2372: The Lost Art of Puzzle Games

I've been playing some old puzzle games recently. By "old" I mean "predating the smartphone", which in the grand scheme of things isn't all that old, but in technology terms is positively ancient. And, while I've known this for a while, the difference between puzzle games now and puzzle games of then makes it abundantly clear, beyond a doubt, that the modern age has done our collective attention spans no favours whatsoever.

The reason I say this is a simple matter of timing and commitment. The age of mobile and social gaming — Bejeweled Blitz in particular had a lot to do with this, I feel — has redefined the puzzle game as an experience that must be over and done with within 30-60 seconds, lest the participant get bored with the experience. This doesn't necessarily mean it has to be easy, mind you — quite the opposite, in fact, in the case of free-to-play games, where "friction" (ugh) is specifically incorporated into the game design at regular intervals for the sole purpose of extracting money from lazy players.

There are some people who are too stubborn to pay up to get past an artificially difficult level in Candy Crush Bullshit, of course, but these people are in the minority, because the 30-second structure of the levels that are easily beatable trains one to expect a bite-size, painless experience rather than having to actually put in any work or practice. And so for many players, the option to pay up to bypass a particular challenge — or at least make it insultingly easy, for the illusion of them having beaten it themselves — becomes an attractive one.

Compare and contrast with a puzzle game designed in the old mould, then. Rather than being designed as rapid-fire timewasters, puzzle games used to fall into two main categories: those which, like the best arcade games, challenged you to see how long you could last against increasingly challenging odds; or those which, like the other best arcade games, challenged you to demonstrate your superiority over either a computer-controlled or human opponent. In both cases, said challenges took a lot longer than 30 seconds to accomplish — in the former instance in particular, a good run could go on for hours or more if you really got "in the zone".

In other words, puzzle games used to be designed with a mind to keeping a player interested and occupied for considerable periods at a time, rather than allowing them to while away a few minutes — that's what simple shoot 'em ups were for. Everything from the classic Tetris to slightly lesser known gems like Klax and oddities like Breakthru were designed in this way; these games weren't just "something to do" — they were a test of endurance, observational skills, strategy and dexterity, both mental and physical. Having a Tetris game that went on for an hour was a badge of honour rather than an inconvenience; you weren't playing the game until something better came along, the game was the better thing that had come along.

This change in focus for puzzle games is a bit sad, as I miss the old days of them offering substantial, lengthy challenges to tackle over time. That's not to say that there's no place for rapid-fire puzzles, too, but it just disappoints me that 30-second "blitz" challenges are all we have these days.

At least the old games still play just as well as they always did — with them being so graphically light in most cases, puzzle games tend to age a whole lot better than many other types of game.

2358: I Whip My Hair Back and Forth

Shantae is a series I've been meaning to explore for a long time. Specifically, ever since I reviewed the iOS version of second game Risky's Revenge a few years ago and was absolutely enamoured by the graphics and overall presentation before being almost immediately put off entirely by the atrocious controls, proving once again that you should never, ever make traditional console-style games for platforms whose only input method is a touchscreen.

As part of the retro gaming and emulation kick I've been on recently, I decided I'd check out the Shantae series from the beginning, starting with its Game Boy Color incarnation. Shantae, as the first game is simply called, is widely regarded as one of the most impressive titles to be released on the GBC, as well as being a great game and the start to a marvellous series in its own right.

The eponymous Shantae is a half-genie girl who is the self-appointed protector of fishing village Scuttle Town. One morning, the voluptuous pirate Risky Boots shows up, bombards the town with cannon fire and then makes off with a Steam Engine, a new invention from local crackpot Mimic based on blueprints he found on an archaeological expedition. Frustrated with herself that she was unable to stop Risky's attack, Shantae pledges to try and get one step ahead of the pirate and find out what she's really up to, and thus begins your standard video game quest of "find the shiny doohickeys before the bad guy does".

In terms of gameplay, Shantae is a fairly simple Metroidvania-esque platformer in that it isn't really divided into discrete levels. Instead, there's an overworld which wraps around on itself, meaning you can start walking in one direction and eventually end up back where you started, and a number of small caves and larger "labyrinths" that can be accessed. There are also five towns that act as waypoints; completing a sidequest where you collect "Warp Squids" enables you to teleport back to that town at any point; the towns also each house various facilities such as shops and minigames.

