The Closeout Warrior

3D Tic-Tac-Toe

April 4th, 2007

Let’s just suppose for a moment that you wanted to jazz up the tired old paper game Tic-Tac-Toe and bring into the age of video games. Let’s also suppose that it’s the 1980’s, so you don’t have a machine that’s really capable of doing a whole lot more than drawing vague shapes on the screen. What do you do? One option might be to move the whole games into the realm of three dimensions.

Drawing a a tic-tac-toe board so that it looks like it leans back in the distance is pretty trivial once you know a bit about perspectives, vanishing points, and… chiaroscuro shading. Now if this were just regular standard tic-tac-toe in three dimensions it would be pretty awesome, but the developers decided to take it two steps forward.

Step 1: Playing on a 3×3 grid is so last century. They updated the standard grid up to 4×4.

Step 2: Why stop at just one 4×4 grid? Let’s stack four of them on top of each other. Futuristic.

The game plays pretty much like regular old boring tic-tac-toe, except that you can win the game by getting four in a row across, down, or in a straight line through the grids (like a mark in the top-left corner of all four grids, or one in the top-left of the top grid, one in the second-to-left square in the top row on the second grid, etc.).

Does all of this sound fun? If so, you can use a pencil and paper to draw your own grids and recreate the experience. I think about five or so minutes will sufficiently recreate the level of fun you could ever get from this game.

Posted in Atari 2600 | No Comments »

Lunar Outpost

April 3rd, 2007

Lunar Outpost is an interesting game. It’s a weird hybrid of shooting game and strategy game. It’s been an extremely long time since I’ve played this game, so I don’t really remember the story very well. What I do remember is that in the future (natch) humans have built an outpost on the Moon. You, the driver of a Lunar Tank, must protect the Lunar Buildings from a Lunar Invasion by extra-Lunar aliens.

The aliens want to destroy the sweet buildings that have been built on the lunar surface. These buildings, it so happens, recharge your tank’s batteries, allowing you to move. You play the game by navigating the Lunar Surface, which it turns out is a large rectangle, and shooting the Lunar Invaders with your Lunar Tank-mounted Lunar Cannon. You do this by patrolling the surface and keeping tabs on invaders via the radar in the corner. You seek out the blips that are a different color than your blip, and show them the business end of your Moon Missiles.

Actually engaging the enemy takes you to a screen that looks kind of like Space Invaders with the exception that you and your adversaries could move forward and back as well as left and right. Hey, it was 1984, that was ludicrously advanced.

The goal of the game was to stave off your attackers for a specific number of Lunar Days that you pick from the outset, with the eventual goal of surviving an entire Lunar Month (a.k.a. 28 days). Alas, I was never able to survive the entire Lunar Month, but I did manage to survive about a Lunar Week before my tank’s batteries gave out when I was equidistant from two power stations. That was right before I decided to retire this game.

Posted in Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Mario Paint

April 2nd, 2007

Mario Paint isn’t really a game. It’s not really educational either. What exactly it is might be a little tough to actually define, but I think ‘creativity tool’ might be as close as anything.

Mario Paint, which was bundled with the Super NES mouse, was a glorified paint program for your Super NES, but you could do more than just doodle on the screen. You could: be the aforementioned screen doodler, create limited animations, color, make simple songs, create 16×16 pixel ’stamps’, and combine all of the above into a project. Oh, and you can swat flies.

The fly-swatting is a tutorial on how to use the mouse disguised as a mini-game. Flies of differing sizes, shapes, and dangers will appear on the screen, and it’s your job to swat them. There are a scant three stages, each with multiple waves of flies that culminates with a battle with the crazy-big mechanical boss fly thing (you have to swat it a lot before it breaks, just like real crazy-big mechanical boss fly things!). Once you win, it starts you over again from the beginning and the flies are a little faster and a little meaner.

By far the most fun part of this package is working within the limitations of the program to try and produce a scene utilizing the drawing, a repeating six-frame animation, and short 4/4 music segments.

