Tag: vcs

#oneaday Day 655: I would rather play Atari 2600 games than mobile games

I probably don't need to say anything more than the headline, but I will expand on it for the sake of having actually written something today. I mean what I say, though! I would genuinely rather play literally anything on the Atari 2600 than a modern mobile game. And with the 2600 being so easy to emulate these days — not to mention the fact I have worked on both devices and game cartridges featuring Atari 2600 games — you can even take the experience on the go with you.

I remember when mobile gaming first became a thing with the Java phones. Well, actually, technically it first became a thing with Snake and the other games no-one remembers on the Nokia 3210 and company. But expandable mobile gaming — by that I mean the ability to download new games onto your phone — really took off in the Java era.

At first, it was mildly exciting… at least until you downloaded a Java game and realised that a lot of them were Not Very Good. Often not for lack of trying, and there were some genuinely decent ones — I recall a good version of Lumines, for example — but for the most part, they were a pale imitation of even the dedicated handheld games consoles that were around at the time. The Game Boy and its successors ruled the roost in that regard for a good long while — and deservedly so.

The advent of iOS was a huge shift, though. Anyone who was around for the launch of the App Store will doubtless remember things like ngmoco's output (before they became free-to-play garbage peddlers), Epic's "Castle" tech demo that eventually became Infinity Blade, and doubtless many others that are lost to time. Quite literally in many cases, because these were digital-only games that were often exclusive to iOS — and while I'm sure some have been preserved, I bet there are plenty more that we'll never see again.

Things seemed… interesting for a while. The ambition of this new breed of mobile game was hard to fault, but many folks (including me) found that touchscreens were less than ideal for console-style experiences. The best games were ones that were built around the inherent limitations and inaccuracy of a finger-based touch interface — or which used other methods of control, such as tilt.

Then, one day, Apple announced that it would be introducing the concept of "in-app purchases". I knew immediately that this would be an awful idea, as the general gaming community had a collective bee in its bonnet about DLC at the time, and adding DLC to mobile games sounded like a really bad idea in that climate.

Unbelievably, though, I underestimated quite how awful things would end up becoming in the mobile space. While there are still a few "premium" games available for a one-off purchase these days, most of them are available on other platforms with actual controllers, leaving the vast majority of mobile-exclusive titles these days as free-to-play gacha crap.

I've done my time in the gacha mines. I've made the mistake of thinking I'd sling a game twenty quid to "support" it because I'd been playing it quite a bit and I liked the look of the current character banners. But in more recent years I've become hyper-aware of quite how much those games exploit horny young men in particular, with massively sexualised artwork designed not to add depth to the characters they depict, but purely to get said horny young men convinced to open their wallets in the hope of acquiring a JPG — or an animated GIF if you're lucky — of their favourite waifu in a skimpy outfit. And I say this as someone who likes sexy games!

No more. I swore off all mobile games quite some time ago now, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Now, at the times when I would typically want a mobile game — when I have a few minutes to spare, when I'm bored, when I just want something to do with my hands that I don't have to think about too much — I will quite happily reach for an Atari 2600 game, because those fit the bill perfectly.

Your average Atari 2600 game can be played for sessions of maybe 1-5 minutes at a time, and that feels like a satisfyingly self-contained play session. You can keep playing to beat your high scores, or to get a little further, or compete against a friend if you're playing together — or you can move on to something else, and have another 1-5 minutes of fun. And at no point in the entire process will these games attempt to monetise your erection.

On that note, may I remind you that Activision Collection 2 is coming to Evercade next month…?

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2278: Difficulty Switch A and B

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

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

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

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

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

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