Shantae definitely plays extremely well, with responsive controls and well-designed, well-paced maps that are challenging but rarely cheap, the odd "leap of faith" aside. As you progress through her quest, you unlock various transformation abilities, each of which are used by playing a rhythm-based minigame and pressing particular combinations of buttons in time with the music for Shantae to make use of her considerable (and frighteningly erotic) bellydancing skills. These transformations, in true Metroidvania tradition, enable you to reach otherwise inaccessible areas through various means: the Monkey form, for instance, can climb walls, while the Harpy form can fly.

While the gameplay is solid, where Shantae's main appeal lies is in its presentation. Although limited by the low resolution and limited colour palette of the Game Boy Color, Shantae is a gorgeous-looking game, with attractive, atmospheric backdrops and excellent sprite work. The star of the show is, appropriately enough, Shantae herself, who is animated with an amazing degree of fluidity and personality — and unlike previous games which had particularly fluid animation, such as Prince of Persia and Flashback, Shantae doesn't sacrifice responsiveness for smooth animation.

Shantae's visual appeal comes from the sheer range of animations she's been programmed with. Rather than simply being built with traversal animations in mind — walking, running, jumping, falling — Shantae has plenty of unique animations only seen in certain situations. There are the dance animations, for starters, one of which can be found on every direction on the Game Boy D-Pad and its two action buttons. When using these for gameplay purposes, you only see them for a brief moment, but they're so visually compelling that it's more than a little tempting to just switch into Dance mode by tapping Select and admiring Shantae's moves for a few minutes before continuing on your quest. On top of this, Shantae has a number of "mood" animations used during dialogue sequences that give her a great deal of visual character, and her personality is backed up by some snappy, witty but brief dialogue that gives you the important information you need to proceed while keeping things light and breezy in tone.

So far I've cleared the first "Labyrinth", which was a delightful delve into a well-designed dungeon with some interesting, creative puzzles involving memory, precision jumping and carefully exploring the environment. I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the game has to offer — and beyond that, finally playing Risky's Revenge on a platform that can do it justice, followed by its sequel Shantae and the Pirate's Curse.

2356: Packing a LaunchBox

I'm a big fan of emulating old systems. There's no substitute for playing on original hardware and having original packaging, of course, but emulation is a relatively straightforward and cost-effective means of enjoying older games without having to brave eBay, thrift stores or exorbitant "collector's" prices.

The legality of emulation is something that has been discussed to death online, so I will sidestep that particular issue for the moment and instead bring your attention to a wonderful tool I've started using recently.

One of the biggest pains with emulation of older systems, particularly if you have a lot of ROM files, is managing and organising all these files, and indeed even knowing what you have available to play. This is a particular issue with old computers, whose disk images tend to contain multiple titles much like the pirated disks "computer clubs" would exchange freely in the '80s and '90s, but given the sheer number of games that have been released for various console platforms over the years, it can be an issue finding what you're looking for even on systems that use media that only contains a single title.

Enter LaunchBox, then, a thoroughly pleasant and well put together front-end for all your emulation… well, no, all your PC-based gaming needs, with a particular emphasis on the emulation of old platforms and operating systems.

Launchbox is, at its heart, a database designed to be filled with records of games with related media files — including ROMs and disk images — attached. It organises software by platform and allows the automatic launching of a particular emulator when selecting a game.

Perhaps its best feature, though, is its online connectivity, which allows it to connect to various online services, including its own online database, Wikipedia and Emumovies, and download all manner of supporting media for each game, where available. This supporting media ranges from simple box art and PDFs of the original manuals to music, movies and fanart of the games. By importing all your ROM files into LaunchBox, you can quickly and easily build up a full gaming database and automatically populate it with relevant information about pretty much any game you'd care to name; any game that doesn't get automatically populated with information can either be corrected yourself or manually searched in case it was stored online under different details.

