A blog about homebrew video games - games written by amateurs, for computers and home systems rendered obsolete long ago. Includes game reviews, observations about video game design, and interviews with the brave souls who write code for these modern classics.
I've commented before on iPad mania, which has seized this nation like swine flu. I've used an iPad before, and I must admit that I'm not a fan. There are aspects of it that I like: it's very sexy, it's light, with fantastic battery life. But I'm a nerd, and one of the classic symptoms of being a nerd is the ineffable desire to tinker with things. Apple's desire to prevent its users from tinkering with the iPad in any way is suspiciously paranoid, and reeks of censorship. How seriously would we take the Honda Corporation if they told us we could only use their cars on Honda-approved roads?
A case in point is Atari's Greatest Hits, just released by Atari for the iPad. The idea sounds great in theory: 100 of the best classic Atari 2600 and arcade games ever made, packed in one free app! Sounds great, right? What they don't tell you, however, is that while the app itself may be free to download, the games cost a buck apiece, or you can download all 100 for $14.99. Can anyone say bait-and-switch? As if that isn't bad enough, the games are slow and buggy, and controlling them accurately with the iPad's baffling touch-screen was a Sysiphean task. I thought it was impossible to ruin a classic like Yar's Revenge, but thanks to Atari's Greatest Hits, I couldn't even get past the first two levels before the damn thing froze and I gave up.
The especially infuriating thing about Atari's Greatest Hits is that I can download thousands of Atari games online and fire them up on any computer with an emulator - all without paying a dime. But Apple doesn't allow any apps other than those available on its App Store to be used on the iPad. This begs the question: why would I fork over my hard-earned money on a $400 iPad that forces me to pay fifteen bucks for a piss-poor version of a game I can play for free on an eMachines PC that's half the price?
What's even worse is that the current entity known as "Atari" has no connection to the original Atari Corporation, which went bankrupt in 1996. The Atari name, logo, and related trademarks have been bounced around for years between companies like JTS and Hasbro before its purchase by Infogrames, a French video game publisher. If Atari's Greatest Hits is any evidence, the folks at Atari clearly hired some hack programming firm to slap a bunch of old trademarks together as quickly and cheaply as possible for a quick buck. It breaks my heart that these classic games, which are the result of many hours of work by a great many very talented programmers and artists, are now being milked like a cow by people who clearly have no appreciation for how special they are to so many people.
It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and everyone has to make money somehow; the video game industry is no exception to this. But there's no excuse for a product as shoddy and joyless as Atari's Greatest Hits. And frankly, the iPad's kind of silly, too.
The 7800 Expansion Module: it also plays LaserDiscs
Once in a blue moon, I see a retro-gaming accessory that's so wonderfully dorky and useless that it brings a tear to my eye. The soon-to-be-released Atari 7800 Expansion Modulemay look like a prop from the lost Dark Crystal sequel, but if you're one of the 3 people who still has an Atari 7800, you can preorder it right now from Legacy Electronics. It even comes with a nifty Silver Atari-style box and instruction manual!
The Atari 7800, Atari's third video game console, was the company's attempt to unseat Nintendo from its dominance of the video game market after the release of the NES. Though it came nowhere close to accomplishing this, it was nevertheless a reasonably successful console with impressive capabilities and a solid library of games. Plus, the 7800 was backwards-compatible with Atari's famous 2600 system, giving it an extra library of thousands of well-known games for its users to choose from. According to Legacy's website, the 7800 Expansion makes the 7800 even better by adding 128K of extra available program memory, a built in High Score capability, and a 15 PIN/Serial port to enable use with keyboards, disk drives, printers, and modems.
Jack Tramiel would be proud.
It's a wonder why anyone thought that 2011 would be a good time to manufacture and produce an accessory for a 20-year-old discontinued toy, and at more than $100 with shipping, it's a pretty steep asking price. But considering its limited availability and authentically cheesy packaging, it's not too much of a stretch to say that this thing could be the ultimate Atari 7800 collectible (which, to be fair, isn't saying much). And if you've got a stack of Atari 2600 games lying around, or some old Atari 400 accessories, the 7800 Expansion may give your collection a new lease on life.
