Super Pitfall for NES was super-pitiful.

Best Of, games
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If you’ve never played a Pitfall game before, it’s best to go back to the beginning to the original Pitfall! on the Atari 2600. One of Activision’s finest games, and one of the best on the console, or on home consoles of its day, period. Pitfall!’s adventuring theme was in style thanks to the popularity of the new blockbuster movie with Indiana Jones, but wasn’t based on the movie. Although it lacked actual “platforms” the game might be thought of as a prototypical platformer — the gameplay is all about running and jumping. Pitfall was followed by a sequel, Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns, which featured a more expansive map, engaging background music, and a real ending, but suffered a bit from repetitive gameplay. Overall it was still a highly regarded game and one of the most technically advanced titles released for the Atari 2600.

In 1985, Nintendo released the NES in North America, and put an end to glut period in the market that had plagued the industry from 1983-4. The consoles of the Atari generation were long in the tooth, but had been so popular in previous years that anyone who could was releasing anything they could burn to an EEPROM cartridge and slap a label on, regardless of quality. This resulted in a huge glut of terrible games, sales plummeted, and some analysts were saying that videogaming was just a fad that had seen its day come and go. Fortunately, Nintendo reversed that thinking, largely on the merits of Super Mario Bros., itself a sequel of sorts to their popular Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., and Mario Bros. arcade titles from the previous generation. SMB was an innovative next-generation platformer, which advanced the state of the art over former running and jumping king Pitfall Harry, and introduced many, many innovations and superb level design and a forgiving, yet challenging difficulty curve.

A full two years after the launch of the NES, Activision released Super Pitfall. Only this time, they didn’t develop the game in-house, instead opting to farm it out to a company called Micronics for Pony Inc., I assume due to lack of familiarity with programming for the NES hardware. The game was a failure on so many levels, it’s difficult to enumerate them all, and unbelievable that the game got released at all given the quality of the competition at the time. It’s interesting to contrast Super Pitfall against Super Mario Bros. because fundamentally they have so many things in common, yet one game does everything so well, and the other does everything so poorly.

As a 12 year old, I was excited to play what seemed like a promising title — the Activision games for Atari were top notch and pushed the hardware past the limits of what many thought possible, and the Pitfall games were the creme de la creme.

I can’t promise an exhaustive list of all the ways that this game fails, but here’s my best attempt. Keep in mind I haven’t played this game since I was 12 or 13, so going on 22 years — THAT is how indellibly the “suck” was burned into my cerebral cortex.

Plot:

Plotwise, Super Pitfall is basically just a rehash of Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns. You’re supposed to rescue your niece Rhonda, her pet cat Quick Claw, and find treasures. Apparently, no one at Activision had bothered to put any time into coming up with any new ideas since the release of Pitfall II in 1984. Did they think not enough people had played Pitfall II, and so the plot was still fresh? Did they think that plot didn’t matter for adventure games in the NES era? I can’t say; I can say that the game feels stale from the minute you start reading the instruction booklet. Come on, anyone who liked video games played Pitfall II in 1984; it’s been three years, couldn’t they have taken 15 minutes somewhere and wrote up a new plot?

Graphics:

It’s tough to appreciate how poor the graphics performance is in Super Pitfall without seeing a video. Still screenshots do not convey the problem adequately. There is so much flicker that it becomes easy to lose track of something on the screen because it’s been invisible for that long. Not only do the sprites flicker like a strobe light on low, but they are poorly animated as well. Pitfall Harry looks like Mario dressed up in an coal miner costume — nothing at all like he looked on the Atari. On the Atari, Pitfall is thin, and looks like he might be a tall, wiry guy. In Super Pitfall, he looks tubby, with a big nose and mustache, like Super Mario. This is at once both a sacrilege to the real Pitfall Harry, and a pale, pathetic imitation to Mario. Scrolling is very jerky. Rather than smoothly draw in the new background tiles as the screen moves, it seems to wait until there is space to draw the entire row or column of tiles, and then draws it in all at once. This creates a clunky, lurching effect that looks and feels horrible.

Hit Detection:

Hit detection is imprecise, to put it kindly. Often you die for no apparent reason. Stuff that looks like you’re clear by a good distance can still hit you. Worse, it appears to be inconsistent. Sometimes you die, sometimes you live, with little visually apparent distinction between the life and death. It’s as though the hit detection mask is a variable sized, invisibile object that orbits around the visible graphical sprite that is Pitfall. It is probably also a rectangle, rather than a precisely fit shape.