Posted in Super NES | No Comments »

Super Pac-Man

April 1st, 2007

Pac-Man has become quite the icon, and like any good video game icon, he’s been in his share of spinoffs, sequels, and clones. Most of these didn’t deviate too far from the standard formula: guide your favorite Pac-person through a maze, avoid the ghost-shaped monsters, eat everything in the maze, proceed to next maze.

Although Pac-Man’s traditional food is dots, in Super Pac-Man you eat actual foods. The problem is that these foods are behind locked doors. How do you open these doors? Well, there are two ways. The obvious way is to eat the keys scattered throughout the levels, each key opens one or more doors letting you get inside. The other way is to eat one of the two giant ‘Super pellets’ in each level (which are conveniently behind locked doors). Unlike traditional power pellets that turn the monsters blue so you can eat them, the Super pellets turn Pac-Man about double his actual size, allowing him to break down the doors, collide with the monsters without getting hurt, and utilize bursts of super speed.

And that’s it. Eat the foods, clear the levels, and move on to the next stage. Continue in that manner until you manage to run out of lives. Fun times.

Posted in Arcade | No Comments »

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans

March 31st, 2007

I remember being told by a friend how awesome Warcraft was. He would play it almost daily in class, although, curiously, not Warcraft class. I think it was Physics. He’d tell me all about playing as the orcs and the humans, and pitting them against each other in epic struggles. Based on his recommendation, and the fact that I found the game for $9.99, I decided to pick it up. I installed it and invited him over to spend some time with the game, maybe show me some of the ins and outs of how to play. He came over and said, “That’s not the game we’re playing in class.”

Turns out he was playing Warcraft II.

So I settled in with Warcraft, learning the intricacies of the ongoing war between the different yet somehow identical factions. The game itself is Real Time Strategy. All that means is that there are no ‘turns’. Everyone playing has the ability to command all of their units all of the time, with the winner being the person that not only is the superior tactician, but also the speediest commander. Your goal is usually to gather enough resources to build a bigger, better army quicker than your opponent, and then to smite them.

Each side can decide to spend their accumulated resources on ‘units’ to flesh out their armies. Units on each side of the fray have corresponding units on the other side. This is a pretty crude but effective way of providing balance to the game, that is, no one side has an obvious advantage over the other. This is especially important in multiplayer.

I never played multiplayer.

The original Warcraft is not compatible with Blizzard’s matchmaking service Battle.net. No Warcraft game would be until Warcraft II:Battle.net edition (i.e. a sequel and a tweak later). So I spent considerable time losing at the single player mode. I would end up finishing the Human campaign, roughly half of the content, before I would shelve this game. I wouldn’t think any more about it until 2002 when Warcraft III was released.

Posted in DOS | No Comments »

Evo: The Search for Eden

March 30th, 2007

Evolution as a concept is intriguing. Implementing it in a game is not unheard of. Basing a game around the concept, now that’s something else entirely.

EVO places you, a prehistoric creature of some sort (you begin as some kind of fish thing) vying for survival. You must kill weaker creatures and feast on their remains to gain ‘evolution points’. You spend these points to upgrade your body parts to be bigger, stronger, or more useful. Your goal? Survive the geologic age, and prove that you’re the ultimate being to Gaia, the spirit of the Earth.

Each age is very different, and a strong body in one age is excessively weak in another. Your sleek fishy physique is pretty useless on land, so you get to change to multi-legged dinosaur form. Your rough and tumble en-fanged dinosaur head with Flesh Rending Razor Teeth(tm) will do nearly zero damage to the new-fangled Warm Blooded Mammals, so you get fur and rodent teeth.

Interestingly, throughout the game you’ll find these mysterious crystals that bestow gifts that range from Big Points ™ to forms of real-world creatures that you get to use for a limited time (they’re super powerful, after all). There is some implication that there is an alien force at work directing evolution for its own unknown motives, motives that I was really never able to divine.