This makes LaunchBox an excellent resource both for organising your collection and learning about titles you might not be familiar with — particularly those from other territories. The brief blurb LaunchBox provides for supported titles gives a good synopsis of what the game is all about and what to expect from it, and from there it's a simple matter to double-click the game in your collection and be playing it in a suitable emulator almost immediately. LaunchBox even recommends and provides download links to emulators for the most popular platforms and can automatically set them up for you; it also comes bundled with the wonderful DOSBox, which enables you to play old DOS-based games on modern Windows computers.

While I'd still prefer to have a wall full of original packaging and games playable on their original systems, that's not an especially cost-effective thing for me to do right now. So LaunchBox is very much scratching my "collector's" itch until I'm in a position to put together an actual physical collection. And in the meantime, it's turned my PC into pretty much the ultimate games console ever.

2355: Playing God

After reading up on their work a bit over on Hardcore Gaming 101, I've become interested in the Super NES games of a developer called Quintet. Their work consists of several games that I've heard of but never actually played, plus one PS1 game that I did enjoy and feel to this day is rather underappreciated: the unusual and interesting action RPG The Granstream Saga.

Quintet are perhaps best known for early SNES game ActRaiser and their subsequent Heaven and Earth trilogy, consisting of Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. (The Granstream Saga is kinda sorta also part of this series, too, though in an unofficial-ish capacity and on a different platform to its three predecessors.)

I decided to start with ActRaiser, since when exploring a developer's work like this I like to start with their early titles and work my way forward through them to see how they developed over time. ActRaiser has primitive elements, for sure — most notably an almost total lack of narrative development, though there are some interesting events that come and go as you play — but by God it's an interesting game, the likes of which I've only ever seen on one (two?) other occasion(s) in the form of Arcen Games' similarly unusual and fascinating A Valley Without Wind.

ActRaiser casts you in the role of God. (Due to the SNES era being the dawn of Nintendo of America's prudishness that persists to this day, He is known as "The Master" in the localisation.) Your job is to deal with Satan. (Likewise, everyone's favourite Ultimate Evil is known as Tanzra in the English version.)

Satan has been up to no good, you see; taking advantage of God having a much-needed rest after Ultimate Good and Ultimate Evil had their last showdown, Satan decided that he should wipe out all of humanity, taint the land to make it uninhabitable by humans should God decide to try and repopulate the world, and then ensconce some of his most trusted lieutenants to make doubly sure that those pesky white-winged types didn't try and undo all their hard work. God isn't standing for this, of course, and so begins your unusual quest.

ActRaiser is split into two very different sections. When you first arrive in a realm tainted by Satan's machinations, your first order of business is to clear out the monsters roaming freely over the land. You do this by descending to the surface and possessing a conveniently placed warrior statue, which comes to life with God's holy power and proceeds to dish out some righteous justice on anyone who dares come in range of its blade. Fight your way through a distinctly Castlevania-esque level to a boss, kill the boss and you're ready for the next phase.

Once you've cleared out the monsters, God has enough power to create two followers, who immediately start shagging and pumping out new population for you, so long as you tell them to build some nice streets to put their houses on in a completely different mode that is somewhat like SimCity "Lite". The town then proceeds to repeatedly inbreed with each other as you direct their expansion efforts, with your ultimate aim being for them to build over the top of the inconveniently placed monster lairs around the land, each of which spit out annoying creatures that steal your population or set fire to your buildings at inconvenient moments. Once you've successfully redeveloped the monsters' areas of outstanding natural beauty, you then unlock the second action-platforming stage of the region, which is different and harder, with a different boss at the end. Once this boss is defeated, the region is at complete peace and you can then continue developing it or move on to a new region.

While these two elements of the game are obviously very disparate, they do feed into one another. Your performance in the initial action phase, for example, partly determines the maximum possible population the region will be able to sustain when you start developing it — score more points and you'll have a higher (unseen) cap on your population. Conversely, the more your population expands in the building phase, the stronger the warrior statue gets in the action phases and the more "SP" God has to spend on Miracles.

Oh yes, Miracles; these are a rather integral part of the building phase, and obviously the most fun, too. Beginning with a lightning bolt that burns down most things on a single tile (including houses) and working up to an earthquake that knocks down all low-level structures in a region, your Miracles are used to both direct development of the towns and clear obstacles out of the way. You have to force yourself to feel a certain amount of detachment when doing this, since as the tech level of each region increases and it becomes able to support houses that hold more occupants, it becomes necessary to demolish low-tech houses to make way for denser developments. And, being God, you don't use a bulldozer; you use natural disasters, which is far more fun. It's hard not to feel a little pang of guilt when you watch the little counter of "total population" in the upper-right corner of the screen plummet after you unleash an earthquake, though.

