Well, Tales of Monkey Island did not make it to WiiWare today, despite rumors of its imminent arrival (it debuted on the PC last week). It's disappointing, but with the remake of the original Secret of Monkey Island coming to XBLA later this week, I'll live.
Here's what's going on in the downloadable world since my last update:
WiiWare -- THREE games today, again, all reasonably priced. Bit Boy!! is an action game with an interesting retro theme -- as you progress, the graphics progress from 4-bit to 128-bit, though the gameplay stays pretty much the same, which sounds like an inherent limitation to me. Incoming! is a simple pointer-based tank command/combat game -- not a true Real-Time Strategy game, it's not nearly that deep, but might be fun for a bit. Ant Nation (from Konami) appears to be more substantial, as you breed and train a colony of ants to take over neighboring territories.
Virtual Console -- TWO games for a pleasant change from the recent trickle, and they're both import titles. Pulseman is a Genesis/Mega Drive platformer that looks great but never saw retail here (though it was ephemerally playable via the Sega Channel downloadable cable system back in the day.) Secret Command actually DID come out here on the Sega Master System, reworked into Rambo, but this European version neatly avoids any licensing messiness.
DSiWare gets just one game, Brain Challenge, which has already been out on WiiWare for a while and appears to be no match for the plethora of such games already out for the DS. But there it is, if anyone's interested -- it does appear to be fairly full-featured by DSiWare standards, but it's a crowded genre already.
XBLA -- Just one new game arrived on Microsoft's service last week, but EA clearly underestimated its impact: Battlefield 1943. The online servers were being hammered, and there was some other weirdness as well -- the game temporarily shot up to a 90,000 point price tag, then became an XBox Live Gold member exclusive temporarily. It's yet another online multiplayer FPS set in World War II -- not really an unmet need on the 360, and it might be best to wait until some of the technical glitches get worked out.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Coin-Op Bootlegs
Back in the heyday of the coin-op arcade game, pirates had to put significantly more effort into ripping off game companies than they do today, when home consoles rule the market. It wasn't just a matter of pirating media -- these guys had to build cabinets, controllers and circuit boards, burn ROM chips, and modify the games ever-so-slightly to make their product "unique." More on that in a bit.
Copyright protection for electronic game software was a new horizon at the time, poorly defined from a legal standpoint, and even the biggest hits had fairly short life cycles, so the pirates managed to get away with it for a while. They pumped their bootleg games into the same distribution channels as the legitimate originals, and appear to have been fairly successful, especially when demand for big hits couldn't be met with original machines.
What's interesting is that as far as I know none of them counterfeited the original machines directly -- they all seem to have tweaked the game software and titles a little bit, perhaps in an effort to avoid prosecution. Unlike the unlicensed home conversions that abounded at the time, these were not even new, similar efforts -- these were modified copies of the original arcade ROMs, with new bytes poked in where necessary to achieve a modicum of distinction. But they never put TOO much effort into the changes -- usually they shuffled the color palette a bit, and modified the title screen, leaving the gameplay and sound effects more or less intact. Sometimes the pirate versions were sold as conversion kits, so arcade operators could turn a dying Galaxian arcade cabinet into a bootleg Pac-Man machine, for example.
I only encountered a few such games growing up. One was Crazy Kong Part II, a bootleg of Donkey Kong credited to "Eagle" with the levels in a different order. The other was Frog, which was Frogger with a different, garish color palette and a title screen that lazily replaced three of the letters in the original title with frog sprites. But I'm sure there were many more out there -- magazines at the time reported that Donkey Kong was so heavily pirated that Nintendo offered its own reward for information on the illegal manufacture and sale of such clones.
The pirates didn't ultimately contribute much to the industry* beyond their hilariously futile attempts to disguise their efforts. They were eventually pushed out of the market by the mid-80's videogame industry crash, quality issues, consumer awareness, and encryption of arcade ROMs in later years.
Still, I have fond memories of the piratey days of yore, and have played a few meta-quasi-legal pirate arcade games on MAME for nostalgia's sake. There's part of me that wishes I could go to GameStop and find a weird-looking "Legend of Zleda: Twilight Prince!!" or "Grand Theft Otto V," just for fun.
