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.

2358: I Whip My Hair Back and Forth

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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

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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

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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

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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.

2314: Games That Deserve the Ys-Style Remake Treatment

Rather than pondering this as it occurred to me last night as I finished writing that day’s post, I thought I’d split this off into its own separate post, as it’s something that I think is worth thinking about in detail.

For the benefit of those who can’t be arsed to read yesterday’s post, my thinking is this: Ys I and II have had so many remakes over the years that their most recent incarnations are both recognisably “modern” and authentically “retro” at the same time. In other words, they maintain the feeling of the original games while incorporating modern aesthetic and mechanical standards to make them more palatable and enjoyable to a modern audience, as well as perhaps expanding on things like the overall script and story. This, to me, is a great way to bring a classic game up to date, so I started pondering what other old games might benefit from this treatment?

Here’s what I came up with. (Or rather, here’s what occurred to me as I wrote this post.)

Phantasy Star II

I played Phantasy Star I all the way through in its Game Boy Advance incarnation — actually just a straight port of the Master System original. I enjoyed it a great deal, despite the necessity of actually getting the graph paper out and mapping the dungeons.

Phantasy Star II, meanwhile, despite being enthusiastically raved about by a Phantasy Star-loving friend as his favourite in the series, just didn’t quite “click” with me for some reason. I liked its aesthetic, I liked its battle system, I liked its concept — I just couldn’t quite get into it.

Part of the reason for this was its dungeon design. By presenting its dungeons from a three-quarter top-down perspective rather than its predecessor’s first-person perspective, they became significantly harder to map effectively — and boy, you still needed to map them. The first big dungeon was a mess of almost identical-looking floors with transitions between them that sent you to all manner of different places, and I found it absolutely impossible to navigate effectively, and moreover, impossible to figure out a sensible, effective means of mapping it.

It’s not necessarily the lack of a map facility that was the problem, as both Ys I and II featured some fairly complex labyrinths that I nonetheless managed to navigate without mapping, but there was something about Phantasy Star II that I found irreconcilably confusing. A modern remake would perhaps benefit from a map facility, or perhaps even a rethinking of the dungeon designs — taking the latter approach would have the added benefit of making the game feel like a “new” experience for veterans, though purists would likely thumb their noses at the possibility. Perhaps there could be an option to have “classic” or “contemporary” dungeons according to your preference.

Aside from that, simply an update of the art would be lovely — and take Ys’ approach of improving the fidelity of the art without necessarily compromising its style; Ys I and II feature gorgeous ’90s anime-style character designs, and they look both lovely and distinctive, so I feel Phantasy Star II could benefit from such a visual update, too.

The Mercenary series

Mercenary and its two sequels Damocles and Mercenary III were defining games in my childhood. Some of the most technically impressive games of the 8- and 16-bit computer era, they were sprawling, open-world adventures that managed to tell an interesting story while giving the player an unprecedented degree of freedom to explore and just generally piss around in the world (and, later, solar system) that developer Paul Woakes had created.

They look very primitive today, though. Built on rigid grid systems with no more than one building per (pretty large) grid square, the environments were certainly large and sprawling, but rather empty-feeling at times. A modern remake could benefit from greater scenery density and perhaps an expansion of the dynamic scenery Mercenary III introduced in the form of its fully functional public transportation system.

There was actually going to be a Damocles remake at one point with full texture-mapped graphics and all manner of other goodies — this was a few years back, too, so I can only imagine what modern graphics hardware would make of this sort of game. Unfortunately, I feel that very few people have heard of this series these days, so I feel it’s destined to remain part of history rather than something that will ever get brought up to date and given to a brand new audience.

Shining Force

Sega’s classic strategy RPG already had one lovely remake on the Game Boy Advance, but it’s since disappeared from relevance everywhere except for the Sega Mega Drive Classics pack available on Steam. And while the Mega Drive version still works just fine, it would be kind of lovely to see a fully up to date version of the original Shining Force, its sequel and even the Game Gear version Shining Force Gaiden (which, fun fact, was also released for Palm devices, of all things).

Shining Force’s gameplay remains solid today, and with the popularity of Fire Emblem it’s not too much of a stretch to say that all it needs is a fresh coat of paint and a remastered soundtrack to make it something people would more than likely happily pay £15 to have in their Steam library or PSN downloads. Hell, I’d happily pay £40 for a physical edition of a Shining Force compilation, including modernised updates of Shining Force, Shining Force II and Shining Force Gaiden, perhaps even with upscaled versions of the various Shining Force III releases for good measure.

And localise the other two Shining Force III games while you’re on, Sega, while I’m dreaming.

Alternate Reality

I mention this game quite a lot, because it’s fascinating to me. I found it fascinating when I first played it as a child, even if I didn’t understand how role-playing games worked at the time, and I still find its complexity and depth fascinating today.

For the uninitiated, Alternate Reality was a proposed series of games that began with The City and continued into The Dungeon, but was ultimately scrapped before its other episodes were completed. The story deals with the player character being abducted by aliens and taken to another world, seemingly medieval in nature but with occasional whiffs of peculiar technology starting to become apparent, particularly in The Dungeon. The ultimate intention was for the player to discover the aliens’ plan — a Matrix-style virtual world designed to make its participants believe that they were living a “real life” in this other world, when in fact they were just existing as part of a simulation — but unfortunately this ambitious concept was never brought to fruition.

We have the graphical technology and programming knowhow to bring the complete Alternate Reality concept to fruition today, in more impressive form than ever before. Bethesda RPGs show that there’s very much a market for sprawling, freeform, open-world games that the player can tackle as they see fit, and the complete scope of Alternate Reality wouldn’t be any more ambitious than your typical Elder Scrolls game.

I would even be happy if it maintained its old-school “gridder”-style dungeon crawling presentation rather than featuring a true, fully modelled 3D open world — I just dream of one day seeing creator Philip Price’s original vision brought to fruition, and kind of wish I was able to do something about it myself!