Controls:

You move slowly, the controls respond slowly to player input, have barely any control over your jump once it’s initiated. It’s just about impossible to get out of the way of anything unless you see it coming well in advance, and it moves in a predictable way. The aforementioned flicker and hit detection problems make this far from simple. The poor jumping control is probably the most inexcusable flaw in the game, after the graphical glitches and performance problems. In a platforming game, jumping is crucial to get right. Super Pitfall blunders by conceding to realism the fact that in real life you can’t alter your trajectory once your feet leave the ground. In Super Mario Bros., you can control much more finely how far and how high you jump, and it makes jumping fun. Mario gets jumping right.

Also, Super Pitfall has a pistol available as a power-up item. The original Pitfall games were essentially non-violent. Pitfall could die from scorpion stings or eaten by alligators, but he himself never committed any violent acts. I’m not against new features, but again, the implementation was shoddy. And I did think that having guns in the game changed the spirit of the original Pitfall, to the detriment of the franchise. What I’m not sure about was the design decision to make the original games non-violent.

Pitfall Harry takes a lot of his cues from Indiana Jones, who only ever used a pistol once in all his movie adventures. So that’s one good reason for Pitfall Harry not to need a gun. As well, in the early 80’s there was a lot of concern about violence in video games affecting young minds, just as there is today. It’s hard to believe, given how cartoonish and low-res the sprite based graphics of the day were back then, but in the early 80’s there were crazy people who were worried that shooting in a video game would result in an increase of shooting in real life. I’m not sure if Pitfall was originally nonviolent due to pressure from these organizations, or due to the idealism of the designers, who maybe wanted to show that non-violent games could be fun, or due to technical limitations for how much you can cram into 4k of 6502 Assembly, or possibly a combination of all three. Partly, I think it was simply because there was only one button on the joystick, and it was for jumping. But the main, and best, reason is that the original games didn’t need a gun. It made for more exciting gameplay if you had to run, evade, and jump past obstacles rather than blast your way through them. Besides, many of the obstacles in the game (I call them obstacles and not enemies, because most of them are indifferent to your presence in the game, and only kill you if you blunder into them) are rare, exotic animals. It just doesn’t seem right that Harry would be willing to gun down some endangered species just so he can get through unimpeded.

Maybe they needed to give you something to do with that second button on the NES game pad. But it’s implemented terribly compared to games where shooting is the main point of playing. In a shooting platformer game, like Contra, you can shoot in any direction, have unlimited ammo, can have as many bullets on the screen as you want. In Super Pitfall, ammo is a resource that you have to collect, you can only fire one bullet at a time, and it sometimes takes several shots to kill an enemy, although I could never tell if this was due to bad hit detection or because there was a variable amount of damage done with the bullets and it sometimes took multiple shots to kill certain enemies. Regardless, killing an enemy feels like a cop-out to avoid having to jump over obstacles. But given how much the hit detection sucks, it’s worth it when you can. But the ammo is so scarse that you dare use the gun only when you’re faced with a situation that you couldn’t possibly jump through unassisted. The idea seems to be that they didn’t want to turn the game into a shooter, and so each bullet you pick up is almost a surrogate for an extra life, and you spend them whenever you see a situation where it looks likely that you’d die if you didn’t use them. It would have been better if they had allowed Pitfall to shoot himself and end the misery.

Hidden stuff, yet no clues as to where they are or what they are for:

Hidden secrets were a big part of Super Mario Bros. popularity. Finding all the hidden coins, bonus rooms, and warp zones was a smart design choice that gave the game a lot of replay value. Super Pitfall has many secrets, too. But again, it’s all spoiled by terrible implementation. Most secrets are discovered by jumping in specific locations on the map. This causes some secret item to appear close by. There’s never any apparent visual cue to tell you that you should try jumping in a specific location; the game sortof expects you to “mine sweep” through the entire map, tile by tile, jumping every step of the way, until you find a secret. Once you do, you’d better memorize it or mark it on a map, or you’ll never find it again. Many of these secrets are essential to making forward progress in the game — keys that unlock other levels, or even the actual gateway to another level. This means if you can’t find the secret, you can’t complete the game. You end up frustrated and give up. There’s no replay incentive to go back again and find secrets, since in order to beat the game once you will end up finding them all, or at least all of the critical items. The non-critical items (bullets, extra lives, bonus points) don’t aren’t necessary if you make it through without getting them, you’re just that much better at the game if you don’t end up needing them, and discovering them is so counter-intuitive and tedious that the less of them you need to find, the happier you are.

