An old Adventure

Lita got a taste of Adventure back in August. Now you can experience the game too! If you're a rich kid, that is.


Adventure is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch for free. You control the dot by tilting the device. I guess you put things down by touching the screen.

Like I said, it's free as long as you can afford an expensive if awesome piece of technology. Then again, you can download for free here, but that's not as cool.

Whatever. Download the game either way and enjoy some dot vs duck adventures.

Video Game #13: Adventure

Tork has this challenge for me today: 14 minutes to grab the chalice and take it back to the palace. Play level 2 if you can beat level one in time.

Chalice to the palace in 14 minutes. Fine. Let's see what we're dealing with.

Ah.

See that yellow dot? The one under that black grid thing? That dot is you, the player. Oh boy.

The main thing to do in this game seems to be to grab stuff and put it inside the castle. That's what I did, anyway. Like that yellow key, there. I picked it up and put it in the castle.


This seahorse did not want me to take the black key, but I did anyway. Then I put it in the castle.

(Yes Tork, I know, Strongbad called it a duck. I don't care. Looks more like a seahorse to me.)


I stored this arrow in the castle for a while, too. But then I decided to take it out and carry it around for a while. I don't know what it's supposed to be. Looks like a sword when it's on this side, but for a while I was carrying it so it was more like <--[]. That would make it a spear? I don't know. I might have killed a seahorse with it later, but it's also possible it just died of old age. The yellow arrow does not help me get into the black castle.

The black key, however, does.

I trade in my key for a rad Fu Manchu mustache.

Somehow the mustache helped me get ahold of the sacred longhorns. I started getting attacked randomly by seahorses all the time after this, but it was ok because by this time I was starting to notice that the seahorses don't seem to actually hurt me at all.

See? He's just hanging out. Even when he bites me nothing happens.

This is me bringing the Sacred Longhorns back into the castle. The game rewards you with an epileptic-fit-inducing lazer light show. Then it freezes.

I had 6 minutes left but the so-called Level 2 seemed to be to float endlessly in a timeless void, so I decided to leave that to the gaming professionals. I'm still considering this challenge beaten.

Video Game #11: Seaquest

Tork sez: You've seen this game before, but you haven't played it. Five minutes. Show us your high score.

Tork overestimates my knowledge of Atari games.


Tork says he's giving me bonus poins if I remember where I've seen this. I'm going to guess it was in an episode of MST3K. I couldn't tell you which episode before, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were Devil Fish.


My pallete swapped and I don't know why.

So you play as the little yellow submarine and you're zooming around underwater and all these other dudes and fish are trying to kill you.


It took me a while to figure it out since everything else in this game kills you, but you want to grab the little blue dudes that are swimming around. I guess you're rescuing them.


You are rescued, dude!

Like I said, everything else kills you. All the other stuff swimming in the water kills you. Running out of oxygen kills you (though you can put just your nose above water and preserve oxygen). If you get your submarine all full up of guys you can't get any more until you pull your sub above the waterline to clear them out, but don't go above water if you don't have a bunch of guys because it kills you.


There's my high score, as of when I lost all my lives after my five minutes were up. The little dudes will have to swim away from fish and evil submarines without me.

I guess this game was fun for Atari. It moves fast and is engaging in the same way those web browser games where you have to keep your mouse poiner from touching stuff that flies around the screen is engaging. I could tell what I was supposed to be looking at and that was nice. You can definitely do worse, as Atari games go.

Video Game #4: Keystone

Blurgh!!! Hi, guys! It might look like I'm a day late, but actually I played this game, screenshotted this game, and had things to say about this game yesterday. It was Blogger that refused to upload the pics until today. I'm sure you'll see why in a moment. This game was really controversial in its day. It's called Keystone and it's on the Atari.

You play as this blue guy in the bowler hat at the bottom of the screen. He's a Keystone Cop, I guess. The goal is to fight crime where you find it and save the city from the grip of evil.



The criminal in question is this guy. How can you tell he's a criminal? For one thing, he's running away. Anybody who runs from a cop has to be guilty of something. Also, he's very considerate as criminals go and is wearing the required "I'm a criminal! Arrest me!" uniform of black and white horizontal stripes. Don't worry, criminal! I will arrest you!

Like Like's eat Keystone's shield. (Dear wurwolf: Don't pay attention to this joke. It is a nerd joke.)


