AtariBox entering “pre-production” phase as architect quits

Atari, Console Gaming
Comments

This morning, my email inbox greeted me with another announcement from Atari, explaining how excited they were that the VCS is “going into pre-production.”

I’m not entirely clear what this means, given that the normal understanding of the term “pre-production” would seemingly cover the entire history of the AtariBox project, given that nothing has gone into production so far.

Some more teaser images showing prototype hardware in various stages of assembly, and some explanation of the design/layout of the motherboard, apparently in response to the reaction to the first announcement where they showed an image of the motherboard, which lead to speculation about whether it was real, or complete, or might have been hastily created by a company that specializes in rapid turnaround in order to give Atari something tangible to show backers while they continue to delay more meaningful steps toward release of a product.

There’s some more information in Atari’s latest Medium article — it is capable of running both Linux and Windows (hardly surprising, given the AtariBox is an AMD x64 system); it will have a fan-based cooling system (to me this is disappointing news, as I would have hoped for a silent running system, but again not terribly surprising, given that most computers these days are fan-cooled); default RAM will be 8GB (2×4) and user upgradeable, some frankly boring talk about plastic injection molds… and they’re still working on the actual software that will run on the system, although they had teased something at E3, it’s not ready to run on this hardware yet. Which is really bizarre — if this AMD x64 system is capable of running Linux and Windows, and if they can tease the front-end that they’ve been working for on some type of computer system, then what’s so different about the AtariBox hardware that Atari can’t run it on the machine they’re designing it for right now? Why couldn’t they all along, every step of the way? Something is not right about their software delivery lifecycle if they can’t create builds that will run on their target hardware.

I guess if there’s one positive thing to take from this announcement, it’s that Atari are apparently stepping up the frequency of their announcements, which may be a good sign that they are actually making progress with bringing their vision closer to reality.

That is, however…

Today The Register is reporting that Rob Wyatt, the architect of the VCS, has quit the project, and claims that he hasn’t been paid in 6 months. It was reported earlier that Wyatt was starting a new project, and after Atari’s previous announcement, rumor boards were awash with speculation about whether Wyatt was still on board with Atari. Atari’s PR deflected questions about it, but it’s clear now that Wyatt is no longer working with Atari on the VCS project.

The Register’s reporting on this project has been very thorough and is to be commended.

Sadly it’s looking more and more like AtariBox has been smoke and mirrors, underfunded wishes, and — let’s be frank — lies, and appears to be increasingly unlikely to launch. And even if it does, there’s no indication that it will be worth buying, due to a lack of first-party exclusive game content.

Intellivision Amico at T-minus 1 year

Console Gaming
Comments

Intellivision’s revival was announced a year ago, at the 2018 Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and they’ve been fairly quiet since then. But it looks as though, unlike Atari, they have been working steadily toward product viability. They are now a year away from their announced release date, and they actually have some games in the works.

A recently posted teaser video showed a number of games, purportedly being played on Amico hardware, that look like re-skinned versions of popular early-80s classic games such as Moon Patrol, Asteroids, and others, but with modern graphics.

I’m not sure what to make of these games yet, but if they’re merely re-skins of old games, that will not be enough to make the Amico successful.

To be compelling, Amico developers need to imagine (and then realize) an alternative history. In the same way that steampunk is a retro vision of what science fiction could have been from the perspective of the 19th century worldview, Amico games should be an expression of the vision of what videogames could have been from the perspective of the late 70’s/early 80’s worldview.

This is a really difficult thing to envision correctly. There really is no one right way to do it, but its a rich space within which different designers could allow their imaginations to run wild, and come up with better or worse visions of what this alternative history might be. Really, we would not have a single alternative timeline, but rather a seeming infinity of branching alternatives.

There are several interesting main branches for this alternative future history.

Platform Steady State

Imagine that the original Intellivision never stopped production, that a new generation of computing hardware never arrived, but that games for the 1979 INTV system continued to be developed, using the same hardware, and the same constraints.

What would the games being developed in 1990, 2000, 2010 or 2020 look like for such a system? To answer that, we need look no further than the homebrew community. Or more broadly, look at the homebrew community for that generation of systems: Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision. Over time, developers can become very familiar with the hardware, discover programming tricks and techniques to get the absolute most out of the system, and refine the quality of the software to its ultimate state.

Now try to envision the present day homebrew community, with the approval of copyright and trademark holders, creating authorized works. This gives us sequels to our favorite games, not just original new games, or thinly veiled “homages” or “parodies” of our favorite games.