ActRaiser is a really interesting game. Both elements are solid, though neither of them are especially complicated. This is probably for the best; it keeps things reasonably accessible for those who tend to gravitate more towards one of the two styles of gameplay than another, though the difficulty of the action phases in particular is a little on the high side if you're not accustomed to how unforgiving old-school games are.

Ultimately it's a satisfying experience to descend to Earth and smite Evil before watching your little minions gradually spread out to cover the entire continent. You really do get the feeling that your people are relying on your divine powers, too; they pray to you every so often and ask you to help make things happen, and they'll reward you with offerings if you fulfil their requests. Many offerings can then be used in other regions to spread various innovations or culture, making the whole world work a bit better; for example, as soon as the second region discovers that wheat is a more productive crop than corn, you can then export wheat from this region to everywhere else so they can all take advantage of this improved efficiency. Likewise, when your followers reach a man lost in the desert a little too late, a distraught artist discovers the secrets of music, which you can then take to another region and use it to lift their spirits after they've been feeling a bit bleak. In this way, the world of ActRaiser feels very much alive, even if you're not dealing directly with named characters or a rigid, ongoing plot.

I like it a lot, in other words, and it makes me excited to check out Quintet's other work. You can count on a full report when I get to them.

2347: Discovering the Neo Geo

To date, my knowledge of the Neo Geo platform has largely been limited to "it was that one where games cost over £100". Thanks to a recent Humble Bundle, though (running for another 16 hours at the time of writing) I've had the opportunity to have a go at what my friend Chris assures me are a pretty classic selection of games from the platform.

I'm kind of sorry I haven't checked out Neo Geo games earlier, because they fulfil every criteria I have in my head for what I think an "arcade game" should look, sound and feel like. This is largely because as well as being a home console, the Neo Geo also powered plenty of arcade machines in its time, and the versions you played on the console were exactly the same as you'd play in the arcade. Very few other consoles at the time could boast arcade perfect gameplay and presentation.

But what do I mean by what an arcade game should look, sound and feel like? Well, it's largely a nostalgia thing. When I think of arcade games, I think of childhood trips to the seaside — primarily either Hunstanton if we were going for a day trip, or Newquay if we'd gone on holiday to Devon and/or Cornwall — which always involved a trip to the arcades. To Americans, this might sound like a strange thing to get excited about, but here in the UK, we never really had much of an arcade culture — except, for some reason, at the seaside. In other words, an arcade was a rather unusual sight unless you happened to live on the waterfront, so it was a rare treat to be able to pump some small change into these games, many of which either didn't see home ports at all, or saw vastly inferior ports to home computer and console hardware that couldn't keep up with the specialised, dedicated arcade hardware.

When I think of these trips to the arcade, I think of several things. I think of the feeling of putting a coin in. I think of the sound the machines would make when it accepted your credits. I think of the sounds they'd make when you'd press the Start button, and the dramatic presentation of a new player joining or the Game Over screen.

I think of beautifully defined pixel art, far sharper and more detailed than anything I'd see on a system connected to the TV. I think of impressive animation. I think of sprite scaling and rotation. I think of specialised controls.

When I boot up a Neo Geo game, all of these feelings come flooding back to me. Individually, these elements aren't much, but they add up to the "arcade experience" for me, and said experience carries some fond memories.

I'll talk a bit more about the specific games I've had a go with in a later post, but for now I'll just say that, in terms of gameplay, the Neo Geo games are a reminder of a time when gameplay was first and foremost, and "gitting gud" wasn't something seen as elitist or exclusionary — if you wanted to see the end of the game, you either had to git gud at the game, or you had to keep throwing those coins into the machine. (Of course, when playing at home, you have the option to keep putting virtual credits in indefinitely — though as any shmup fan will tell you, the real challenge in these games is going for a 1CC, or 1 Credit Clear — beating the game without ever using the Continue feature.)