Ha ha!!! Caught you, you puppy-raping son of a bitch!

Keystone is an ok cop. It's not too hard to get him to catch his man. Actually his greatest enemy in the whole game is the escalator. He can go up it with no problem, but when it's time to go back down again he is gripped with a horrible primal fear the likes of which have not been known since man had to battle the saber-toothed tiger. The most I could get him to do was poop on the top step.

Overall I'd say this game is pretty good for an Atari game. The five minutes Tork gave me was really three too many, since I caught the criminal in two, and by then had seen all the game had to show me. It wasn't bad, though. If you're determined to play an Atari game, you could do worse than this.

Video Game #1: Pitfall

Hello! And welcome to the brand new August Challenge! Tork decided that since he sort of almost succeeded in watching a video for each day of July, I should have to face a challenge, too. Tork doesn't know any music videos other than the ones I show him, though, so the challenge he's giving me is different. He's got me playing a new video game every day for the month of August. Let's see how it goes.

Tork is a complete and utter Atari Whore and he's always expecting me to see the light and love Atari, too. I don't see that happening, but he just keeps trying. That's why it's no surprise to me at all that my first game is an Atari game. Time to play some Pitfall.

Sigh.

Here's the terms Tork gave me: Play at least 20 minutes and try to get a screenshot of your top score. You're allowed to look up gamefaqs or some online instruction manual if you need to.

20 minutes? Gee whiz. And GameFAQs? Yeah, I'm not looking up a FAQ for Pitfall. I'm making that part of the challenge right now. I know where the direction buttons are and my jump button and that's all I need.

I've got 20 minutes on my timer. Let's do this.

Pitfall seems to star a dude in green pants who I think I heard was named Pitfall Harry. I don't know what his backstory is, but I'm sure as hell not googling it to find out. He dresses like some environmentalists I know and he spends a lot of times in the woods, so I'm going to say that the poin of Pitfall Harry is to save his friend, Pitfall Barry, from some evil anti-rainforest corporate weasils who want to cut down the forest that Harry holds so dear. Why do they want to cut down the forest? It's fun to be an asshole, I guess.

You don't ever see these guys in the game because they're corporate weasils and they stay in their offices, but their influence is there. Who do you think is responsible for all those logs that roll across the screen? Those trees are crying out for revenge! Go get 'em Harry!



This was the trickiest part of the game for me. Of the 20 minutes I spent playing this game it took a good 10 of them to get past this part. Those crocodiles are brutal! Harry doesn't care, though. He understands that all creatures must eat and the crocs aren't being evil, they're just trying to survive. If they could comprehend that Harry is their friend, they'd leave him alone, but they don't speak hippy.

See that scorpion at the bottom there? He's pretty cool. Don't just write him off as a cute decoration for the bottom of the screen; he's there to teach us all a very important environmental lesson. Scorpions look scary, but they're no biggie. They stay down there and you stay up here and nobody has a problem. I liked this scorpion. I named him Shirley and he became Harry's best friend in the game.



The rattlesnake is also an important lesson. When I saw how I was about to make Harry swing right into him I got scared that he'd jump up and bite! But, like a real snake, that snake doesn't want to bite Harry. He knows Harry is too big to swallow. He's just chillin'.


The corporate weasils tried to suck Harry into their greedy vortex of greed and materialism and capitalism by leaving gold out for Harry. He knew better, but I forced him to try to pick it up. Think of how many anti-industrialist pamphlets can be printed up at Kinkos for a huge block of gold like that! Harry paid for my greed with his life when a hole that the capitalists left as a trap opened up right in front of him and swallowed him whole. It was a sad day for us all. I realized that perhaps there are things more important than wealth.

(I made him grab the gold anyway the next time through, though.)



This is the final challenge of the game (for me, anyway) and my screenshot of my high score. Fire. It can be so kind yet so cruel. I didn't know what to do with it. I was tempted to try to grab it on the grounds that it's the same color as the gold and the gold raised my score and also fire is one of mankinds most useful tools...but on the other hand it burns. I remembered the folly of being greedy from before and made Harry jump over the fire.

Nothing interesting happened after that. (Or before it.)

Video Game News that you heard here first.

Please remember to credit this blog when reporting on this.

Projects I Will Complete Someday #2

This is another video game related project I've been working on. I want to program an Atari 2600 game, and maybe even sell a copy or two. I started this a couple years ago and my interest has been renewed recently.