Game Map is next to impossible to navigate:

One thing I’ll say about the Lost Caverns that Super Pitfall takes place in: the designers sure gave a convincing feeling that you were lost. So many areas of the game look identical to other areas that it’s very difficult to determine if you’re in a new place or if you’ve somehow looped back to where you had been before. The different areas in the game are linked together through “warps” that take away your sense of geography and you lose your spatial orientation. I couldn’t even tell if I’d left “world 1” and proceeded to “world 2” and then to “world 3” when I warped, or if the entire game was open to me and I was simply warping from Point A to Point B back to Point A. In several places the connection points from one warp area to another are stuck in dead-end passages that you would have no reason to walk down. They look like they’re merely “filler” space on the map and have no purpose.

Conclusions:

I was fortunate in that I discovered the game at a video rental store, so I didn’t waste my money actually buying it. A better title for this game would have been Super PitFAIL. This game was so bad it basically trashed the franchise. I never bothered even looking at any Pitfall title that came afterward. Activision’s execution here is abominable and inexcusable, a travesty to fans of the greatness that was the Atari-era Pitfall. This game has a lot of similarities to Super Mario Bros. when you look at a list of its features and the elements of play, but when you look further, the only real similarity these two games share is the word “Super” in the title.

To properly appreciate how badly designed AND badly constructed this game really is, you should watch a video of it on youtube. There are many, but one of the better one’s is by game reviewer Aqualung. (Warning, may contain objectionable language.)

Part 1/2:

Part 2/2:

A response to “Fanboy Flamewars is not a game”

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A fellow student in my class replied to my post, “Fanboy Flamewars is not a game“, and I have responded:

I think that you need to understand that we are all taking a Computer Games and Simulation Class. You are required to make games. If you are told that what you are making is not a game and you stop listening to them then you obviously have not read the first lessons of this class. Be an advocate for the player, if you do want to listen to the player and continue doing what you are going to do anyways then that does not make you a team player or a very good video game designer. You maybe making something wonderful but in this class we are making “games” no matter what you want to call it this class calls it a game. That is why we are here to make games.

I get what you’re saying here, and it is a good point to make. Of course we want to be able to function in teams effectively. Of course we want our players to have great experiences with the things we build.

I’ll clarify what I said earlier by saying that I said that I don’t really find the question “what is a game” interesting. This is because I already know what a game is, and I don’t find a whole lot of mystery or controversy to draw my interest in the question as a philosopher. To me, it’s just not one of those fundamental, unanswerable questions like “determinism vs. free will” or “what is good” that will always be interesting to debate.

I think it’s fine to draw up lists of formal elements that we have found in games, and think about how these elements may be combined and modified to create novel games. That’s a good thing to do, in this class or otherwise. That said, I do think that it’s important to recognize that we need not constrain ourselves by the terms and definitions that we come up with. Language is a tool that humans develop in order to do useful things. But often we are too clever for ourselves, and trap ourselves with language and the things that we construct out of language.

Having a Theory of Games is useful, and it is especially interesting if you’ve never really thought about the nature of games before. If you’re trapped in language and don’t realize it, asking these questions can help you see beyond your horizons and grow as a person. Me, personally? Not so much, but to someone who might be taking this class, it quite possibly is.

My advice, then, should be seen as a caution: once you’ve come up with a Theory of Games that you think is very good, don’t get too attached to it. Philosophers often talk about different “camps” and talk about who they are in terms of who’s philosophy they’ve read and who they agree with, and so on. Humans seem to want to do this, but I think it just gets in the way of getting anywhere or resolving conflicts that separate us into different “camps”.

Imagine for a moment that we had this Theory of Game, which contained a mistake. To make a concrete example that we can all see clearly, let’s say that the error is that according to our broken theory, all games must have a scoring system. Now we’re forced to consider whether Super Mario Bros. 2 is a game or not. Clearly, nearly everyone would call SMB2 a game, without hesitation. And it’s often on many people’s lists of favorite games of all time. But SMB2 does not have a scorekeeping feature. If we’re trapped in the point of view that our flawed theory of games provides us, we will waste a lot of time arguing about why SMB2 isn’t “really” a game, because after all we all agree that all games must have scorekeeping.

To give another example: You can get into similar debates over whether hang gliding, cheerleading, auto racing, figure skating and other similar activities are “really” sports or whether they’re something else. If I told you “My favorite sports were baseball and sky diving” and you replied, “Hang on, sky diving isn’t a sport!” it wouldn’t take away from the fact that sky diving exists, that I enjoy sky diving, and that sky diving is a legitimate… “activity” of some kind.

To better illustrate the absurdity of arguing about theory, I might get further away from sports in talking about other things I like to do, and start saying nonsense like “painting is a sport” or “singing is a sport” and we can all see that they’re clearly not “sports” as we commonly understand and use the term. Now, it might be useful to have a well-considered Theory of Sports which we can use to precisely understand WHY painting isn’t a sport… but I don’t see much point in it, because in reality, there’s about 0% chance of me ever having to debate the matter seriously with anyone — we all know that painting and singing aren’t sports.

