Entries Tagged as 'Retro Tuesday'
Retro Tuesday: Sid Meier’s Colonization
Just after Sid Meier released a little game called Civilization, there came Colonization. To tell the truth, I tend to prefer this game over any of the Civilization games, and I’m not sure why. It’s just as complex and still offers a very open game world for you to play in. When it really gets down to it, it might just be the nifty background music that plays as you discover The New World and ravage it for your country’s own particular benefit, at least until you revolt. Either that, or the fact that I just like to discover strange new lands and make lots of money doing it.
Retro Tuesday: Crime City
Once upon a time there was a happy and carefree young bloke who used to hang around with other such happy and carefree young blokes. There were no girls, no school, no jobs, just an endless summer of gaming. Lots of overnight parties involving soda, crisps (chips to Americans) and lots and lots of roleplaying games and computer gaming.
That was a long time ago, and that was when a friend and I sat down one night and completed Crime City in one sitting while everyone else slept off a massive sugar high. Crime City was published by Impressions Games, the same guys behind Caesar, Pharoah, Zeus and Lords of the Realm III. It was released in Europe where it got a lot of interest and it crossed a number of different genres including strategy, RPG and adventure, which was very unusual the time.
In the game, you play Mr. White (how dubious is that?), who’s father has just been arrested for murder. You set out to prove his innocence, but you only have a limited amount of time in which to do it. Fail and your father goes to the Big House…
Much of the game is a traditional point and click adventure, but there are a number of elements which set it apart. You’ll need to collect information, and this will require that you travel around the game map. Travel takes time, and you don’t have that much time to begin with, but you can reduce the time it takes to travel by using the bus or using a taxi. This costs money, and you’ve only got a certain amount at the start. You can play the stock market to make more money though, which is a mini game within the game and adds an element of strategy to the game. You also have to placate your girlfriend and keep your mum from stressing while you hunt down the real killer, who is throwing down challenges to you throughout the game.
The game was put together by two blokes, Steve Redpath (Design & Graphics) and Andrew Prime (programming) and they did a heck of a job creating a fun and innovative adventure game that still stands up today as a challenge. One of these days I’m going to sit back down and complete it again, just as soon as I complete all the other games I’ve got in my collection…
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Retro Tuesday: A Quarter Century Of Casual Games
Image courtesy of the IGDA 2006 Casual Games report.
Today, the casual games market is huge, and is cross-platform. Everyone talks as if it’s the next big thing in gaming, that it’s where the money is at. The irony is that casual games have been the mainstay of the industry for years, where they started from, and what the majority of the gaming population play.
Let’s define what a casual game is first of all. In my opinion a casual game is one that you can pick up and play whenever you want to play something quickly and in between something else going on in your life This seems like an overly broad statement, but for me it suffices. I’m not a complicated man. I just make complicated decisions.
The IGDA in their 2006 Casual Games White Paper defines a casual game across a number of dimensions, but also defines it as
“… games that are easy to learn, utilize simple, controls and aspire to forgiving gameplay”.
They also look at gaming patterns including:
- Specific Favored Genres (Puzzle, Card, Light System Management, Casual Action)
- Primary Points of Access (where and how you play)
- Responding to Audience Needs and Demands
Not a bad description of casual games today. Of course, casual games really started back many years ago with the creation of the original gaming consoles, 8-bit computers and then 16-bit computers. The Atari 2600 was the granddaddy of the casual game platform with the ability to swap cartridges in and out on a whim. This allowed you to play games incredibly quickly because there was little to no load time.
Most of the 8- bit computers used a tape deck to load games from, and this would mean it would often take 2-3 minutes of loading before you could play a game. The development of disk drives changed this so that games could be larger and could load quicker. This became the standard for the Amiga and Atari ST home computers. A few computers used cartridges. The Acorn Electron I owned years back had a peripheral called the Plus 1 ROM extender which allowed you to use applications already loaded into ROMs; I used to play Starship Command regularly this way. In fact, at the time I felt spoiled because the game would load instantly. It was also an incredibly geeky thing for anyone, never mind a 13 year old to own.
Let’s get back to casual gaming today. What Douglas Adams said about space in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
“Space is big - really big - you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
we can say the same about casual gaming. Just like space, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger. Our lives today are much more complex than they were 25 years ago, with demands on our time coming from many areas such as family, work and friends. The technology that’s supposed to have made life easier for us has instead made live much for frantic for us, which is why casual games have really taken off. Many people don’t have the ability to invest 1-2 hours at a time on a particular game, but they can spare 15-30 minutes of time here and there while they commute or are between particular tasks. The massive growth of the Nintendo DS market shows just this. Games are also more socially acceptable these days and we’re exposed to them on a regular basis, and what used to be passive entertainment on television has become interactive entertainment in the palm of your hand or on your desktop between Word documents.