I like them a lot, in other words, and I'm looking forward to exploring the rest of these interesting, unusual and extremely addictive games further in the near future.

2262: Have You Played Major Havoc Today?

Continuing my exploration of Atari Vault on Steam — and partly in honour of the fact that for some inexplicable (but welcome!) reason, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell followed me on Twitter earlier today — I thought I'd take a look at another game I was previously unfamiliar with: Major Havoc.

Major Havoc is one of those games from the early '80s that eschewed sprites, bitmaps and pixels in favour of vector graphics, giving it a very distinctive, recognisable look that stands alongside other vector games such as Asteroids, Battlezone, Red Baron, Tempest and Star Wars. In keeping with the inventiveness of video gaming's youth, Major Havoc is a rather peculiar game with some ambitious concepts, and quite possibly one of the first attempts at cross-genre gaming.

Major Havoc is split into several phases. First of all there's a quasi-3D shoot 'em up section, where you control Major Havoc's spaceship at the bottom of the screen and shoot incoming enemies as they come towards you. The interesting thing about this part is that it's not just straight Space Invaders-style waves of enemies: the first level features enemies that turn into a different form and home in on you when you hit them; the second features Galaxians-style swooping enemies, and the third starts with swirling, spiral enemies that draw lines on the screen, which subsequently become a maze you have to navigate your ship through as you approach your destination. (I can't get past this one, so I can't speak to what comes later!)

Following this, you have a Lunar Lander-lite section where you have to land Major Havoc's ship on a flashing white platform atop the target you were approaching in the first phase. Then Major Havoc gets out of the ship and you're seamlessly taken into a side-on platformer with weird gravity (hold the jump button down and you keep rising; let go and you'll fall) where you have to find a reactor, set it to explode and then get back out to your ship before you blow up with it. After that, the process repeats with a different wave of enemies, different platform to land on and different maze to negotiate.

It's a really cool game that tries some things I certainly haven't seen before, and the blend of space shooter and platforming hasn't really been attempted again (to my knowledge, anyway) until FuturLab's very recent Velocity 2x on PlayStation 4 and Vita.

It's also a stark reminder and interesting reminder that differences between Eastern and Western games have always been very apparent, though not always in quite the same way as today — Atari's games of the early '80s capitalised on the popularity of futuristic sci-fi thanks to Star Wars and made effective use of technologies such as vector graphics to create that aesthetic, while Japanese games of a similar era were often based around pixel art with cute aesthetics and more mascot-like characters.

Major Havoc, then: pretty neat, and another nice discovery from the Atari Vault. Looking forward to discovering more. (Also, hi, Mr Bushnell, if you're reading, which you probably aren't. Thank you for following.)

1936: Modern Old-School

One of the games I've been playing a bunch on my shiny new PlayStation 4 is Resogun, a game that I was previously moderately excited about, and which, prior to Omega Quintet (and, arguably, Final Fantasy Type-0, which I'm interested to try at some point in the near future) was a game I often cited as the only (then-current) reason that I'd be interested in a PlayStation 4.

But it wasn't enough by itself to make me want to buy one. For a new platform to be truly compelling for me, there needs to be some long-form games that I'm interested in, whereas Resogun is an arcade game, intended to be enjoyed in relatively short bursts. This isn't a criticism of it, mind, but I'd have had a tough time justifying a PlayStation 4 purchase to myself purely on the strength of what is, essentially, next-gen Defender.

But oh, what a game Resogun actually is! I'm still skeptical of whether I'd have found it worth buying a PS4 for by itself — although in retrospect, I bought an Xbox 360 primarily because of Geometry Wars, which is even more simplistic than Resogun — but I'm absolutely in love with it, because it represents a true fusion between classic old-school arcade-style gameplay and modern presentation.

At its core, as previously noted, Resogun is similar to the classic arcade game Defender. You fly a little ship that can move and fire left and right at will. Like Defender, the game unfolds on a scrolling, wrapping stage, though here it's represented as a cylinder that you fly around the outer surface of. Like Defender, your job is to save little green humans from being abducted by invading alien flying saucers. Unlike Defender, there's significantly more to it than that.