This is one potential alternative history, and since it is one that we already have, in large part, in the form of the homebrew gamedev scene, it’s certainly viable. But it’s probably not the most interesting branch. The homebrew scene is awesome and it would be great to see it promoted on a modern platform that has mass appeal. But my hunch is that the appeal of the homebrew scene is narrow and niche. That is to say, the homebrew audience today is limited to a relatively small number of enthusiasts who have an old system that still works, and this number is most likely to dwindle as the enthusiasts die off and as the hardware breaks.

Unlimited Budget, 1979 tech

Now let’s go a bit further, and envision an Intellivision-like system that has just a little bit more capability. Not enough to put the system into a “next generation”, but more like what Intellivision could have been with an unlimited R&D budget and no compromises, subject to the limits of 1979’s tech. Whatever that tech is, it still has to fit inside a console-sized box, but it can be a no-compromises design within that box.

To properly envision this, we’d need to know the internals of the INTV rather intimately, as well as what other components were around at the time that could have been chosen for the system instead, but weren’t due to, primarily price considerations.

I don’t really have such an understanding, but imagine that we had a computer and electronics catalog from 1979, and it had all the components that went into the production of the INTV. Most likely, these parts were not the most expensive available, but the cheapest that could still do the job. Maybe in some cases they had to drop features entirely, in order to get the design to fit within a price point.

But you have unlimited budget, so you can select the top end parts, and include all the features. So maybe your CPU is speedier, maybe you have a bit more RAM, and the RAM is faster. Maybe this gives you the capability to do slightly higher resolution graphics modes, or more colors on screen from a larger palette. Maybe the IntelliVoice expansion module is built-in as standard equipment, and maybe it’s capable of speech synthesis that’s a little better. Games can have more sprites on screen without flicker, larger sprites, more animation frames, bigger levels, more items, etc.

Essentially this describes something like an “Intellivision III Plus” — the INTV3 was a backward compatible system released in 1982, which had a faster CPU, better graphics chip with double resolution capability and more sprites and colors, and yes, integrated IntelliVoice.

So this branch of alternative history more or less actually existed, but its life was cut short when Mattel canceled the INTV3 in 1983 due to the Crash. As such, we didn’t really get to see the full potential of what the INTV3 could have delivered. I’m not familiar with the homebrew community centered around the INTV3 hardware — most homebrew development focuses on more popular systems, such as the Atari 2600 or the NES, but to the extent there is one, the games it’s producing are essentially what this branch of alternative history might have looked like.

Moore’s Law Goes Linear

Let’s envision a future world wherein Moore’s Law failed early, and computers grew slightly more powerful, rather than exponentially.

Imagine that Mattel released a new system in 1983 or 84, and again in 1988, and then in 1993… and so on, until today. But rather than each generation of hardware roughly doubling in speed, memory, and so forth, the advances were merely linear. So, imagine that 40 years of integrated circuit micronization R&D results in a CPU clock speeds increasing from 1MHz to 40MHz instead of 4000 MHz. RAM increases from 2 KB to… just a few megabytes.

This is basically what personal computers were in the early-mid 1990s, only it happens 30 years later in the alternate history than it did in the real world. I had a Macintosh Centris 610 purchased in 1993, which had a 20MHz Motorola 68000 series CPU, 4MB of RAM (upgradeable to 16MB or so), and an 80 MB hard drive. A game console in the mold of the Intellivision likely wouldn’t have had a hard drive, so swap it for a cartridge slot, but let each cartridge hold ROM images of around 1-4MB on average, with maybe a spectacular, premium game topping out around 12-16MB. Graphics on my system were limited to 8-bit or 16-bit color depth, depending on resolution mode, and I think my 14″ monitor did 800×600, but maybe it was only 640×320.

If you programmed a system with specs like that at the bare metal, in assembly, dedicating the hardware fully to running the game, and not an operating system with layers of services for applications, that’s actually quite a powerful system, which would be very capable, even without hardware accelerated 3D graphics.

Keep in mind that software developers would have a very strong incentive to push hardware to its limit, and much more time to perfect performance optimization techniques for a stable hardware platform that doesn’t fall into obsolescence after 18 months. There wouldn’t be the mentality of just making software that’s good enough and shoving it out the door, and trust that next year’s computers would be powerful enough to run it acceptably. In such an alternate history, software craftsmanship would be highly advanced compared to in our world, and developers would work in low-level languages.

The thing is, I feel that a few generations advanced version of what Mattel could have evolved the Intellivision into doesn’t really feel like an Intellivision. It feels like… well, like an early 1990’s pre-PowerMac Macintosh. But it’s not really what Intellivision would need to be going with the Amico for if they wanted to tap into nostalgia for what Intellivision was in 1979-1982.

Something else then?

