Available at the GDC Vault is a wonderfully informative video of a talk game creator Mark Cerny gave in 2011 about his greatest work, Atari Games' Marble Madness. This was a game I fell in love with in the arcades in 1984, with its M.C. Escher-esque graphics and dangerous-feeling physics. Cerney gives a frank and entertaining talk about the immense technical challenges and innovations required to produce the game in the dying days of the arcade.
Not Pacman, by Maurice Ltd., is an interesting take on the venerable dot eater formula. It resembles the classic game, appropriates the sounds, but here the play is the thing. Here, you don't play by moving Pac around directly, but spin the maze in which he and his dreaded ghost antagonists reside. Gravity does the rest, and the characters roll around while you try to keep our yellow hero from tumbling into an enemy.
There are a few control options, including using joysticks or even a steering wheel if you have one, but I find I like the mouse option the best, spinning the maze clockwise and counter-clockwise by moving the mouse right or left.
What the game is really crying out for, of course, is a tablet version that uses accelerometer sensors to let you tilt the device to roll Pac-Man around. Unfortunately, we only have Windows, OSX and Linux versions so far. Also, you can only finish the maze once and then the game records your points and time taken to finish, then resets itself, so the goal currently is to finish in the fastest time. But hey, it's free! You can download the different versions of Not Pacman here at stabyourself.net.
Here's our video of gameplay using a mouse in the OSX version:
Today the Visual Cortex hatches an ad for the Atari 2600 and 5200 versions of Williams' arcade hit Joust:
Click to enlarge
Running in periodicals in 1984, it's short on actual screenshots of the game, and heavy on artist renditions of the action. I also find it humourous how it tries to sex-up the "beasts of the air" you fly in the game, the ostriches from the original arcade game. The ad copy starts off with an unusual, confusing take on the classic opening words of the Star Wars movies:
Well, which is it? Long ago, or a distant future? Anyway, I don't think I want to purchase a game that spits eggs out of my TV screen, from whence evil, sharp-taloned dragons attack me.
As our final entry into The 12 Video Games of Christmas we bring youGalaga 30th Collection for iOS, made by Namco Bandai.
This app was released in 2011 to mark the 30th anniversary of Galaga, the sequel to 1979's paradigm-shifting Galaxian by Namco, distributed in North America by Midway. The initial download is free, and for that you get the original Galaxian for free. The rest of the games, available through in-app purchases, are as follows:
Galaga $2.99
Galpus $2.99
Galaga '88 $3.99
All-games pack: $7.99
The app keeps the basic mechanics of the arcade games, and gussies up the graphics so the aliens look cleaner and buzz around with coloured glowing streaks behind them. Besides the normal versions of the Galaga and Galpus games, you can also play a score attack round and try to beat your high score in three very difficult screens. For control, you can chose a standard joystick/button configuration, or go for the option to move your ship by sliding your finger to and fro across the screen and tapping to fire, which feels much more precise. The app provides rapid fire shooting, which makes dispatching a large number of aliens at once much easier than the originals.
You also have access to a store where you can spend Galaga points in order to upgrade your ship with such ordinance as faster reloading shots or a forward shield. These points are earned by playing the game and performing well. Achievements and a ranking system rounds things off. Over all, this is another good update of classic arcade games for iOS devices. You can snag Galaga 30th Collection at the iTunes store here. Happy holidays!
Today in our The 12 Video Games of Christmas feature, we have Midway Arcade Origins for PS3, developed by Backbone Entertainment and released by Warner Bros. Interactive.
Warner Bros. picked up the assets of Midway when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Their presentation here of 30 classic Midway arcade games is certainly a no-frills affair, where you merely quickly cycle through the cabinets to choose your game, while the murmur of a busy arcade plays in the background. A nice option though is being able to tag games as favourites, so you can use that option to quickly find the cabinets you prefer to play on. You also get access to operators switch options, letting you do things like change difficulty or add more lives. Unfortunately, there are no bonuses or history offered.
There could also be some more options given for configuring controls in the games, although most of them feel pretty good on the PS3 gamepad. It's also great to see these classics up on the big screen, bezel art and all. A high score leaderboard system helps you keep tabs on your friends' activities in the arcade.