The fact that it’s undisputed that singing isn’t a sport doesn’t stop people from having karaoke contests, but we still don’t think of them as a type of sport. But if we did for some reason consider a karaoke contest to be a sport, it wouldn’t be of much consequence, either.

And there’s possibly a chance that some day someone might invent a new sport that incorporates painting in some way. I don’t want to stifle that guy.

To put it another way, does it bother any comic book fans that most comic books aren’t about comedy? Why get hung up on the term? Some people wanted to take comic books more seriously as an art form, so they started calling them “Graphic Novels”. But a lot of comics *aren’t* novels! Most of them are serials. Who cares what you call them or what the labels mean, just read them and enjoy them if you want to.

What you can take away from all this is: Beware the False Theory. If you’re taking a theory seriously and *using* it, always be suspicious or skeptical that it might have some flaw that you haven’t considered. Or, another way to put it, don’t worry too much about theories, and just do. Let the philosophers argue about what games are, or whether what you’re building is a game or not. Don’t let that deter you from exploring your ideas and doing what you want to do and what you enjoy.

In conclusion, I say that the term “video game” is merely an accident of history. It’s a good term, and I like it, but I’m not a slave to it. The first video game was called a video game, and the term stuck. But it might well have been called a “video toy” or a “video sport” or “video interactive” or something else. For that matter, the term “video” is accidental, as well. We could have computer games that do not incorporate video — text adventures are a notable example of this. These are worthy computer games, and if you substitute the monitor on which the text is displayed with a text-to-speech engine, the game is fully without a video component. We should not ignore or discount text adventures simply because they are not “video” games. And we should not ignore or discount “video somethings” that aren’t strictly according to definition “games”.

Attract Mode and young children: Using a game to not-play a non-game

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(Another good post I made in the class discussion board today)

When I was a kid, there were arcade machines everywhere. They had a few at the grocery store, or at the mini-mart, or at the gas station. Pretty much anywhere you could stick one, you’d find one. This was a wonderful period in the history of video games.

When I was a kid, I didn’t have a whole lot of money. I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t get much of an allowance. I rarely had quarters on hand. If I did they got spent on candy bars.

But I didn’t let that stop me! I’d walk up to the game and “play” its attract mode. Attract mode is the replay of recorded gameplay demo footage. I’d walk up, grab the controls, and pound the buttons. I’d get to “play” for maybe 15 seconds or so and then the Hi Score screen would display.

I bet millions of kids without quarters did this back in the day. It was a way of life for those of us not old enough to have a job, or too young to see over the controller deck.

It was a lot of fun, pretending to play a game. It was free, and I could play all day long. It didn’t seem to get boring. It didn’t matter that there was no actual interactivity. It didn’t matter that I didn’t develop any skill. It didn’t matter that the demo footage was always the same, looping over and over. It didn’t matter that the game made the same stupid mistake and kept dying over and over. To my 5-year-old self, it didn’t matter. I was playing the game. Pretend-playing, but it didn’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter that I’m not *really* flying a *real* spaceship when I got old enough to put the quarter in.

As soon as I got older, of course, I lost the ability to enjoy pretend-playing a videogame. I might watch an attract mode and be amused by it, but I no longer attempted to pretend to interact with the demo. Fortunately, I had gained the ability to really-play a videogame.

By the definitions offered in Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, “pretend-play” is not a game, since it lacks the interactivity and does/doesn’t have a real player… but what is it? Is it anything?

Fanboy Flamewars is not a game

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Quick background: I’m taking a class on computer game and simulation design. This week one of our topics for discussion was to talk about what defines a game. One of the students posted to the discussion board that “Final Fantasy VII is THE DEFINITION of a game!” While I can appreciate the fandom, and don’t mean to take anything away from it, the sentiment did trigger the following rant that I thought worthy of publication:

I feel I need to say this before I start out, the point of this week’s discussion topic is not to crow about your favorite game and how it “defines” the notion of “game”. OK, so you love your favorite game. Big whooptie. “Talk about your favorite games” was kindof last week’s topic.

The idea for this week is to talk about what aspects of games are essential to games, and to try to identify the necessary and sufficient criteria for the definition of “game”.

Now, to understand the full weight of what I’m about to say, you should know that I have a degree in philosophy, and that basically means that I ought to rabidly devour this topic. But I’m going to commit a little blasphemy:

I’m not really at all interested in this question.

I’m sorry, I’m just not.

