The inspiration for this challenge was something that happened to me a few times while gaming. Once, I played Sega Genesis a lot – perhaps a week or more. Then, I got out my Sega Saturn and played that. The flying polygons coalescing into the Sega Saturn logo made my eyes pop – despite the fact that this was sometime in 2006. Point is, my brain got used to Genesis level of quality, then I switched to Saturn and I wasn't used to it, even though both were outdated by that point.
Another time this happened, except more dramatically. I was playing Panzer Dragoon Saga (my review of which can be found here: http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... 61&start=0 ). Meanwhile, my brother was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum on my PC. I was really into PDS and had grown used to its graphics, then I turned and saw Batman and I almost came unglued. I could not believe a game could look so sexy. The level of detail was unbelievable.
By this point I started to notice a trend, so I got a fiendish idea: what if I played nothing but Atari 2600 for a month, then played something modern on my PC? Would my head explode?
I've never actually had any extensive hands on time with an Atari. I've played the arcade versions of Centipede, Battlezone, etc. on a Playstation compilation (and loved them), but the home versions of those were still unfamiliar territory to me. I apologize for being born in 1990.
So, I traded for an Atari Flashback 2 on Racketboy.
First of all? The Atari controller is garbage. It's like they designed the most un-ergonomic thing conceivable. The meat of my thumb is subjected to a sharp, 90 degree angle of hard plastic, and it hurts. The joystick is like... I don't know, like playing Street Fighter with an arcade pad that's tiny enough to hold in the palm of your hand. They should have done 2 things: make the pad big enough to fit in my lap, stationary, or give it a D-pad. Yes, I know D-pad wasn't invented yet.
So I cheated.
I remember reading back on http://www.videogamecritic.net that the Atari and Sega Genesis used the same interface port, and that the controllers could be interchanged from one system to the next. I hate the Atari stick so bad that I played with a Genny controller. No, I don't regret it and will not apologize for it. You 80's kids had terrible controllers. On top of that, your music was cheesy and your haircuts look weird (you guys had a pretty awesome president most of the decade, though.)
The Atari graphics impressed me because I was expecting something so rudimentary, so primitive, that anything conveying the slightest illusion of reality looked good. I didn't expect the Pitfall guy to have legs that actually bent at the joints, or Fatal Run to actually look like a halfway decent Pole Position clone. For the first half hour or so I was like, “Wow, it actually... doesn't look as terrible as I expected.”
The Atari is filled with many bad, bad games. Like, the developers knew they COULD, but didn't stop to ask if they SHOULD. My favorite example is “hangman.” It's a game where you choose letters to spell a word. Every time you miss a letter, a stick figure in a noose gets drawn on the screen. I guess this game was designed for very lonely, bored kids with lots of money and no friends to play paper hangman with them. Or no books to read. (Which is ironic because reading ability is a prerequisite for this game.)
I couldn't get into Pitfall, either, despite the spectacular flexing knees. (The game also had a pretty rad snake with a single pixel tongue flicking in and out, though.) At first, I thought it was really impressive, like some kind of proto-Mario style platformer. And the difficulty – good gravy I've never played a platformer so insanely hard. Holes literally expand from out of nowhere in the middle of the ground to suck you in, and only by jumping at the EXACT split second necessary can you avoid them. The “tarzan yell” made me grin.
Nonetheless, I realized it seemed to cycle the same stage over and over. Maybe that was Mario's innovation: that he, you know, actually had different worlds to travel to, not the same one cut and pasted 256 times.
I got bored and tried something else.
Caverns of Mars was interesting because it enlightened me to a technological shortcoming at the time – smoothly scrolling screens. In most Atari games, the screen remains rigid, locked in place like a backdrop on your TV while the characters scurry around on it. Touching the edge of the screen causes you to flash to a new screen, popping out the other side like Pac Man in that hole in his maze. Caverns of Mars tries to make the entire screen move fluidly downward; in doing so it flashes on and off like a strobe light.