I wouldn't exactly call this collection the "origin" of Midway's storied past in the video game world, but it certainly is a cornucopia of gaming goodness from the company.
Wrapping up an entire video game arcade is a little tough. Today's entry in The 12 Video Games of Christmas makes it a whole lot easier. The Atari's Greatest Hits app is a masterfully made collection of classic Atari arcade and VCS/2600 games, available for both iOS and Android.
"Options" is the operative word here, and Atari provides plenty of. The app is available for free, and with that you get Atari's cold-war influenced arcade game Missile Command. If you want to add to your classic collection, you can: download 4-game packs for $0.99 each, buy a pack of 15 tokens for $0.99 that lets you sample any games you wish, or buy the whole shebang of 100 games for $5.99. What's even better, though, are the myriad of control options you get. You'd be justified in worrying how a mobile app would handle the wide gamut of control options you get in the long history of Atari games, like the trak ball in Centipede to the thrust controller of Lunar Lander to the VCS paddles of Video Olympics and more. The Atari's Greatest Hits app serves up multiple ways of playing the game, sometimes with 7 or more configurations; fixed joystick, touch-screen control, fire button on the right, fire button on the left, on the top, on the bottom... it's a given that you'll find some way to play the game comfortably, either in portrait or landscape mode. What's more, this app was the first to offer support of the mini-arcade cabinet iCade, and Atari has since come out with their own official Atari Arcade joystick for the iPad. It's not as retro-cool as the iCade, but it comes in lighter in weight as well as price, selling for $59.99 as opposed to $99.99 for the iCade.
All these options, plus 2-player simultaneous play via Bluetooth for some games. The Atari's Greatest Hits app lets you defy physics by stuffing an entire arcade into the stocking of the retrogamer in your life. Get it here from Apple's app store, or for Android at Google Play.
Yellow ornaments hang from the tree in today's The 12 Video Games of Christmas. Wait, that one is eating the tinsel! Darn you, Pac-Man!
Made by Namco and selling for $4.99 in the App Store, this round of Pac-Man is for the iPad only. It definitely feels like the arcade game, and has some good options for controlling our yellow hero. Using the virtual joystick feels a bit logey, but an option to move Pac around the maze by swiping your finger to make him turn feels surprisingly responsive. What's really neat, however, is the accelerometer control scheme, where you tilt the iPad to move the character, kind of rolling him around the maze like in a marble-roll game such as Labyrinth. It feels pretty cool and physical, although not particularly precise. All of these control methods come included with the free Lite version; if you want to really get the arcade controller experience by hooking the game up to the mini-arcade cabinetiCade, you'll need to pay for the full version of the app.
Another interesting addition to the formula is the ability to continue your game where you left off after losing your last man, by spending Namco coins, which, of course, you can purchase with real cash. This particular freemium endeavour is not so obnoxious as others you find in the app store, as you get an awful lot of the program in the free version.
Our entry today in The 12 Video Games of Christmas comes in its own beautiful wooden box: the iCade.
This squat and sturdy mini-arcade cabinet started life as an April Fool's Day prank in 2010, part of a tradition at the ThinkGeek website that also spawned the tauntaun sleeping bag. As theiCade joke post went viral, however, response for a real device was so strong that ThinkGeek teamed up with ION Audio to actually produce it. ION Audio is the consumer brand of Numark Industries, makers of professional DJ equipment. Also partnering with the project was Atari, and their classic game app Atari's Greatest Hits was the sole compatible game program with the iCade's launch on June 27, 2001.
As stated, the iCade is solidly built, a wooden cabinet into which one slides any generation of iPad. The two devices connect via Bluetooth, after which compatible apps will display the iCade as a controller. Since launch, the list of supported apps has been growing, includingMidway Arcade and the recently released Vectrex Regeneration. The iCade's joystick is professional grade, although its action could be a bit tighter. The buttons, all eight of them, are rock solid and have a real arcade feel. Overall, the iCade goes a long way to mitigating the control problems you generally find playing classic games on mobile devices.
