#oneaday Day 114: dotHack and Slash

I’ve been playing .hack//Infection for the last couple of days on PlayStation 2. I’ve had the full set of four games on my shelf for a very long time and been meaning to properly run through them all, but have somehow never gotten around to it. I have previously completed Infection a very long time ago, but I’ve never gone through all four games and seen how it all ends — nor have I been spoiled on any of it. I also own a copy of the .hack//G.U. remasters on PlayStation 4, so I’ll have to get to those at some point, too, but I wanted to knock out the PS2 games first.

For the unfamiliar, .hack was one of the first (possibly the first) “MMO gone mad, if you die in the game you die for real” series. Unusually, it was designed from the outset as a fully transmedia production: not only were there four PS2 games in the series, each of these games also came with a DVD featuring an episode of a specially made anime known as .hack//Liminality which tells a “real world” story that unfolds concurrently with the events of the game, and there was a completely separate anime series known as .hack//Sign. Since that time, there have apparently been several other anime and manga series, along with the aforementioned .hack//G.U. trilogy of games, which originated on PS2 but which were ported to PS4 in 2017.

That may all sound terribly complicated, but be at ease: you can have a satisfying .hack experience if you just play the games. .hack//Infection, the first of the original set of four games, tells the story of “you”, an 8th grader who has just signed up for the hottest new MMO, The World, at the recommendation of your friend Yasuhiko, a veteran player. You join up and in that inimitable “early 2000s MMO” sort of way, you party up with Yasuhiko, or “Orca” as he’s known in the game, who destroys absolutely everything before you can even get a hit in by virtue of him being 50 levels higher than you.

But something goes horribly wrong. After an encounter with a mysterious young girl who is seemingly being chased by a bizarre creature carrying a red wand, Orca is entrusted with a strange book and shortly afterwards, his character is “Data Drained”, leaving the real Yasuhiko comatose. You end up taking possession of the book, which manifests itself as a strange bracelet that equips you with the power to Data Drain enemies in the game, and it’s then up to you to investigate the strange happenings in The World and determine if there’s any truth to the game seemingly having an impact on the real world.

The cool thing about .hack//Infection is that the entire PS2 game is diegetic, intended to represent you using your computer to check your mail, read the news and log in to The World. You never see the actual real world yourself in the game — hence the inclusion of the Liminality DVDs — but instead all your investigation is online. This unfolds through a combination of you checking and replying to mails (with predefined responses) and browsing through the official message boards for The World, looking for clues.

Canonically, .hack//Infection is supposed to be unfolding in 2010, but obviously in 2002 developers CyberConnect2 had to make something of a best guess as to what that near-future setting might look like. They actually got a fair few things right, such as high-speed, always-on Internet access being pretty much universal and fibre-optic cables being the main means of this infrastructure being implemented — though here in the real world, fibre broadband is a little more recent than 2010.

What’s quite interesting is the design of The World itself, because it could quite plausibly work as an online RPG — though perhaps not in the way that western players understood “MMOs” at the time. For context, World of Warcraft came out in 2004, two years after .hack//Infection, so “MMO” up until that point in the west meant either EverQuest or Ultima Online.

The World is closer in execution to something like Sega’s Phantasy Star Online from 2000 in that there are small, shared communal areas (known as “Root Towns”) where you can hang out with other players, but your actual fighting and questing takes place in discrete areas that you teleport to rather than exploring a coherent world. It’s not quite the same as the “instanced” areas seen in World of Warcraft and, later, Final Fantasy XIV, as you can meet up with other players who happen to be visiting the same area, but the nature of how The World is structured means that you’re relatively unlikely to stumble across someone at random.

Anyway, let’s not get bogged down too much in details as I’ll probably want to write about this on MoeGamer once I’m finished. Suffice to say for now that .hack//Infection and its subsequent parts unfold as a combination of you just flat-out playing The World to get treasure, gear and helpful items, and gradually working your way through the core mystery at the heart of everything. At most points in the game, you can put the main plot on hold and just go dungeon-crawling to your heart’s content — and it’s probably advisable to, since you’ll need to level both your own character and the various companions you can recruit to your cause.

.hack//Infection is somewhat clunky by more recent action RPG standards, but once you get a feel for it and an understanding of its mechanics, it’s enjoyable. There’s a variety of enemies to deal with, and their different strengths and weaknesses will often require you to think about various strategies to deal with them. And, since the game is supposed to be simulating an MMO, you can pretty much concentrate on your own play; any companions you bring with you will usually do a pretty good job of fighting alongside you, though you can issue various orders to them if you need them to, say, heal or unleash their most powerful abilities. You can also micromanage their equipment to a certain degree, and since equipment has skills attached, by doing this you can try and optimise them for the challenges you’re about to face.

I can completely understand the criticisms of .hack from back in the day. It is repetitive. The dungeons are very obviously constructed from pre-built blocks with different textures put atop them, and there’s not a lot of variation to them. And yet there’s something about .hack that I’ve always found fascinating and compelling. I think it’s the oddly menacing atmosphere the whole thing has; The World, as a game, is designed to be cheerful and colourful, but it’s very obvious that there are dark things going on beneath the surface, and that the players of the game are clearly being used for some nefarious purpose.

I’m in no rush to plough through all four games, but I’ve enjoyed making a start on .hack//Infection this weekend, and as a long term project I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end. And there will, of course, be in-depth articles on MoeGamer (and possibly videos) to go along with it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 101: Body Harvest

Today, inspired by yesterday’s post and my recent acquisition of an EverDrive 64, I decided to have a “fuck it, I’m playing something new” evening and booted up an N64 game I’ve always been curious about but never actually tried: DMA Design’s Body Harvest, often described by many as a proto-Grand Theft Auto 3. Naturally, as with any sort of widespread and oversimplified opinion, that does Body Harvest something of a disservice, but it is an interesting game that I’m going to spend some more time with.

For the unfamiliar, Body Harvest is a quasi-open world action game in which you take on the role of time-travelling supersoldier Adam Drake in a quest to defeat a bunch of pesky insectoid aliens who show up every 25 years and attempt to eat everyone in sight. For reasons it’s best you don’t ask too much about — the game’s original designer and writer has more on that — it has been decided that Drake should travel back to each of these instances of the aliens arriving on Earth and obliterate them rather than, you know, just attempting to cut them off at the source.

This then unfolds as a series of absolutely vast open-plan 3D levels in which you can control Drake on foot or in a wide variety of vehicles. It’s open world and it has vehicles in it, therefore it’s just like Grand Theft Auto 3, see?