We’re now in what I’d term the Second Gamer Generation where the children of the first true gamers are coming into their own. My own kids have grown up exposed to games from an early age, much earlier than I was. They’re going to be gamers all their life, and I’m happy for that, because I’d rather they did that than get involved in any number of other problems.
Okay, enough maudlin’. Time to get back to Peggle .. casual games don’t complete themselves you know.
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Technorati Tags: advocacy, bagder, casual games
Retro: Stairway To Hell
Image courtesy of 1000bit.net.
The Stairway to Hell is an awesome collection of Acorn Electron and BBC Model B ROMs, tape/disk images and utilities, and named after a classic BBC/Electron game. A labor of love by Dave Moore and other contributors, it's the central place to get access to classic games that I used to play many years ago. The game database is incredibly extensive with a huge inventory of games, and cover scans for tapes and boxes are also included. This should be considered THE resource for Old Skool Acorn gaming. I've lost many hours of my life playing the games listed on this site and I've not really regretted any of it at all. The price was right years ago, and I had a lot of fun playing them back then, and even more so now.
Games I can heartily recommend are:
- Philosopher's Quest (Adventure)
- Sphinx Adventure (Adventure, duhr)
- Twin Kingdom Valley (Adventure)
- Starship Command
- Spellbinder
- Citadel
- Stryker's Run
- Codename: Droid (Stryker's Run 2)
- Dare Devil Dennis
- Danger UXB
- Jet Boot Jack
- Deathstar
- Chuckie Egg (A must!)
- Hunkidory
- Ghouls
- Imogen
- Impossible Mission
- Omega Orb
- Thrust
- Thunderstruck
- Thunderstruck 2
- Vindaloo
- Night World
- Elite
- Elixir
- Exile
- Repton (any of the games)
- Rubble Trouble
- Smash & Grab
- Frak!
- and Stairway to Hell (obviously)
You'll need to grab an emulator and both BASIC and OS ROMS to get up and running with this great gaming platform, but if you're big into retro gaming and remember the days of the Spectrum 48k and the Commodore 64 well, you'll probably remember the Acorn machines (probably with snobbery) and you should check out the goodness that there was on offer all those years ago.
The Acorn Electron is the computer I cut my teeth on for programming, writing my first computer program when I was 12 years old (that would be in 1985). Today I still have fond memories of that computer and I have a single unit sitting in the basement here that I take out from time to time and look at, remembering just how old I am today.
If you don't hear from me, I'm lost in the mists of time.
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Technorati Tags: acorn electron, bagder, retro, stairway to hell
Retro: Impossible Mission
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
I was 13 years old and feeling sick one day (one of many days that turned out to be from recently discovered food allergies). My parents decided to let me stay home from school. Two days before this I had ordered Mission Impossible for my Acorn Electron and wasn’t expecting it to arrive by mail for another week when it popped through my mailbox that morning. I rushed to open the package, pulled the cassette tape out of its holder, put it into my tape recorder and typed “CHAIN *.*” . Within ten seconds, the screeching and scrawing of the tape only added to the anticipation I had to play this game. As soon as it loaded, I was all over it, actually managing to complete the game that day, which was a first for me, and something I’ve yet to repeat. For years afterwards, I’d bring this game out when I’d get annoyed with Elite. Ah, those were glory days back then, back when I had lots of free gaming time and didn’t mind a 10 minute load for each game.
The platforming in this game was part of the fun. Much like in Prince of Persia, timing was everything. You only had a set amount of time to complete the game and stop the evil Professor Atombender from succeeding as his evil plans. Rooms on different levels were accessed by an elevator system, and you had to dodge various robot sentries to access the computer terminals scattered throughout the game. Accessing these terminals allowed you to send various robots to sleep as well as resetting lifts in each room. Furniture held parts of the password that you needed to compile so that you could finally capture Professor Atombender in his secret room, and once you had all the parts you could compile it. From the first time that I did a somersault over a sentry robot while playing the game on my friend’s Commodore 64, I fell in love with this game.
Lately, the Wii remake of the game has been announced and has garnered some acclaim as being the first non-emulated Virtual Console game to be released by Nintendo. This is pretty awesome news because it means the game has been written for specific platforms, not that it really needs it. It runs perfectly under emulation. There’s DS, PSP and PS2 versions coming soon as well according to the developer website (System 3).
You can still play this game under emulation on a number of platforms, including the original Commodore 64 version. There was a second game in the series which I didn’t enjoy as much, but that could simply be because the first game was so much fun that a sequel seemed superfluous.
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Copyright © 2007 I Am Teh Bagder.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Design originally by Anthony Baggett, but heavily modifed.