A few years ago I discovered a website called Atari Age.com This was a great site to find out stuff about Atari, especially the earlier years. It had many old catalogs and a big database for Atari roms and instruction manuals. It also has a couple tutorials for programming.

I thought it would be really cool if I could make an Atari game, but I put it off for a while. It wasn't until the beginning of 2005 where I had too much free time. I found a pdf file with a tutorial for programming and it included 24 steps. I skimmed it and thought it would be perfect. I downloaded the tutorial and DASM, a program that converts Atari 2600 code to roms.

I enjoyed reading the tutorial for the first several chapters. It helped me learn about how televisions work and it gave me an opportunity to apply some of the stuff I've learned about binary numbers.

Sadly, I eventually learned that the tutorial wasn't complete. Further more, even though the Atari is primitive enough that one programmer is enough to do everything, it's also really difficult. You have to program every single horizontal line on the television, and you also can do only so much on one line before you need to move on to the next. The Atari 2600 was originally designed with Pong in mind, and nobody at the time (probably) could foresee all the classic games that Activision made in the early eighties. You only have a ball, a couple sprites, and a couple missiles to work with, and manipulating those so you can make it appear that you have more was way beyond me. So it looked like my dreams of making an Atari 2600 game was over.

I bounced around a couple other projects. I tried to learn to program for the Atari 800, which was a computer I played with as a kid, and the NES, which used the same machine language that the Atari did. Then, during the summer of 2005, someone released something that could solve the problems I had before. A guy named Fred Quimby - if that's his real name! - released Batari BASIC, which allowed people to program for the Atari 2600 with a much easier to use language. This thing was incredibly exciting, and I downloaded it immediately.

I spend several weeks trying to make my first game. I had a decent idea in mind when I started learning how Batari BASIC worked. The first release of Batari BASIC was very primitive, in that it expected you to space everything properly and it required line numbers. Which I didn't care about because I just wanted to be one of the first people to release a game on a forum that was created for this. It was one of the few times where I started a project and saw it through to the end without quitting.

My game was "Homsar" which was based on the Strong Bad email of the same name. The basic idea I had was a reverse Kaboom!, where you had to dodge something instead of catching it. Instead of a paddle I let the joystick control Homsar as he dodges back and forth avoiding heavy weights (actually just blocks that are part of the playfield.) I threw in a missile that had to be avoided, because I could. It took me a long time just to get the timing of the weights right.

Of course, just dodging back and forth wasn't enough, even if it had a funny Internet character. I had to throw in as much gimmicks as I could. I created a title screen and included all the email text from the cartoon. Since Batari BASIC lets you have a 6 digit score, I threw in three short intervals. You could see Homestar, The Cheat, and Trogdor, but I made the necessary scores very high. I even added some sound, but mostly a death sound and the song that Strong Bad sings at the beginning of the email. I eventually released it to the forum.

It now has almost 250 downloads, and I've even gotten a couple emails about it. There's just one problem with it that stops me from releasing it as a game. Well, two, if you count the fact that I don't own the copyright to the characters. The problem with the game is that it's not what I would call complete. The blocks always fall at the same speed. The missile never gets faster. The game should get more and more frantic while staying fair to the player, but instead it just stays the same. Part of the reason is that the first primitive version of bB made it really difficult to update code. Also, I had moved on to other bB projects that ultimately went nowhere.

After I released Homsar, bB 0.2 and 0.3 were released, which removed annoying stuff like whitespace issues and line numbers. Despite that I struggled making a second game, my ambitions way bigger then my skills as a programmer. The only successful thing I did afterwards was make a "video" for Lita on her 25th birthday. I would show it at youtube but it uses her real name and it tells a lot of jokes that only a dozen or so people would get.

So that stop my dream for a while. Quimby eventually released a .99 version of bB, which included the ability to have more then two sprites on the screen, but I never got far with that. I guess my heart wasn't into it. I had a notebook filled with a couple ideas, but I haven't touched it in a while. Plus, I had recently gotten a job, so my too much free time became just a lot of free time. I moved on to other stuff, like the portable NES project I WILL SOMEDAY DO, REALLY!.