No, if anything, Body Harvest is closer in execution to something like 16-bit classic Hunter, but with a bit more focus. Because despite unfolding in wide open environments, there’s not a lot of incentive to go off exploring; for the most part, completing the game involves running through a series of objectives one at a time, dealing with alien invasions that tend to punctuate getting from one place to another, and attempting to ensure that the little meter indicating how many humans have been eaten doesn’t fill up.

It’s a game I’d always assumed to be a bit more complicated than it actually is, though to be honest I’m kind of relieved. Body Harvest, although incredibly clunky by modern standards, and even by N64 standards, feels like it has some focus to it, and you’re rarely left in a situation where you have no idea what to do or where to go. Being a game from the fifth generation, though, you’re not bombarded with tutorials and guide NPCs telling you to shoot the hinges or whatever, meaning there are sequences where you’ll have to determine what the best course of action is — even if that action makes you a bit of an asshole, such as a point where you shoot the blades off a windmill because you need one of the cogs that runs it.

Body Harvest scatters a lot of vehicles around the map with good reason: it’s a lot easier to get around in them, and they provide considerably more protection for Drake. It’s possible to fight while driving a vehicle, either using Drake’s weaponry if it’s a civilian vehicle or the weapons fitted to the vehicle itself if it’s military hardware, and the game’s excellent lock-on system means that you don’t need to faff around aiming too hard; you can just concentrate on positioning yourself strategically and/or avoiding incoming attacks. In fact, the lock-on system is so good I can’t help but wonder how they managed to completely balls that aspect of Grand Theft Auto up so badly, and not even come anywhere approaching to fixing it until the ever-present, never-ending Grand Theft Auto V, which is, of course, the twelfth game in the series.

But yes. Aside from unfolding in a kind-of-sort-of open world and having vehicles in it, Body Harvest doesn’t have much to do with Grand Theft Auto. There’s no picking and choosing what missions to do, there are no side activities aside from a few collectibles here and there, and your progress through the game is, outside of a couple of opportunities to sequence-break, linear.

But that’s fine. It works well for the game, and it keeps you on your toes, always pushing you onwards into the next section of the game world rather than keeping you confined to one place. I appreciate how the game gives you a feeling of freedom, but doesn’t overwhelm you with it.

The one aspect that I can see being troublesome is the save system. Each level is absolutely enormous, and is split into several distinct “stages”, each of which culminates with a boss fight of sorts, which, early in the level, tends to take the form of eliminating a large static structure that is trying to pelt you with lasers. Upon clearing one of these “stages”, a beacon is dropped which acts as both a save point and a fast travel point; outside of that, you can’t save, meaning if you fuck things up after an hour of poncing around the open world, you’ll have to do all the important stuff again.

Still, this at least gives failure some degree of consequence, and encourages you to perhaps find more efficient ways to complete your objectives — or just memorise the things you need to do. I haven’t fallen foul of it yet, but I suspect I will before long!

As an N64 game, Body Harvest is ugly. It was renowned as a particularly ugly N64 game even on its original release and, as you might expect, time hasn’t been all that kind to it. But if you can look past that — I certainly can — there’s a really enjoyable game with a menacing atmosphere, a moody soundtrack and some satisfying bug-squishing combat to enjoy. I like, so I’ll definitely be playing some more of this.

#oneaday Day 97: EverDriving the ’64

Inspired by my success with the GDEMU for the Dreamcast, I decided to pick up an EverDrive 64 for my Nintendo 64. Long-term, I’m planning on grabbing one of these excellent devices for all my cart-based consoles, as I’ve been burned just once too many by duff cartridges purchased from second-hand sources. As much fun as it is to collect things and have the satisfying tactile thunk of slamming a cartridge into a slot, it’s even more fun to have games that actually work.

For the unfamiliar, an EverDrive is a cartridge designed to work with a cartridge-based system… obviously. In most cases, they have a micro SD card slot, on which you load some simple OS files for the thing to be able to do its thing, and then any ROM files you want to use. This effectively means in most instances, you can carry around the complete library for a system on just one cartridge. Very convenient — particularly as the EverDrive also takes care of managing save data, and even allows you to back up and restore Controller Pak saves so you don’t need umpteen of the little buggers to be able to save your progress.

The one small issue I’ve found is that when running NTSC games on my PAL N64, there’s a horrible “ghosting” effect on the image that makes playing those games undesirable. It’s a bit of a shame, as there are a few North American NTSC N64 titles I wouldn’t mind playing, but to be honest, I suspect the EU library will keep me busy for quite some time.

This evening I’ve been exploring a few games I’ve always been curious about, but never had the opportunity to play for one reason or another. The two that I’ve probably had the most fun with are both Midway titles, as it happens, and both arcade conversions: San Francisco Rush and Gauntlet Legends.

San Francisco Rush is an arcade racer that is markedly different from most other arcade racers from the ’90s that I’m familiar with. Probably its most notable standout feature is that its courses are relatively “open”, often offering alternative routes and shortcuts, and in some cases allowing you to proceed around a section of the course in the opposite direction to the rest of the pack and still end up where you’re going.

Of course, open-structure races aren’t a particularly uncommon sight these days — to be honest, it’s harder to find a modern racing game that isn’t open world outside of the hardcore sim sector — but I suspect back in the ’90s, San Francisco Rush would have been quite the unusual little thing.

It’s also noteworthy in that it’s an arcade racer where you really do have to slow down for corners. If there’s a drift function, I certainly haven’t got to grips with it; thus far I’ve had a reasonable amount of success with just actually using the brakes (or at the very least letting off the accelerator) ahead of sharp corners — and with the game being set in San Francisco, there are lots of sharp corners.

The visuals are fairly ugly by modern standards, though I found that I quickly stopped noticing the low-resolution blurry nature of the game, and the fact that many of the races are covered in fog is entirely appropriate for the setting. It thus far seems to be an enjoyable racer, and with a decent amount of longevity, too; the main “championship” mode is 24 tracks long, thankfully with the ability to save your progress.

Gauntlet Legends, meanwhile, is a successor to the classic 4-player dungeon crawler from Atari Games. It takes the action into the polygonal 3D realm, though still plays mostly like a top-down maze game. It has all the classic Gauntlet elements present and correct: finding keys to open doors, standing on switches to open up walls, blasting generators to stem the tide of monsters. It adds a few new elements to the mix, though, including an inventory where you can activate and deactivate power-ups at will, and some RPG-lite mechanics whereby you can level up and improve your stats.

Perhaps most importantly, your health doesn’t tick down gradually as you play. Bliss! This makes it one of the few Gauntlet games that it doesn’t feel utterly futile to play; as much as I like old-school Gauntlet, the various home ports tend to trivialise themselves by providing you the opportunity to “insert coins” as much as you want, affording you effectively unlimited health.