I’m not now, nor have I ever been, in an existential crisis because I did not know what a game is.

I’ve never once been in a situation where I found myself looking at something, and thought to myself, “Gee, I can’t tell if that’s a game or not.”

And I’ve never had someone point at something and say, “Hey, know what? I just realized that’s a game!” and then thought “Wow, hey he’s right! I never noticed that before!”

I mean, “game” is just a word. Let’s not get too hung up on it, OK?

What if, instead of video GAME, they had been called video TOYS?

Would we think of them differently? Would they be different?

How is a toy different from a game? I can see clearly that these are different concepts, and I don’t see all that much that I consider profound or interesting about it.

If I call them “video SPORTS” suddenly you start thinking about competitive play and winning and losing and being a champion. That’s not really essential to a game, but it is to sports.

Or maybe you think more literally, and think instead about videogames that are sports simulations, rather than Counterstrike tournaments and Koreans who play StarCraft professionally.

Does it even matter?

I mean, if I’m building something that I call a game, and someone walks up to me and tries to say, “Oh, that’s not really a game. See, a real game would have… blah blah blah” I would be very uninterested in hearing the rest of that sentence. I’d tell that person to go away and not bother me, and continue making whatever I was making. People would either get it, or they wouldn’t. They would either like it, or they wouldn’t.

Take a look at Electroplankton and Korg DS-10. Both not games. The makers of these non-games got my money. Do they care that it’s not a game? Do I care? Does anyone?

###

Now, on the topic of Final Fantasy… I’m about to commit a little more blasphemy.

Mind you, I’ve only played the series through the SNES releases. Now, I loved the original when it came out. LOVED IT. It was the most epic turn-based RPG available on the NES, and had the best interface (at the time) although still painful and primitive to use. I loved FF II and FF III. I never owned a PSX, and never had the time or money back when I was in college to play through the CD-ROM era games. When FF VII came out, I thought it looked impressive and really wanted to play it, but I never got the chance. A few years on, I watched a friend who had just bought FF IX play it. While I was amazed at the graphics, I felt that the FF series had turned away from being games, and more toward… well, minimally interactive movies.

Here’s what I realized about Final Fantasy: you spend a lot of time walking around doing stuff. Mostly exploring and leveling up, talking to people, finding things. This is fairly interesting, and it’s cool to find all the items, encounter all the monsters, see and do everything. It’s fun, even.

But — it’s not challenging.

The random encounters that you grind through are just there to take time. Overcoming them is trivial, and you can last through many fights before you need to heal up and resupply, which is always pretty easy, so there’s little risk of party death. Even if you did lose your entire party, you’d just go back to the last save point and start over, hardly missing anything but maybe the last few minutes of play. The monsters barely do any damage to your characters, while most of the time you hit them once and they die.

Even boss fights aren’t all that much more challenging. You just need to be at about the right level, and you’ll cruise through the encounter. FF II & III even took much of that challenge away by turning the boss battles into scripted events. You encountered the boss and dished out a certain amount of damage, which then triggers a story event or dialog. Some fights, intending to be dramatic, would let your party get knocked down to nearly being defeated, and then some deus ex machina would happen, and something would save you and turn the tide. It was supposed to be dramatic, except that it wasn’t. It just made you realize that all the fighting you’d done up to that point was part of a scripted routine, and that no matter what, you had to deal/take that much damage in order for the game to trigger the next part of the battle sequence so the game could continue.

And here’s the other thing I don’t like about Final Fantasy. No matter what you do in the game, you’re basically only going to have one possible outcome. You either play through the entire game, or you give up and walk away from it. Nothing you do in the game makes any real, lasting, meaningful difference to the eventual outcome. The choices you make have no real consequence. There’s one story, with very few if any branches. There’s no choice you can make which, once made, permanently excludes other areas of the game from remaining open to you.

There’s a good parody game that makes this point pretty well, called Turn Based Battle. It basically is a parody of jRPGs and maximizes all the things that sucked about them while removing all the cool parts, and turns that into a game. Give it a try and you’ll get an idea what I mean:

Turn Based Battle

If you actually enjoy it, other than to get the joke, I’m sorry.

In a like vein, check into Progress Quest — It’s kindof like SETI@Home in that it keeps your CPU warm, and you don’t have to interact with it at all.

I understand that the later FF titles did away with a lot of the random encounter grinding, in order to focus more on storytelling, and amazing graphics, but even so, the games are basically kindof like a movie. Only, you have a game controller in your hand, and you have to keep pressing buttons. Casablanca would not be a better movie if you had to press Play repeatedly in order to get to the end and see the whole thing. As for all the amazing graphics and animation, this stuff gets tedious in short order. Very pretty the first time you see it, annoying to have to sit through repeatedly. Imagine an action/fx film where the same exact action sequences get repeated again and again. YAWN!