Once the undisputed king of the North American video game market, Atari's downfall in the early 1990s was slow, painful, and awkward. The company was devoting most of its attention to its line of Amiga computers, which left its video games division underfunded and understaffed. Nowhere is there a more obvious piece of evidence of this identity crisis than the Atari Jaguar, Atari's last and least successful video game console. Released in 1993, the Jaguar billed itself as the world's first 64-bit system. Though the system did see some great games (including one of my all-time favorites, Tempest 2000),lack of developer support and mediocre processing power had killed the Jaguar by 1996, having sold less than 250,000 unites.
Despite its status as a footnote in technology history, the Jaguar maintains a devoted base of fans who continue to develop homebrew games for it. Why anyone would do this is beyond me, as the Jaguar's odd CPU structure and limited graphics memory make programming for it an exercise in frustration and self-torture. Nevertheless, Jagware, a prolific programming collective that's released numerous other Jaguar games, has just announced its newest release: Downfall.
Downfall is a simple game that bears a striking resemblance to Man Goes Down, another homebrew game for the Atari 2600 written back in 2004 by Alex Herbert. The player controls a man continuously falling down as platforms scroll up the screen; you must survive as long as you can falling downward onto the platforms without falling off the screen. In this way it somewhat resembles the old NES game Ice Climbers, except in the other direction and without the cutesy cartoon characters.
Downfall's simplicity won't convince the uninitiated to immediately order a Jaguar on eBay, but it is a fun little diversion on an emulator. The scrolling background is detailed and highly fluid, controls are simple (though I can't imagine how it plays on the actual Jaguar controller), and the background music is catchy and clearly rendered. It is, however, ridiculously easy, and since the game has no variations or extra modes, you've pretty much seen all there is to see after about 15 minutes of gameplay. It almost resembles a programming exercise more than a full-fledged game.
A worthy effort for an perenially unappreciated console, but I certainly wouldn't spend money on a cartridge version. I'll stick to Tempest 2000 for my taste of early-90s Atari.
This gorgeous machine is the creation of Niklas Roy, a prolific German artist who creates works that shatter conventional ideas about industrial design and the capabilities of technology. PONGMECHANIK is an authentic game of Pong, powered entirely by a fully-functional analog computer, and by far the most ambitious work of retro-inspired hacking I've ever seen.
Party like it's 1939.
The heart and soul of PONGMECHANIK is the relay switch. A relay is an electromagnetic device that operates a switching mechanism; this switch can be off (zero) or on (one), and thus represents a single byte of data in a binary computer system. (Many of these relays together is known as an array.) Nowadays, relays are commonplace in the telephone and railway industries, where it is necessary to instantaneously control huge voltages of electricity without delay. Relays were also used in the 1930s to construct the world's first computers, but were abandoned quickly due to their size and unpredictability. The total processing power of PONGMECHANIK's brain, entirely driven by a few dozen telephone relays, is barely enough to store a single word of text on this page.
These wheels rotate underneath the black playing surface to indicate score.
Niklas explains PONGMECHANIK's design on his webpage. The machine is divided into four parts: the array of telephone relays, a system of pulleys and springs which control the movement of the player/ball, the metal chassis that detects the collision of the ball with the paddle, and the sound effects, provided by two wood blocks (seriously!) struck with large metal solenoids controlled by the brain.
While I was skeptical at first as to the practical application of such a daunting (and low-tech) task, all it took was a few YouTube videos to thoroughly impress me. PONGMECHANIK is an almost-exact replica of the 1972 Atari version of Pong, a game which launched the entire commercial video game industry in the United States and left burning holes in the wallets of college dropouts nationwide. Although paddle and ball movement seems a tad slow, collision detection is suprisingly accurate. Furthermore, the machine's design is, dare I say, sexy. A clear plexiglass cabinet on top of a handsome wooden base gives the machine a clean, futuristic look. Ducking underneath the playfield allows a user to ooh and ah at the ballet-like dance of relays, pulleys, springs, and wires, all pulling and whirring in glorious harmony to bring Pong to life.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like PONGMECHANIK will be available to the masses any time soon; the machine is large, cumbersome, and delicate, and spends most of its life in Niklas's home. But that doesn't stop me from giving its inventor the NERD OF THE CENTURY award. This is, quite simply, the biggest, most ambitiously complex, and most wonderful home video game project I've ever come across, and it's not even really a video game!