Not so in Gauntlet Legends! Instead, you lose health at a much more sensible rate if you get hit or caught in a trap, and healing items give you a meaningful amount of health back. Plus you can buy more health with the gold you earn in levels, and you also get more health every time you level up.

Probably the thing I’m most impressed with about Gauntlet Legends is how smoothly it runs. While it doesn’t run at a rock-solid framerate, it happily gets up to a full 50fps (I’m running PAL, remember) when you’re wandering around exploring, and while the frame rate does drop a bit when the screen gets busy, it’s never to an unplayable degree, and the controls always remain nicely responsive.

I’m looking forward to spending a bit more time with both games, along with revisiting some old favourites and discovering some new titles. If you have an N64 and a bit of cash to splash, I can highly recommend an EverDrive; I suspect it’s going to revitalise my interest in this classic system, and I’m looking forward to getting one for my other classic consoles, too. After payday, though; they ain’t cheap!

#oneaday Day 80: Gaming specialism vs. generalised mediocrity

I decided to hop on board with a friend’s “high score” (well, “best time”, really) challenge over on his Discord today. The game? Sega Rally on the Saturn, a game (and console) I have precisely zero experience with outside of an occasional go on an arcade machine back in the ’90s.

Unsurprisingly, I am not yet at a standard where I can even enter the challenge, given that it requires participants to complete all three stages of the game and post a time on the game’s high score table. But I’m not mad about that. In fact, it brought something into focus that I’ve probably been aware of for a good long while, but which I hadn’t really thought about actively before.

A key difference between older, arcade-style games and the stuff we typically get today is that older games demand that you specialise — get really good at one very specific thing — while today’s games only demand that you reach a bare minimum acceptable standard in a wide variety of different activities.

Using racing games as an example, when you play Sega Rally, outside of stuff like the Time Attack and two-player modes, you’re always doing the same thing. You’re always racing the same three courses in the same order using one of the two same cars each time. Minimal variables. Minimal randomisation. Maximum scope for learning how to play the game well, and developing specific strategies that work for you.

Compare with a modern-day racing game. Leaving aside the fact that arcade-style racers barely exist any more outside of the indie space, today’s racing games are much more likely to give you hundreds of individual challenges to complete, and never really demand that you get good at one of them to a notable degree. Rather than specialising in one very specific thing, you are developing a standard of generalised mediocrity — enough to get by, but nothing more.

Of course, some players choose to take things a little further and want to top the online leaderboards or beat things on the hardest difficulty, obtain “S-Ranks” or whatever. But I’m willing to bet that a statistically significant portion of players of any given game featuring a wide swathe of content (ugh, I know, but bear with me) will play each thing the precise number of times they need to in order to mark it as “complete”, and then never touch it again.

I’m not saying either of these approaches is wrong per se — although I suspect a game as “content-light” as Sega Rally would be a hard sell as a full-price game today — but it is interesting how different those two types of game feel. My brief jaunt with Sega Rally this afternoon was genuinely exciting. I could see myself improving as my lap times got better with each attempt — and the successful completion of the challenge was within sight. Add the competitive element to that (once I’ve actually cleared the three races, of course) and you have even more exciting thrills.

This isn’t to say that games like this don’t exist in the modern day, either — although they’re less common. The last time I really feel like there was a highly competitive, specialised game that I spent a significant amount of time with was probably Geometry Wars 2 on Xbox 360, and that must be pushing 20 years old at this point. But it was the exact same sort of thing I was feeling today with Sega Rally: a specific, well-defined, non-randomised challenge, and the desire to do well at that one thing.

The other benefit of games like this is that they’re much more friendly to shorter sessions. This makes it ideal for those of you who have been browbeaten into believing you “don’t have time” to play games any more, or if you only have a half hour before your food arrives, or before you have to catch the bus, or log on to Teams and pretend that you’re working or something.

There’s something to be said for the “no strings” aspect of these games; the fact that they don’t demand your commitment over the long term, and they’re not trying to bribe you into making that one game your complete lifestyle with things like Battle Passes, microtransactions, progression systems and other such shenanigans. On top of that, it often just feels like games that have a small number of very specific challenges to complete are probably better designed; if you only have three tracks in your racing game, you better make sure they’re damn good ones, whereas if you have 100 tracks, who cares if one or two are a bit of a stinker?

If you haven’t played a “specialised” game like Sega Rally for a long time, I highly recommend the experience. Boot it up, spend some time with it, enjoy the experience, then set it aside and do something else. Far from being a “waste of time”, as certain quarters of modern gaming might like you to believe, I think you might be surprised what a pleasantly invigorating experience it is… and how likely you might be to come back and try again later.

#oneaday Day 65: Retro Games Aren’t Bad

It seems we’ve reached the point in gaming history where everything over a certain age is automatically “bad”. I’ll be honest, as an enthusiast of gaming from the 8, 16 and 32-bit eras, this is a massive bummer to see, because it makes it a huge uphill struggle to convince people that it’s worth exploring gaming history.

I’m sure this is a temporary thing, and that the people who would get something from acknowledging and exploring gaming history will always find their way into the classics of yesteryear, but it’s still frustrating and annoying. Particularly when people start spouting their opinions as fact.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of home computer games rather than console games. Home computer games were of massive importance to the games industry in Europe, but to see folks so casually write so many of them off because they are perceived as “worse” than console titles from the same period is a huge fucking bummer. Plus we get the old “inverse hype” problem: games that were popular back in the day are now lambasted as “actually not being that good after all”, rather than any consideration being given to why they might have been popular and so well-received back in the day.

A good example is pretty much anything by The Bitmap Brothers. On their original release, to home computer fans, a Bitmap release was an event. These were games that were slickly produced, good-looking and, particularly unusually for the period, sounded great, too, thanks to their use of sampled intro music.

Yes, there were cases where the hype definitely got the better of everyone, with Xenon 2: Megablast probably being the best example of this, but there are other cases where hate is thrown for reasons I genuinely don’t understand. Probably the best example of this is Gods, a well-presented platformer with some interesting levels, plenty of secrets and a lot of replayability.

Speak to someone today about Gods and chances are they’ll brand it as “bad”. Having been playing Gods quite a bit recently due to the impending release of The Bitmap Brothers Collection 2 for Evercade, though, it absolutely is not “bad” at all. To say so is ridiculous. Are there elements of it that might be an acquired taste, or for which game design has moved on? Absolutely. It has stiff controls, an inexplicable inability to jump straight upwards and some of the most obtuse secrets in all of gaming. Like most European-developed platformers, it has no concept of invincibility frames other than immediately after respawing. And it doesn’t scroll or move as smoothly as games developed for console.

But none of those things make Gods a “bad” game. They might make it a game you need to put a bit of time in before you understand it, sure, but again, that’s not “bad”.

