2425: Life in the 8-Bit Era

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.

And this is the Atari 800.

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:

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.

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

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:

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:

$rescue_on_fractalus_atari_us_8$

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2356: Packing a LaunchBox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2355: Playing God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2347: Discovering the Neo Geo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

2278: Difficulty Switch A and B

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

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

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

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

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

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

2276: Video Computer System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2262: Have You Played Major Havoc Today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2260: Have You Played Liberator Today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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