Archive for the ‘Games’ Category

London Calling

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

JBF’s off on another all-day train safari today, this time to Cardiff. KLS and I had shopping to take care of, since we’d managed to gather precisely almost zero souvenirs. With checklist in hand, we traipsed out into London.

By the way I have sent a total of 34 postcards this trip! I think/hope most of you reading this got one (if I have your address) and some of you many more than one. Hopefully they gave you a smile 🙂

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^ Ghastly stuff! The overall quality of the trash in 99% of the souvenir stores is truly appalling, and for some reason we’ve really struggled finding stuff this trip (by comparison, it’s usually tough not to find appropriate items for people in Tokyo). I can assure you all though, that nothing in the above image was purchased 😉

Anyway we traipsed and traipsed, and at one point found ourselves in Forbidden Planet, a really friggin’ big sci-fi and fantasy store. Here’s a photo…

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… and everything in it is Doctor Who (except for me, of course)! It was Doctor Who merchandise heaven! I bought a CD drama (“Plague Of The Daleks”, chosen based on the companion and not the Doctor) and a few other items, and spent a lot of time wishing a similar selection was available in some store closer to home.

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We stumbled across a vast multi-story arcade named Funland near Picadilly Circus. It had a mind-boggling selection of games and was actually a very good arcade, but for some reason I gravitated toward and played the hopping game “Hopping Road”

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Yes it’s a racing game based around hopping using a pogo stick controller. I hopped and hopped like a madman and won the race easily but at the cost of almost-death. It was torturous, boring and embarassing since people were watching. Why I played it I have no idea!

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We just had dinner (shown above), and are both bone-tired so it’s time to crash and eat junk (cheese & onion chips, mars bars and lemonade), watch TV and play DS.

But I’ll leave with a certain photo, deliberately without description or explanation. Go on AW, comment on this one!

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Brighton

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Yesterday we visited Brighton. Rather than use words, here’s the day in a picture…

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Seaside resort! Pebble beach! And – uniquely British – the Pier.

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The first shot above shows the ruined old (west) Brighton Pier. The top right shot shows the Royal Pier, which contains amusement arcades, amusement rides and oodles of food stores. At one of them, I bought some candy floss…

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Backing up a bit… the above was after lunch. Here’s lunch:

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We also went on some rides on the end of the pier:

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The mouse was the best of it’s kind I have ever been on. A very intense ride with many fast corners and spins, the three of us went on it and had a blast.

Brighton was amazing. My thoughts of England, for almost my entire life, includes the seaside resort. It was a great experience to finally visit one 🙂

The Greatest Lie Ever Told

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

I believe it is important to document important knowledge for future generations. With that in mind, a tale from my distant past…

It was 1982 or 1983, and I was at Jason L’s house doing what kids of that age (10) do. Riding bikes, eating lollies, talking about Star Wars. And – of course – playing Atari 2600.

We were in Jason’s downstairs room. The one where his dad stored the pickled tumors and testicles (I think he was a urologist). There was a large cream-coloured sofa and an ancient console-style TV on which the 2600 was connected. There were quite a few people there – a dozen or more. It was probably a birthday party for Jason. Many were there to hear the lie.

John F lived nearby. He was there with his brothers. I remember them as twins, although I doubt that is true. They were both younger, and probably only invited because they were virtually neighbours. Both were energetic and talkative boys, especially compared to John. They are key players in the tale, since one of them (I forget which one) would be the person that would that day utter the greatest lie ever told.

I wonder what we had for lunch? Hamburgers maybe? Hotdogs? Jason had a pet crow in a giant aviary-cage in the backyard. Or was it a magpie? I went into the cage one time and fed it. I was no doubt scared, for corvids scared me at that age.

Many years later (at university) I would befriend Jason’s sister Alison, who was a few years older than me. She was a sweet girl, who once had trouble at school because she was reluctant to euthanize the rabbits and rats used in her lab. I assume she was there that day to hear the lie.

We were all playing Pac-Man on the 2600. It was dark. Was it winter? Was it a pyjama party? I doubt the latter; probably just a party that went into the evening. There were quite a few of us in that room all playing Atari at the time, probably unaware of how legendary the game would become one day.

At that age children exaggerate. It is common for younger boys to attempt to impress older boys with outrageous statements. Lies if you will. On that day one of John F’s younger brothers revealed a dark and spooky secret, otherwise known as the greatest lie ever told:

One night I was playing Pac-Man and the game stopped and a skeleton hand dragged across the screen and the words ‘don’t kill my babies’ appeared.”

I imagine it looked something like this:

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As I said, many heard this claim. He was quizzed on it, and stuck to his story. Laughter ensued, and in the days that followed amusement would turn to mockery as word spread at school. Somehow John himself became the victim of some of the teasing, as if he was responsible for his brothers ludicrous comment. I recall dimly the teasing became so bad a teacher was involved at some point (or so I heard).