Yesterday, I saw what resurrected my interest in making a game. I was looking at my rss feeds at My Yahoo and saw an update for Atari Age. Quimby had just released bB 1.0. I haven't kept up on the features of Batari BASIC, but hopefully I can eventually find the time to sit down and write a few programs. Maybe one day I can advertise a game cartridge that was programmed by me. Then I could make like five bucks and travel to retro game expos begging people to buy my game. My friends will buy a copy of my game just to shut me up! It'll be great!

Football Games

I'm a fan of the NFL, but I'm not a fan of sports video games. I prefer arcade sports games to more "realistic" ones. Also, I've hated Madden since he started praising Dallas at every moment. So let's look at the threes or fours of football games that I've owned.



Joe Montana Sports Talk Football (Genesis) - This game was fun just to hear the announcer call plays. Of course, it was stiff and repetitive, but at the time it was huge. The game had a vertical view of the field which I thought was the standard until I played other football games. This game wasn't NFL licensed, so Joe was the only name player on a no-name San Francisco team. You continued the game by password, and I probably still have my perfect 19-0 Washington team passwords in the box.

There were few plays, but just enough that you had enough passing and rushing plays. My favorite play was the fake field goal. The computer would fall for it EVERY SINGLE TIME, and the announcer would be like, "It's first and ten, and I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! ... It's a fake!" Even more fun was playing the computer in easy mode. The computer would tell you what play it's calling, and then show you the exact poin where a ball was going to be thrown. I even found a glitch in the game that caused turnovers by having one of your defensive players stand on the ball before the center hiked it. Plus the game wasn't that hard when I played it on hard mode without using 3-4 back to back fake field goals.



NFL 95 (Genesis) - I was a fan of Montana, so I really rooted for him after he made his comeback in Kansas City. Sadly, we got a boring rematch of Dallas and Buffalo instead of a more interesting San Francisco vs Kansas City.

Anyway, this game had a horizontal field and faster game play. It also added taunting, which was repetitive, but some of the taunts were so goofy that I still smile when I think of them. (I wish I could take "HAW! CAN'T TAKE THE HEAT!" and remix it into a song.) There were far more plays, an NFL license, battery back-up, and the game had the ability to draft, trade, and make up players. Sadly, this last option was useless. My dad and I took Dallas's big three and sent them to other teams, yet when we let the computer simulate a season, Dallas still won everything. It never made any sense.

NFL 95 gave you a more sophisticated season then Sports Talk Football did. You can pick any game you wanted to do, and it saved stats and player of the game afterwards. (It's half time show wasn't as memorable as Sports Talk Football though.) I once made the dumb mistake of thinking that I could play every game in a season. I probably made it to week three before I gave up on that, and I was only playing 20 minute games.



Madden 94 (SNES) - This is my least favorite football game, and the only Madden game I ever got. This game was slow and defensive, not something I want in a football game. It was almost impossible to complete a throw, and I've never been a fan of the triple split screen on top of the screen. It's just way too much to keep track of before your sacked. Interceptions were plentiful. I don't remember if there was an option to trade players, but I doubted it mattered. Like NFL 95, this game was made in the middle of the Cowboy dynasty, so I'm sure that team would be impossible to beat. I played mostly by plugging in the second controller and having the opponents QB head for the wrong end zone.

This game had a horizontal field, long passwords, licensed teams (but only numbered players.) It had cheerleaders, but not very good looking ones. I think it had a better instant replay option then NFL 95, but I may be reaching for compliments. It had all-time teams, but the lack of names hurts it.

I later read in a magazine that the Genesis version of this game was faster and more offensive. This was around the time that EA released a Madden game that was filled with all-teams but was only available at Blockbuster. Either of those game would have probably been better then the SNES version of Madden 94. (The SNES has a slower clock then the Genesis. Hence the silly "Blast Processing" campaign Sega had.)


Football (Atari VCS) Primitive but fun game. Sadly, it's only a two player game, but I did enjoy it when I could play it. For some bizarre reason, throwing an incomplete pass seemed to result in a turnover.

Feature a small horizontal field, blocky football players, and only 4 players for each side. You only had five plays total, and I could never remember them. It was just easier, and more fun, to just snap the ball and run around avoiding the defenders.

This game is part of Atari Anthology.



Will I ever get another football game? Sure, but I have a rule. I'll get a new football/basketball/hockey/baseball game whenever a Washington team wins a championship. (Or make it to the finals, in the case of NHL Faceoff 99.)

Translation: Not for a long time.