I was impressed by how ambitious this one was and kept playing. I killed a lot of enemy space ships who travel only in straight lines and don't seem to shoot. I had to avoid the walls, or else explode. Once I reached the bottom of the cavern, I blew up a reactor, then backtracked through the exact same cavern as before. Then the screen informed me, “CONGRATULATIONS, NOW LET'S DO THE EXACT SAME THING ALL OVER AGAIN.”
What the heck. You guys paid how much for these Atari cartridges?
Then I selected Missile Command.
OK, I must hand it to you, this one's good. This one had me sweating bullets and sinking my teeth into the experience. I reached a point where I was counting how many points I needed in order to survive the next round, cause all my cities were nuked and I'd game over... then at the last second I'd whack one of those homing missiles that gives you extra points, and that ridiculous “DOODLEYDOODELYBEEPBOOPDOODELYBEEPDEEDLYBOOP” chiptune plays, and I pump my first in the air. I could predict WHERE the missiles would end up before they were there, intercept them perfectly, wait for several intersecting missiles to converge and snipe them at the sweet spot to save on ammo... Oh yes, Missile Command is all kinds of awesome.
Sometime later I tried Adventure.
I don't think I've ever played a game before where the hero is rendered in 1 x 1 resolution.
OK, so gate ahead of me; key there. Put key in gate?
Oh. OK. So far so good.
Now there's another key. I guess there's another gate somewhere I need to take it to.
Wh... what the heck is Q-bert doing here?
And what's he doing to me? Do I have a health meter? This is kind of kinky...
OK, now I'm carrying a gigantic pair of purple brackets } { ? Just what are THEY supposed to do? What do they represent, anyway? and... oh, for crying out loud, I lost the key, can't find the next stupid gate, this doesn't make any sense.
Too weird for me. Sorry.
Up next: Battlezone
This one kicks butt. It's basically a first person shooter where you drive a tank around in a big empty field filled with other tanks who roll around, lumberingly aim at you, and open fire. It's very 'kill or be killed' and can get pretty frantic. Most astounding to me, though, is how this fossil pulls off believable perspective effects – enemies grow and shrink when you get closer to or further from them (granted the tanks themselves are duochrome and extremely low resolution, but it's still pretty cool). When someone shoots you from behind, and you avoid their shot, you can see the bullet traveling to the side of you, flying off into space – wow. Enemies can even bump into each other by mistake, causing them to explode. I didn't expect this sort of thing to be possible on the Atari – heck, I'd have never expected something like this on the NES – much less be so fun in the process. Like Missile Command, this one had me counting the number of points I needed before I could get another extra life and survive for another round. I'm impressed.
Did I mention the Atari lacks a pause button? That's pretty lame when you're 100,000 points into a game and the phone rings.
Next: Centipede
I think it's funny how Centipede's title screen shows a high res, multi colored centipede surrounded by high res, multi colored mushrooms, then when you hit the start button it changes to a bunch of monochrome blocks.
Nonetheless, this one is really clever and fun. It's basically space invaders on steroids. In Space Invaders, you just have a wall of aliens progressing down to your little guy at the bottom of the screen. In Centipede, the aliens are replaced by a multi-segmented centipede who weaves in and out of a field – and not just a blank, black field of vacuum, either, but one filled with mushrooms (represented by monochrome rectangles). Shooting the centipede mid-section causes him to split off into two centipedes. If he bumps into a mushroom, he advances one block closer to you and turns 180 degrees. Every time you kill a centipede segment, he turns into a mushroom. So pretty soon the screen is scurrying with this little orphan centipede segments bumping all over the place against fungal road blocks.
Plus, a spider randomly pops out from the side of the screen. I. Hate. THE SPIDER. He's worse than those dinosaur claw things from Zelda Ocarina of Time, the ones that drop from the ceiling and drag you upstairs with them, kicking and screaming. You CANNOT rest, cannot let down your guard for an instant, otherwise the spider will molest you.
