2278: Difficulty Switch A and B

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Spending a bit more time with Atari Vault over the last few days makes me appreciate one of the most interesting things about the 2600 — and something that, to my knowledge, hasn’t really been done on any other console since: its use of difficulty switches and game selectors.

It wasn’t unusual to see 2600 cartridges promising “9 video games” or similar on their front covers; by modern definitions, this wasn’t entirely accurate, as each cartridge did indeed contain just one game, but tended to have multiple variations available to play. In some cases, these variations were minor — difficulty modes, essentially — but in others, they changed the gameplay fairly drastically. And along with these selectable games, the 2600 also afforded both players the opportunity to select their difficulty independently of one another.

Handicap systems are still found in modern multiplayer games in various ways, the most common of which being racing games’ tendency to give the pack’s back markers a slight speed boost to allow them to catch up a bit. But on the 2600, this was a revolutionary feature: by setting difficulty levels independently for each player, it became possible for experienced players to play “fairly” with newcomers, youngsters or those who simply didn’t have quite the same dexterity and/or ability to handle those horrible Atari joysticks.

The ways that the difficulty switches were implemented varied from game to game. In the case of Air-Sea Battle, for example, the difficulty switches allowed players to set the size of their bullets independently — less experienced players could have larger bullets, making it easier to hit the targets. In Combat, the difficulty switches adjusted the speed of the player’s bullets — more experienced players could choose to have slower shots, making it easier for their opponent to dodge. (Of course, you could then tweak the difficulty further by playing one of the variants where you could “bend” your shots around corners by steering after firing.)

It’s a really interesting idea, and one of the coolest things about the 2600. I knew about the existence of these switches before — I’ve played some 2600 games before — but it hasn’t been until I’ve actually started investigating some of these games in detail that I’ve really appreciated the surprising amount of interest and flexibility that they bring to these rough-looking but surprisingly fun old games.

Plus another nice feature of 2600 games I’ve discovered is that they’re straightforward and easy to learn enough that my wife and I can play together without me having to spend hours explaining how to do things, or for us to play with an enormous skill imbalance thanks to the fact I have more experience than her. Thanks to the 2600’s switches, we can tweak the experience to one that we both find challenging, but fair — and, it has to be said, the 2600 had some enormously fun two-player games that, while simple, can get very, very competitive very quickly!

2276: Video Computer System

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As I wrote in a few posts recently, I’ve been checking out the new Atari Vault compilation on Steam. Rather than talking about a specific game today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the value of the compilation as a whole, and why I’m enjoying exploring it.

Atari Vault is a compilation of somewhere in the region of 100 Atari games from the ’80s. The bulk of the compilation consists of VCS 2600 games, but there are some arcade games in there too, including the likes of Crystal Castles, Missile Command, Major Havoc and Liberator.

I’ve owned a number of previous similar compilations in the past, and have typically gravitated towards the arcade games, since they seem more “palatable” from a modern perspective than the extremely primitive-looking 2600 games. I recall growing up with the Atari 8-bit home computers, and in comparison to those, 2600 games looked primitive even back at that time when it was relatively current, and as such, I’ve always found them a little offputting. I’ve made a specific effort to explore them a bit more this time around, though, and I’ve been pleased to discover some really interesting games.

Take Haunted House, for example. This is a fairly straightforward top-down “find all the things” game with an intriguing twist: you’re in the dark. With your character represented as nothing more than a pair of eyes, you navigate around by either bumping into walls or lighting matches to illuminate the area immediately around you. A single game of Haunted House requires that you find all the pieces of a… thing… an urn? And you have to do so while using as few matches as possible and losing as few lives as possible, for this being a haunted house, it has a number of unpleasant beasties lurking around just waiting to nibble on you.

Or take Save Mary, a prototype game that never saw commercial release, but which presented an interesting twist on vaguely Tetris-ish block puzzles. The eponymous Mary is trapped at the bottom of a pit which is slowly filling with water. You control a crane and have to drop blocks into the well for Mary to climb up. You need to get her high enough to be able to grab her with the crane and save her. Once you’ve done this, you have to do it again, only with significantly more awkward-shaped blocks. The peculiar variation on the typical block puzzle formula is the fact that Mary has a mind of her own (albeit a predictable one) and you have to be careful not to squish her with the blocks you drop as she wanders back and forth trying to get to high ground.