The other interesting thing is that once the appropriate age is reached you can choose to evolve into a human, and eventually into a mer-person. Just like Real Life Humans, the human walks around with a club and is particularly physically weak with a comparatively weak constitution. In other words, don’t evolve into a human. It makes the game much harder, unless you like that kind of challenge. In fact, evolving into a human is a one way street. You can’t go back to the piecemeal animal forms you had been using, and half of the fun is making some crazy patchwork monstrosity and seeing how it will fare. The game even lets you save pictures of your favorites.

I’m not sure that a game has been made since that covers the sheer scope of history that this game does, but it would be fantastic to see this game remade or a sequel to come out. The original was apparently a bit of a low-seller, so it’s tough to find these days and rather expensive if you do.

Posted in Super NES | No Comments »

Titan Quest

March 29th, 2007

Based on the reviews I read, Titan Quest promised to be a fun distraction. It was a pretty blatant ripoff of the very successful Diablo II formula: run around the landscape, kill things, gain levels, spend skill points, etc. etc. Only this time, it’s set in ancient Greece.

There’s a story, but it really doesn’t matter what it is. You get to slog through ancient Greece and search for monsters to kill, which will make you stronger and give you the ability to kill stronger abominations. Your character will start out the same every time and how you fight and develop your fighter will ultimately determine its class.

As you level up, you get Skill Points. You can spend these skill points in up to two Specializations. Picking two Specializations that benefit each other will make your character a force to be reckoned with. Sounds like some built-in replayability. If you can stand the game.

I’ve started the game three separate times so far, and each time peter out after a couple of hours, barely making it to Level 10 (out of 99 or so). I’m not sure why. I think it comes down to the presentation. It’s not really clear why I’m fighting, and as a consequence, I don’t really care about the people that inhabit this world. They’re just going to have to deal with their problems without me.

Oh, but I can get the Special Edition Best Buy version of the Expansion pack, with limited edition Best Buy armor. I didn’t really get to see what that meant, but I couldn’t shake the thought of running around ancient Greece fighting mythical beasts clad in a blue polo and khaki pants.

Okay, yes, that would be pretty hilarious, but not worth the price of admission.

Posted in PC | No Comments »

Jupiter Lander

March 28th, 2007

It’s hard to believe that a scant two dozen or so years ago the games that we know as the throwaway games you play in your browser when you have a spare five minutes were full, standalone products that wild-eyed kids (and some adults) would play, often for hours. Games that took one basic concept and sold it as a complete gaming experience. Games that just get harder the longer you play them, with the only reward being a higher score that was lost the instant you turned the power off. Games like Jupiter Lander.

Jupiter Lander tasks you with safely landing a craft that looks like the Lunar Lander (but it’s not, obviously) on some planetary surface, probably Jupiter.

You are capable of thrusting in three directions: left, right, and up. Each thrust eats up precious fuel, but you have to use your thrusters to slow your craft down to a non-crashing speed. Non-crashing in this case means between 0 and 0.5 miles per hour in any direction. Anything faster than means that your Lander explodes. It seems a little harsh.

You can choose to land on any one of several landing sites on the planet’s surface. The harder it is to navigate to the landing site, the more points you’ll get, but you’ll use more fuel.

People would spend hours upon hours on this game. Landing the same ship on the same planetary surface over and over again. I am not one of those people. I spent maybe three dozen minutes total on this game before I gave up, and those were 1998 minutes. With attention spans today, that’s roughly equivalent to three hours, which is more than enough.

Posted in Commodore 64, Vic-20 | No Comments »

Beach Head 2: The Dictator Strikes Back

March 27th, 2007

According to the manual for this game, there was a game called Beach Head. I never heard of it, never could find it, and never did play it. I did, however, manage to get some quality time with Beach Head 2, which was apparently superior in just about every way, so no big loss.