To do this, we need to understand the resource constraints of the Intellivision in a bit more detail, and then come up with some way to relax only one or two of them, in just such a way that it enables some new possibilities for games that are similar to the games that typified the Intellivision era, yet were just out of reach of what the console was actually capable of.

As an example, we might look at what sort of games we could have seen with twice the resolution, or an extra color per sprite, or removing the limitation on the number of sprites per horizontal scan line. Or ROMs that could be an extra 4KB in size.

Another way to think about it would be to think about ways we could augment the Intellivision by granting one capability from present day systems. For example, what sort of games could an Intellivision have played if it had always-on, low-latency network connectivity, that enabled it to connect to the internet and communicate high scores or enable online multiplayer? But (since the games are still based on EEPROM technology that is not re-writeablee) cannot apply updates or patches (other than new content). Or what would an Intellivision game look like with WSVGA resolution and thousands of sprites instead of NTSC resolution, but the same color palette?

We’d want to remember that these are not actual limitations we’re designing into the actual hardware, but rather artificial limitations we pretend to exist, accepting them as design constraints, in order to force us to come up with creative solutions for the problems that would arise in game development as a result of them, so that we could end up with games that have a distinctive flavor to their style that evokes an Intellivision aesthetic.

So summing up:

Do I want a game that plays exactly like Astrosmash, but has 4K resolution graphics, with 32-bit color depth, and the sprites look photorealistic, but it’s just a re-skin of the original Astrosmash? Nah, I’d probably rate that about a 4/10 (and the original Astrosmash is easily an 8/10). You don’t get a better game just by multiplying the graphical output.

What I would be excited about is a spiritual successor to Astrosmash, with extended play mechanics, and blocky, low-res graphics that evoke the original, but have enhanced effects, maybe some trails or motion blur, some neon glow, something like that. Something like what Tempest 2K was to Tempest.

A retro-inspired game like Geometry Wars would be a good fit for the console.

I’d also love to see a game that looks like it could have been drawn by an INTV or Atari 2600, but which is much larger in scope than what those games were capable of. Think Pitfall 3, and it looks like Pitfall I and II, but it has a larger world, more variety of obstacles and creatures, and additional play mechanics that weren’t possible on the original hardware.

Intellivision’s FAQ on Games suggests that this sort of thing is pretty well what they have in mind for the console, although what the games actually end up like obviously remains to be seen. They are looking to launch with a catalog of about 40 games, which is a respectable number of exclusive titles to start out with.

It is still a very difficult market to establish a new console in, though. Intellivision’s approach is to target a different market segment, rather than try to compete directly with Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Google, and this seems smart, but whether it will succeed is up to Intellivision’s execution, and the market to decide. The casual/family gaming market is already pretty well served by mobile devices, and it’s difficult to say whether the Amico will appeal enough to consumers to get them to buy enough to make it a commercial success.

Atari: We now have games for the VCS! (Not really…)

Atari, Console Gaming
Comments

After being stung recently and repeatedly for their lack of progress on the AtariBox project, Atari released their Big Announcement about the games that will be available on the console.

TL;DR, the announcement is very underwhelming. Atari is packaging a bunch of old classic games for streaming to your AtariBox. They’re not even doing it themselves; they’re partnering with another company.

That’s right, they still have ZERO new exclusive launch titles for this system. You know, the thing that tends to drive people to buy new systems? They still don’t have that.

Let’s be generous, the three word elevator pitch for this is: “Netflix for videogames”. Only, no Netflix Originals, just re-runs of games you’ve played a million times already, and already have access to through a variety of other platforms. If you aren’t lucky enough to have lived through most of the history of video games and have a library devoted to that history, you might find this enticing.

In a way, this is cool. For only about 25 years now, gamers have had to resort to piracy and emulation to play thousands of arcade game titles for free. Now, they can pay $10/mo + $350 for the console for the privilege of doing it guilt-free, albeit restricted to just those titles that are available through Antstream. And that’s something, isn’t it? 

No, I know that sound sarcastic, but it really is. For only 25 years or so, the problem of preserving historic videogames has been ignored by the industry that created them, and was left to be solved by dedicated fans who recognized the importance of such an effort. But this was always an ethical quandary, and enthusiasts were forced into a dilemma: literally preserve history before it was too late and games were lost forever, and violate copyright for a bunch of outdated products that companies refused to continue to produce or make available in any format? Well now for just $10/mo our consciences can finally be clear. And our reward for this will be that only the games deemed worthy of preservation for their long-tail commercial potential will be preserved. Shut down the MAME project, everyone, and rejoice: we’ve won.