So, sorry, Square/Enix, but I’d rather sink 60-100 hours into Geometry Wars than the newest FF. I like games with good story sometimes, but story and character are pretty inessential to me when it comes to enjoying a good game.

Also, this is a worthy read.

Honestly, I’m not here to tell you your favorite game sucks. If you enjoy it, who’s to say you’re wrong? Clearly, you like games for different reasons than I do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Enjoy what you enjoy. I just wanted to put some thoughts out there so people can see other sides to it.

wp_theme update

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I’ve switched WordPress themes. Formerly, I was using Thematic; now I’m using LightWord.

I really like both of these themes, they are high quality work. I don’t have a reason for changing, other than to learn though experimentation.

I did find that I needed to make a couple minor modifications to the default stylesheet for LightWord, to make the main article text a bit larger so it’ll be easier to read without having to resort to zooming the page. On my 15.4″ notebook screen, at 1680×1050 resolution, the default text size was uncomfortably small at 100% zoom.

I’ve tested it in IE8, FF3.6, and Chrome 5 on Windows 7, and I haven’t seen any problems so far. If you notice any, drop me a comment and I’ll look into it. Be sure to say what your OS and Browser are, and be as specific as possible about the problem.

Thanks!

Follow-up:

I’ve switched to the wider-layout configuration for LightWord, in order to accomodate YouTube videos. I think the narrower width layout is nicer for text, though, as it makes for a more readable line length for the main content column. I’m not sure if fitting default-sized YouTube videos is worth it, given that I can resize them down and that text is going to be the main thing people will likely be reading here.

Games: 5 Colors Pandora looks cool

design, games, reviews
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I love graphical minimalism, and this game by Jordan Magnuson takes it pretty close to as minimal as you can get. The graphics are so low res, and only use about four shades of grey for the most part, yet you can tell exactly what stuff is supposed to be, because the shapes and animation suggest and the brain fills in the rest. Caves, buildings, cars, doors, are all readily apparent.

“You” are just a 3-px line, yet it’s enough to convey “person”. Foreground/background objects are conveyed through how dark/light its color is. I have little idea what’s going on plot-wise, yet, but it looks like you go around exploring a world trying to figure out puzzles to take you deeper into the world. Musical cues seem to communicate something about what’s going on, but that’s all I can make of it so far. Stylistically, I really like it.

It reminds a bit of Terry Cavanaugh’s Don’t Look Back because of the low-res graphics + atmospheric and evocative background music. The gameplay is a bit simple and could use a little more elements to this basic formula, maybe, but I’m not sure what just yet. Mostly you explore these large, empty areas and it seems like there should be more things populating these spaces in order to make them more interesting. You get a good sense of travel and exploration, and figuring out how to navigate and get around obstacles is an interesting puzzle that will take some time to figure out, but once you get past that, there’s not much more to engage the player. Items to collect and use, creatures or other people to encounter would make it more interesting. I could see it being developed into a deeper game with a story, maybe. Certain aspects of the game remind me of so many different titles that I like — everything from Pong, Adventure, Zelda II, Mario, Don’t Look Back.

Built with GameMaker, the developer is even distributing the source for it, which is very awesome. I might have to tinker with this a bit…

Get it here

GET LAMP

games, reviews
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Today a long-awaited treat arrived in my mailbox: copy #858 of Get Lamp, a film by Jason Scott.

I’d already seen an early cut of this film from when Scott did a midnight screening at Notacon 7, but now here it is in my hands, two discs representing thousands of hours of work by hacker historian Jason Scott. I’ve been waiting for this for… almost a year?

If you used a computer in the 80’s, then likely you are familiar with text adventures. As a gaming genre, text adventures have all but disappeared, but at one time they were among the most popular software products available. There is nothing like them today, except maybe in some very tiny niches. They were games that required literacy and imagination, off the wall problem solving skills, a sense of humor, a love of fantasy, and could suck a player in for hours, even days at a time. It seemed like you could do anything in these games, all you had to do was figure out the right command to type in.

To my knowledge, I only ever played one actual text adventure on a computer: Zork. I might also have played Colossal Cave once. I was maybe about 10 years old, perhaps a bit younger. I don’t remember a whole lot about the experience other than being amazed that a world so rich could fit inside a computer, and that the computer could actually (well, seemed to, anyway) understand what I typed into it, allowing me to interact with it in a manner not unlike my experiences playing pen-and-paper role playing games. Growing up, I didn’t have a computer in the house for many years; all we had was an Atari 2600 gaming console, and later, a Nintendo Entertainment System, and an SNES. I only got to play text adventures if I was lucky enough to get a little time on a computer at school, or at my mom’s friend’s house. One time at my grandma’s house I got to play on a computer (I think it was an original Compaq portable) that my uncle brought home with him from college. When I couldn’t play on a computer, I spent hours reading and re-reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, and looking for people to play D&D with.