For starters, the humans are held in captivity before you can rescue them. In order to do so, you need to destroy "Keepers" — special enemies that show up every so often with a green glow surrounding them. You'll get an audible announcement when some Keepers show up, but not a visual indicator showing where they are if they're around the other side of the level, so you'll need to find and destroy them quickly to save the human in question, because if you miss any of them — or, in some cases, destroy them in the wrong order — the human will immediately die. Succeed, however, and the human will pop out of his little prison box and start running around on the ground, at which point he becomes vulnerable to being abducted, falling into holes, drowning and being splattered by unpleasant things. He also becomes available to be picked up by your ship and transported to one of the rescue pods at the top of the level.

To complete a level, you need to proceed through three "phases". Each phase requires you to destroy a certain amount of enemies represented by a bar filling up at the bottom of the screen. When you complete a phase, you get a brief "time out" where you can still move and fire, but you're invincible and the enemies move in slow-motion. This allows you a moment to compose yourself and get yourself into an advantageous position before proceeding. The end of the third phase, however, jumps directly into a boss battle, with bosses taking the form of various peculiar geometric shapes that warp and twist before your very eyes as you shoot chunks off them and chip away at their energy bar. When the boss is dead, the whole level explodes and you move on to the next one. Repeat for five levels, beat game.

Except that's not all that there is to Resogun — at least not with the excellent DLC packages that have been released since it originally came out. Between these two packages (available as a bundle or individually) there are several new modes, including Survival, which places you on a single level and tasks you with surviving through a series of increasingly difficult days, acquiring power-ups by picking up humans; Protector, which requires you to deliver humans to cities to rebuild them and subsequently defend them from giant alien flying saucers; Commando, which casts you as a human attempting to protect his house from falling meteors in scenes somewhat reminiscent of Missile Command for a new generation; and Challenge, which gives you a series of unconventional ways to play the game and tasks you with completing some generally pretty fiendish objectives.

Resogun is unabashedly a score-attack game, and consequently it naturally comes with online support, allowing you to compare your scores both to your friends and the rest of the world's players. You can also filter these scores by time, allowing you to challenge friends each week or month to see who is truly the best (this week/month), and scores are tracked completely independently for each mode and difficulty setting.

Combine this with a robust ship editor, allowing you to create your own custom ships using the 3D "voxel" pixels from which the entire game is built (and which it is very fond of exploding things into at a moment's notice) and the ability to share said creations online and you have a remarkably "complete"-feeling package that, now I've spent some time with it, I'm pretty confident in recommending as an essential purchase for anyone with a PlayStation 4. (Assuming you like shooting things and watching numbers go up. And who doesn't like shooting things and watching numbers go up?)

So yeah. Buy Resogun. You won't regret it.

1824: First Fantasy

I finished Final Fantasy I last night, bringing the first chapter in my Final Fantasy marathon to a close. And you know what? I really, really enjoyed it.

This may have something to do with the fact that I was playing the PSP version, also known as Final Fantasy Anniversary Edition, which has been substantially tweaked and rebalanced from both the original NES release and the subsequent enhanced PSone Final Fantasy Origins version, which I played last time I beat this first installment.

While there's an argument that it's worth experiencing the game in its original, purest, grind-heavy and rather difficult form — complete with its Vancian Magic system, just one of many influences the game drew from Dungeons & Dragons — the PSP version proved to be a lot more enjoyable generally. The pacing was better, there was a lot less running around in circles grinding — the original required you to do this to even beat the first boss, which appeared before the game's title screen — and the more traditional Magic Points system made some of the more lengthy encounters and dungeons later in the game somewhat more feasible.

Those late-game dungeons — four of which were added in the Game Boy Advance Dawn of Souls release of the game and the last of which was added in the Anniversary Edition release — proved to be really great, if a little bizarre. Collectively dubbed the Soul of Chaos, the first four extra dungeons live up to their name by tasking you with exploring 5, 10, 20 and 40 floors that feature set layouts but randomised floor orders and available treasures. There's not really a coherent theme to the dungeon floors as such — although the less interesting floors tend to be of an appropriate element to the dungeon's name: fiery caverns in Hellfire Chasm, for example — but the chaotic, unpredictable nature of them is what makes them interesting. On one floor you might be exploring a cave; the next you might be paddling a canoe around a flooded village; on the next, you might be attempting to navigate a maze of bookshelves while scholars mumble about their research and get in your way.