OK, ok, that’s unavoidably sarcastic, but it’s true. This service creates value by ripping the hard work of emulation preservationists, and by graverobbing what rightfully should have by now been the public domain, to provide games-as-a-service to you, so that you can pay for them forever, without ever owning them. Because in the new economy, ownership is theft. There’s literally no reason you would ever want to own anything anyway, this is a post-scarsity economy, after all.

Antstream itself kickstarted into existence in April of 2019, and, well, isn’t it telling that a physical “not-a-console” gaming system that kickstarted TWO YEARS earlier and STILL doesn’t have any exclusive launch titles lined up, kept silent about this deficiency for all that time, until fed-up backers had a mutiny about it on Reddit, and so had to run out and find something, anything, so they could claim that they will have games, and picks something that only became a thing this year?

It makes you wonder what the hell Atari have been up to for the past two years, apart from rendering the shell they’re putting their components into, and re-releasing the same empty hype announcement every 6 months or so. According to their Kickstarter page, Antstream have been developing their service for four years now, so the Kickstarter is more an effort to do viral marketing for the launch of the service rather than a no-product preorder like Atari’s VCS Indigogo was. Yet, if Atari had planned all along to make use of this service, and had to remain quiet about it all this time, one wonders why they couldn’t have said something around the time that Antsream launched their Kickstarter campaign. Why the need to remain silent for another 6 months?

Still unanswered: Is anyone actually developing any games that will run only on this system, so that there will be a reason to buy it? Any first party game development, at all? (Well, it’s a silent NO, that’s the answer.) Atari 2019 is a brand name only, not a developer of anything substantial. In trying to establish a platform, they’re leveraging the work of others and passing it off as their own. AMD for the hardware. Antstream for the content. Maybe there’s some internal work being done to create the GUI to do configuration management and launch apps, but that’s not exactly exciting, now, is it?

It’s worth mentioning that around the time Antstream announced itself — about a month before, actually — Google announced Stadia, and there’s literally no reason any of the games that you might have access to through Antstream couldn’t also be streamed to your screen through Stadia. Other than, I guess, some exclusive rights deal that would preclude availability on other platforms. But then, Stadia is still in pre-order, too. Sigh.

So for the time being we’re still safe from the future hell of games-as-service, that you can never own, and which will be preserved for all time only to the extent that a company decides to preserve them. Which is to say, any old versions will be superceded by the latest patch, even if earlier releases are historically relevant. And games that aren’t attracting sufficient interest will be dropped unceremoniously, and probably not many people will care, except the small audiences for games who really love those games even though they’re part of a small audience not big enough to be considered commercially viable. But who cares about them, anyway?

Even if Antstream is great — no, especially if their service is great– it’ll be available on all platforms that its client can be ported to, there’s still no compelling answer to the question, why get an AtariBox?

Atari attempts to answer this by assuring us that:

When Atari VCS users log in or subscribe to the Antstream service using their Atari VCS, it will immediately unlock an exclusive and enhanced version of the Antstream app engineered specifically for the Atari VCS. The Atari VCS Edition of the app will house the largest collection of Atari games available anywhere and ready for immediate play. This enhanced collection will be exclusive to the Atari VCS at launch and will not be available on other Antstream platforms without an Atari VCS account.

Atari

Re-read that last sentence. You can stream Antstream’s exclusive AtariVCS content to any Antstream-capable platform, provided you have an Atari VCS account. My guess is that you’ll be able to get one of those without buying the AtariBox hardware, if not immediately then eventually. No word on whether that will cost a monthly subscription on top of whatever Antstream will cost.

But this leads me to wonder what’s up with Atari’s earlier announcement that the Atari Vault would be available to VCS owners? I mean, I don’t really wonder, because who cares. The AtariVault is on Steam and I can buy it and play it right now through my Steam account on my PC, and I don’t have to pre-order and then wait 3 years for some outdated low end PC in a pretty case to do it, either.

But lets say I did decide to wonder. Well, is the Atari Vault still going to be part of the picture, or did they just shitcan it and replace it with a subscription-based streaming service?

Oh, and there’s a picture of their motherboard. Suck on that, haters! I bet everyone who doubted that AMD Ryzen board could have an Atari Fuji logo custom silkscreened onto its PCB are all eating crow now!

Well, it’s something, anyway. Not enough. But at least it’s something.

The AtariBox story continues to be dismal

Atari, Console Gaming
Comments

Update from the Register… It’s sad that this is the reality but it’s about exactly what I expected, and have been warning the public about since the crowdfunding campaign pitch.