By the time we got an a computer in the house, an Apple //gs, text adventures were already falling out of fashion, and hybrid text/animation adventures like the King’s Quest series from Sierra Online were the new big thing. Graphics were here to stay, and it seemed no one really missed text-only games.

There really can be no way to adequately quantify the influence that these experiences collectively had on me during my formative years. Suffice it to say that I could not have been who I am without them playing the role in my life that they did. I can’t thank Jason Scott enough for investing the last four years of his life, thousands of dollars, hours, and miles to produce this wonderful documentary and DVD, and to the people who donated to his kickstarter fund to allow him to devote himself to this project.

This post isn’t going to be a proper review of the DVD, as I have barely had time to pull the shrink wrap off, let alone explore all the special features on it. But I have seen the documentary, and if you have any fond memories of afternoons spent trying to puzzle through the arcane puzzles and mazes that made these game such an obsession, or if you’re just curious to know something about a forgotten bit of computer history, you definitely should order a copy of Get Lamp.

On the death of Google Wave

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I read today that Google pulled the plug on Wave. This shouldn’t matter, since Wave was always supposed to be open source from the beginning. I don’t know if Google actually kept that promise or not, but if they did, then Wave should live on.

Even if it doesn’t, I believe that the future will look more and more Wave-like.

Perhaps Wave needed to happen to give us a clear picture of what the future ought to look like. I have little doubt that the concepts of cross-app integration and direct collaboration are definitely going to stick around.

Wave was ahead of its time. I remember when it was first announced, my first reaction was “WTF is Wave?” After I watched the video and understood the concept, I thought, “Wow, what a great idea.”

That’s about as far as I, and many other people, it seems, got with it.

The problem I had with it was I never had a reason to work in Wave for any document I was authoring solo, which, it turns out, is better than 90% of the documents that I author. The few times I had occasion to suggest to a group that we look into trying out Wave, we never got off the ground with it. Either there was a question of did everyone have an invite, or if that wasn’t the problem, then no one really knew how to get things started in Wave in order to kick off a project.

There seems to be something about working collaboratively on mentally-intensive (particularly creative) endeavors that makes it a struggle for most people, especially people who don’t already know each other well and have fallen into roles that are familiar to them, where everyone knows what they’re doing and what’s expected of them. Wave might have been a great tool for us, but in order to have had a chance it needed a Wave Evangelist, someone familiar with the tool and who had leadership qualities and would be effective at delegating tasks to team members. I’ve always found that working in a group is not much fun without strong leadership. By which, I mean, someone who knows what the group needs, and has a clear vision for how to accomplish that goal, and who can communicate effectively with everyone else.

Human teaming factors aside, I think that Wave didn’t stand much of a chance because it didn’t offer people a “gateway drug” kind of experience. If you’ll pardon the metaphor, Wave needed some way to get users’ toes wet, and encourage them to wade into it until they developed the skills necessary to swim. It never managed to do this.

Despite this, I think that Google was on to something when they announced Wave. Like many great ideas, it came ahead of its time. In 10 years or so, we’ll look back and see that it paved the way for a new cloud-centered, collaborative way of working with documents, with information, with other people. Eventually, Wave will happen. But it will not happen as a big announcement with an hour long introductory video to explain it. Instead, it will seep in gradually and immerse us all until we suddenly realize that the tide has come in. (Again with apologies for the extended aquatic metaphor.)

What I mean by that is this: Wave was all about integration of existing technologies that we’re already familiar with: word processing, calendaring, instant messaging, email, web browsing. Google’s mistake with Wave was thinking that they needed to convince everyone that the old tools should be cast aside in favor of the new Web 2.0+ hotness that Wave represented.

When a oceanic wave crosses a point on the surface, there are two ways that it can first reach that point: trough first, or crest first. Google’s approach, essentially, was a crest-first approach: Wow everyone with this new concept and generate a lot of buzz so that people would be excited and want to use this new, cool technology. Apparently this was needed in order to get everyone to ditch their old, pre-Web 2.0 ways of doing things and give Wave a try.

It failed. People are comfortable with their old tools, and didn’t know how to transition to Wave. And until their friends were all on Wave, they would likely never have a reason to.