The final new dungeon, known as the Labyrinth of Time, was the most interesting by far, however. The Labyrinth of Time creates a new dungeon each time by picking ten different "puzzle floors" out of a selection of 30, then challenging you to beat these puzzles against the clock and with one or more of your abilities sealed off. The more abilities you seal off — and the more useful they are — the more time you have available to complete a floor. Run out of time and a dark miasma descends, damaging you every second and increasing the number of monsters you encounter.

The puzzles vary from simple observation puzzles, in which you have to answer questions about something you've just seen, to challenging physical tasks such as marching in line with a group of NPC soldiers. Like the Soul of Chaos dungeons, they have little to do with the overall Final Fantasy story — what little story it has anyway — but they're immensely enjoyable and challenging to complete. And then at the end of it all you have Chronodia, one of the toughest bosses in the game, to fight for ultimate bragging rights… oh, and the best sword in the game, too.

The first time I played Final Fantasy I, with the Origins release, I did so in order to understand the series' roots, and sort of had a good time, but found it a bit of a chore after a while. The PSP version, meanwhile, I found genuinely enjoyable, even from a modern perspective, and was inspired to go on and complete the game's most challenging content. I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it to anyone looking for a fun portable RPG experience — and those of you without a PSP can even play it on your phone.

Onwards to Final Fantasy II, then, which I remember enjoying quite a lot the first time I tried it (again, with Origins) but which is widely regarded to be one of the worst installments in the whole series thanks to its bafflingly bizarre mechanics. For Fynn! Wild Rose!

1373: Steem-Powered

Although I grew up with the Atari 8-bit range of computers, some of my fondest early memories of using computers and playing games relate to that range's successor: the Atari ST. Unlike the 8-bit range, the ST was a 16-bit machine with an 8MHz processor, either 512K or 1MB of memory, support for MIDI, hard drives and floppy disks that held up to 720K of information. It was a huge leap over the 8-bit systems in many ways — though it did suffer from an appalling soundchip that actually sounded worse than the 8-bit range's POKEY chip in the hands of anyone other than the most skilled chiptune musicians.

I had a sudden urge to revisit some old ST memories the other day, prompted partly by a discussion with Andie on the subject of chemistry, of all things. (Andie's in hospital right now, if you didn't know, so discussions naturally turn to vaguely medicine- and science-related things on occasion.) Our discussion caused me to randomly remember an old Atari ST puzzle game from Psygnosis and Blue Byte called Atomino in which you had to create molecules by attaching atoms to one another and not leaving any… err… connecty bits (I'm not a chemist!) dangling loose. Remembering turned into downloading the Steem emulator and a copy of the game just to see if it held up. And it does!

I played Atomino for a bit until the emulation crashed (I think it was more a problem with the dodgy pirate disk image rather than the emulator itself) and then suddenly remembered a few other things — specifically, a few entries from the demoscene that I used to enjoy indulging in on occasion.

The demoscene is an odd old beast when you think about it, but it was a popular movement that, I believe, is still going on today. For the uninitiated, a demo disk was exactly what it sounds like: it was something you booted up when you wanted to demonstrate what your computer was capable of. More often than not, said demos were technically impressive in some way — they might use graphical trickery to get more than the normal 16 colours on screen, for example, or they might show off by putting graphics in places where it was normally "impossible" for the ST to render graphics. They'd often have good music, demonstrating skilled chiptune artists' mastery of the ST's crappy three-channel sound chip, and they were also often notable for quite how much stuff they fit onto a single disk.

One demo I remember particularly fondly — and which I successfully found a disk image of, so am enjoying while I type this out — was called The B.I.G. Demo. I can't remember why we had a copy with our original computer — chances are it was one of the disks acquired via my dad and brother's attendance at the local "computer club" (actually more of a local piracy swap meet — everyone was at it in the '80s and early '90s) that adorned the several big boxes of 3.5-inch floppy disks we had for the ST.