* One notable exception was Crazy Otto, an unauthorized Pac-Man modification kit designed to freshen up the existing game. Its "underground" designers went on to create Ms. Pac-Man at Midway's request -- Namco later adopted the game as its own, but it was born of the US distributor's need for a hasty sequel.
Copyright protection for electronic game software was a new horizon at the time, poorly defined from a legal standpoint, and even the biggest hits had fairly short life cycles, so the pirates managed to get away with it for a while. They pumped their bootleg games into the same distribution channels as the legitimate originals, and appear to have been fairly successful, especially when demand for big hits couldn't be met with original machines.
What's interesting is that as far as I know none of them counterfeited the original machines directly -- they all seem to have tweaked the game software and titles a little bit, perhaps in an effort to avoid prosecution. Unlike the unlicensed home conversions that abounded at the time, these were not even new, similar efforts -- these were modified copies of the original arcade ROMs, with new bytes poked in where necessary to achieve a modicum of distinction. But they never put TOO much effort into the changes -- usually they shuffled the color palette a bit, and modified the title screen, leaving the gameplay and sound effects more or less intact. Sometimes the pirate versions were sold as conversion kits, so arcade operators could turn a dying Galaxian arcade cabinet into a bootleg Pac-Man machine, for example.
I only encountered a few such games growing up. One was Crazy Kong Part II, a bootleg of Donkey Kong credited to "Eagle" with the levels in a different order. The other was Frog, which was Frogger with a different, garish color palette and a title screen that lazily replaced three of the letters in the original title with frog sprites. But I'm sure there were many more out there -- magazines at the time reported that Donkey Kong was so heavily pirated that Nintendo offered its own reward for information on the illegal manufacture and sale of such clones.
The pirates didn't ultimately contribute much to the industry* beyond their hilariously futile attempts to disguise their efforts. They were eventually pushed out of the market by the mid-80's videogame industry crash, quality issues, consumer awareness, and encryption of arcade ROMs in later years.
Still, I have fond memories of the piratey days of yore, and have played a few meta-quasi-legal pirate arcade games on MAME for nostalgia's sake. There's part of me that wishes I could go to GameStop and find a weird-looking "Legend of Zleda: Twilight Prince!!" or "Grand Theft Otto V," just for fun.
* One notable exception was Crazy Otto, an unauthorized Pac-Man modification kit designed to freshen up the existing game. Its "underground" designers went on to create Ms. Pac-Man at Midway's request -- Namco later adopted the game as its own, but it was born of the US distributor's need for a hasty sequel.
Friday, July 10, 2009
This Was a Triumph: Portal
If you haven't played Valve's 3-D puzzle adventure, Portal, from a few years back, you really must. It's available in The Orange Box at retail, or via download on Steam, XBLA, and probably elsewhere.
I have been replaying parts of it lately, working towards a few XBox 360 achievements I missed my first few times through, and I am thoroughly enjoying it yet again. The physics, the atmosphere, the storyline and its sense of humor are top-notch.
What I really love about it is that it's one of the few 3-D games that realizes that "realism" need not be the end-game. It has a trippy core concept -- the Portal Gun that allows the player to, for example, punch a hole in a wall somewhere, punch a hole in the floor somewhere else, then fall through the hole here and come flying out of the wall there. It breaks all the traditional rules of 3-D gaming, because it's impossible -- and yet it feels completely real.
And the effect is tremendously well-implemented -- you can see yourself if you put the holes in the right place, you can carry or drop objects through them, and you can fall or run through an infinite series of complementary portals if you so desire. I have been listening to the in-game developer commentary and am learning what a tremendous amount of work it took to pull this off -- it's doubly impressive for its transparency.
It's also accessible even to my aging gamerskilz -- it's not a long game, and the puzzles are challenging but not frustrating at the default difficulty level (though the Advanced versions of several maps are significantly tougher. 4 down, 2 to go to close out that set of achievements!)
Plus, it ends with a marvelous Jonathan Coulton song sung by the game's omnipresent AI voice -- it's catchy, it's smart, it's very funny and it's infinitely memorable. Every time I think about the game and its world I start singing it to myself. Usually out loud.