Don’t give these people money until they have a product. Promises and hype are nothing. Shame on the people who continue to abuse the Atari name for continuing to string gullible fans along with so little evidence of any actual work happening toward delivering on the vision they pitched over 2 years ago.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Collectorvision’s Phoenix console is shipping in October, and was announced after Atari first announced the AtariBox concept. The Phoenix not only plays ColecoVision games through a cartridge slot, it also has an FPGA core to play Atari 2600 cartridges as well. It’s not trying to be a next-gen console or a brand reboot for a dead company, but it exists, it works, it plays classic games with incredible fidelity to the original hardware, and I’ve touched one.

Ancient Technologies accepted into Open World Arcade at Akron Art Museum

games
Comments

My game Ancient Technologies, originally created for Ludum Dare 36, has been selected by a panel of judges into the Open World Arcade at Akron Art Museum.

Open World is an art exhibit of contemporary art influenced by video games. The Open World Arcade is a one-day event, to be held on December 7th, 2019, from 11 AM – 5 PM. Games presented in the arcade are judged by a panel of museum staff and video game professionals based on novelty, professional polish, aesthetics, quality of game experience and “wow factor.”

My game Ancient Technologies was an homage to the “ancient” technology of videogaming’s past, and re-creates the experience of setting up an Atari 2600 video game system. If you “win” the challenge of setting up the system correctly, your reward is that you get to play a somewhat faithful re-creation of the game Asteroids.

I created the Ancient Technologies in about 25 hours using GameMaker Studio, Stella, and Audacity. The Asteroids game that you play inside of Ancient Technologies is a simulation, not emulated. I used graphic and audio samples generated by Stella to create the simulation. I also sampled pixel art renderings of the Atari 2600 six-switch console and joystick created by pixel artists, and a partner provided the TV image, while I created the background of the living room. The simulation is a reasonably faithful re-creation of Asteroids’ gameplay, and feels pretty authentic in many respects, although it is not completely accurate. Most notably, it is missing the UFO and Satellite enemies, which I ran out of time to implement in the game.

Further reading

  1. Ancient Technologies postmortem
  2. Ludum Dare 36 is at an end

Book Review: Arcade Perfect by David L. Craddock

Arcade, Console Gaming, games, reviews
Comments

An interesting thing happened to me few months ago.

I was reading Shovel Knight, by David L. Craddock, published by Boss Fight Books, and thoroughly enjoying the ride, when I received an email from none other than… David L. Craddock. Craddock had found my contact info through this website, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in reading a pre-release copy of his latest book, Arcade Perfect, and publishing a review on it.

I thought that the name sounded familiar, so I looked him up, and found that he’d written the book that was in my left hand, as I read the email on the smartphone in my right hand. I wrote back, asking him if he was indeed one and the same. He was. I felt oddly watched.

Shovel Knight was a fantastic read, a detailed history of Yacht Club Games’s origins and how they came to create one of the best videogames of 2014. It was well paced, thorough,, interesting, and covered the human side of the story as well as the technical.

Of course I said yes.

I also offered to provide feedback on the manuscript, as I have helped several other authors in the past with technical review of their manuscripts. Craddock appreciated my offer and offered me an acknowledgement in his Foreward. I say this not as a brag, but for transparency’s sake, to say that this may not be a review completely free of bias, although I’ll strive for that anyway.

Arcade Perfect is a collection of histories on over a dozen popular arcade games, and the story of how they were ported to home consoles. If you’ve read Racing The Beam, or The Ultimate History of Video Games, this book will be of interest to you.

The book is long. At nearly 600 pages, it will take you a while to get through. It spans almost the entire the breadth of video gaming history, starting with Pong and going through about 2015-17. Golden age titles Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac Man, Missile Command, and Donkey Kong are all given treatment, as is Tetris, and the 90’s are represented by the games NBA Jam, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Each of these games has an interesting back story of how it came to exist, and how it was brought from the arcade to home consoles. The challenges the developers faced are many. Most if not all of these games were ported to other platforms not by the original developers, but by another talented programmer or team. Oftentimes, no original project documentation was provided to the porting effort, and developers had to “interpret” the game by playing it until they knew it backwards and forwards, reverse engineering to the best of their ability, and working within the constraints of the target platform’s hardware, dealing with hard deadlines and high expectations to deliver an acceptable translation of a very popular title eagerly anticipated by a rabid consumer fanbase.

The last 150 or so pages of the book are devoted to full transcripts of the interviews that Craddock conducted with various creators who worked on the games. This is primary resource material and very nice to have in its entirety.

The book is illustrated, although in the advance copy I saw, the image layouts were still rough. I would hope that these issues will be addressed before the first edition of the book goes to print.

Arcade Perfect is available today. Follow the author on Twitter @davidlcraddok.