There are plenty of other examples of this, too. The James Pond series springs to mind. This is a series that certainly does have a stinker in its midst in the form of The Aquatic Games, but the most commonly cited game from the range that people think is “bad” is James Pond 2: Robocod, which is probably the best of the bunch. And it’s a game that is still pretty good to this day.

Again, though, context is everything. You have to understand that in Europe, console ownership was by no means the “norm” — and those folks who did have consoles maybe only had three or four games. For those who didn’t have a console at all, Robocod was a revelation. Here was a scrolling platform game that, to ST and Amiga owners, offered many of the same appeal elements as titles like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog. Is it as good as either of those games? No. But that absolutely doesn’t make it “bad”, either. It makes it especially noteworthy that it was among the best platformers we had on 16-bit home computer platforms at the time.

I guess a lot of this is a side-effect of the way that online discussion seems to have precisely zero nuance to it these days, whether you’re talking politics or video games. Everything is an us-vs-them situation, and there are accepted “correct” and “wrong” opinions. And the lack of nuance means that it’s near-impossible to have a viewpoint that takes a little from column A, a little from column B, because both columns want to hand you a flag and make you stand in line glaring at the other group.

I won’t get into political examples, because that’s a sure-fire route to starting some arguments — though I will say that Disco Elysium, which I played recently, handles the “shades of grey” quite nicely — but in the case of video games, there’s very much a divide between those who think console games are the only retro worth preserving, and those who acknowledge that home computer gaming is a thing that actually existed, and in many cases prefer it to what consoles offered.

I occupy a space between those two viewpoints. A lot of my online work focuses on home computer games precisely because there’s not nearly enough discussion about them compared to console games, but that doesn’t mean I reject console games altogether. On the contrary, in more recent years in particular I’ve had a lot of fun exploring parts of the NES, Master System, Mega Drive and SNES libraries that I never had access to back in the day. And those systems are technically superior to the general-purpose home computers of the time.

But that doesn’t mean home computer stuff should be rejected either. There’s value there. There’s cultural history there. Sure, they might not scroll as smoothly, sound as nice or play as well as some console games, but they’re not “bad”. They are part of gaming history, too. And it’s starting to genuinely annoy me when people just reject things they’ve arbitrarily decided are “bad” for one reason or another.

So if that’s you, knock it off. And if it’s not you? Well, I’ve got a bunch of videos you might be interested in…

I bought a Sega Master System.

Now that I’ve stepped aside from the games press, I’ve resolved to myself to spend more time enjoying games just for the sake of enjoying them, not because I want to write about them or whatever. This doesn’t mean that I won’t write about them, of course — it just means that my priorities are not “get through as much shit as possible so I can write about something every week/day/hour”.

To that end, this week I’ve been spending some time with my retro systems, which have been going a bit unloved in their dedicated room upstairs for a little while. Yes, I have multiple emulation devices and complete ROM sets for everything up to Dreamcast on my PC downstairs, but there’s still something thoroughly pleasant about playing on original hardware.

In fact, in the case of systems like Nintendo 64, original hardware still provides a superior experience, since today’s N64 emulation still has a certain degree of jank about it — not to mention the fact that no modern controller quite feels like the N64’s weird three-pronged monstrosity.

One system I’ve been meaning to explore for a while is the Sega Master System. I’ve never owned one of these and don’t really know a whole lot about it — and as such, any time I’ve considered exploring the library of games for it that I have on my PC and emulation devices, I never really know where to start. Herein lies another benefit of playing with original hardware: rather than attempting to get everything, you can curate your own collection and discover new favourites one at a time rather than being overwhelmed by choice.

Anyway, my background with the Sega Master System is brief. Growing up, I only know one person who had one: someone I went to school with named Dale. Dale was a curious character in that he flip-flopped between being a cool guy to hang out with and someone I’d consider a friend, to full-on “school bully” status. And he’d do it without warning from day to day; I never quite knew what to make of him. He could burp like no-one else, though, and his mum was nice.

To my recollection, I only ever went over to Dale’s house once during my childhood, but while I was there we spent some time playing on his Sega Master System. I don’t think he had many games — the only one I remember playing was Alex Kidd in Miracle World — but I remember being quite taken with both the system and its games. And it’s sort of stuck in my head that I’d quite like to fiddle around with one ever since… only I’ve never gotten around to it for one reason or another.

Well, I’ve been chatting with some retro gaming YouTubers of late, and I finally got around to watching the work of one of them that I’d been meaning to check out for a while: Dudley of Yesterzine. Dudley’s “thing” on YouTube is taking an individual issue of an old games magazine, going through what it covered and diving deep into one or two of the games and features that were in that issue. It’s enjoyable viewing — plus attempting to anticipate the single “your mum” joke in each episode is always entertaining — but I digress.

The reason I bring up Dudley is that he’s a big fan of the Master System. He refers to it, only partly jokingly, as “history’s greatest console”, and knows a great deal about the system, its library of games and all manner of other things. And it was through seeing Dudley’s enthusiasm for the platform that I decided that now might as well be the time I jump on board the Sega Master System train. Particularly since he was kind enough to send me a couple of loose carts to get me started, even before I had anything to play them on.

I trawled eBay for a bit, looking specifically for a mk1 Master System, since that has an AV out port that allows it to be used with a nice SCART cable, and eventually came across a listing that had a Master System in good condition, one controller, the Phaser light gun and fifteen games, most of which were boxed and with manuals intact. It wasn’t cheap, but it also didn’t seem unreasonably priced, either. So I took the plunge, and it finally arrived today.

I’m thoroughly charmed with it so far. The selection of games I’ve acquired with the system cover a wide selection of bases — including three excellent Sonic titles — and I was delighted to discover that the specific model of Master System I have is the one with the built-in game “Snail Maze” rather than Sonic the Hedgehog or Hang-On. Nothing against either of those games, of course, but you can get them on cartridge; Snail Maze is a proper “exclusive” to that particular hardware revision.

Snail Maze, as a game built in to the ROM-based OS of an ’80s games console, is not a complicated affair — it’s literally just a maze game in which you have to beat the clock — but its simple existence gives the Master System a ton of character and personality. Hell, even the fact that the Master System has an OS that is visible to the end user, unlike any other non-computer console around at the time, makes it stand out — particularly with its friendly, helpful on-screen instructions that encourage you to “ENJOY!” if you switch on with no cartridge in the slot.

The games themselves, too, have a very distinctive feel to them. The Master System’s ability to colour the entire “border” of the screen (much like how the Atari 8-bit and ST could) rather than simply confining the action to a smaller window in the middle surrounded by inky blackness is immediately recognisable, and there’s definitely a recognisable Master System “look and feel” — and certainly no-one would mistake the SMS’ PSG sound chip for the NES’ custom APU. (This isn’t a slight against either of them, just an observation that they are noticeably distinct.)