Best. Ending. Reward. Ever.
But play it for the sheer joy of the game, too.
I have been replaying parts of it lately, working towards a few XBox 360 achievements I missed my first few times through, and I am thoroughly enjoying it yet again. The physics, the atmosphere, the storyline and its sense of humor are top-notch.
What I really love about it is that it's one of the few 3-D games that realizes that "realism" need not be the end-game. It has a trippy core concept -- the Portal Gun that allows the player to, for example, punch a hole in a wall somewhere, punch a hole in the floor somewhere else, then fall through the hole here and come flying out of the wall there. It breaks all the traditional rules of 3-D gaming, because it's impossible -- and yet it feels completely real.
And the effect is tremendously well-implemented -- you can see yourself if you put the holes in the right place, you can carry or drop objects through them, and you can fall or run through an infinite series of complementary portals if you so desire. I have been listening to the in-game developer commentary and am learning what a tremendous amount of work it took to pull this off -- it's doubly impressive for its transparency.
It's also accessible even to my aging gamerskilz -- it's not a long game, and the puzzles are challenging but not frustrating at the default difficulty level (though the Advanced versions of several maps are significantly tougher. 4 down, 2 to go to close out that set of achievements!)
Plus, it ends with a marvelous Jonathan Coulton song sung by the game's omnipresent AI voice -- it's catchy, it's smart, it's very funny and it's infinitely memorable. Every time I think about the game and its world I start singing it to myself. Usually out loud.
Best. Ending. Reward. Ever.
But play it for the sheer joy of the game, too.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Thrifty Gaming
In these recessionary times, it can seem an extravagance to spend 50 or 60 bucks on a brand new retail game. The nice thing about being an older gamer is that there are plenty of worthwhile games we never had a chance to play back in the day when they were the state of the art. And if we've kept our old systems around, old games can sometimes be found dirt cheap at garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores.
They may not be THE classic games whose reputation and rarity has made them highly collectible. And one usually has to sift through a lot of obsolete sports titles -- as the fundamental rules of gameplay have not really changed much over the years, but the technology and rosters have, EA NHL '95 and the like are a dime a dozen. Sports gamers tend to go for the latest and greatest, and nostalgia aside there isn't really a compelling reason to go back to most vintage titles.
Anyway, I was reminded of the value of shopping around and keeping an open mind yesterday evening when we stopped by a local thrift store while questing for set and prop items for an upcoming play. The game bins and CD racks had quite a few games on hand, for a variety of platforms. Maybe 20% of them were non-sports titles, and most were complete with box/case, media and manual; physical condition appears solid, although I haven't tested them out yet. I managed to pick up:
Genesis - Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings
Philips CD-I - Video Speedway (curiosity value)
Playstation - Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (re-release in CD case), Builder's Block (odd Taito/Jaleco puzzler), Crash Bandicoot: Warped, Armored Core, Namco Museum Volume 3 (later release emphasizing Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug after discs 2, 4, and 5 bombed)
Dreamcast - World Series Baseball 2K2 (a sports game, yes, but I don't own a modern baseball game and I don't find a lot of Dreamcast titles in the wild; the copy of Virtua Tennis I also spotted there was missing the game disc)
NES - Infiltrator (no box, but the manual is present)
9 games worth trying out, at least. Grand total at the checkout?
$18.98.
:)
They may not be THE classic games whose reputation and rarity has made them highly collectible. And one usually has to sift through a lot of obsolete sports titles -- as the fundamental rules of gameplay have not really changed much over the years, but the technology and rosters have, EA NHL '95 and the like are a dime a dozen. Sports gamers tend to go for the latest and greatest, and nostalgia aside there isn't really a compelling reason to go back to most vintage titles.