The cabinet is available from ThinkGeek and various retailers, usually selling for $99.99. Currently, however, ThinkGeek has them on sale for $69.99. Recently ION has released the iCade Jr., a similar device for the iPhone, but I think this is delving a little bit into the ridiculous. It is a bit cheaper, however, going for $49.99.
Buy the retrogamer in your life an iCade, and you are truly giving them the gift of the arcade.
Continuing today with The 12 Video Games of Christmas retro game guide: Santa's elves have been busy on the assembly line.
Imagine seeing this with a big red bow tied on it, under your tree Christmas morning. Hell, it could BE the tree, just wrap tinsel around it and plug in a Super Mario Bros. star at the top. SuperCade, from the good folks at Chicago Gaming. 50 licensed, classic games such as Asteroids, Berzerk, Battlezone and many more, all in an upright cabinet with two joysticks, multiple buttons and even a roller ball. All for a cool US$ 2069.49, but hey, free shipping! While you're composing your email to Santa, here's a video of Supercade in action:
For even quicker results than Santa, here's the Amazon link. Go ahead, press the 1-Click button. Your rec-room will thank you for it.
Today we start our 12 Video Games of Christmas feature, where we spotlight a game a day that would jingle a retrogamer's bells this holiday season.
In the stocking today is the Midway Arcade app for iOS devices. It is a universal app that works for both iPhone and iPad. It is a collection of 10 classic titles from Midway, one of the first manufacturers of arcade video games and producer of such classics as Gunfight, Sea Wolf, a little number imported from Japan called Space Invaders, among many, many others. This app features some of the later games of Midway.
The in-game Menu has you moving through a virtual re-creation of a classic arcade, faithfully replicating the noisy din of a typical video game hangout. As you shift from one rendered classic cabinet to the next, you can choose to step up to one of the 10 games included for the initial $1.99 purchase:
Defender
Spy Hunter
Rampage
Root Beer Tapper
Arch Rivals
Joust
Four skill games: Basketball, Pool, Air Hockey and Roll Ball (Skee-ball)
Available for in-app purchase are two game packs, for $0.99 each:
Fantasy Game Pack
Gauntlet
Gauntlet II
Wizard of Wor
Action Game Pack
NARC
Total Carnage
APB
Start flapping
It gets to be a bit of a broken record with reviews of classic game emulation on mobile devices, but a real problem here are the controls. There aren't many options for adjusting the nature of the virtual joystick, and the tilt-controls are a bit wonky too. Driving games like APB and Spy Hunter are a lost cause. A mitigating factor here is that Midway Arcade supports the iCade, a mini-arcade cabinet with a joystick and button array, which you just might see under the tree later in this series. Since the iCade lacks a steering wheel, it doesn't help much to control the vehicle games.
Midway made some great games for the arcades, and Midway Arcade brings that shifty, smokey coin-op jive right onto your iOS device.
The show ran on Ted Turner's WTBS cable channel from 1982 - 1983, and in syndication the following year. Billed as the first video arcade game show, Starcade featured players facing off against each other on the popular arcade games of the time. Watching the episodes is like glimpsing coin-op Valhalla, with shiny Tron, Super Zaxxon and Stargate cabinets filling the backstage. It prefectly captures the 80's in video amber.
We might not have arcades in our neighbourhoods anymore, but we still have Starcade.
On November 29, 1972, a recently incorporated company in California named Atari announced the release of its first product, an electronic video arcade game called PONG. Two players would stand at the wood-grain and yellow cabinet, twiddling the control knobs that moved two paddles displayed on a B&W TV screen. With the paddles they would play an electronically abstract game of table tennis, batting a little white blip back and forth in an attempt to "Avoid Missing Ball For High Score", as the simple gameplay instructions prompted.
Conceived by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and designed by Al Alcorn, Pong was a smash success, giving birth to the video game industry. Fast-forward nearly 40 years later, in 2011 that industry was worth US$65 billion dollars.
Among other celebrations of Pong's 40th birthday, an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest game of Pong was made on Nov. 16, 2012. A 22-story version of the game, complete with festive lighting, was played on the side of the Downtown Marriott hotel in Kansas City, MO.