The good thing is, Centipede rewards you for killing the spider; rewards you handsomely indeed. The closer you are to the spider, the more points you get for nailing him. If he's far away, you get 300 points – mid range is 600 – point blank is 900. It reminds me of Bangai O. The most effective strategy I managed was stalling the centipede so he'd take forever to get down to me, then zapping the spider point blank as many times as possible.
Sometimes a snake or something travels horizontally across the screen – killing this creature scores you 1000 points. If you shoot up all the mushrooms, a moth or some winged bug flies down vertically and distributes more mushrooms at random. So, another strategy is to shoot up all the mushrooms, then wait for the moths to show up and nail them, getting a few hundred points each. 10,000 points is an extra life, so earning an appropriate score can bail you out of a tight spot.
This game has one feature that made me want to pull my hair out – the velocity of your warrior. In many games, like Pac Man, pressing right causes Pac Man to move right at – say, one tile per second. It's a constant rate of movement that lets you predict where you'll end up with relative ease. The centipede guy, however, moves 0 tiles per second the first second you press right, next second he moves 1 tile per second, next 2, next 4, next 8. They made him move on some kind of exponential curve, and it's infuriating. Lining up my character with any degree of precision just couldn't be done – he'd always slip too far away or not enough. I know this game was designed for a track ball, but that's not included with the Flashback 2, and my experience was impeded because of it.
I really wanted to like Centipede, so I grew to wonder if Milipede improved on this shortcoming. I tried it next.
Holy cow. Milipede is amazing. For the record, yes – the “hard to control” velocity problem is solved in this game. I would have been fine with that, but this also shakes up the formula by adding as many as TWO spiders, diagonally traveling dragonflies, lady bugs with their own unique attack pattern, swerving mosquitoes(?), a bonus round where a gajillion bugs swarm at you all at once and you get increasingly more and more points for killing them, explosive barrels that create a blast radius and kill any bugs in touching distance, plus a bonus caterpillar that makes time slow down when you shoot him. Needless to say extra lives are awarded every 15,000 points rather than 10,000 like before.
This game is a warzone. The sheer level of focus needed to survive the chaos is intense. This game kept me biting my lip, lurching along with my warrior to survive the onslaught, and pressing the reset button with my toe. This game gave me a new respect for the Atari. I've found a game for this system where made the technology transcended the sum of its parts and was pure magic.
Well, before I knew it Christmas arrived, so I played Left 4 Dead 2 on my PC.
For all practical intents and purposes, my Atari experiment failed. Two reasons:
1 I got exposed to modern graphics through other outlets.
2 Experimental bias. It's like trying to surprise yourself with something you already know is on its way. With my Sega Genesis and PDS experience, it was an accident; here I tried to make it happen on purpose, so it didn't work. Yeah, it looks better. No, I didn't feel like a time traveler from 1984.
Nonetheless, this challenge gave me a new respect for the pre-NES days of gaming. I'm now more curious about the Intellivision, Colecovision, and the Coleco portable LED arcades. I'm also tempted to get my hands on an Atari trackball, or even a real 2600 with some other carts, like Berzerk, or some homebrew like the Track Ball supporting version of Missile Command. While fun, however, the restriction of “only Atari” ironically, made me find other ways to occupy myself, since – let's face it – gaming in '84 isn't as enthralling as it is in '10. Instead of gaming I read a lot of books (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Jurassic Park, The Martian Chronicles, and I'm about a third through The Stand by Steven King.) If I had been an 80's kid I probably wouldn't have spent so much time gaming.
There were a lot of crazy technological predictions popular culture made in the 20th century. I think it's ironic how the main expectations of those days were never lived up to, whereas totally random ones had a borderline Cambrian explosion beyond what anyone predicted. We don't have sentient computers or colonies on Mars or flying cars, but we do have GPS's, cell phones, and hedonistically supercharged computers that play back game programs with visuals comparable to a Hollywood production. I'd come up with a profound moral for this story, but other than “times change” or something lame like that, I don't think there is one.