Anyway, The B.I.G. Demo was pretty neat. It wasn't the absolute flashiest demo I've ever seen, but it was cool. It had graphics in the borders, it had 256-colour visuals, and it had renditions of a wide variety of music from the 8-bit era. In fact, the main point of the demo was to act as a jukebox, providing access to a huge number of C64 classics in glorious ST-o-phonics. There was also a "Digital Department" menu that loaded separately and included digitised (more than likely MOD file-based) renditions of a number of the same tracks. Aside from this, though, everything in The B.I.G. Demo was loaded into the ST's memory, meaning no loading breaks whatsoever — not bad for a 512K machine.

One of the most interesting things about many of these demos was the scrolling text that inevitably adorned them. In many cases, the length of the scrolling message in the demo was the source of considerable bragging rights for the developers — not an unreasonable boast, given that when you only have 720KB tops to play with on a double-sided ST disk, even a short bit of text can and will eat into that space significantly.

The B.I.G. Demo had a whole bunch of scrolling messages, including one on the main screen that bragged about its lower border artwork, and the demo's crowning glory, the B.I.G. Scroller. This was quite simply a scrolling message that whizzed past in large print and would make you quite dizzy if you watched it for more than a few minutes at a time, but reading the whole thing would take you a significant amount of time. I can't remember a lot of the content from the B.I.G. Scroller (and haven't tried to read it since re-downloading the demo), but more often than not these "scrolltexts" took the form of stream-of-consciousness ramblings from one of the demo's creators, and were often quite interesting to read. In many ways, I guess they were a precursor to stream-of-consciousness blogging, and they're certainly an artifact that is very distinctive to the late '80s and early '90s.

I haven't kept up on the demoscene since I was a daily user of the Atari ST but I'm sure this sort of thing is still going on. I wonder how long the longest scrolltext is today?

1261: Registered Version

The resurrection of various video games from my youth is interesting.

I'm not talking about remakes here — though this discussion is in part prompted by the upcoming Unreal Engine 3-powered remake of Rise of the Triad — but instead, the rerelease of old DOS games, suitably tweaked and DOSboxed up in order to make them work properly on modern machines.

An awful lot of these games that are being resurrected were once "shareware" titles. For those of you too young to remember the shareware model — I'm not even sure it's still around these days — it was a means of distributing usually independently-developed games that involved giving away a significant proportion of a finished product for free, then inviting people to cough up for a more fully-featured "registered version" if they liked it.

The distinguishing factor between a shareware version and a good old-fashioned demo was the fact that demos are usually crippled or limited in some way; shareware versions, meanwhile, are fully-functional, just not quite as fully-functional as the registered version.

I didn't explain that very well. Let me give you a practical example that might make it a bit clearer.

Let's take the PC game Rise of the Triad, since it was that that got me thinking about this today. Rise of the Triad's shareware version was subtitled The HUNT Begins and featured ten levels in which you could only play one of the different characters available in the full version. These ten levels did not appear anywhere in the registered version, which was known as Dark War. This meant that you could play through the shareware version, decide you liked the game, buy the "full" version and play through a completely new series of levels.

This was one approach to the shareware model. Other games, such as Rise of the Triad's spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, were split into discrete "episodes", with the shareware version consisting of only the first episode and usually not featuring all the enemies, weapons and graphics from the full version.

The reason I'm thinking about this today is because when I was young and playing shareware versions of these games that I got from various magazine cover CDs and downloaded from CompuServe (yeah, you heard me), attaining the registered version appeared to be something that was all but impossible to me as a teenager with no credit or debit card. Digital distribution of paid-for titles was unheard for, so there was no "just download it from Steam", and many shareware titles required you to order the registered versions from America, leading to exorbitant shipping costs.

As such, I didn't really get to play many registered versions of shareware games I remember rather fondly until much, much later. It's a lot of fun to be able to revisit these games so quickly and easily these days and discover that the registered versions were indeed rather fun, after all.

Do they still hold up as decent games after all this time, though? Your mileage may vary somewhat, but I certainly still have a soft spot for things like Rise of the Triad, and am very much looking forward to seeing what Interceptor Entertainment have made of the upcoming reboot, which I preordered today. (It's $15, and you get four old Apogee titles for free when you preorder, including the original Rise of the Triad, its expansion and the two Blake Stone games. Not a bad deal at all.)