GDEX 2019

GameDev
Comments

I learned today that I will be a speaker at GDEX 2019 in Columbus, OH, which will take place Oct. 11-13. This will be my first presentation given at the conference. The talk is entitled, Finding Yourself in Metropolis: Designing an interesting space with minimal resources in Superman (Atari, 1979).

Diatris by Rob van Saaze

GameMaker, games, Indie Gaming, reviews
Comments

Diatris is a Tetris-like falling stack game by Rob van Saaze. Released earlier this year and developed in GameMaker Studio.

I had the good fortune of catching a work-in-progress screenshot tweet, and messaged Rob, and ended up being a playtester for his game.

I like the interesting twist he put on the classic Tetris. This game is really different from its inspiration. The shapes are different, the falling pieces slide down the slopes of the stack, and the angle factor really changes the way the game feels. It’s quite challenging, and fun.

The graphical style is clean and polished, but juicy, and it looks as great as it plays. Rob has a great eye for graphical design, and it shows in his work. The attention to detail in animation and motion is

Best of all, it’s completely free.

Thoughts on Nintendo Switch Lite

Nintendo
Comments

Yesterday, Nintendo announced their hardware revision for the Switch Lite. As I already have a Switch, I’m not likely to buy one, and if I didn’t have a Switch, but wanted to buy one, I’m not sure whether I would opt for the original or this new version.

The new version is cheaper, by about $100, but it gets to that price point by dropping features.  The controllers are not detachable from the unit, which has a number of repercussions, both good and bad:

Good:

  • The controllers don’t get lost.
  • The connector/locking mechanism is a weak point that is prone to wear and breakage.
  • The controllers don’t need to have separate batteries so they can be used wirelessly, independent of the battery in the main body of the Switch.
  • This makes it considerably less expensive.
  • The left side incorporates a D-pad rather than the 4 separate buttons, which many gamers agree feels better and is better.

Bad:

  • They dropped the HD rumble feature, which means that pretty much kills any future game development that might have made use of this feature.  
  • The motion-tracking capabilities (accelerometer, gyroscopes, IR camera) of the controllers and their ability to be used in various configurations are gone, too.  Even if they were kept, being attached to the console would prevent the controllers from being used freely in the way that detachable controllers could be.  This marks a move away from the novel motion controls that Nintendo were lauded for innovating with the Wii. 
  • It doesn’t connect to a TV, so is portable only. While the smaller size will appeal to gamers who want a more truly portable Switch, this likely means that the end is near for Nintendo’s venerable 3DS line of handhelds. (Of course, that writing was already on the wall the moment Nintendo revealed the Switch.)

To me, the bad outweighs the good, here.  Dropping these features means that gaming consoles are reducing the scope of their capabilities, which means that game developers will have to work within a more limited set of constraints for how they can deliver experiences to gamers.

The reality is that most games are developed for multiple platforms, ported to any system that they can.  The result of this is that game developers are already constrained to designing within the set of feature constraints represented by the least common denominator across all systems.  As such, unique features that differentiate a console tend to go unused, and thus aren’t worth investing in.  This means that innovations can only make headway if they’re adopted industry wide by all competitors. 

That is, if everyone decides to do HD rumble and motion control, then game designers can create designs that target these capabilities, and by making use of them, will justify their existence and the large R&D and manufacturing costs associated with providing them.  In other words, it’s use it or lose it.  

This isn’t really anything new.  In the NES era, there were very few games produced that supported the light gun.  The Zapper was an optional accessory that didn’t come standard with every NES, and as a result the install base was too small, so a game developer who wanted to maximize sales would want to target the widest possible audience, which meant constraining themselves to develop games that could be played on any and all NES consoles, and this meant ignoring the people who spent the extra money to invest in the Zapper. 

When Taito ported the arcade light gun rail shooter Operation: Wolf to the NES, they implemented an on-screen target reticle controlled by the D-pad, rather than support the light gun.  I bought that game, assuming that of course they would provide a means to play the game for people who didn’t own a Zapper, but would surely have supported the Zapper as well, to provide the best translation of the arcade experience to the home console.  But they didn’t.  Instead, you had to deal with a slow, awkward control mechanism which made the game horrible to play. I couldn’t have been more disappointed. The game was a hit in the arcade, and a bomb on the NES.

In like fashion, we can now expect game developers to ignore the dropped features of the Switch that differentiated it from the market and made it special, but now are “non-standard” and not part of the full feature set. In large part, most 3rd party developers probably were already ignoring those features, rather than expending extra effort to create Switch-enhanced versions of their games that made full use of what the hardware could offer. But now even first party Nintendo titles that Switch-exclusive will likely not support these now-“extra” features.