Anyway, I was reminded of the value of shopping around and keeping an open mind yesterday evening when we stopped by a local thrift store while questing for set and prop items for an upcoming play. The game bins and CD racks had quite a few games on hand, for a variety of platforms. Maybe 20% of them were non-sports titles, and most were complete with box/case, media and manual; physical condition appears solid, although I haven't tested them out yet. I managed to pick up:
Genesis - Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings
Philips CD-I - Video Speedway (curiosity value)
Playstation - Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (re-release in CD case), Builder's Block (odd Taito/Jaleco puzzler), Crash Bandicoot: Warped, Armored Core, Namco Museum Volume 3 (later release emphasizing Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug after discs 2, 4, and 5 bombed)
Dreamcast - World Series Baseball 2K2 (a sports game, yes, but I don't own a modern baseball game and I don't find a lot of Dreamcast titles in the wild; the copy of Virtua Tennis I also spotted there was missing the game disc)
NES - Infiltrator (no box, but the manual is present)
9 games worth trying out, at least. Grand total at the checkout?
$18.98.
:)
Monday, July 6, 2009
Oddities: Michael Jackson's Moonwalker
This one has been on my to-blog list for a while, but Mr. Jackson's recent passing has given it relevance, something this blog generally strives to avoid. Based on the odd 1988 "movie," really a collection of music video-style segments, Sega reportedly worked closely with Michael Jackson to bring his unique persona to videogames.
I quote: "HOOOOOO!"
The game sends Michael out to battle evil in his Smooth Criminal costume; to Sega and Jackson's mutual credit, this is clearly not a generic action platformer with new graphics slapped onto it. For example, Mr. Jackson does not employ any violent weapons -- while his enemies have guns, he ducks to avoid their bullets, throws his hat Oddjob style, and dances his enemies to death. This sounds silly, and it is completely ludicrous, but it somehow feels right -- while the sprites are on the tiny side, and the backgrounds simple and repetitive, the animation is impressively varied and smooth. Clearly a lot of effort and cartridge space was put into capturing Jackson's dance moves. The Thriller level is a particular favorite of mine, and the Smooth Criminal dances are nicely handled as well.
The music is nicely rendered given the limited capabilities of the Sega Genesis; Jackson's infectious pop hooks come through loud and clear. Unfortunately, the game is also infected by Mr. Jackson's trademark weirdness. For instance, Bubbles the chimp shows up to ride around on his shoulder, and makes a strangely ambivalent cameo on the Game Over screen, boogeying and clapping like a demented monkey whether the player chooses to quit or continue.
And then there's this... the reason it's hard to play this game today without feeling complicit in all manner of yuck. The ultimate object of Michael's quest is to find all of the young, blonde, male children hiding in each level. He fends off pretty dance hall girls, slamming them into walls before ignoring their advances, and breaks through all manner of obstacles to find the children's hiding places. Sometimes they're just sitting out in the open, crying uncontrollably as they see Michael Jackson approach.
He's supposed to be rescuing them, of course. But when Michael touches each boy, he shouts "Michael!" before jumping and running away to safety; it's supposed to be a squeal of delight, but it's very hard to hear it that way with contemporary ears.
Still, seeing the video Michael's defeated body turn into a ball of light and zip offscreen, only to return after a fade out, restored and vibrant, one can't help wishing that the boy who never grew up never had to. No one wants to be defeated.
The LoadDown - 07/06/2009
Since this has become a recurring feature, I'm trying to get its format nailed down to something consistent. I'm going to start covering the PREVIOUS week's XBLA releases here, rather than doing two download posts a week or covering them only in passing. And instead of speculating about which games I might be purchasing, I'll just talk about what I am actually playing in this vein. So without further ado...
WiiWare gets three titles this week. BIT.TRIP CORE is another retro-inspired psychedelic rhythm/action game from the BIT.TRIP.BEAT folks. Taito continues its remake series with BUST-A-MOVE Plus!, yet another update of the venerable action puzzler also known as Puzzle Bobble. And Neko Entertainment, makers of the middling Cocoto games, delivers Heracles Chariot Racing; better on WiiWare than cluttering the discount shelves at Best Buy, I imagine.
Virtual Console continues at a trickle, with this week's release being Epyx's classic California Games in its original Commodore 64 incarnation. It was very popular back in the day and might still be worth a play for nostalgia's sake; in my opinion, its casual flavor has held up better than linemates Summer Games and Winter Games, both of which have been superseded by more sophisticated equivalents in later years.
DSiWare gets Art Style: BASE 10, a math-based puzzler, and Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, which appears to be a decent racer with some neat online photo features.