The control pad is surprisingly tiny, being even smaller than an NES pad but similar in shape, and features possibly one of the worst directional pads ever to exist. It’s not unusable by any means, but its squishy nature means that it’s much, much too easy to accidentally push diagonals, particularly the downwards ones, and in certain games this can be absolutely disastrous if done at just the wrong moment.

The buttons are nice, though, and, squishiness aside, the controller is, on the whole, responsive. It’s a little odd there not being a dedicated “Start” button — the first action button is also regarded as “Start”, and pausing is achieved by pressing a button on the console itself, rather than the controller — but given most games are designed around the two-button limitation it’s not a huge issue.

I haven’t got deep into any of the games just yet, but some early favourites are “Commando, but feudal Japan”, aka The Ninja, and “legally distinct from Pole Position”, World Grand Prix. I also already know that the Master System Sonic games are excellent from when I’ve previously covered them, but it will be great to finally play them through on real hardware.

In terms of collecting, while it’s tempting to try and go for a “complete set”, particularly since the Master System’s total library is relatively small compared to other platforms, I don’t really have the room to store that. Some would argue I didn’t really have the room to start collecting for another console in the first place, but I can make it work.

Anyway, what I’m intending on doing is simply curating a moderately sized but well-formed collection of games that I will genuinely enjoy. I’m not going to lose sleep over the fact Phantasy Star is over a hundred quid — I have multiple other ways to play that — and nor am I going to lust after things that are expensive just for the sake of it; I can live without 8-bit Streets of Rage II if it’s going to be that absurdly priced.

Instead, I’m going to take the opportunity to nab the games that are affordable, and which I feel like I will genuinely enjoy, and then be content with that. And I’m going to take the time to enjoy them just for the sake of enjoying them. I might write or make a video about them at some point, I might not. Point is, it’s completely my decision as to whether or not to do that now — and I’m not going to put any pressure on myself in that regard.

Now, question is, what to add to the collection next…?

Gaming Comfort Food

Just recently I have been suffering from what mental health professionals tend to refer to somewhat euphemistically as “low mood” — which is to say I’ve been feeling really fucking depressed. Video games have long been a part of my own personal coping mechanism for times like this, but I’ve been somewhat surprised of late as to the specific experiences I’ve found myself gravitating towards.

In the past, I’d historically try and immerse myself in a thoroughly involving game with a good story to try and get away from feeling bad about everyday life. And don’t get me wrong, that’s still very much appealing, and something I will absolutely continue with until the end of time. But specifically during my most recent depressive episode, I’ve found no greater joy than that which I have discovered in the depths of really old video games. Specifically, Atari 2600 and Intellivision titles.

I didn’t grow up with the Atari 2600 — it was always the poor cousin to the Atari 8-bit home computers that were in our household during my childhood — but in more recent years I’ve come to regard the classic system with considerable fondness. This is a result of a combination of factors: the number of times I’ve watched Mark Bussler’s “Classic Game Room” videos on YouTube, where he seems to hold even the very worst Atari 2600 games with a considerable degree of affection, and the Atari A to Z Flashback project I did myself on YouTube, which involved playing through 150 Atari games, many of which were 2600 titles.

The Intellivision, meanwhile, is not a system I had any contact with whatsoever growing up, but having explored it through a combination of Intellivision Lives! on PS2 and the two Evercade Intellivision compilations — both of which I was heavily involved with the production of on the documentation and testing side of things — I have also come to regard it with some fondness. And there are a few games I find myself continually coming back to.

So just for a bit of fun today, I thought I’d pick out a few games that I’ve been drawing distinct comfort from recently. And if you’re open to the idea of really old games — I realise they’re an acquired taste for many — then I encourage you to give these a go when you’re feeling low. They might just give you the lift you need.

Motocross (Intellivision)

When I first saw Motocross, I thought it looked like a load of old shit. When I first played Motocross, I thought it was a load of old shit. And yet this is probably the Intellivision title I’ve found myself returning to most frequently of late — there’s an undeniably addictive quality to simply chasing your own best times around the three included courses, and on top of that there’s a course editor included for you to make your own challenges.

Motocross is an isometric perspective racing game that was noteworthy at the time of its original release for its relatively realistic physics — indeed, the programmer used to troll people in the office by turning the gravity down really low then giggling as people launched themselves into the stratosphere from the various jump ramps.

It’s slow and sluggish to play and the scrolling is terrible — the Intellivision wasn’t great at that — but once you look past the surface-level ugliness there’s a game that strikes a good balance between accessibility and being technically demanding underneath. I’ve been finding it a great comfort of late.

Enduro (Atari 2600)

The spiritual precursor to The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, Enduro from Activision is an all-time classic for Atari 2600. The concept is simple: you simply have to overtake a set number of cars over the course of a virtual in-game day. If you succeed, you get to keep racing for another day; fail and your race is over. Your aim is simply to record as high a distance as possible on the satisfyingly “rolly numbers” odometer at the bottom of the screen.

Enduro is cool because it’s a simple, early vanishing point racer that plays to the Atari 2600’s strengths and doesn’t try to do anything too ambitious in terms of gameplay. Presentation is another matter, however; this was a noteworthy game back in the day for incorporating a full day-night cycle, variable weather conditions and even a rudimentary form of lighting simulation.

Enduro is simple enough to pick up and play, but massively addictive because of that. You always feel like you might be able to push yourself just that little bit further — and that’s just what you need when you’re feeling a bit low.

Berzerk (Atari 2600)

It may not be the prettiest or best version of Berzerk — the Atari 8-bit version is rather more authentic to the arcade machine, complete with digitised speech — but the 2600 version has a distinct character all of its own, and it’s a ton of fun to play.

For the unfamiliar, Berzerk involves nothing more than moving your little man around and shooting the robots. Clear a room full of robots and you get some bonus points, but stick around too long and Evil Otto comes chasing you down. Like most 2600 games, it’s simple but effective, and it really keeps you on your toes as the pace gradually increases.

Cloudy Mountain (Intellivision)

The Intellivision Collection 2 cartridge for Evercade contains two of the platform’s best and most ambitious games: Cloudy Mountain (formerly Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cartridge) and Tower of Doom. Both of these are games that I find myself coming back to regularly, but Cloudy Mountain is probably the one I turn to more often if my brain isn’t quite functioning quite correctly and I just want something to fiddle around with for a few minutes.

In Cloudy Mountain, your aim is simple: get your party of three bow-wielding warriors from the little house on the left of the map to the eponymous mountain on the right side of the map. Once there, defeat the two winged dragons guarding the two halves of the Crown of Kings, then grab said Crown and enjoy your well-earned sense of victory. Along the way, you’ll have to explore randomly generated dungeons and find helpful items to traverse the various obstacles on the map, with your only defence being your dwindling stock of arrows.

