and the controls. Graphically, the ball could scale slightly smaller as it moves further away from the bowler, to create a better simulation of 3D. The title screen music is a bit basic, and could be improved. That’s about it. There could be additional controls and simulation for ball weight and velocity, but I think it would take away from the simplicity of the game, and it doesn’t really need those things to feel complete and like a good challenge.

As is, the game is already a solid A-level effort.