XBLA last week got SNK's 2-D Neo-Geo classic The King of Fighters '98 Ultimate Match, a decent game but not as revered as the previous week's Garou: Mark of the Wolves. And a top-selling XBLA title gets a followup with Worms 2: Armageddon (which semantically speaking appears to be titled as a sequel to XBLA's Worms, and just happens to share a subtitle with the original Worms Armageddon.) Always a great series, especially with online play.
At the moment, I am playing Sega's Phantasy Star II, which came out on XBLA a few weeks ago -- I have played it before, but never gotten into it seriously. Once again, achievements prove a sufficiently enticing carrot.
WiiWare gets three titles this week. BIT.TRIP CORE is another retro-inspired psychedelic rhythm/action game from the BIT.TRIP.BEAT folks. Taito continues its remake series with BUST-A-MOVE Plus!, yet another update of the venerable action puzzler also known as Puzzle Bobble. And Neko Entertainment, makers of the middling Cocoto games, delivers Heracles Chariot Racing; better on WiiWare than cluttering the discount shelves at Best Buy, I imagine.
Virtual Console continues at a trickle, with this week's release being Epyx's classic California Games in its original Commodore 64 incarnation. It was very popular back in the day and might still be worth a play for nostalgia's sake; in my opinion, its casual flavor has held up better than linemates Summer Games and Winter Games, both of which have been superseded by more sophisticated equivalents in later years.
DSiWare gets Art Style: BASE 10, a math-based puzzler, and Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, which appears to be a decent racer with some neat online photo features.
XBLA last week got SNK's 2-D Neo-Geo classic The King of Fighters '98 Ultimate Match, a decent game but not as revered as the previous week's Garou: Mark of the Wolves. And a top-selling XBLA title gets a followup with Worms 2: Armageddon (which semantically speaking appears to be titled as a sequel to XBLA's Worms, and just happens to share a subtitle with the original Worms Armageddon.) Always a great series, especially with online play.
At the moment, I am playing Sega's Phantasy Star II, which came out on XBLA a few weeks ago -- I have played it before, but never gotten into it seriously. Once again, achievements prove a sufficiently enticing carrot.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
What the heck is a GP2X?
While I have been on vacation, with my idle time generally spent sleeping or riding in some sort of conveyance, it seems, I haven't been able to do much gaming. But for those few moments when we had time to kill, we brought our Nintendo DS along, as well as our GamePark GP2X portable. I've mentioned it before in this blog, but I'm sure a lot of people are still asking: What the heck is a GP2X? So it's high time I talked about it in a little more detail.
The GP2X is a Korean-made handheld gaming system available on a mail-order import basis. I first learned about it from a UK magazine, Retro Gamer, and ordered one back in 2006. It runs Linux, which is its great hidden strength as it makes development and porting existing software straightforward. The system's design makes it a natural for emulation -- its 320x240 resolution maps pretty cleanly to most vintage systems and VGA-era PC games, and it has enough power to emulate consoles from the 2-D era quite nicely, usually in the 30-60 frames-per-second range. It has four buttons, a joystick, and enough other buttons to allow use in either portrait or landscape orientation, making vintage arcade games a pleasure to play.
There aren't many commercial games for it, but it runs emulators for just about every popular system and game engine, and there are ports of some great homebrew titles, including Cave Story. I have used it for several years to play DOOM, The Secret of Monkey Island, retro arcade titles via MAME, and many of my favorite console games from the pre-Playstation era. (Yes, the emulators are in a legal gray zone, requiring ROM files, but I do own licensed copies of the games I play this way. Engines like the ScummVM player for LucasArts and other adventures work directly with the original data files, copied over from the PC media to the GP2x SD card, with some options for compressing the audio content.) I have used it to acquaint myself with some 8-bit era titles that were popular in the UK but never made a splash here, like Codemasters' Dizzy series, and to play vintage game music files. It can also be used to play MP3 files and various obscure video formats.