Cloudy Mountain is one of those games that looks and sounds like it might be quite complex when you first try it, but it’s actually quite simple — and as such it’s a great game to jump into if you just want to play something that doesn’t make too many demands of the player.

Missile Command (Atari 2600)

Missile Command is an inherently stressful game, particularly in its arcade incarnation, but I’ve found the Atari 2600 version on its default difficulty level to strike a good balance between challenge and accessibility. Despite lacking a few features from the arcade game, it plays really well and is an enjoyable game to pick up when I’m not in a great mood.

Most of you reading this probably know Missile Command already, but in case you don’t: missiles fly in from the top of the screen, and you have to blast them by setting off explosions in the sky and catching the “heads” of the missile trails in them. Clear out a wave and you get bonus points and the action accelerates. You lose when the six cities you’re supposed to be defending get nuked — an inevitability in a game like this, as Missile Command is at least in part a depiction of the futility of nuclear war.

I didn’t enjoy Missile Command a ton when I was younger — and I would have probably written the 2600 version off purely for being on the 2600 — but in more recent years I’ve come to really love this version, and it’s a great stress reliever, as well as something of a stress-causer at its higher levels!

So there you go. I’m not going to pretend these games will appeal to everyone these days — for some, they’re just too old to be enjoyable, either mechanically or in terms of presentation — but I’ve been drawing specific comfort from all of these just lately. So if you’ve found yourself in a similar position, consider returning to your roots and seeing what some of the very earliest games have to offer — you might just find yourself surprised.

2450: Original Hardware

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Emulators are great and all, but there’s something indescribably wonderful about playing old games — or using old applications — on their original hardware.

I hooked up my Atari 800XL to an old-fashioned CRT TV/monitor today, attached the 1050 disk drive and booted up a few old favourites from my childhood. And it’s been marvellous.

One thing that’s struck me with the retro scene of today is that you often hear the same game names coming up time after time, and they’re more often than not console titles. For my money, while the consoles of the ’80s were technologically superior — most notably with regard to scrolling and sprite work, which were done in hardware as opposed to the home computers, which required extensive poking around in RAM to accomplish the same goal — the games were far, far more creative.

I guess this is kind of a reflection of the situation we have today, where all the blockbusters come out on consoles, but the truly creative, weird indie games tend to hit PC first and perhaps consoles a bit later if we’re lucky and/or the developers feel like jumping through Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo’s respective hoops to publish their titles. The only difference is that home computers of today are regarded as the pinnacle of gaming technology, while the consoles represent the “affordable” option.

One thing I find especially interesting about the Atari 8-Bit scene in particular — and I’m sure it’s the same for the Spectrum and Commodore 64; I just don’t know those systems nearly as well — is that some of the most creative, interesting games were put out for free(ish) as type-in listings for magazines. All Atari systems could run the programming language Atari BASIC: early models had it on a ROM cartridge, while later models had it built in so that you’d just turn the machine on and it was ready to obey your every command.

The fact that absolutely everyone had access to this easy to learn (albeit not very efficient or speedy) programming language meant that magazines were able to publish complete programs sent in by readers or composed by staff members. Type the program listings into your computer using BASIC, save them to disk or cassette and voila: a free game or application for you!

Because these games weren’t beholden to the fickle whims of publishers — not that even commercial games were particularly restricted in this regard at the time — the authors were free to be as batshit crazy as they wanted with them. And oh, they were: some of the greatest games on the Atari are some of the most abstract, in which the answer to the question “why does that happen?” is simply “because it’s more fun and interesting that way”.

Take a game called Duck Dash, published by renowned Database publication Atari User in July of 1987. This is a game in which you play a farmer (inexplicably represented by a green diamond) as he runs around his farmyard trying to gather up his ducks in preparation for Hurricane Harriet. A simple enough concept, you might think. But there are two farmer-eating spiders wandering around the farmyard. And the ground is so muddy that you dig out bottomless pits behind you with every step you take, meaning you can’t retrace your steps.

Or how about Doctor Boris, from the same publication a few months later? So confident was Atari User in the quality of this game — written entirely in BASIC — that they declared it “Game of the Year” on their front cover, promising “the ultimate challenge”. In Doctor Boris you play the eponymous doctor, a recent graduate from medical school who has come to his new hospital in the North of England only to find that it’s still a building site, so it’s up to the good doctor to finish the building work himself. Also there are unexploded bombs scattered around the area. And your supervisor has skin so bad it is fatal to the touch. And there are radioactive skulls buried everywhere.

Ridiculous and insane-sounding, right? Obviously. But the thing is, these games play really well. They’re simple, they have clear goals, they’re well designed and their rules are self-explanatory. Above all, they’ve been designed with fun and challenge in mind, not realism, and for this reason they’ve aged better than a lot of other games I could mention, even with their primitive graphics and sound, not to mention their slow initialisation routines thanks to them being written in BASIC.

We have games that are this silly these days, of course, but when it happens today it always feels very much like they’re being designed as wacky YouTube-bait — that they’re trying a bit too hard to be funny. Neither Duck Dash nor Doctor Boris are trying to be funny or ridiculous; their premises and setup are pretty much irrelevant once you start playing, and the focus is entirely on providing a satisfying, enjoyable and challenging experience for the player. To put it another way, they “play it straight” rather than the whole thing being infused with the feeling that the game is going “HEY! HEY! LOOK AT ME! I’M HILARIOUS!” that you get with modern “creative” titles like, say, Shower With Your Dad Simulator and suchlike.

Anyway. So far it’s been an absolute pleasure to boot up these games — many of which are often neglected and forgotten by the broader retro scene thanks to them not being commercial releases — and I anticipate there are plenty more treasures hiding in the disk boxes full of not-at-all-pirated-games-honest that I happen to have standing by. You can probably count on hearing about a few more in the near future!

2427: 10 Atari 8-Bit Classics*

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Still curious about the Atari 8-Bit? Here are 10 classic games.

River Raid

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The 2600 version of River Raid has been whored around the place numerous times over the last few years, but the infinitely superior Atari 800 version never gets any love.

While the formula remains the same — fly up the river, don’t crash into the sides, don’t run out of fuel, blast any helicopters, ships and bridges in your way — the execution is better thanks to the addition of numerous features that use the additional power the 8-Bit computers had over the 2600.

Atari 8-Bit River Raid also had tanks, hot air baloons, jet planes that flew across the screen ignoring the river boundaries and more complex level designs. It’s still a top-notch shoot ’em up today.