No, you aren't hallucinating - this really is Halo, the unbelievably successful video game series that debuted on the XBox in 2001 and has since exploded into perhaps the most successful video game franchise of the 21st century so far. But this certainly isn't Halo as you've ever seen it before. While the original Halo series is a complex, high-tech shoot-em-up with a focus on intense naturalism and realism, this version somewhat resembles Lego bricks playing field hockey on a broken computer screen. But that's part of the charm of playing the venerable old Atari 2600.
For those not born during the Kennedy administration, the Atari 2600 is the granddaddy of video game consoles, the machine that started it all. In its heyday, it was the most successful toy ever created, and its parent company, Atari, was the Apple Computer of its time. (Steve Jobs was a lowly employee there early in his career.) Yet, barely fifteen years after their meteoric rise, a changing marketplace and a series of colossal failures led Atari to bite the silicon dust. Today, the name is nothing more than a trademark, floating around the corporate world like a digital ghost.
Nevertheless, the Atari 2600 lives on. Thanks to many enterprising coders with an appreciation for finely aged bits 'n bytes, several dozen new games a year are being programmed by hobbyists. With no big corporate bosses to tell them what to do, these games are more inventive and audacious than Atari could have ever dreamed of. And, since more than 30 million Atari 2600 consoles were sold, playing one is as easy as looking around Craigslist, eBay, or your mom's attic.
The genius of the Atari 2600 is its accessibility. The controller is a single joystick with one button. The graphics make your little brother's Game Boy look like a nuclear supercomputer. But it's this stone-age simplicity that makes the Atari 2600 so beautiful. The technical limitations of this machine meant that programmers can't rely on flashy extras, like blood or cutscenes or voice actors or fancy animation. They've got to focus on gameplay - making the experience of playing quick, engaging, and rewarding.
Which brings us to Halo 2600. This game is speedier than crack, and even more addictive. This two-dimensional shooter plays very similarly to the arcade classic Bezerk!, but with many notable twists, including several different types of enemies, upgradeable weapons, and shields which can be acquired to protect the player from shots. Although the graphics are simple, they're very effective, and it's incredible the variety and detail the programmer, Ed Fries, has packed into this tiny little 128K cartridge.
Ed Fries is the former vice-president of publishing at Microsoft, and one of the people who first brought the Halo series into existence. He's also a veteran of the late-70s/early-80s video game industry, and a former Atari programmer. In his free time, he decided to bring his programming skills back to life, and wrote a version of his XBox masterpiece for the 30-year-old Atari. The result is a weird, surreal, and astonishingly fun mixture of past and present - a cross between primitive and cutting-edge.
If you don't have access to an Atari 2600 console, you can still play Halo 2600 online. Ed's been kind enough to create a version in JavaScript: just visit Ed's webpage to play. A warning: if you start playing, you probably won't be doing anything productive for the next hour or so.
A case in point is Atari's Greatest Hits, just released by Atari for the iPad. The idea sounds great in theory: 100 of the best classic Atari 2600 and arcade games ever made, packed in one free app! Sounds great, right? What they don't tell you, however, is that while the app itself may be free to download, the games cost a buck apiece, or you can download all 100 for $14.99. Can anyone say bait-and-switch? As if that isn't bad enough, the games are slow and buggy, and controlling them accurately with the iPad's baffling touch-screen was a Sysiphean task. I thought it was impossible to ruin a classic like Yar's Revenge, but thanks to Atari's Greatest Hits, I couldn't even get past the first two levels before the damn thing froze and I gave up.