Considering that Nintendo put so much effort into engineering these features in the first place, and made it a big part of the appeal to customers to buy a Switch instead of the more standard PS4/XBOne ,to me this feels like an admission that they were mistaken that such innovations would drive sales, and now they’ve taken an alternative track to target budget gamers. This might be a sound business decision; I’m not saying it isn’t. But it is a sad thing to realize; we’ll be seeing a blander future for games with the library of features reduced to just buttons and sticks.

It might well be that this is all any game designer “needs”, but I feel like the painter’s palette has been reduced. Imagine if painters had developed paints that produced scents that reproduced the odors of the subject, creating an enhanced experience for the viewer. Or textured paints that reproduce the tactile experience for someone touching the artwork. Not every painting would need olfactory features or haptics, but it would be more immersive for those that did make use of it, and would open up new worlds of possibility for people working in the medium. But if only a few painters bothered to make use of the capability, and if the enhanced features could only be experienced in person, and not through prints, photographs, or other-media transliterations of the original, many painters might well think “why bother?” and abandon the enhanced paints, leading to their death in the marketplace, and an endpoint to further development of the innovation.

What about “Switch Pro”?

The other rumored Switch revision has not surfaced. It seems unlikely now that it will. But many Nintendo fans had expressed a desire for a “Switch Pro” with features like a bigger, higher-resolution screen, larger JoyCons for adult-sized hands, larger internal storage and a beefier processor/RAM, and possibly losing the handheld mode and going TV-mode only.

While I’d definitely be more interested in this, I don’t think we’ll see it, especially now that the Switch Lite is out. Switch was intended to be a crossover device that unified living room and portable gamers. Splitting back up to “Switch Lite” for portable gaming and “Switch Pro” for higher-end entertainment center gaming would be a reversal of course, and for that reason alone I doubt Nintendo would make such a move.

It’s more likely that a hardware revision for the full Switch would bring additional RAM, CPU, and/or internal storage, but I wouldn’t count on a bigger screen with higher resolution (too much battery drain) and it seems to me there’s more than enough controller options for players with larger hands, particularly the Nintendo Pro Controller that if the JoyCons are too tiny for you, they’ve got you covered already.

Update: Nintendo announced a revision to the original Switch, bringing a larger battery capacity, and no other upgrades.

Super Mario Maker 2 review

Nintendo
Comments

Although my friends know me as someone who is an avid video game player, I have a confession to make.  My last Mario game was Super Mario World on the SNES.  I never played Super Mario 64, or anything later than that on the main Mario sequence.  I mean, I’ve played Mario Kart and most of its sequels, but in terms of 2D run and jump platformer Mario games, I kinda left off early. By the time Nintendo 64 was out, I was in college, I had to work, and didn’t have as much time for playing games as I once did.

It wasn’t that the Mario games weren’t good. But I did feel like Mario was kinda over-hyped, and a bit overrated.

There, I said it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Mario.  I do!  But he’s everywhere. With Nintendo’s other star franchises — Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Punch Out, Kirby, Pokemon — you had time to miss them. A new game might or might not come out for this generation’s new console. But it might only be one game. And there wouldn’t be a slew of cameos and guest appearances in other games, either. Mario hype was just relentless, and for me at least, it became somewhat tiresome. It felt like they should come out with a game called Super Mario Saturation, and be done with it.

That’s kindof where we’re at now. After three, almost four decades of Mario games, the developers have a robust, mature Marioverse. They keep coming up with new ideas, somehow, but one wonders just how many more Mario concepts there might be left to explore. Infinity – 1, of course, but one might well ask: Does the world really need another Mario game?

The answer, of course, is: of course. The world will always need another Mario game. Nintendo will see to that, rest assured.

But that said, Super Mario Maker 2 just might be the last Mario game you ever need.

I missed out on the original Mario Maker, as it was a Wii U release, and I didn’t buy into the Wii U. But man, was I tempted to buy a Wii U just to be able to make Mario levels!

The idea of Mario Maker was obvious: Take classic 2D Mario platforming and add the level editor from the original Excitebike, and garnish with social media. This was everything a Mario platformer fan could ask for. Fans unleashed their creativity. People created amazing levels that pushed the limits of Mario physics. Some really amazing levels were made. I can only imagine that Shigeru Miyamoto’s own expectations were exceeded.