In a lead-up to the anniversary, earlier this year Atari announced the Pong Indie Developer Challenge. Offering a grand prize of up to $100,000, the company solicited independent app developers to submit their take on the venerable Pong. The three winners were announced on Aug. 2, and they will participate in a profit sharing scheme divided between the three Pong apps that will see them collect royalties up to the winning prize amounts. The top winner, the freemium-based PONG World by zGames, can be snagged at the iOS App Store here.
Pong put Atari on the road to becoming the fastest growing company in American history. It's no stretch to consider that when you say Pong is 40 years-old today, you're also saying the video game industry is 40 years-old. So like those tipsy patrons of Andy Capp's bar in Sunnyvale California, who played the original Pong prototype until it broke and convinced Bushnell and Atari to produce the game commercially, raise a glass to the grand-daddy of the video game industry. Your serve, PONG!
After the enormous success of laser arcade game Dragon's Lair, Rick Dyer and his RDI Video Systems company created another groundbreaking laser coin-op game in 1984, called Thayer's Quest. Its story was more closely based on Shadoan, the Tolkien-esqe source material that Dyer had conceived earlier and from which he had spun off Dragon's Lair.
Thayer was an astounding attempt to produce a sword & sorcery RPG epic for the arcades. Eschewing joysticks and buttons, Thayer had a full-size membrane keyboard mounted on the cabinet, which players used to input choices during the game. At the start, you could enter your name, and then be personally refered to via speech synthesis. Shown on the keyboard were various inventory items that Thayer could use at certain spots to advance the plot. The game even had a save game system, where the last ten players could return to continue their progress after losing their last life.
The innovation found in Thayer's Quest makes it a very special and unusual arcade game indeed. Posted below is our gameplay video. For more information on Thayer's Quest, Dragon's Lair and the rest of the 80's laser game craze, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.
It struck me today how certain things can make a big difference in the quality of classic video games. Programmers didn't have a lot to work with, so they had to really put their heart into what they were doing.
Take Moon Cresta, for instance. It's yet another Galaxian clone, riding the coat-tails of the game that unshackled the alien invaders from marching single file across the screen as sitting ducks, and sent them swirling down at the player like cosmic Stukkas. Moon Cresta would be nothing special, if not for its wonderful sound design. From the majestic opening theme to the squirrelly screams of the dying aliens to the insistent imperatives that pressure you as you play, it's wonderful stuff that really helps fill in the gaps left by the limited graphics available at the time.
Sounds were one of the most important ways of games to draw you in while wandering around a noisy arcade (remember those things?), and Moon Cresta really shoots for the moon in auditory quality. Here's a video to help you hear what I mean.
The more I play Blaster, released by Williams in 1983, the more the game amazes me.
Designed by Defender creators Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, it features a startling 3-D perspective as you soar over an alien landscape, blasting giant robots and rescuing floating astronauts. The visual effects are nothing short of amazing, especially considering the time at which the game was made. It's no surprise that several designers at Williams would eventually move on to work on the ground-breaking Amiga computer at Commodore. Added to the allure of this and several other Williams games, such as Bubbles and Sinistar, is that it came in an indestructible plastic cabinet, named Duramold by the company. Rumour has it, however, that the plastic would shrink over time, causing the monitor inside to eventually be ejected.
Enjoy a video we made of Blaster gameplay, and as always, for more information on Blaster, Jarvis, Defender, and other things Williams, please consult your local Dot Eaters entry.
For Halloween night, let me point to the first game to foster protest over video game violence, Exidy's 1976 Death Race.
In the game you drive a vehicle around a play field, chasing stick figures who flee randomly in all directions to avoid becoming a hood ornament. If and when you strike one, the victim screams and turns into a grave marker, complete with cross. If you have a buddy with you with a handy quarter, you can both mow down "gremlins", as they were described in the game cabinet text, simultaneously.
Even though with 1976 black and white graphics things are barely sketched out for you, the game brought a firestorm of controversy, which only helped to increase sales for Exidy. They moved over 1,000 units of the game, their best-selling up to that point.
If you dare, read the history of the game the National Safety Council branded as "sick, sick sick", here at The Dot Eaters.