Miner 2049’er

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Any self-respecting Atari enthusiast will almost certainly put this game near the top of their “favourite games” list, though interestingly I didn’t warm to it much first time around. Replaying it again now, however, I see its appeal — it’s a well-crafted platform game with interesting environmental puzzles that never gets too complicated for its own good.

Playing the role of renowned (and rather chubby) mountie Bounty Bob, it’s your job to make your way through a uranium-infested mine in search of the nefarious Yukon Yohan. In order to do this, you need to “paint” every platform in each screen by walking over it, while simultaneously avoiding the mutant uranium beasties that prowl the platforms. But in true Pac-Man tradition, grabbing a bonus item allows you the temporary ability to turn the tables on the meanies, eliminating them from the screen and helping to clear a path for you.

Star Raiders

Again, the 2600 version of this has been re-released time after time, but the Atari 8-Bit version is much better. It’s the original 3D space sim, essentially being a more action-oriented take on the traditional grid-and-vector-based “Star Trek” game that can be played on anything from a mainframe to a graphic calculator.

Aliens are invading the galaxy. You need to stop them. You do this by reviewing the galactic map, determining which of your starbases are in most immediate need of attention, then warping to the aliens’ location, blasting them to smithereens and then repeating the process until the galaxy is safe once again.

Notable for being more complex than simply “point and fire”, you had to manage your energy levels by determining when was (and wasn’t) an appropriate time to switch on systems such as your shields and targeting computer.

Star Raiders II

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Not perhaps as fondly regarded as the legendary original, I still loved Star Raiders II (originally intended to be a licensed game of the movie The Last Starfighter), because to me it kept what made the original great while improving almost every aspect of it.

Instead of a grid-based galactic map, you now had a convincing looking solar system map and could even orbit planets. The enemies you confronted were more than just fighters that went down with a single shot, too; in one of the earliest examples of boss fights, Star Raiders II often put you up against enemy destroyers and battlecruisers, requiring you to change tactics somewhat.

Star Raiders II also saw you going on the offensive rather than playing strictly defensively, too; when you thought you saw an opportunity, you could warp into the aliens’ star system and bomb their planets in an attempt to stop their invasions once and for all.

Oh, and you could fly your ship into the sun and the on-screen cockpit would melt.

Ballblazer

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An early Lucasfilm game, Ballblazer was a split-screen arcade sports game for one or two players. The basic premise was similar to soccer in that you had to gain possession of a ball and shoot it between the opponent’s goal posts, but there was only one person on each team and the goalposts moved.

Ballblazer made use of a convincing first-person 3D perspective using a patchwork grid effect on the ground and automatic 90-degree turns whenever you needed to face the ball. Despite its simplicity, the game was fiercely competitive, and had some fantastic music, too.

Rescue on Fractalus

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I mentioned this the other day, but I can’t talk about 8-Bit classics without discussing Rescue on Fractalus, another early Lucasfilm game.

Unfolding from a first-person in-cockpit view, you were sent down to the planet Fractalus (so named because its 3D landscape was generated using fractals) to rescue crashed pilots and fend off the evil Jaggi forces. The game was remarkably complex for its time, featuring numerous keyboard commands that made it feel like a proper simulation of flying an advanced spacecraft, and the 3D graphics were extremely impressive.

Rescue on Fractalus was most noteworthy for its little touches: the sound of a pilot banging on your airlock door would get more and more faint if you failed to open it for him in a timely manner; if you switched your engines back on before the pilot was on board, you’d fry the poor bastard to a crisp; and occasionally on later levels, the downed pilots would turn out to be aliens that would leap up and hammer on your windshield. Absolutely terrifying… until you switched the engines back on for their benefit and watched them fry.

M.U.L.E.

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One of the finest multiplayer games of all time, and one of the finest strategy games of all time. Accessible and understandable yet filled with complexity, M.U.L.E. was — is — an absolute masterpiece.

Marooned on the planet Proc Irata (seriously) for six or twelve months depending on the difficulty you were playing on, it was up to you to make the most of the situation by making use of the land that was granted to you and which you bought at auction. You could assign land to harvest food, energy, smithore or, on the higher levels, a “cash crop” called crystite. The type of terrain determined what type of facility a plot was most suitable for, with the river running down the middle of the map being the most abundant for food, while mountains were best for smithore.

M.U.L.E. challenged you to combine cooperative play with competitiveness — while you were competing against three other players, all of whom could be human-controlled if you had an Atari that supported four joysticks, if you didn’t all work together to ensure the colony as a whole had enough food, energy and smithore to survive the next month, you’d all be in trouble.

The game made use of an interesting graphical depiction of negotiating prices by allowing buyers and sellers to “walk” up and down the screen to determine the prices they were willing to buy or sell at. By meeting another player — or the colony store — you could buy and sell goods as you saw fit — stockpile for later or sell for a high price right now?

Final Legacy

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A lesser-known game, this one, Final Legacy was a strategic shoot ’em up with elements of Missile Command to it, and, like many other games of the period, was the embodiment of Cold War paranoia.

In Final Legacy, you were in charge of the good ship Legacy and were tasked with destroying the nasty horrible enemy missile bases that were pointing their nasty horrible missiles at your cities. You had to torpedo enemy ships, blast the enemy bases with your laser cannon and shoot down the missiles that inevitably got fired the moment you started attacking a base.

Later difficulty levels added some interesting mechanics such as having to destroy “Intelligence” ships in order to find out the locations of the enemy missile bases, but mostly the game was about frantically zipping back and forth between four different screens and hoping you didn’t accidentally let anyone get nuked.

Batty Builders

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Another lesser-known game, this time from the once-prolific English Software. Batty Builders saw you in the role of a builder attempting to build a wall. In order to do so, you’d have to catch bricks falling from the conveyor belt at the top of the screen, then toss them into place in the wall, all without killing yourself in the process.

That’s pretty much all there was to it, but it was enormously addictive, and is noteworthy for being one of the earliest examples of a frantic puzzle game I can remember.

Bruce Lee

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An interesting and peculiar game, Bruce Lee combined elements from a number of different game types, most notably beat ’em up and platform adventure.

As Lee, you’d have to make your way through each screen collecting lanterns. Attempting to stop you from doing so were an anonymous ninja and The Green Yamo, both of whom would pursue you around each screen with a surprising amount of simulated intelligence (or, in the case of Yamo, who could be controlled by a second player, actual intelligence), making your life miserable. Fortunately, you could deal with them by giving them a smack in the chops or a flying kick to the face, though they’d always be back.

Bruce Lee remains one of the finest licensed games out there, thanks in part to the fact that it’s not trying too hard to follow any particular movie. It’s still a fun platformer today.

* your definition of “classic” may vary, but I enjoyed all these.