But it's not a mainstream system by any means -- it's a hacker's platform, requiring a fair amount of configuration and moving files around to get them where various tools expect to find them, often with the barest of freeware documentation to go on. The wealth of software available is balanced by the difficulties of getting all the pieces together to make things work properly -- to get DOOM going, for example, one has to install a Linux freeware music program to render the background music, rename the target .WAD file to the expected name the engine looks for, and accept that save games "named" without a keyboard must end up as "BBYYYXXX" and so forth, using the available controller buttons. Other impracticalities abound -- for example, I have an Infocom Z-code engine for it that runs from the Linux command shell, but starting and playing Zork without a proper keyboard, entering characters one by one by selecting them with the controller, is so tedious as to be strictly a novelty. But for the games that work properly and naturally, mostly action-based games with minimal keyboard input, I have found the the GP2X a worthwhile investment of money and time.
The GP2X was itself a followup to an earlier system called the GP32, and it appears I completely missed out on an upgrade -- my model is now known as the GP2X F100, and an F200 model with touch-screen came out sometime in the past few years. And there is already a more powerful followup on the market called the GP2X Wiz, which provides a few additional control options with dual cross-pads. It also appears to have substantially more commercial software support, at least from lesser-known Asian publishers; I don't expect to see Konami or Capcom supporting it any time soon. So I don't think I'm in any hurry to pick it up, as the old model meets my needs pretty well, but I'm glad to see it's been successful enough to merit a sequel. It's no competition for Nintendo or Sony, but its existence makes my gaming life a little richer on the go.
The GP2X is a Korean-made handheld gaming system available on a mail-order import basis. I first learned about it from a UK magazine, Retro Gamer, and ordered one back in 2006. It runs Linux, which is its great hidden strength as it makes development and porting existing software straightforward. The system's design makes it a natural for emulation -- its 320x240 resolution maps pretty cleanly to most vintage systems and VGA-era PC games, and it has enough power to emulate consoles from the 2-D era quite nicely, usually in the 30-60 frames-per-second range. It has four buttons, a joystick, and enough other buttons to allow use in either portrait or landscape orientation, making vintage arcade games a pleasure to play.
There aren't many commercial games for it, but it runs emulators for just about every popular system and game engine, and there are ports of some great homebrew titles, including Cave Story. I have used it for several years to play DOOM, The Secret of Monkey Island, retro arcade titles via MAME, and many of my favorite console games from the pre-Playstation era. (Yes, the emulators are in a legal gray zone, requiring ROM files, but I do own licensed copies of the games I play this way. Engines like the ScummVM player for LucasArts and other adventures work directly with the original data files, copied over from the PC media to the GP2x SD card, with some options for compressing the audio content.) I have used it to acquaint myself with some 8-bit era titles that were popular in the UK but never made a splash here, like Codemasters' Dizzy series, and to play vintage game music files. It can also be used to play MP3 files and various obscure video formats.
But it's not a mainstream system by any means -- it's a hacker's platform, requiring a fair amount of configuration and moving files around to get them where various tools expect to find them, often with the barest of freeware documentation to go on. The wealth of software available is balanced by the difficulties of getting all the pieces together to make things work properly -- to get DOOM going, for example, one has to install a Linux freeware music program to render the background music, rename the target .WAD file to the expected name the engine looks for, and accept that save games "named" without a keyboard must end up as "BBYYYXXX" and so forth, using the available controller buttons. Other impracticalities abound -- for example, I have an Infocom Z-code engine for it that runs from the Linux command shell, but starting and playing Zork without a proper keyboard, entering characters one by one by selecting them with the controller, is so tedious as to be strictly a novelty. But for the games that work properly and naturally, mostly action-based games with minimal keyboard input, I have found the the GP2X a worthwhile investment of money and time.
The GP2X was itself a followup to an earlier system called the GP32, and it appears I completely missed out on an upgrade -- my model is now known as the GP2X F100, and an F200 model with touch-screen came out sometime in the past few years. And there is already a more powerful followup on the market called the GP2X Wiz, which provides a few additional control options with dual cross-pads. It also appears to have substantially more commercial software support, at least from lesser-known Asian publishers; I don't expect to see Konami or Capcom supporting it any time soon. So I don't think I'm in any hurry to pick it up, as the old model meets my needs pretty well, but I'm glad to see it's been successful enough to merit a sequel. It's no competition for Nintendo or Sony, but its existence makes my gaming life a little richer on the go.
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