Or how about Atari Video Cube, a really simple but surprisingly compelling puzzle game loosely based on Rubik’s Cube? Controlling a weird little man (who has a name and a backstory and everything, though I can’t remember it offhand), it’s your job to pick up coloured squares from each of the 3×3 faces of the cube and lay them down so that each side is a solid colour. To make this more difficult, to pick up a coloured tile, you have to swap it with the one you’re holding, and to make it even more difficult, you can’t walk through tiles that are the same colour as the tile you’re holding, even if they’re on a different face of the cube.

The 2600 back catalogue appears to be filled with these sorts of interesting little games that we’d probably find laughable if released as full-scale, full-price commercial releases today, but as part of this compilation, they provide a surprising amount of entertainment value — and, in some cases, represent types of games that are very much deserving of a modern remake.

My only issue with them from a modern viewpoint is the fact that 2600 games tend to end rather abruptly, regardless of whether you “win” or “lose”, and this can sometimes make victories over a particularly difficult level feel a bit less than satisfying. Still, this was from an age where gaming was quite a social pursuit — many of the 2600 games are very much designed to be played together with a partner — and so, I feel, a key part of the fun back then must have been making your own fun with the games to a certain extent; similar to how a tabletop game doesn’t automatically set off fireworks as soon as you win, neither does a 2600 game. The celebrations and victory rewards are entirely up to you; I recommend betting each other a slice of pizza or a big lump of cake on a game of Combat and see how much you like each other by the end of the evening!

2262: Have You Played Major Havoc Today?

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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.)

2260: Have You Played Liberator Today?

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I like retro compilations, not just for the ability to play games from my youth on modern hardware, but also to discover some classics that, for whatever reason, I missed out on when they were first released.

Such has been the case after just a few minutes with Atari Vault, a new release on Steam that packages together about a hundred Atari 2600 and arcade games from the late ’70s and early ’80s — including a few previously unreleased prototypes, which is kinda cool.

One such discovery I made today was an interesting (and surprisingly impressive for the time) game called Liberator, a quasi-sequel to Missile Command that flipped the concept of the original Cold War-inspired game on its head by putting you in the role of the aggressors, attacking enemy bases on planets in order to liberate the population from the villains.

Liberator, I’ve discovered, was quite a rare game even on its original release, which might explain why I’ve never come across it before. According to Gaming History, the original arcade machine sold for a whopping $2,000 and did not prove particularly popular, with only somewhere in the region of 760 cabinets actually being made — all this despite it being a game absolutely made for cross-promotion with Atari’s “Atari Force” comic series. The curse of old-school Atari constantly and consistently failing at marketing strikes once again, I guess.

Anyway. The game plays quite a bit like Missile Command in that it’s a somewhat different take on the shoot ’em up. Rather than firing directly at things, you fire at a crosshair on screen, and your missiles detonate when they reach the point you fired at. Thus, to destroy things, you have to cause explosions at locations where the enemies will be when your missiles arrive — usually meaning you have to fire ahead of them carefully, anticipating their movements.

Much like Missile Command, you can fire from several different places on screen, and these missile launchers — here depicted as starships orbiting an enemy planet — can be independently destroyed, acting as your “lives” for the game session. The game, then, becomes a matter of balancing your offense on the planet surface, which requires you to destroy enemy missile bases on the rotating globe ahead of you, and defending yourself against incoming missiles and other attacks. Not every attack is guaranteed to hit you, either, so you also need to spot which things you need to prioritise destroying and which you can safely ignore.

It’s an interesting game; very simple, but undoubtedly addictive in the same way that Missile Command is. It’s a good-looking game for the time period (1982), as well, with some decent pixel art for “Commander Champion”, who briefs you on your mission, and a well-done 3D rotating globe effect for the planets you’re orbiting. Sound effects, meanwhile, are the same bleeps, burbles and booms from Missile Command — nothing special, but certainly iconic of this particular period in gaming.

There’s a lot more to explore in Atari Vault, but I anticipate that Liberator will be one I keep coming back to!