So when Nintendo announced Super Mario Maker 2 for the Switch, I pre-ordered it immediately. This is noteworthy, as it’s the first time I’ve ever pre-ordered a videogame. I’ve always felt that videogame preorders were a bad deal and a bad idea — games get canceled all the time, and frequently games don’t live up to the hype when they’re finally released, and it’s always cheaper to wait a bit and buy games on sale. But I’d been waiting — since 2015! — to get my hands on Mario Maker, and I would not be delayed.

So I picked up the game on Friday, and have been playing it for a few hours a day since then.

Mario Maker lets you create levels using most of the 2D Mario engines: classic SMB, SMB3, SMW, New Super Mario Bros. Notably missing is the capability of making levels in the SMB2/Doki Doki Panic engine, which I find sad as SMB2 is a different game and among the best in the series.

To my surprise, I have yet to make my first Mario level. The game has a Story Mode, which I’ve been using to get caught up with all the changes that have accumulated since I last picked up SMW. The story is: the mushroom people had just completed a new palace for Princess Peach, when Undo Dog accidentally sets off the Reset Rocket, obliterating the entire construction. Wiped out, they must build anew, but lack the coins needed to fund the rebuild. So Mario must complete “jobs” in order to earn coins, which are used to rebuild the castle bit by bit. So far, I’m a bit less than halfway through the reconstruction.

The Story Mode gives me the opportunity to experience a wide variety of course designs, and appreciate them as a designer as well as a player. If I struggle with a level, the game gives me the option to edit the level to add a power up, or remove a challenge, to make it easier to complete. This is such a clever way of giving the player a way to get into level design — by editing a professionally designed level, rather than having to start from scratch. If I really have trouble, I can also “call Luigi” to clear the level for me. I had hoped that this would involve watching a computer-controlled Luigi run through the course, so I could see how it’s done, but it all happens off-screen, which is a bit disappointing.

For clearing these Story Mode levels, you are rewarded with coins, which you can use to rebuild the new palace, and each bit of building advances the story a bit further. I find that it really does make me feel like I want to play more levels, beyond my desire to enjoy the levels for their own sake.

So as I’m playing these levels, I’m getting ideas for how I might design a level using the multitude of design elements: time limits, auto-scrolling, platform jumping challenges, hidden secrets, puzzles, enemies, all the different power-ups a Mario game has ever given us — to create an interesting and fun level. There is a lot to work with.

I will probably follow up this brief review with another article focusing on the Mario Maker editor in greater depth. My initial impression is that while the variety of pieces you can work with is a bit daunting, the level editor is polished enough that it is enjoyable to work with it. While a Mario level can be quite complex, it’s pretty simple to get started. From there, you can get as complicated as you want. If you’ve been living under a rock and would like to see what’s possible, without actually owning the game or a Switch, just check out all the videos on YouTube of people showing off their amazing, crazy level designs.

Once you’ve designed a level (which I have yet to do), you can upload it and share it with the world. Then you can download and play levels made by other players, and challenge yourself to complete them. The replayability offered is truly unlimited. And, I would imagine, probably frees up Miyamoto to retire from designing new Mario games, if he would like. I hope that he continues to produce new, creative works, but at 66 years old, it’s inevitable that day will come sooner or later. And, let’s face it, with all that he’s given the world in his career, he’s definitely earned it if he wants to step away.

Even if Miyamoto-san becomes immortal and never stops working, perhaps we could say that the Mario Universe has now been completed, and that from here out, we can make our own Mario levels, and Nintendo can reassign their design teams to developing some brand new ideas. But I’m sure there will probably be a Mario Maker 3, maybe it will be a Mario Maker 3D, and give us the ability to make Mario 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, and Odyssey levels. But I’ll be satisfied if they release a 2.1 that includes the ability to create SMB2 levels.

Even the title screen of the game is fun. It is actually a complete, playable SMB3-style ship level. No, wait, it’s better than that. It’s a random different level every time you restart the game! I got to the end of it, hoping something special would happen, like I’d get a trophy or unlock something, but I guess it was just for fun. For all I know, maybe there’s some secret I didn’t discover in there.

Super Mario Maker 2 offers so much to the player. I’m tempted to say “everything a Mario fan could want” but without a SMB2 physics engine, it feels a bit incomplete. Still, there’s no end to the creativity enabled by this tool. And even without creating anything with it at all, there’s still a ton of fun to be had from playing the included Story Mode levels, and playing the thousands of levels thas SMM players have created already. Whether you’re a creative, level designer type or just a casual Mario gamer, Super Mario Maker 2 is a must-buy.

I’d love to see Nintendo bring out a Zelda Maker for top-down classic Zelda fans. And if Capcom would put their blessing on the MegaMan Maker project and give them funding, publishing, and everything else they need, that would be sweet. And we should all be asking for a Metroid Maker, and a Castlevania Maker.