But consider if Google had taken a “trough-first” approach. Rather than inundating the world with an hour-long video explaining just what Wave is and how you can’t live without it, they start simply by adding Wave-like features into the existing suite of Google applications. The convergence of gTalk and gMail is an excellent example of this. Gradually, Google extends all of their existing web-served apps until users realize they’re waist deep in Wave. Maybe it’ so immersive by then that it hardly even needs its own name. No one would have been asked to throw away their old tools. No one would have had to have been the first to dive into learning some new, strange tool, and try to get their friends or colleagues interested in trying it out. It would have just grown up around us, rolling in like a rising tide. That approach would have worked.

And indeed, I believe that it will happen, eventually. And it will happen just as I’ve outlined in the above paragraph. A combination of cloud storage going mainstream, plus open standards for data formats, plus extensible feature sets in applications is all that is needed. Given these three things, add time, and it will happen.

Why I <3 my laptop bag

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I don’t really travel a lot. At least, I haven’t until recently. But in the last month, I attended The Next HOPE hacker conference in New York City, and PyOhio 2010 in Columbus, OH.

Because of this, I’ve come to hold a deep appreciation for my Targus laptop bag.

I don’t intend to turn this blog into a product review site, but I’m not averse to speaking well of products that I use when they deserve it. Having used the case as an all-day carry-all for not just my laptop, but all my “stuff” that I need to survive at a tech conference, I couldn’t be happier with this thing.

After realizing just how much I liked what I’d previously thought of as “just my laptop bag” I felt compelled to find out what model it is, so I could properly credit it. I couldn’t find anything identifying the model on the bag itself, so I browsed google image search results until I found it. It took me a while, because Targus has probably produced hundreds of different bags over the years, but I finally managed to ID it as a Targus Brilliance TBB001US.

Anyhow, I bought this bag back in 2007 when I bought my current laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T61p (which also deserves a plug as it has been a very reliable everyday computer for me over the years, and still feels like it has plenty of life left in it). I needed a new bag because my previous bag for my previous laptop wasn’t big enough to hold the new one.

At the time, I didn’t really care too much about what I got, I just wanted something cheap. A few weeks after I bought this bag. It was a super deal, I think I paid like $15 for what is normally an $80 bag. And while I’ve never been disappointed with the purchase, I never fully appreciated it until I basically lived out of it for a weekend, carrying it with me all day long, and constantly opening it and looking through it for something I needed.

I don’t believe that I’ve ever owned a more thoroughly thought out product. This thing has more pockets than I can count, it seems like every surface has a zipper or a flap on it, and each pocket seems to have another pocket in it. Despite this, the pockets are well-placed, sized appropriately for their intended purpose, and are quite easy to get into, even with only one hand free in most cases. It’s a little bulky compared to a lot of notebook bags — with just the laptop in it it feels almost empty — but if you need the space it’s probably the most efficient way to carry everything you need. It even has a mesh bottle holder that zips away when you don’t need it.

It is very easy to carry, with a suitcase-style handle, a messenger bag style shoulder strap, and backpack straps. However is most convenient at the moment, I can carry it that way. It’s comfortable, too. All carrying methods are well padded and don’t dig in even after standing around with it for hours.

I’ve actually walked around with it all day, carrying TWO laptop computers, chargers, a 25′ ethernet patch cable, various papers, tickets, my cell phone, and a digital camera, a paper notepad, and various pens and pencils, a couple of t-shirts, and some other schwag, and a 350-page book, and it never felt like a burden. Most impressively of all, I could get at everything in the bag without everything else feeling like it was in the way.

It really helps out when you’re traveling to have the ability to carry everything you need, comfortably, and have all be readily available and convenient to access.

I’d love to have some insight into Targus’s product design process, to learn how they came up with such a great solution. I have to imagine that they must have done their homework, figuring out all the different things that most people typically carry with them, and prioritize based on how often they need to access each thing, and then design a bag that can carry everything in a compact, organized, ergonomic fashion, and protect any delicate items, and on top of everything else, be comfortable.

How to get a comment approved

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To date, my ratio of spam comments to legit comments is 35:0. I don’t get a lot of traffic yet, and I’m not surprised. But if you’re a real human reading this blog and are actually thinking about posting a real comment, here’s all you have to do to get it passed moderation:

1) Say something substantive. I don’t care if you agree with what I said or not, just say something substantive.
2) Ask a question.
3) Don’t post a suspicious url in the ‘website’ field. I’m probably going to turn this off entirely, but until I do just know that if you post some url that doesn’t look legitimate I’m not going to expose my readership to your probably-malicious url.

That said, if you’re a real person and have actually read one of my posts and have something to say about it, I’d love to hear from you.