2425: Life in the 8-Bit Era

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I’ve been on a proper nostalgia trip with my old magazines and retro machine emulation recently, so I thought I’d share some memories and factoids about growing up in a household filled with home computers rather than games consoles.

This post was inspired by a conversation with my friend Chris earlier today, who noted that it’s an area of gaming history that he’s not as familiar with as the consoles of the time.

I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who grew up with the Atari 8-Bit range of home computers. Your experiences may vary if you were a Commodore 64 or Spectrum child!

The early machines were massive

The Atari 400 and 800, the first models of home computer released by Atari, were absolute behemoths — the size and weight of a typewriter. The reason for this was that due to FCC regulations regarding signal leakage protection, their innards had to be encased in solid aluminium.

This is the Atari 400.

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And this is the Atari 800.

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There were a few differences between the two. The 400 was originally set to ship with 4K RAM and the 800 with 8K, but by the time they hit the market, the price of RAM had already come down enough to outfit them both with 8K. The 800, which had expandable memory, eventually underwent numerous upgrades to end up with a then-massive 48K of RAM.

The 400 had a horrible membrane keyboard (which many users, including our family, replaced with mechanical keys) while the 800 had mechanical keys as standard. Both featured a then-revolutionary bit of kit called Serial Input/Output or SIO, which could be regarded as a modern precursor to USB in that it allowed the connection of multiple, automatically configuring devices to the computer. It was mostly use to connect tape decks and disk drives.

The later machines were smaller and looked a bit nicer

Here’s the 64K 800XL, probably the most direct competitor to the Commodore 64:

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And the 128KB 130XE, whose extra power went largely unused due to it coming out pretty late in the 8-Bit life cycle; its resemblance to the 16-bit Atari ST is no coincidence.

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(Here’s the ST, for comparison’s sake:)

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Early games came on cartridge

Part of the thinking behind the early systems was that they should be as user-friendly as possible. With that in mind, the very simplest method of getting a program up and running on the 400 and 800 — and indeed all subsequent Atari 8-Bits — was to plug in a ROM cartridge, turn on the power and enjoy the instantaneous load times of the format.

Many of the 8-Bit’s earliest and most well-regarded games — most notably the excellent Star Raiders, one of the first 3D space sims, and still a great game today — came on cartridge, but eventually games got big enough that they needed to be distributed on cassette tape or 5.25″ floppy disk instead.

The 400 and 800 had four joystick ports

…but very few games used them. However, one of the very best games on the system, Electronic Arts’ highly competitive strategy game M.U.L.E., allowed for four players simultaneously. Later versions of the Atari 8-bit only had two joystick ports, so true four-player titles remained rare.

Programming for the Atari and other 8-Bit machines was a big British industry

A lot of the software companies that are doing proud business today — Eutechnyx (formerly Zeppelin Games), Rare (formerly Ultimate Play the Game), Codemasters (still Codemasters) and Electronic Arts began their lives in the 8-bit era, and many of them (all of the above except EA, among others) started in Britain.

The 8-Bit era saw the birth of what we would now call the indie games industry. Single programmers or small teams of friends would assemble games in school holidays or during free time and release them on cassette at budget prices. Many would go on to become hugely popular. And many of them chose to create extremely creative titles rather than lazy copycat clones of arcade shoot ’em ups — though make no mistake, there were plenty of lazy clones around, too.

The reason why so many people got into programming on their Atari is that when you booted it up you were straight into Atari BASIC and could start writing code straight away. Granted, BASIC wasn’t the speediest language in the world, but learning it formed a great foundation for discovering more complex languages.

Loading from tape took ages

This can’t be overstated. It’s a well-known fact that loading a game from cassette took a long time, but really. It took a long time. In the case of the Atari, you’d have to ensure the system going “BURRRRRRRRR, BURRRRRRRRRR!!” over and over while the data loaded from the cassette.

Loading from disk made a great noise

One thing I really miss from the original 8-Bit days when using an emulator is the sound that loading things from disk made. There was this weird farting sound when the machine started up, then loading combined the whirring snark of the drive’s mechanisms with a weird “BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL” noise, punctuated by zurbits from the drive. I was always a bit disappointed when developers poked the appropriate memory location to make loading quieter. (And yes, “poke” actually is the technical term.)

And of course someone’s made a YouTube video featuring that noise. It’s number 4 in this video:

Magazines were a key part of the ownership experience

Getting copies of Analog, Antic, Atari User and Page 6 each month meant that we were never short of toilet reading material. And as I noted yesterday, the articles you got in these old mags ran the gamut from in-depth technical explorations of the systems themselves (and how to harness that technology) to the sort of game reviews we’re familiar with today.

The Atari sound chip was awesome

Commodore’s SID chip gets all the love these days, but Atari’s POKEY was no slouch either. Here’s a selection of fine tunes from renowned composer Adam Gilmore.

Piracy was rife

It’s a wonder we didn’t kill the fledgling games industry completely in the ’80s, since very few people seemed to purchase original games; I know it was certainly a rare treat in our household.

Instead, bootleg cassette tapes and floppy disks did the rounds in the schoolyard, at workplaces and even at gatherings specifically for people to swap dodgy copies of the latest goodness. I was too young to attend at the time, but I remember my father and brother attending a local “computer club”, which was the source of most of the boxes full of floppy disks I still own today.

Interesting, for the pirates themselves, piracy was less about getting something for free and instead all about proving their worth. “Cracked” games often came with elaborate introduction sequences (typically including some great chiptune music) and made use of advanced compression technologies to fit multiple games on a single floppy disk. Today, retro enthusiasts are as keen to preserve cracked versions of games as they are originals.

The systems weren’t as powerful as consoles, but they tried hard

Being general-purpose computers rather than dedicated games machines, the Atari 8-Bit range struggled to keep pace with the specialist machines from Sega and Nintendo, but that didn’t mean developers would rest on their laurels. Particularly late in the 8-Bit’s lifespan, developers were squeezing every possible ounce of graphical power they could out of the little machine’s chips, and the results could be both impressive and heavily stylized. Check out Lucasfilm’s games in particular, which featured full 3D fractal landscapes and detailed sprites.

Here’s strange action adventure The Eidolon, in which you travelled through time, fought mushrooms and battled rather arrogant-looking dragons:

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Here’s wonderful flight sim/first-person Defender-alike Rescue on Fractalus, surprisingly one of the most terrifying games in existence for reasons I’ll leave you to discover if you ever play it:

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And here’s the rather strange (but impressive) Koronis Rift:

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I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the 8-Bit era was probably one of my favourite times to be into computers. It was exciting, it was accessible and it felt like these machines could do anything; there was none of the cynicism or taking things for granted that we have today.

Oh to go back, eh.