I think it is safe to say that few – if any – of us believed that such an incident had occured.

Looking back almost 30 years later I am torn. The scientist in me requires hard evidence to believe anything, but the imaginist in me likes to be proven wrong on such matters. In time, the boy that made the claim grew into a man and (sadly) passed away some years ago, so the veracity of his tale is beyond further investigation. Did he even remember it? Does anyone else? Why do I?

More importantly: could this really have occurred?

Suffice to say, even if he was telling the truth, the title of this post would remain accurate…

Competition Pro

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

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That is a picture of the ‘Competition Pro’ joystick – the first (and I believe only) item I ever bought on lay-by.

Known as ‘layaway’ in the US, lay-by is the process of buying an item in installments. It is virtually unknown these days due to credit cards, but used to be very popular.

One day in 1984 (or early 1985), after endlessly reading about how great the Competition Pro joystick was in the imported UK game magazines of the day, I discovered they were sold at K-Mart, Charlestown Square. I remember seeing one in a glass case in the electronics section and wanting it so badly. In those days game systems did not come with controllers, so there was a vibrant market of third party devices. For me, the competition pro was at the top of the pile. The pinnacle of control! It even had microswitches!

This was the box:

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I forget the price, but A$40 comes to mind. Whatever the cost, it was much more than I had available, and I was so worried about the joystick disappearing from the shop I hastily put it on lay-by. I remember being very excited as I collected the various documents (including payment slips) with all sorts of dates on them (“Pay this much by XX” etc.). I planned out my repayment schedule, based on what meagre income (pocket money?) I had in those days. I can even remember having dad drive me to the shop one day just so I could put $2 onto my lay-by! Only when the full price was paid would the joystick be mine.

Oh the unfettered enthusiasm of youth 🙂

Eventually I got my competition pro, and it was awesome. I still recall how much I loved the thing, and how much I loved the little clicks from the microswitches every time you moved the stick or pushed the button. It was the ticket to even higher love for my Commodore 64. I even carried it to friends houses when I went over to play games with them. I was so proud of it, and that I had lay-bought it.

Remembering this, and writing about it now, makes me wonder what ever happened to that beloved competition pro of mine. Is it in a box in an attic, dusty and forgotten? Or was it long-since buried in a mountain of landfill, or crushed in some reprocessing plant?

Or could it be – impossibly – that some retro enthusiast is loving it still, and using it to this day?

A Technical Discussion

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

So I was thinking yesterday, during a hot walk to the post office “How did Eugene Jarvis do the lasers in Defender?

I swear this is not a joke post. Such thoughts as this do occasionally work their way into my mind.

To see what I am talking about, here’s a video of the arcade version of Defender:

There are countless amazing things about the game Defender. The sound effects, the controls, the particle effects, the sublime design. All this in a game that is 28 years old.

Pay close attention to the lasers the ship puts out. See how they are not an unbroken line? See how they seem to start as a random stream of particles and then connect into a solid line. They are simultanenously chaotic and structured; solid and discrete. Could this be a representation of the wave and particle duality of light in video game form? Who knows… certainly not me… but I do know the laser graphics are mesmerising and one of the most memorable things about the game.

So I wondered to myself yesterday, in my memory, how did he do these very organic and colourful particle-y laser beams? How did he make each beam unique and therefore special?

I came up with what seems like a good technique. Start with an 1 dimensional array representing the laser. Pick some random positions (on the left side) and occupy them: these are the dots that begin the laser. Then do a pass through the array populating empty spots with a frequency depending on the occupancy of nearest and next-nearest neighbours. This gives a good representation of particles knitting together to form a beam. You could even fake the movement of the laser by making the array width the same as the screen width and base the start on the ship start position (ie. no sprite movement is needed). Using this technique you could even write to the screen memory directly and possibly avoid sprites.

I’d solved it! Randomized laser beams that look like those in Defender! Voila!

But…

Take a look at this video:

It’s a little tricky to see but if you inspect the lasers you will notice they all look… similar.

Can’t decide? This may be clearer:

Nothing special about those lasers. Just lines… but more importantly: all the same lines. (As an aside, that previous video deserves a blog post unto itself…)

So is it because the BBC Micro and the 2600 are craptastic computers that the coders couldn’t reproduce the majesty of Jarvis original lasers? Perhaps, and this is certainly an attractive thought.

But go take a look at the original video again. Look very closely.

Yes, the sad truth: all the lasers in Defender are identical. There is no magic coding at work there. Just a sprite.

Another childhood illusion dashed on the shores of truth 🙁