Beach Head 2 tells the classic story of the battles between Dictator of an Island Nation (presumably defeated at the end of the first game) and the Good Guy Army Corps. out to stop his Reign of Terror before it Spreads to Crush the Free World Under its Oppressive Boot.

How do you stop the Evil Dictator? With mini-games, duh.

There are four separate mini-missions for you to perform. The twist is that you can play either as the Allies or the Dictator. There are four or so missions that you can choose to do, but I only remember playing three of them, so the fourth one must have been terrible.

Game 1: You take control of the Allied Mobile Death Cannon, and scroll the screen slowly to the left while you control the cannon. You have to shoot the tanks, people, and ultimately what looks like a giant termite’s nest with guns, windows and flags all over it. I don’t think you can actually play as the Dictator in this one.

Game 2: The Dictator is in the Jungle with his Stationary Rapid-Fire Death Gun, in his Jungle Stronghold. The Allies parachute in, behind staggered walls, and run toward Hot Lead Death, in an attempt to make it all the way to the Gun. It’s kind of like Assault from American Gladiators, except with fake simulated bullets instead of tennis balls. You can either be the Dictator and gun down the Allies or you can be the Allied team deploying troops. Much more fun with two players.

Game 3: I dunno. Something with helicopters. I don’t remember much about it, so it must have been pretty boring.

Game 4: The final showdown, you’re on a platform on one side of a cave, and the Dictator is on the other. There is a river flowing beneath your platforms. Both sides have inexplicably run out of weapons, so they resort to sharpened sticks (poontas, the game calls them) that you throw at each other. You take enough hits, you fall into the water, and your side loses the War.

What’s striking about this game is that it makes use of digitized audio, which was pretty rare on for the Commodore 64. There are only three voice clips that I remember: the standard “Ungh!” when you get hit with something, the standard scream when you get hit with something that kills you, and the Dictator that says “You can’t hurt me!” when you throw a sharpened stick into his heart of course, he dictator sounded more like Snidely Whiplash than an actual villain, but it helped create an atmosphere. An atmosphere where I nearly jumped out of my pants the first time I heard it.

Fun times.

Posted in Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja

March 26th, 2007

I guess cavepeople are easy targets for game developers: they have an established image, they are inaccurately portrayed as living side-by-side with dinosaurs, and, perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to pay a license to anyone to put cavemen in your game. Like Joe and Mac. Caveman. Ninja.

Although my understanding of the Ninja Arts is limited, I saw neither Joe nor mac performing many ninja-related activities. Unless you count bonking a tyrannosaurus upside the head with a giant stone wheel, which, for the sake of this discussion, we don’t.

The story for the game goes something like this: Some rival tribe of cavemen has kidnapped all of the cavewomen from Joe and Mac’s tribe. You have to run to the right, and sometimes up, killing anything that moves to get them back. Along the way you’ll find weapons that you’d expect cavemen to have: clubs, boomerangs, fire, the afore-mentioned stone wheels, and the very rare powerup that throws a shadow version of yourself at your enemies… like a ninja. You’ll also find a variety of foodstuffs strewn about the level because although you have a health bar, just existing makes it go down (i.e. your caveman apparently metabolizes food amazingly fast and gets hungry all the time).

Boss fights at the end of the stages are your typical ‘fight a giant version of a regular enemy’. One in particular, the Giant Carnivorous Caveman-eating Plant… of Doom, is rumored to yell an expletive when it’s hit. I never really heard it until someone told me that, and it’s a bit of a stretch.

Naming oddities aside, the game’s actually kind of fun with two players, two players who can actually hurt each other with their Bonk Sticks. Just make sure that if you play it with two players that you play it with a complete stranger. That way when you ‘accidentally’ kill him off so you can bash in the skull of a giant thingus at the end of a level and get all the points, he can’t find you to bug you for the quarter you apparently now owe him because he ‘wasted it’ by getting in a game with you without asking first.

Posted in Arcade, Super NES | 2 Comments »